Abstract

Reviews Raffaella Cribiore, The School of Libanins in Late Antique Antioch. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 360 pp. ISBN-10· 0-691128234 -3 Given the enormous body of writing left bv Libanius (b. 314 C.E.), sophist of Antioch, it is surprising that more scholarship has not been generated on this dynamic figure. Raffaella Cribiore, author of the prize winning Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton, 2001), has gone some distance in filling that gap with the impressive volume under consideration here. Her book serves two purposes: to provide an overview of education in the Greek East in Late Antiquity, with a focus on the school of Libanius in Antioch, and to present new English translations of ox er 200 of Libanius' letters to fathers, students, and other teachers. Using this material, Cribiore argues that assessments of Libanius as a personality based on his orations and the long Autobiography (composed in 374 and supplemented on numerous occasions up to the supposed date of his death, 393: see A. L. Norman, Libanius. Autobiography and Selected Letters, vol I, ed. and trans. A. L. Norman (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992), "Introduction" pp. 7-16) will become more three-dimensional through the evidence of the letters. Admirably, she does not read the letters as direct reports of Libanius' character or of history: "[l]etters manipulate reality no less than do speeches self-consciously composed for public consumption or autobiography" (p. 3). The character that takes shape in these letters, argues Cribiore, provides a counterbalance to the "old, embittered sophist" of the Autobiography and the late speeches (p. 6). She seeks to keep in view the warm, supportive teacher and passionate devotee of the logoi alongside the more familiar figure: a Libanius anguished over his physical trials and personal losses, and resentful at the loss of students to other teachers and other interests, such as philosophy and Roman law. Cribiore brings attention to the status of the letter as a genre residing "between public and private" (p. 4) and to the teaching of epistolary rhetoric (pp. 169-73). Letters were essential to the sophist in maintaining contact with former students, their families, and friends; he used them as a central form of promotion and recruitment to keep his school, so closely identified with the man himself, active and filled with students. "'A friend's children have come Rhetorica, Vol. XXVII, Issue 1, pp. 98-111, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . C2009 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2009.27.1.98. Reviews 99 to a friend through a friend"' (letter number 204, 321; qtd. p. 110): through such artful formulations Libanius forges a chain of connections among elites across the great distances of the empire. Cribiore emphasizes the role of the carrier, often the student in question, in presenting the letter, and the topos of letter as gift (p. 173; see also Norman, Libanius, pp. 17-43). In the translation section, Cribiore helpfully groups letters into "dossiers": clusters of letters concerning a single student or family. Most had instrumental goals—to evaluate a student to a father, to recommend a student for a position—but more fundamentally, Cribiore observes, each "had to represent the cultural values [Libanius] embodied" (p. 105). They functioned to maintain bonds of philia, the practice of a codified web of relationships (p. 107), forming the connective tissue of elite Greek society in Late Antiquity. Beginning with overview chapters on Libanius in Antioch and schools of rhetoric in the Roman East, Cribiore then moves in more closely to educational practices: the network of relations woven by epistolary practices, processes of admission and evaluation, the content of the curriculum, a long and short course of study, and a discussion of career paths of students after they completed their rhetorical education. The analysis ends with a somewhat cryptic and gloomy section on the silences of Libanius' final years: his illness and depression, the usurpation of rhetoric...