LATE ANTIQUE CULTURE AND PRIVATE LIFEnorthern Syria, chose to emphasize their religious upbringing and monastic
connections, but clearly acquired an extensive knowledge of classical litera-
ture. Synesius in Cyrene and Sidonius Apollinaris in Gaul were both fi fth-
century bishops who were also accomplished authors in the classical manner.
Sidonius, author of Latin panegyrics, poems and letters, came from a family
with two generations of praetorian prefects and was himself city prefect of
Rome in 468; other former offi ce-holders who became bishops in the fi fth
and early sixth centuries were Germanus of Auxerre, and in the east Irenaeus
of Tyre, Isaiah of Rhodes and Ephraem of Antioch.^19 Caesarius of Arles, Avi-
tus of Vienne, Ennodius of Pavia and later Venantius Fortunatus were others
who all drew on a rhetorical training in the classics.
Acquiring such a training was a matter of social background: it was neces-
sary to be comparatively well-to-do and, usually, male. Only a few particularly
favoured women gained access to these skills, such as Eudocia, the wife of
Theodosius II, who was the daughter of a sophist in Athens and herself com-
posed both secular and Christian poetry.^20 Greek verse composition was highly
valued; many poets fl ourished in Egypt in the fi fth century and were able to sell
their services as panegyrists. Nonnus of Panopolis is the most important of the
fi fth-century poets: author both of an immensely long and elaborate hexameter
poem known as the Dionysiaca and of a poetic paraphrase of St John’s Gospel,
he set a pattern of poetic style and diction which others followed extremely
closely, while his mythological themes provide the literary context for the
mythologizing mosaics of late antique sites in Syria, Jordan and Cyprus.^21
In the late sixth century, Dioscorus from Aphrodito in Upper Egypt was
still writing Greek verse on traditional subjects,^22 and at the court of Heraclius
in the early seventh century, George of Pisidia was the author of panegyri-
cal poems which combined classical metres and techniques with Old Tes-
tament imagery, while Sophronius, monk and patriarch of Jerusalem from
634–38, composed anacreontic verses on the capture of Jerusalem in 614 by
the Persians.^23 A Christian school of Greek rhetoricians and poets flourished
in sixth-century Gaza, which was also home to important monastic figures
and the site of a spectacular synagogue mosaic.^24 A series of historians wrote
classicizing histories in Greek in the fifth and sixth centuries,^25 and though
the approach of the ecclesiastical histories of such writers as Socrates and
Sozomen in the fifth century or Evagrius Scholasticus at the end of the sixth
may have been somewhat different, these too were works written from the
basis of a thorough training in rhetoric. A similar training continued to be
available in Latin in the west. Servius’ commentary on Virgil, Macrobius’ Sat-
urnalia and Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, in nine books,
belong to the first half of the fifth century,^26 while the North African poet
Dracontius composed lengthy hexameter poems in the Vandal period, from
which we also have the collection of short Latin poems known as the Latin
Anthology and the epigrams of Luxorius.^27 The African Latin poet Corippus
composed an eight-book hexameter poem on the Byzantine campaigns there
in the 540s and later delivered a Latin panegyric in Constantinople on the