Charles N. Aull holds a PhD in History from Indiana University. His research focuses on political and legal history.

Han Baltussen is the Walter W. Hughes Professor of Classics at the University of Adelaide and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He has held fellowships at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington DC and the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He has published books on Theophrastus (2000), Simplicius (2008), the Peripatetics (2016), and co‐edited volumes on ancient commentaries (2004), consolations (2012), and self‐censorship (2013). He is currently preparing a study of consolation strategies in antiquity and a new translation of Eunapius’s Lives of Philosophers and Sophists.

David Brakke is Joe R. Engle Chair in the History of Christianity and Professor of History at the Ohio State University. He has published books and essays on early Egyptian Christianity, monasticism, and Gnosticism, including Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity (2006). He and Andrew Crislip translated a selection of Shenoute’s works in Selected Discourses of Shenoute the Great: Community, Theology, and Social Conflict in Late Antique Egypt (2015).

R.W. Burgess has been a professor of Classics at the University of Ottawa since 1989 and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has written five books, almost 50 articles and chapters, and almost 70 encyclopedia entries on chronicles, numismatics, consuls, late Roman and Byzantine historiography, and late Roman history.

Marie‐Pierre Bussières, Associate Professor in Classics at the University of Ottawa (Canada), specializes in late antique Latin literature. She has published an edition and translation of two fourth‐century Latin polemics against the pagans and astrology by the anonymous author known as Ambrosiaster and is currently working on an edition and translation of the Questions and Answers on the Old and New Testament by the same author.

Touraj Daryaee is the Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies and the Director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine. He is a historian of ancient Iran and works on Pahlavi texts and the history of Zoroastrianism.

Jan Willem Drijvers is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Groningen. He has published widely on a variety of topics concerning late antiquity. He is author of Helena Augusta (1992) and Cyril of Jerusalem: Bishop and City (2004), and co‐author of the Philological and Historical Commentary on the Res Gestae of Ammianus Marcellinus XXII–XXXI (1995–2017). See also http://www.rug.nl/staff/j.w.drijvers

Marco Formisano is Professor of Latin Literature at Ghent University, Belgium. He has published extensively on ancient technical and scientific writing: Tecnica e scrittura (Rome 2001); Vegezio, Arte della guerra romana (Milan 2003); War in Words: Transformations of War from Antiquity to Clausewitz, co‐edited with H. Böhme (Berlin 2012); Vitruvius. Text, Architecture, Reception, co‐edited with S. Cuomo (Arethusa, 49.2, 2016); and Knowledge, Text and Practice in Ancient Technical Writing, co‐edited with P. Van der Eijk (Cambridge 2017). He is the editor of a series devoted to late antique literature entitled The Library of the Other Antiquity (Winter).

Diane Shane Fruchtman is Assistant Professor of Religion at Rutgers University and specializes in Western Christian Thought from Augustine to the Reformation. She is currently working on a monograph, Surviving Martyrdom: Martyrdom without Death in the Late Ancient West and Beyond, which uncovers the historical diversity of understandings of martyrdom by focusing on the phenomenon of “living martyrs” in Christian history. She received her PhD in History of Christianity from the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University in 2014.

Alessandro Garcea is Full Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of Paris‐Sorbonne and member of the Institut Universitaire de France. His main works include Gellio et la dialettica (Turin 2000), Cicerone in esilio: L’epistolario e le passioni (Hildesheim 2005); Caesar’s De analogia (Oxford 2012). He coordinates the CGL – Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum and FLG – Fragmentary Latin Grammarians web projects.

Marietta Horster is Chair in Ancient History, University of Mainz. She shares an interest with Christiane Reitz (see below) in technical writing and the processes of the transformation of knowledge and condensation of texts. Her main working fields are Greek cult, the Roman imperial family, and Roman imperial and late antique administrative and organizational developments.

Sarah Insley is the Dean of Branford College at Yale University. A specialist in postclassical Greek philology and literature, her research focuses on monastic literature, hagiography, and liturgical texts in late antiquity and Byzantium. She is currently completing a translation of the Letters of Gregory of Nazianzus for the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library.

