Libanius

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Libanius (Greek: Λιβάνιος, Libanios; c. 314-c. 394) was a Greek-speaking teacher of rhetoric of the later Roman Empire, an educated pagan of the Sophist school in an Empire that was turning Christian.

He was born into a once-influential, deeply cultured family of Antioch that had recently lost most of its wealth and influence. When fourteen years old, Libanius fell in love with rhetoric and focused his whole life on it. Like many 4th-century pagans of high education, Libanius withdrew from public life and devoted himself to scholarship. He scorned to become familiar with Latin literature and deplored its influence and the increasing imperial pressures on the traditional city-oriented culture that had been supported and dominated by the local upper classes. Libanius used his arts of rhetoric as a potent defender of private and political causes. He is one of the last voices to speak in favour of religious toleration: his religious and cultural views did not preclude long-lasting friendships with Christians, both as private individuals and as imperial officials.

He studied in Athens and began his career in Constantinople as a private tutor, but was soon exiled to Nicomedia.

Before his exile, Libanius was friend of the emperor Julian, with whom some correspondence survives, and for whose memory he wrote the orations that are the highlights of his literary works; they were composed between 362 and 365.

Among his pupils: John Chrysostom, Basil, Bishop of Caesarea, and the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. Libanius has much to tell us about the fanatical world of the later 4th century. Libanius's first Oration I is a revealing and colorful autobiographical narrative, first written in 374 and revised throughout his life, a scholar's account that ends as an old exile's private journal.

In 354, he accepted the chair of rhetoric in Antioch, where he stayed until his death. Although a pagan, his students included the Christians John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia. He was a friend of the pagan Emperor Julian, yet was made an honorary praetorian prefect by the very Christian Emperor Theodosius I.

[edit] His works

  • 64 orations in the three fields of oratory: judicial, deliberative, and epideictic, both orations as if delivered in public and orations meant to be privately read (aloud) in the study. The two volumes of selections in the Loeb Classical Library devote one volume to Libanius' orations that bear on the emperor Julian, the other on Theodosius; the most famous is his "Lamentation" about the desecration of the temples (peri ton leron);
  • 51 declamationes, a traditional public-speaking format of Rhetoric in Antiquity, taking set topics with historical and mythological themes (translations into English by e.g. D.A. Russell, "Libanius: Imaginary Speeches"; M. Johansson, "Libanius' Declamations 9 and 10";
  • 57 hypotheses or introductions to Demosthenes' orations (written ca 352), in which he sets them in historical context for the novice reader, without polemics;
  • several dozen model writing exercises, Progymnasmata, that were used in his courses of instruction and became widely admired models of good style;
  • 1544 letters have been preserved, more letters than those of Cicero. The Middle Ages uncritically accepted some 400 additional letters in Latin, purporting to be translations, but were demonstrated to be misattributed or forgeries by the Italian humanist Francesco Zambeccari in the 15th century, in a dispassionate examination of the texts themselves.

[edit] External links

[edit] English translations

  • Scott Bradbury, Selected Letters of Libanius. Liverpool, University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-85323-509-0
  • A.F. Norman, Libanius: Selected Works, 2 volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Loeb Classical Library, 1969-1977.
  • A.F. Norman, Libanius: Autobiography and Selected Letters, 2 volumes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Loeb Classical Library, 1993. (Reviewed in Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews).)
  • Otto Seeck, Die Briefe des Libanios
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