This book studies the complex attitude of late ancient Christians towards classical education. In recent years, the different theoretical positions that can be found among the Church Fathers have received particular attention: their statements ranged from enthusiastic assimilation to outright rejection, the latter sometimes masking implicit adoption. Shifting attention away from such explicit statements, this volume focuses on a series of lesser-known texts in order to study the impact of specific literary and social contexts on late ancient educational views and practices. By moving attention from statements to strategies this volume wishes to enrich our understanding of the creative engagement with classical ideals of education. The multi-faceted approach adopted here illuminates the close connection between specific educational purposes on the one hand, and the possibilities and limitations offered by specific genres and contexts on the other. Instead of seeing attitudes towards education in late antique texts as applications of theoretical positions, it reads them as complex negotiations between authorial intent, the limitations of genre, and the context of performance.

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.

Education in Late Antiquity explores how the Christian and pagan writers of the Graeco-Roman world between c. 300 and 550 CE rethought the role of intellectual and ethical formation. Analysing explicit and implicit theorization of education, it traces changing attitudes towards the aims and methods of teaching, learning, and formation. Influential scholarship has seen the postclassical education system as an immovable and uniform field. In response, this book argues that writers of the period offered substantive critiques of established formal education and tried to reorient ancient approaches to learning. By bringing together a wide range of discourses and genres, Education in Late Antiquity reveals that educational thought was implicated in the ideas and practices of wider society. Educational ideologies addressed central preoccupations of the time, including morality, religion, the relationship with others and the world, and concepts of gender and the self. The idea that education was a transformative process that gave shape to the entire being of a person, instead of imparting formal knowledge and skills, was key. The debate revolved around attaining happiness, the good life, and fulfilment, thus orienting education toward the development of the notion of humanity within the person. By exploring the discourse on education, this book recovers the changing horizons of Graeco-Roman thought on learning and formation from the fourth to the sixth centuries

In this book A.D. Lee charts the rise to dominance of Christianity in the Roman empire. Using translated texts he explains the fortunes of both Pagans and Christians from the upheavals of the 3rd Century to the increasingly tumultuous times of the 5th and 6th centuries. The book also examines important themes in Late Antiquity such as the growth of monasticism, the emerging power of bishops and the development of pilgrimage, and looks at the fate of other significant religious groups including the Jews, Zoroastrians and Manichaeans.

This book is for scholars and students of the ideas, literatures, and cultures of early Christianity and late antiquity, ancient philosophers, and historians of theology. It offers new perspectives on early Christian modes of knowing and ordering knowledge in relation to changing discourses, institutions, and material culture of late antiquity.

The social values of upper-class Christians in Late Antiquity often contrasted with the modest backgrounds of their religion's founders – the apostles – and the virtues they exemplified. Drawing on examples from the Cappadocian Fathers, John Chrysostom, and other late antique authors, this book examines attitudes toward the apostles' status as manual workers and their virtues of simplicity and humility. Due to the strong connection between these traits and low socioeconomic status, late antique bishops often allowed their own high standing to influence how they understood these matters. The virtues of simplicity and humility had been a natural fit for tentmakers and fishermen, but posed a significant challenge to Christians born into the elite and trained in prestigious schools. This volume examines the socioeconomic implications of Christianity in the Roman Empire by considering how the first wave of powerful, upper-class church leaders interpreted the socially radical elements of their religion.