Scott Fitzgerald Johnson is Associate Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma. He has published widely on late antique literature and culture, including the recent monograph Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2016).

Anthony Kaldellis is Professor of Classics at the Ohio State University. He has published widely on many aspects of Byzantine history, culture, and literature and has also translated many Byzantine authors, especially the historians. For more, see http://kaldellispublications.weebly.com.

Christopher Kelly is Professor of Classics and Ancient History in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College. His books include Ruling the Later Roman Empire (2004), The End of Empire: Attila the Hun and the Fall of Rome (2009), and Theodosius II: Rethinking the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity (2013). He is editor of the Journal of Roman Studies.

Gavin Kelly studied Classics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and at Gibbon’s old Oxford College, Magdalen, before holding Research Fellowships at Peterhouse, Cambridge, and the University of Manchester. He has taught since 2005 in the department of Classics at the University of Edinburgh, where he is Professor of Latin Literature and Roman History. He is the author of Ammianus Marcellinus: The Allusive Historian, two edited books, and articles on authors including Ammianus, Claudian, Sidonius, and Symmachus.

Daniel King is Associate Research Fellow (formerly Lecturer) at Cardiff University, specializing in Syriac Studies. Major publications include The Syriac Versions of the Writings of Cyril of Alexandria (Peeters, 2008) and an edition of The Earliest Syriac version of Aristotle’s Categories (Brill, 2010); he also regularly translates works out of Syriac, Greek, and Latin. In addition, he is an advisor and consultant for the translation of the Bible into modern Bantu languages in East Africa for the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Michael Kulikowski is Professor of History and Classics at Penn State and Head of the Department of History. He is the author of several monographs, most recently The Triumph of Empire: The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine (2016), and editor‐in‐chief of the Landmark Ammianus Marcellinus project.

Lillian I. Larsen holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Columbia University in New York City. She currently serves as Associate Professor and Chair of Religious Studies at the University of Redlands, in Southern California. Her research – long focused on rewriting the history of monastic education – is represented in a series of articles addressing monastic pedagogy. These publications likewise represent a conceptual core of the recently concluded “Monastic and Classical Paideia Project” at Lund University in Sweden. She is currently completing work on a forthcoming compendium, Monastic Education in Late Antiquity: The Transformation of Classical Paideia, co‐edited with Samuel Rubenson and published by Cambridge. Her revisionary monograph, which rereads narrative, regulatory, and material refractions of monastic pedagogy “against the grain,” is under contract and near completion. Work on a complementary catalog of monastic school texts is likewise underway.

Josef Lössl is Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Cardiff University. He is Director of the Cardiff Centre for Late Antique Religion and Culture and Editor‐in‐Chief of the Journal for Late Antique Religion and Culture and Vigiliae Christianae: A Review of Early Christian Life and Language. His Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity, co‐edited with Nicholas Baker‐Brian, is in press.

Javier Martínez is Professor of Greek Philology at the University of Oviedo. He has translated works of Plato and Aristophanes into Spanish, with commentary, and published articles on Greek literary tradition and philosophy. He has edited several volumes on the subject of fakes, forgers, and forgeries in classical literature: Falsificaciones y falsarios de la Literatura Clásica (2011), Mundus vult decipi (2012), Fakes and Forgers of Classical Literature – Ergo decipiatur! (2014), and Splendide Mendax: Rethinking Fakes and Forgeries in Classical, Late Antique, and Early Christian Literature (2016).

Jaclyn Maxwell is Associate Professor in the departments of History and Classics/World Religions at Ohio University. Her publications include Christianization and Communication in Late Antiquity: John Chrysostom and his congregation in Antioch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), “Social Interactions in a Rural Monastery: Scholars, Peasants, Monks and More in the Life of Hypatius,” in Motions of Late Antiquity: Essays on Religion, Politics, and Society in Honour of Peter Brown, edited by Jamie Kreiner and Helmut Reimitz (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), and “Popular Theology in Late Antiquity,” in Popular Culture in the Ancient World, edited by Lucy Grig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Scott McGill is Professor of Classical Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is the author of Virgil Recomposed: The Mythological and Secular Virgilian Centos in Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), Plagiarism in Latin Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Juvencus’ Four Books of the Gospels: Evangeliorum libri quattuor (London: Routledge, 2016).

