The works of Libanius (c. ad 314-93) are an ideal source for a study of change and continuity in fourth-century education. What we know about paideia in Late Antiquity derives from a range of literary and papyrological evidence; but only in the writings of Libanius does an actual rhetorical school, and the personalities of the students and teachers it comprised, emerge from the past. Medieval copyists preserved much of Libanius’ voluminous literary production: sixty-four orations, fifty-one declamations, and 1,500 letters, besides the exercises and summaries of Demosthenes’ speeches Libanius wrote for students. Many of his works have not yet appeared in translation, a situation that is perhaps in part due to the fact that Libanius’ Greek is quite demanding. In the middle of the twentieth century, the school of Libanius attracted considerable attention. Peter Wolf in 1952, Paul Petit in 1956, and A.-J. Festugiere in 1959 focused on Libanius’ students and assistants, and looked at aspects of recruitment. Petit’s work in particular was fundamental in establishing a list of the pupils of this sophist and clarifying their social and economic standing. He was strongly influenced, however, by the scholarly practices of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and he looked at Libanius’ works in a positivist spirit, as if they could be interpreted with complete objectivity. The outline he presented is weak in other respects, in spite of his lists of percentages and similar numerical details.
The most influential of Libanius’ works has always been his Autobiography. He composed its first part (Or. 1. 1-155) in ad 374. The second part consists of bits and pieces of his personal journal that were added arbitrarily after his death. Incidentally, this second part, shapeless and pessimistic, has contributed to an image of Libanius as a choleric, dark, and paranoid character, different from the concerned teacher and intense man of letters that his correspondence and some other orations reveal. Libanius spent almost forty years as the official sophist of Antioch and received an imperial stipend, supplemented by students’ fees (Kaster 1983). At that time, Antioch - together with Rome, Alexandria, and Constantinople - was one of the four major cities of the Roman world. Her population included Greeks, Romans, and Syrians, Jews, and Christians, and one could roughly distinguish between a Greek-speaking city and an Aramaic-speaking countryside. Libanius taught Greek rhetoric and did not know Latin.
Libanius’ school included some assistant rhetors, whose principal function was to introduce students to the classical authors. He was anxious to maintain friendly relations with his assistants and appealed to the city council in an attempt to obtain more generous financial treatment for them (Or. 31), but he rarely alluded to them in his letters. Libanius was his school, which probably either disappeared or continued on a much reduced basis after his death. He ruled over a student population that reached eighty in the best years. In antiquity, there was no uniform rule about the age of admission to (or graduation from) a program of education at any level; but on average young men of the elite started studying rhetoric when they were about 14 or 15, after learning the rudiments of literacy from an elementary teacher and studying poetry and grammar under the tutelage of a grammarian. Girls, who sometimes had access to grammatical education, did not study rhetoric, which was seen as a preparation for a public life and career. In an age when most intellectuals had accepted Christianity, Libanius defended paganism. He admitted both Christian and pagan students to his classes, but his correspondence very rarely alludes to a student’s religion, since his main allegiance was to rhetoric itself.
The evidence from Libanius and from other contemporary figures well schooled in rhetoric, such as Basil of Caesarea and Gregory of Nazianzus, shows that students frequently did not learn rhetoric from a single teacher. They started with a rhetor close to home, then moved to more prominent educational centers. For young men of the elite, the traditional boundaries between town, city, and metropolis did not exist. Gregory received his elementary instruction at Nazianzus and studied grammar and rhetoric at Caesarea. Even though this city in Cappadocia, which he called ‘‘the metropolis of the logoi’’ (Or. 43. 13), had legitimate claims to fame as a center for rhetoric, he considered it necessary to complete his education in Athens. Like Basil and Libanius, he remained in Greece for many years. Libanius’ writings show that several trends affected school attendance. Students’ mobility was not a new phenomenon, but seems to have become more common in the second part of the fourth century. The typical movement from smaller schools close to home to larger and more prestigious educational centers is perceptible in his letters. But while Libanius had to accept that reality, he wanted Antioch to be the culmination of the training of his students. He considered the fame of Athens as a center for rhetoric undeserved, and he aimed (albeit in vain) to dethrone her, putting Antioch in her place. On account of her past glories, Athens continued to be regarded as the ultimate educational destination, even though in the later fourth century she was no longer the vibrant place where the illustrious teachers described by Eunapius in the Lives of the Sophists held forth. Synesius felt obliged to visit the city in ad 399, because those who studied there continued to put on airs of superiority and behaved ‘‘like demigods amidst mules’’ (Ep. 56).
