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 "This is a work of outstanding scholarship, a thorough and lively account which I would not only recommend to classicists and ancient historians but to anyone with a broad interest for the history of education. . . . Any review will do injustice to the book as a whole, which should be read and reread: undoubtedly the rich footnotes and bibliography will provide historians of childhood and youth with many new and unexpected facts."---Véronique Van Driessche, Les Etudes Classiques