Paideia, or education and literary culture, was a major point of friction in the fourth-century pagan-Christian Kulturkampf. Partisans on both sides were constantly invoking exemplars of virtue and vice drawn from mythology, literature, history, and Scripture. This talk examines the role such exemplars played in writings of a small group of fourth-century writers from Cappadocia. Central here are St. Gregory Nazianzen and his nemesis (and sometime coursemate), Julian the Apostate Emperor. How and why did they present such figures as Zeus, Abraham, Socrates, Alexander the Great, Jesus, or Trajan to their audiences? What about those of their contemporaries whom they turned into exemplars? How exactly were listeners and readers meant to relate imaginatively to these figures? What were they to do with them? Addressing these questions will clarify the nature of exemplarist ethics in some of the most prominent culture-shapers of the later Roman empire. It will also shed light on exemplarism more generally, and, by way of conclusion, raise questions about relation between exemplarist mimetics and the Christian understanding of theosis.