Laura Miguélez‐Cavero (Junior Research Fellow, Balliol College, University of Oxford; Co‐Investigator of the Project “Greek Epic of the Roman Empire: A Cultural History,” Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge) specializes in late antique Greek poetry and has worked mainly on Egyptian authors. She is the author of Poems in Context: Greek Poetry in the Egyptian Thebaid, 200–600 AD (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008) and Triphiodorus: The Sack of Troy (Berlin: De Gruyter 2013).

Bret Mulligan, Associate Professor and Chair of Classics at Haverford College, has published on Martial, Statius, Claudian, epigram, and, most recently, Nepos’s Life of Hannibal. He is currently working on a translation of Ennodius’s poetry, a commentary on Martial, book 10, and the image of disease in Latin poetry.

Alex Petkas is a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego. He is completing his PhD disssertation in Classics at Princeton University, writing on the philosophical letter collection of Synesius of Cyrene. His research interests include the history of Greek rhetoric and criticism, epistolography, and the cultural reception of philosophy in antiquity. He is co‐editor of a forthcoming volume on Hypatia of Alexandria and has also presented papers on imperial panegyric, animals in Greek literature, and late antique invective.

Joseph Pucci is Professor of Classics, of Medieval Studies, and of Comparative Literature, Brown University. He is the author of Medieval Latin, 2nd ed. (1997); The Full‐Knowing Reader (1998); Venantius Fortunatus: Poems to Friends (2010); Augustine's Virgilian Retreat: Reading the Auctores at Cassiciacum (2014); Classics Renewed: Reception and Innovation in the Latin Poetry of Late Antiquity (ed. with Scott McGill, 2016); General Editor of the Routledge Series in Late Latin Poetry; and co‐editor of Brill's Late Antique Literature series.

Stephen H. Rapp, Jr. received his PhD at the University of Michigan in 1997 and has taught at Georgia State University, the Russian State Humanities University (RGGU), and Sam Houston State University. His research explores the overlap and negotiation of the Iranian and Romano‐Byzantine worlds through the prism of late antique Caucasia, one of Eurasia’s most vibrant cultural crossroads. His latest monograph, The Sasanian World through Georgian Eyes: Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in Late Antique Georgian Literature, was published by Ashgate in 2014.

Roger Rees is Reader in Latin at St. Andrews University, UK. His research focuses on panegyric. He is part of a collaborative team working on the Panegyrici Latini collection (see, for example, Arethusa 46.2, 2013, co‐edited with Bruce Gibson). His commentary on the speech to Theodosius by Pacatus Drepanius is in press with Cambridge University Press.

Christiane Reitz is Chair in Classical Philology (Latin), University of Rostock. She shares an interest with Marietta Horster (see above) in technical writing and the processes of the transformation of knowledge and condensation of texts. Her main working fields are ancient epic and classical reception.

Joel C. Relihan is in his 25th year at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where he is Professor of Classics. He is currently preparing an annotated translation of Pseudo‐Lucian, The Ass, and laying the groundwork for a wide‐ranging literary study, Panopticon: A History of Menippean Satire.

Michael Roberts is the Robert Rich Professor of Latin at Wesleyan University. He has published a number of books and articles on the literature, especially the poetry, of late antiquity, including The Jeweled Style: Poetry and Poetics in Late Antiquity (Ithaca, NY, 1989) and The Humblest Sparrow: The Poetry of Venantius Fortunatus (Ann Arbor, 2009).

Jeanne‐Nicole Mellon Saint‐Laurent is Assistant Professor of Theology at Marquette University. She is the author of Missionary Narratives and the Formation of the Syriac Churches, published by University of California Press. She is also the editor of a two‐volume digital catalog of Syriac saints and their lives, The Gateway to the Syriac Saints, produced by Syriaca.org.

