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Ancient education better than most today, says Townsend lecturer
by Linda Glaser
When Hayden Pelliccia, acting chair of classics, first contacted Raffaella Cribiore about serving as the
Fall’s Townsend Visiting Professor, he said her talks had to be original: she couldn’t repeat what she’d
already done. Cribiore took him quite literally. Laughing, she said in an interview that she read all 1,500
of the letters Libanius (314-394 A.D.) wrote, in order to have newly translated material to present.
Cribiore, a professor of classics at New York University, delivered three
lectures during her residency from October 15-22, entitled "Studies on
Libanius: Rhetoric, Reality, and Religion." In addition to the lectures,
she also conducted a graduate seminar on ancient education.
Libanius, a renowned teacher of rhetoric in 4 th century AD Syria, was
the equivalent of a college professor, said Cribiore. Students in
Libanius’ school were trained in rhetoric through exercises and writing
assignments; professors worked with students one-on-one. “They had
a marvelous education in learning to write and speak,” Cribiore said,
better than many students today. She called the compositions of confirmation and refutation they had
to write “very creative,” adding that “they gave students the habit of seeing all the sides of a story and
being able to discuss them.”
Although Libanius’ public affiliation was as a pagan, Cribiore said he shows a very different side of
himself in his letters; “particularly when he was older, he was very disillusioned by the gods.” She also
pointed out that in the fourth century “religious groups were not monolithic. People lived next to each
other and were friends. There was a great deal of intermingling.” While Libanius counted the pagan
Emperor Julian as a friend, he also knew John Chrystostom, Saint Basil the Great, and Gregory of
Nazianzus, and counted some Christians as intimate friends.
Cribiore’s careful and systematic analysis of Libanius’ work and of the curriculum he had his students
follow, as well as her research into other students in antiquity, have changed how scholars understand
ancient education. “A ‘learned’ allusion by Virgil to Euripides looks somewhat different when we know
that everybody who learned how to write Greek did so by copying out verses from Euripidean drama,”
said Pelliccia.
Graduate student Lindsay Sears noted that Cribiore’s presence at Cornell was marked by the way she
interacted with people, especially students. “She’s generous and approachable, with a ready laugh and
an incisive intellect--a model for aspiring educators,” said Sears in an email.
But Cribiore said her own education path “was all up hill.” Having married in the first year of college, she
turned down a position in her field to go with her husband to New York City, where she taught in the
Italian High School for fifteen years before entering graduate school. She received a PhD from Columbia

in 1993, and served as an adjunct professor of classics and curator of papyri in Columbia’s Rare Book and
Manuscript Library before becoming a professor at New York University.
“She had a rapid ascent into academic superstardom via the quick publication of some superb,
groundbreaking books,” Pelliccia said, including “Writing, Teachers and Students in Graeco-Roman
Egypt”; “Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt,” which won the
prestigious Goodwin Award of the American Philological Association; and “The School of Libanius in Late
Antique Antioch.” She also coauthored “Women’s Letters in Ancient Egypt: 300 BC-AD 800” with R.S.
Bagnall.
The Townsend Lectures were established in 1985 by the Department of Classics with a bequest from the
late Daphne Townsend, in memory of her late husband, Prescott Townsend ‘16. In keeping with
tradition, Cribiore’s Townsend Lectures will be published by Cornell University Press as part of the series
“Cornell Studies in Classical Philology.”
Linda Glaser is a staff writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.