Education in the Graeco-Roman world was a hallmark of the polis. Yet the complex ways in which pedagogical theory and practice intersected with their local environments has not been much explored in recent scholarship. Learning Cities in Late Antiquity suggests a new explanatory model that helps to understand better how conditions in the cities shaped learning and teaching, and how, in turn, education had an impact on its urban context. Drawing inspiration from the modern idea of ‘learning cities’, the chapters explore the interplay of teachers, learners, political leaders, communities and institutions in the Mediterranean polis, with a focus on the well-documented city of Gaza in the sixth century CE. They demonstrate in detail that formal and informal teaching, as well as educational thinking, not only responded to specifically local needs, but also exerted considerable influence on local society. With its interdisciplinary and comparatist approach, the volume aims to contextualise ancient education, in order to stimulate further research on ancient learning cities. It also highlights the benefits of historical research to theory and practice in modern education.

This lively and wide-ranging study of the men and ideas of late antique education explores the intellectual and doctrinal milieux in the two great cities of Athens and Alexandria from the second to the sixth centuries to shed new light on the interaction between the pagan cultural legacy and Christianity. While previous scholarship has seen Christian reactions to pagan educational culture as the product of an empire-wide process of development, Edward J. Watts crafts two narratives that reveal how differently education was shaped by the local power structures and urban contexts of each city. Touching on the careers of Herodes Atticus, Proclus, Damascius, Ammonius Saccas, Origen, Hypatia, and Olympiodorus; and events including the Herulian sack of Athens, the closing of the Athenian Neoplatonic school under Justinian, the rise of Arian Christianity, and the sack of the Serapeum, he shows that by the sixth century, Athens and Alexandria had two distinct, locally determined, approaches to pagan teaching that had their roots in the unique historical relationships between city and school.

The last half century has seen an explosion in the study of late antiquity, which has characterised the period between the third and seventh centuries not as one of catastrophic collapse and ‘decline and fall’, but rather as one of dynamic and positive transformation. Yet research on cities in this period has provoked challenges to this positive picture of late antiquity. This study surveys the nature of this debate, examining problems associated with the sources historians use to examine late antique urbanism, and the discourses and methodological approaches they have constructed from them. It aims to set out the difficulties and opportunities presented by the study of cities in late antiquity in terms of transformations of politics, the economy, and religion, and to show that this period witnessed very real upheaval and dislocation alongside continuity and innovation in cities around the Mediterranean.

Redefines the role assigned education in the history of monasticism, by re-situating monasticism in the history of education.

"This volume is dedicated to eliciting the interactions between localities across late antique and early medieval Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Significant research has been done in recent years to explore how late "Roman" and post-"Roman" cities, towns and other localities communicated vis-à-vis larger structural phenomena, such as provinces, empires, kingdoms, institutions and so on. This research has contributed considerably to our understanding of the place of the city in its context, but tends to portray the city as a necessarily subordinate conduit within larger structures, rather than an entity in itself, or as a hermeneutical object of enquiry. Consequently, not enough research has been committed to examining how local people and communities thought about, engaged with, and struggled against nearby or distant urban neighbors.Urban Interactions addresses this lacuna in urban history by presenting articles that apply a diverse spectrum of approaches, from archaeological investigation to critical analyses of historiographical and historical biases and developmental consideration of antagonisms between ecclesiastical centers. Through these avenues of investigation, this volume elucidates the relationship between the urban centers and their immediate hinterlands and neighboring cities with which they might vie or collaborate. This entanglement and competition, whether subterraneous or explicit across overarching political, religious or other macro categories, is evaluated through a broad geographical range of late "Roman" provinces and post-"Roman" states to maintain an expansive perspective of developmental trends within and about the city."

Excavations on the site of this remarkable fort in northern Bulgaria (1996–2005) formed part of a long-term program of excavation and intensive field survey, aimed at tracing the economic as well as physical changes which mark the transition from the Roman Empire to the Middle Ages, a program that commenced with the excavation and full publication of the early Byzantine fortress/city of Nicopolis ad Istrum. The analysis of well-dated finds and their full publication provides a unique database for the late Roman period in the Balkans; they include metal-work, pottery (local and imported fine ware), glass, copper alloy finds, inscriptions and dipinti (on amphorae), as well as quantified environmental reports on animal, birds, and fish with specialist reports on the archaeobotanical material, glass analysis, and querns. The report also details the results of site-specific intensive survey, a new method developed for use in the rich farmland of the central Balkans. In addition, there is a detailed report on a most remarkable and well-preserved aqueduct, which employed the largest siphon ever discovered in the Roman Empire. This publication will provide a substantial database of material and environmental finds, an invaluable resource for the region and for the Roman Empire: material invaluable for studies, which seeks to place the late Roman urban and military identity within its regional and extra-regional economic setting.

First Published in 2001. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.