Cristiana Sogno is Associate Professor of Classics at Fordham University. She has worked on the correspondence of Symmachus and has recently co‐edited a volume on late antique letter collections together with Bradley Storin and Edward Watts.

James Uden is an Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University. He is the author of The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second‐Century Rome (Oxford, 2015), and numerous articles and book chapters on late antique literature.

Kevin T. van Bladel is Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Yale University. He has published books and articles on the Classical Near East including The Arabic Hermes (2009) and From Sasanian Mandaeans to Ṣāians of the Marshes (2017).

Raymond Van Dam is Professor emeritus of History and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan. His books include Rome and Constantinople: Rewriting Roman History during Late Antiquity (2010) and Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge (2011).

Peter Van Nuffelen is Professor of Ancient History at Ghent University. He publishes on Roman religion and philosophy, early Christianity, and late antiquity. Recent publications include Orosius and the Rhetoric of History (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Penser la tolérance durant l’Antiquité tardive (Editions du Cerf, 2018).

Edward J. Watts is Alkiviadis Vassiliadis Chair in Byzantine Greek History and Professor and the University of California, San Diego. In addition to a co‐edited volume on letter collections, he has recently published two monographs that make extensive use of letter collections: The Final Pagan Generation (UC Press, 2015) and Hypatia: The Life and Legacy of an Ancient Philosopher, (Oxford, 2017).

John W. Watt is Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University. His research has focused on Syriac rhetoric and philosophy, and in these areas he has edited major treatises of Antony of Tagrit (Louvain: Peeters, 1986) and Bar Hebraeus (Leiden: Brill, 2005). Several of his articles are collected in his Rhetoric and Philosophy from Greek into Syriac (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).

Mary Whitby is Faculty Lector in Greek and Latin language and a lecturer at Merton College, Oxford. Her research interests focus on the poetry of late antiquity, which she has explored in a number of articles.

Ian Wood is Professor emeritus at University of Leeds. He taught at Leeds from 1976 to 2015. His D.Phil. was on Avitus of Vienne (Oxford, 1980). His books include The Merovingian Kingdoms (1994), The Missionary Life (2001), The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages (2013), and, with Fred Orton and Clare Lees, Fragments of History: Rethinking the Ruthwell and Bewcastle Monuments (2007). Editions and translations are: with Danuta Shanzer, Avitus of Vienne (2002); and with Chris Grocock, Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow (2013) and Jonas of Bobbio, Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Réomé, and Life of Vedast (2017).

Robin Darling Young has translated and studied works in classical Armenian, including Armenian translations of late ancient Greek works. She is Associate Professor of Church History at the Catholic University of America.

This volume presents a set of essays highlighting the richness and creativity of late antique literature. Our description of that literature will surprise far fewer readers today than it would have throughout most of the twentieth century. A consensus existed then, especially in the Anglophone world, that late antique texts were generally derivative, uninteresting, and reflective of decline across the Mediterranean. Indeed, with a few exceptions (notably Augustine), late antique literature was largely dismissed if acknowledged at all.

The declinist approach that reigned in the twentieth century and relegated late antiquity to the dusk before the Dark Ages has not yet disappeared. But it has widely given way to responses that shed the old prejudices – however inscribed they remain in school curricula – and recognize the quality, interest, and value of late antique literature.

Late antiquity was an extremely productive time in literary history. A great amount of Greek and Latin texts in prose and verse survives from the mid‐third to the early seventh century, the period upon which this book centers. Alongside that work, moreover, stand large corpora written in Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, Georgian, Pahlavi, Arabic, and a host of other regional languages. Taken together, the surviving literature from these centuries exceeds the sum total of surviving texts from the Mediterranean during the preceding millennium.

Late antique literature was also profoundly innovative. It was marked by modes of productive reception in which authors updated and transformed what came before them and by the emergence of new subject matter, new genres, new settings for literary production, new textual functions, and new reading practices (see Herzog 1989, p. 33). As a result, late antiquity has much to tell us about the dynamics of literary history: how the cultural past creates, and is created by, what succeeds it, and how traditions are endlessly in movement as they flow through the manifold channels of reception. What is more, late antique literature is an indispensable witness to a period of seismic cultural changes. The corpus of texts, with its huge size and variety, sheds much light on the late antique world across vast swaths of territory and across linguistic, religious, and class lines.

