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31 The Greek sophist Libanius recounts in his autobiography the struggle that he faced when he returned to his hometown of Antioch in the middle of the fourth century, intending to teach there after years abroad. At first confined to teaching in his home to a small group of students, he eventually acquired a classroom at the edge of the marketplace (agora), and then finally the coveted right to lecture at the bouleutērion, the city hall, where he gained numerous students, and his authority increased exponentially. Libanius’s manipulation of Antioch’s places also reveals itself through the numerous interactions that he narrates with local and imperial officials, from the praetorian prefect Strategius to the emperor Julian. In particular, the power dynamics of attendance (or avoidance) at strategic locations throughout Antioch demonstrate the authority that Libanius was able to wield through his control of the city’s topography. In these same decades, as many as four Christian leaders concurrently claimed the title of bishop of Antioch, each elected by a different Christian faction. This led to sharp and long-lived competition about who could preach in which of Antioch’s church buildings (and who was exiled altogether ). This chapter will examine Libanius’s competition for Antioch’s most prestigious teaching places, and the power attendant on teaching in the prime bouleutērion classroom, setting the stage for comparisons with Christian leaders’ competition to control the city’s most prestigious preaching places. Together the Christian disputes and Libanius’s narratives reveal the complexity of the spatial power dynamics in fourth-century Antioch. Roman leaders of all types took advantage of the benefits that came from controlling identifiably powerful places, in terms of the numbers of people they could influence and the local authority they would gain. 1 The Power of Prestigious Places Teaching and Preaching in Fourth-Century Antioch 32 The Power of Prestigious Places ROMAN CLASSROOMS While Christian leaders were busy competing over Antioch’s churches, Libanius suggests that the city’s teachers likewise competed not only for students, but also for the best classrooms in the city, where they could gain visibility in areas with large audiences. Unlike the churches, however, which at least have some extant textual and occasionally even archaeological evidence for when and where they existed, Antioch’s classrooms are less recoverable, not least because many of them would have been rooms that were also (and sometimes primarily) used for purposes other than teaching. Roman education consisted of several different levels, from the basic reading and writing skills that the elementary didaskalos taught to the more advanced study offered by the grammarians to the elite higher education provided by teachers of rhetoric. The locations of education at any of these levels were quite varied and are difficult to reconstruct with much clarity. When Stanley Bonner gathered much of the textual evidence for Roman teaching places, he lamented the dearth of evidence : “There is scarcely any part of the study of Roman education in which precise information is so difficult to obtain as that which concerns the localities and premises in which teaching took place.”1 As discussed below, more recent excavations , such as in Egypt; further analysis of textual references, including newly available papyri from Oxyrhynchos; and material culture, such as scenes portrayed in vase paintings, have led to some more detailed academic discussions, although much still remains unknown. Raffaella Cribiore has outlined the numerous possibilities for teaching places in the Roman world: “Besides occupying a private or public building, a school could have been located within the perimeter of an ancient temple, in the cell of a monastery, in a private house, or even in the open air, at a street corner or under a tree.”2 New evidence for what appear to have been classrooms has come to light from large auditoria in excavations in Alexandria and from a room with poems painted on the wall in excavations in the Dakhleh Oasis of western Egypt.3 Likewise, parts of some Roman baths, the forum of Trajan in Rome, and various stoai appear to have had educational uses. 1. Stanley Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1977), 115 (see 115–25 for his summary of places that were used for education). On late Roman education more generally, see also Robert Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Henri Marrou, Histoire de l...

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