The Emperor Julian’s momentous sojourn in Antioch is a key theme in the discourse of Christianity and paganism in the Greek East. This chapter chronicles the events and climate of 362 and 363 CE on the shores of the Orontes, not least highlighting Julian’s utopia of Antioch "city of marble."

Introduction

After the presentations of Libanius’ Orations, Declamations and Progymnasmata in the preceding chapters, this chapter presents the last great part of Libanius’ oeuvre: his Letters. Like the other works, the letters present a paradox in the sense that they were as famous and popular from Libanius’ lifetime through the Renaissance and beyond (cf. Chapter 8) as they are obscure and neglected today: while late antique, Byzantine and humanist scholars used Libanius’ letters as models, modern scholarship has not yet produced a complete translation nor an in-depth overall study of Libanius’ letters from a literary or historical point of view. The reason for this neglect is twofold. On the one hand, accessing the text itself can be rather challenging: Libanius’ letters are highly complex texts, and by far not all of them are, as yet, available in translation. On the other hand, as classical studies have long neglected epistolography as a minor genre whilst studies of Late Antiquity have had a marked preference for Christian texts, no overall study of Libanius’ letters is, as yet, available. Times, however, are changing: epistolography and Late Antiquity in its widest sense have become hot topics of study, and Libanius’ letters fully merit their share in this double revival: not only is Libanius’ letter collection the largest one to have come down to us from classical antiquity, it is also one of the few and earliest ancient Greek letter collections to have come down to us at all.