Students also frequently switched schools, and this was a perennial source of friction between students and their teachers. The problem of defection (apostasis) was apparently widespread, and was not confined to the end of the year. If we believe Libanius’ late orations, it reached its climax in the 380 s when, with some exaggeration, he complained of students leaving his school on a daily basis (Or. 43; Ep. 405. 8; Or. 36. 13; 1. 241-2; 3. 24; 34. 20; 62. 25). After a tour of other academic options, they supposedly returned to the place they started from; but then the cycle started again. In Oration 43 (On the Agreements), a speech addressed to other sophists in Antioch, Libanius tried to devise a remedy to target delinquent students. Yet, by making students’ learning dependent on teachers’ professionalism and proposing to submit the latter to parents’ inspection, he must have alienated the other members of the teaching profession.
Libanius maintained that defections had been more rare in his own school days, and he considered the escalation of the phenomenon in Antioch as another manifestation of what he, in his old age, believed to be rampant disregard for traditional paideia. It is not easy to gain an objective view of the matter on the basis of his testimony alone. The orations of the sophist Himerius (c. ad 310-90), who taught in Athens, show that students’ unrest was not confined to Antioch. Realistic details such as students’ fights and classroom strife and discontent often appear amid Himerius’ convoluted mythological and poetic allusions (Or. 18, 35, 38, 65, and especially 66). Late antique students of rhetoric seem to have been somewhat intolerant of a traditional, unchanging discipline, and wished to experiment. Himerius could offer them the fire of lyric poetry and the beauty of Pindar to imitate. Yet, his eloquence was heavy and lifeless (Kennedy 1983: 215-39; Barnes 1987). Libanius, enamored as he was of the classic models (Demosthenes in particular) and of his discipline, never doubted the intrinsic value of rhetoric, but he placed the blame for its diminished attraction on the changing times. The search for easy success, the lack of toleration of hard work, the desire to encapsulate learning in immediately digestible pills, and the increasing reliance on new subjects such as Latin and Roman law, all had an adverse effect on the number of those pursuing rhetorical studies.
Paul Petit’s calculations of the length of attendance of students in Libanius’ school need to be adjusted. When a letter shows that a young man was in Antioch in a certain year but the next letter that mentions him dates from many years later, one cannot suppose continuous attendance. Deaths in the family, illness, the geographic mobility of fathers, and other circumstances (besides apostasis per se) might interrupt schooling. A few years (two on average) would give a young man with good natural talent (physis) the ability to write, speak, and compose encomiastic orations. The student Albanius, the scion of a wealthy family of Ancyra in Galatia, provides a good example of how fruitful two years of rhetoric might be. Libanius said of him, ‘‘He is my student in the strictest sense of the word since he did not come to my teaching from another teacher nor did he have another after us. If his mother’s crying and begging had not led him away from his studies before the time was right, he would now do what I do’’ (Ep. 1444). Once again, Libanius’ dream that one of his ‘‘sons’’ (as he called his favorite students) could follow in his footsteps was shattered. Yet, he considered Albanius a complete success. This young man delivered a panegyric in praise of the powerful governor Modestus (PLRE i: Domitius Modestus 2), winning the admiration of a prominent orator, who took an interest in his work (Ep. 63). With the knowledge he had acquired, Albanius managed his patrimony, gained great wealth, undertook honorable civil service, and worked for the governor of Galatia, acquiring the reputation of a good orator. In writing to the governor (Ep. 834), Libanius urged him to continue to spur on Albanius and other students who were in his retinue, ‘‘so that no one may throw in our face the proverb of the one swallow’’ (which, according to the comic poet Cratinus, ‘‘could not make a spring’’). The success of his pupils would silence those who objected that the training he offered was useless. To these ‘‘biting flies’’ he responded years later with Oration 62.
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