Designated the capital of the Roman province of Syria -and eventually the leading Eastern metropolis -it served as an imperial military and judicial headquarters. Antioch was one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, in wealth and size and population the first of all the cities of the eastern Roman empire.1. Cosmopolitan and ethnically diverse, Roman Antioch was home to pagan, Jewish, and Christian Roman citizens speaking variously Aramaic, Greek, and to a lesser extent Latin. Less than 250 years after its founding, in 64 BCE, the Roman general Pompey inaugurated Roman rule in the region, which lasted for nearly seven hundred years, until the advent of Islamic rule in 638 CE. The city’s harbor site at the mouth of the Orontes on the Mediterranean coast was named Seleucia Pieria. Antioch was founded in the midst of a «Semitic landscape » as a Helle¬ nistic (Seleucid) capital city in 300 BCE with a population of Greek-speaking colonists in addition to local Syrians.
The body of the essay (III) is preceded by (I) a brief portrait of the city where Libanius lived and worked from 354 until his death around 393, which had also been the city of his birth and youth : Syrian Antioch on the Orontes River and (II) a biographical sketch of Libanius himself with attention to his version of paganism.
The purpose of this essay is to evaluate the relations of the fourth-century pagan rhetorician Libanius of Antioch with individual Christians on the basis of his selected correspondence either with or concerning Christian persons, and provisionally to situate Libanius as a «pagan traditionalist » responding to Christianity in a key city of the late Eastern Roman empire. LIBANIUS OF ANTIOCH IN RELATION TO CHRISTIANS AND CHRISTIANITY : THE EVIDENCE OF SELECTED LETTERS
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