A professor of Greek rhetoric, frequent letter writer and influential social figure, Libanius (AD 314–393) is a key author for anybody interested in late antiquity, ancient rhetoric, ancient epistolography and ancient biography. Nevertheless, he remains understudied because it is such a daunting task to access his large and only partially translated oeuvre. This volume, which is the first comprehensive study of Libanius, offers a critical introduction to the man, his texts, their context and reception. Clear presentations of the orations, progymnasmata, declamations and letters unlock the corpus, and a survey of all available translations is provided. At the same time, the volume explores new interpretative approaches of the texts from a variety of angles. Written by a team of established as well as upcoming experts in the field, it substantially reassesses works such as the Autobiography, the Julianic speeches and letters, and Oration 30 For the Temples.

This book is a study of the fourth-century sophist Libanius, a major intellectual figure who ran one of the most prestigious schools of rhetoric in the later Roman Empire. He was a tenacious adherent of pagan religion and a friend of the emperor Julian, but also taught leaders of the early Christian church like St. John Chrysostom and St. Basil the Great. Raffaella Cribiore examines Libanius's training and personality, showing him to be a vibrant educator, though somewhat gloomy and anxious by nature. She traces how he cultivated a wide network of friends and former pupils and courted powerful officials to recruit top students. Cribiore describes his school in Antioch--how students applied, how they were evaluated and trained, and how Libanius reported progress to their families. She details the professional opportunities that a thorough training in rhetoric opened up for young men of the day. Also included here are translations of 200 of Libanius's most important letters on education, almost none of which have appeared in English before. Cribiore casts into striking relief the importance of rhetoric in late antiquity and its influence not only on pagan intellectuals but also on prominent Christian figures. She gives a balanced view of Libanius and his circle against the far-flung panorama of the Greek East.

This volume provides an English translation of four Greek treatises written during the time of the Roman empire and attributed to Theon, Hermogenes, Aphthonius, and Nicolaus. Several of these works are translated here for the first time. Paperback edition available from the Society of Biblical Literature (www.sbl-site.org).

Shows the unique perspective of Talmudic rabbis as they navigate between platonic objective truth and the realm of rhetorical argumentation.

Practicing Intertextuality attempts something bold and ambitious: to map both the interactions and intertextual techniques used by New Testament authors as they engaged the Old Testament and the discourses of their fellow Jewish and Greco-Roman contemporaries. This collection of essays functions collectively as a handbook describing the relationship between ancient authors, their texts, and audience capacity to detect allusions and echoes. Aimed for biblical studies majors, graduate and seminary students, and academics, the book catalogues how New Testament authors used the very process of interacting with their Scriptures (that is, the Masoretic Text, the Septuagint, and their variants) and the texts of their immediate environment (including popular literary works, treatises, rhetorical handbooks, papyri, inscriptions, artifacts, and graffiti) for the very production of their message. Each chapter demonstrates a type of interaction (that is, doctrinal reformulations, common ancient ethical and religious usage, refutation, irenic appropriation, and competitive appropriation), describes the intertextual technique(s) employed by the ancient author, and explains how these were practiced in Jewish, Greco-Roman, or early Christian circles. Seventeen scholars, each an expert in their respective fields, have contributed studies which illuminate the biblical interpretation of the Gospels, the Pauline letters, and General Epistles through the process of intertextuality.

In this book various authors explore how rabbinic traditions that were formulated in the Land of Israel migrated to Jewish study houses in Babylonia. The authors demonstrate how the new location and the unique literary character of the Babylonian Talmud combine to create new and surprising texts out of the old ones. Some authors concentrate on inner rabbinic social structures that influence the changes the traditions underwent. Others show the influence of the host culture on the metamorphosis of the traditions. The result is a complex study of cultural processes, as shaped by a unique historical moment.

This clear and engaging book offers readers an introduction to European Literary History from antiquity through to the present day. Each chapter discusses a short extract from a literary text, whilst including a close reading and a longer essay examining other key texts of the period and their place within European Literature. Offering a view of Europe as an evolving cultural space and examining the mobility and travel of literature both within and out of Europe, this guide offers an introduction to the dynamics of major literary networks, international literary networks, publication cultures and debates, and the cultural history of 'Europe' as a region as well as a concept.

Anyone who reads the Gospels carefully will notice that there are differences in the manner in which they report the same events. These differences have led many conservative Christians to resort to harmonization efforts that are often quite strained, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Many people have concluded the Gospels are hopelessly contradictory and therefore historically unreliable as accounts of Jesus. The majority of New Testament scholars now hold that most if not all of the Gospels belong to the genre of Greco-Roman biography and that this genre permitted some flexibility in the way in which historical events were narrated. However, few scholars have undertaken a robust discussion of how this plays out in Gospel pericopes (self-contained passages). Why Are There Differences in the Gospels? provides a fresh approach to the question by examining the works of Plutarch, a Greek essayist who lived in the first and second centuries CE. Michael R. Licona discovers three-dozen pericopes narrated two or more times in Plutarch's Lives, identifies differences between the accounts, and analyzes these differences in light of compositional devices identified by classical scholars as commonly employed by ancient authors. The book then applies the same approach to nineteen pericopes that are narrated in two or more Gospels, demonstrating that the major differences found there likely result from the same compositional devices employed by Plutarch. Showing both the strained harmonizations and the hasty dismissals of the Gospels as reliable accounts to be misguided, Licona invites readers to approach them in light of their biographical genre and in that way to gain a clearer understanding of why they differ.

Late antiquity saw a proliferation of Christian texts dwelling on the emotions and physical sensations of dying, not as a heroic martyr in a public square or a judge's court, but as an individual, at home in a bed or in a private room. In sermons, letters, and ascetic traditions, late ancient Christians imagined the last minutes of life and the events that followed death in elaborate detail. The majority of these imagined scenarios linked the quality of the experience to the moral state of the person who died. Death was no longer the "happy ending," in Judith Perkins's words, it had been to Christians of the first three centuries, an escape from the difficult and painful world. Instead, death was most often imagined as a terrifying, desperate experience. This book is the first to trace how, in late ancient Christianity, death came to be thought of as a moment of reckoning: a physical ordeal whose pain is followed by an immediate judgment of one's actions by angels and demons and, after that, fitting punishment. Because late ancient Christian culture valued the use of the imagination as a religious tool and because Christian teachers encouraged Christians to revisit the prospect of their deaths often, this novel description of death was more than an abstract idea. Rather, its appearance ushered in a new ethical sensibility among Christians, in which one's death was to be imagined frequently and anticipated in detail. This was, at first glance, meant as a tool for individuals: preachers counted on the fact that becoming aware of a judgment arriving at the end of one's life tends to sharpen one's scruples. But, as this book argues, the change in Christian sensibility toward death did not just affect individuals. Once established, it shifted the ethics of Christianity as a tradition. This is because death repeatedly and frequently imagined as the moment of reckoning created a fund of images and ideas about what constituted a human being and how variances in human morality should be treated. This had significant effects on the Christian assumption of power in late antiquity, especially in the case of the capacity to authorize violence against others. The thinking about death traced here thus contributed to the seemingly paradoxical situation in which Christians proclaimed their identity with a crucified person, yet were willing to use force against their ideological opponents.