The chapters comprising this volume give an overview of the literature of late antiquity, while also providing a selective account of its reception history. The book centers on Greek and Latin texts; these were, of course, predominant in the literary culture of the late Roman Empire, which is the primary focus of this Companion. But the volume also expands to include literature in other languages. This reflects the multicultural and polyglot world of late antiquity, in which the literature of Greek‐ and Latin‐speaking Romans was situated among and interacted with the texts of different kingdoms and peoples. The period was a time when a broad range of Greek and Latin texts crossed political, linguistic, and cultural borderlands into the emerging and vibrant vernacular literatures of the Mediterranean, the Caucasus Mountains, the Iranian Plateau, and the Arabian Peninsula. To get a more developed sense of the literature of the period, it is therefore crucial to break free of the Greek/Latin binary and to encompass a broader range of languages and traditions (Humphries 2017).¹ The creative energy of late antiquity can only be appreciated when the extent of its reverberations are recognized.

Late antique literature demands, too, that we be flexible with the binary classical/Christian. Late antiquity represented one of the great transitional eras in literary history. Its authors, especially but not exclusively those working in Greek and Latin, were trained to appreciate classical forms and rhetoric, and many developed great familiarity with the works of classical authors. This training deeply influenced both their conception of literature and the sorts of projects they undertook. While established classical genres and literary models often framed the work that late antique authors undertook, these men and women were not at all stuck in or constricted by the past. Instead, late antique authors recast the classical inheritance to create texts that reflected contemporary tastes and needs and that fit with new cultural and historical developments. Foremost among those developments was the rise of Christianity into a culturally and politically dominant force. The literature that accompanies the emergence of Christianity as a privileged religion in the Roman world represents a significant late antique innovation. Christian authors remade established genres and specific textual models from the classical past, but they also departed from that past by responding to a separate authoritative tradition comprising the Scriptures and other Christian writings while producing texts in styles and for settings and uses with no precedent in classical culture. Christian literature thus lies both within and outside of the classical tradition; organizations of knowledge and of cultural history in which the classics stand on one side and Christianity on the other are entirely inadequate to deal with that body of material (Elsner and Hernández Lobato 2017, pp. 3–6).

The chronological limits of the late antique world cannot be precisely defined. We have chosen to center the volume on the period between the middle of the third century and the roughly first third of the seventh century. The boundaries we have set require both some explanation and some flexibility. The mid‐third century represents a significant point of demarcation between the literature of the high Roman Empire and the literature that begins to emerge in the fourth century. While it is true that some authors like Plotinus, Cyprian, and Bardaisan stand astride this divide, most of the major developments we want to consider in Greek and Latin as well as in the various vernacular literatures take distinctive turns in the later third and early fourth centuries. To give just three examples, these years saw the flowering of Syriac poetry, the emergence of several new forms of Christian literature, and an expansion in the texts treated and approaches utilized by exegetical commentators.

It is also clear that many of these literary developments reach a natural end point in the first decades of the seventh century. This is the case with Greek poetry, for instance, whose last late antique representative is George of Pisidia, and is essentially true of Latin poetry, despite the history of Visigothic verse. There are also distinct and dramatic breaks in the Greek medical, philosophical, and astrological commentary traditions. Likewise, after Theophylact Simocatta and Isidore of Seville in the first third of the seventh century, there will be no major authors of Greek or Latin historiography active for more than a century. Admittedly, the date has less meaning in some areas, including Syriac and Coptic literature, and little significance at all in Persia. Still, the dramatic decrease in surviving Greek and Latin literature written after ca. 630 means that most of the essays in this volume do not understand late antiquity to extend beyond the first half of the seventh century.

While our chronological boundaries are relatively well demarcated, our definition of literature is a capacious one. The modern restriction of the word to creative works, particularly poetry, drama, and prose fiction, is alien to antiquity (Goldhill 1999; Vessey 2012, 2015), and we follow convention in the field of classical studies in applying the term to an array of texts that today would be classified differently. “Literature” is in our formulation a broad rubric, and it covers a wide range of textual means, both written and oral, through which individuals in late antiquity represented, organized, and understood the world around them. We recognize that the line between the literary and the nonliterary/subliterary is sometimes uncertain. We acknowledge, too, some restrictions in our approach: For the most part in this book, the category “literature” comprises only texts to which authors and textual communities assign value that separates them from the purely functional and the disposable. This includes school exercises, which, even when they were throwaway student efforts, belonged to literate culture and were designed to train the young to attain some level of rhetorical skill. Those exercises can also be placed within the bounds of literature for the same reason that texts like technical treatises and laws can be: They defy attempts to classify them as nonliterary because they possess features, notably linguistic self‐consciousness, representational strategies, rhetorical characteristics, and intertextual ties to authoritative textual models, associated with the literary. Intertextuality is, in general, another important marker of literature in our formulation. Literary works operate within or against (at times multiple) discursive systems with different histories; they belong to and participate in diachronic fields of marked textuality, including when they update and remake that inheritance. Paraliterary and metaliterary compositions – e.g. commentaries, epitomes, and handbooks, all of which are characteristic of late antiquity – are not separate from the literary, moreover, but are extensions of it.

A broad examination of the textual resources that were transmitted and transmissible in late antiquity provides an expansive view of literary production in the period. The essays gathered in the volume examine the forms, histories, characteristics, audiences, and functions of many different kinds of late antique literature. In the process, contributors demonstrate how modern analytic techniques developed primarily for a narrower band of literary forms can be applied productively to a wider group of texts.

The volume is organized into three sections. In Part One, the chapters consider the processes through which the literary outline of the ancient world was expanded as more authors began working in a broader group of languages. The chapters in this section present the diverse linguistic literary histories of the period, and they connect literature to currents in political, religious, and cultural history throughout the later Roman, Sasanian, and Arab worlds. Collectively, the bodies of literature reveal varied and sustained sets of literary projects through which authors over vast territories used literature to deal with topics and to articulate worldviews within and, at times, across the cultures of the late antique world.

The second and longest section of the volume considers a wide range of late antique literature. It is organized around the concept of a literary form. The concept includes genres, which are fluid and dynamic in late antiquity: An important characteristic of late antique literature is the way in which authors pushed against and beyond inherited generic conventions and develop new variations on traditional genres (including by combining them) or new genres altogether. But “form,” as we are using it, is a more elastic term than “genre.” By “form” we mean a body of texts linked, sometimes in a broad sense, by formal properties, subject matter, method, tone, or function (or some combination of these). The texts might lie within or across genres, or they might lie outside of the traditional, recognized generic matrix. The category “form” provides a balance of coherence and flexibility, and it enables the section to cover a very wide amount of material. A clear sense of the variety and vitality of late antique literature emerges from the chapters. Contributors analyze the sets of characteristics that define the different literary forms and the ways that the forms reveal a distinctive late antique culture of literary experimentation and growth.

The final section of the volume considers the reception of late antique literature. It is, of course, impossible to deal exhaustively with the subject. The chapters instead examine particular epochs, as well as major individuals, in the reception history of late antiquity. Contributors consider the transmission of late antique texts, the interpretation of them in the respective ages, and the resonance they enjoyed. The chapters show how the literature of the period now known as late antiquity was made and remade over the course of its long and varied history. There are many late antiquities that emerge during its reception; with the past as our guide, we can expect that there will be many more in generations to come.

We are now at a time of reengagement, which has brought much late antique literature back from the brink of scholarly extinction and has led to considerable reevaluation of late antique texts and literary culture. This volume is an attempt to further those developments. Our strong wish is that the book will help scholars and students to understand late antique literature on its own terms. This, in turn, will enable them not only to know better the world of late antiquity but also to appreciate more deeply ways in which literary creativity can be expressed.