PART I

Prologue
Anazarbus

In the southeast comer of Asia Minor lies the great plain left behind as the Taurus Mountains drop away from the coast before turning back to meet the Amanus range, which rises from the south. The pocket of land thus formed was called by the Greeks Cilicia Pedias (Cilicia of the Plain) and provided the conditions for a prosperity unknown to the neighboring wilderness of Cilicia Tracheia (Rough Cilicia): soil that was—and still is—among the richest on the Anatolian Peninsula, especially favorable for grain and cotton; three major rivers that drained the territory from north to south and linked the inland regions to the coast; and the important trade routes that ran overland from the Syrian Gates in the Amanus Mountains to the Cilician Gates in the Taurus, funneling goods and men through the region. Such conditions made for a robust urbanization. Gradually detached from the control of local kings and brought under Roman rule, the plain showed some seventeen cities by the end of the first century A.D. , both very old and very new foundations, set along the coast or on one of the three rivers, with Tarsus enjoying pride of place.^[1]

Originally among the cities of second rank was Anazarbus, located on a tributary of the Pyramus, the easternmost of the major rivers, about forty kilometers as the crow flies from the nearest point on the coast. Probably ruled with the rest of the upper Pyramus by the native Tarcondimotid dynasty until A.D. 17, Anazarbus was issuing imperial coinage at least by the reign of Claudius (A.D. 41-54). From the late first century onward it is shown by its coins and inscriptions to have entered into the

[1] See Jones, CERP 191ff. For general accounts of Anazarbus (following paragraph), see ibid. 204ff.; Magie, RRAM 275, 408; Verzone, "Città"; and esp. Gough, "Anazarbus."

patterns of civic life and the inevitable intercity competition typical in the eastern provinces of the empire.^[2]

With seeming suddenness, however, Anazarbus came at the very end of the second century to claim a new position of prestige, rivaling Tarsus as first city of the region in political and religious importance. Its inscriptions from the Severan era proclaim Anazarbus both , a title long worn by Tarsus, and , or temple warden of the provincial cult of the emperor.^[3] How Anazarbus won these honors is not precisely known, but its prominence was apparently neither short-lived nor of purely local interest. The rivalry with Tarsus was finally resolved two centuries later, when the province of Cilicia was reorganized: Tarsus was made the metropolis of Cilicia Prima; Anazarbus, of Cilicia Secunda.^[4] Probably about the same time, an account of the local history and antiquities () of Anazarbus was composed, a distinction usually enjoyed by cities that could be said to have arrived.^[5]

But already in the early third century the new prestige of Anazarbus was recorded as far away as Delphi, where all the city's titles were duly mentioned in an inscription raised to one of its native sons. The publicist on this occasion was a grammarian, here honored in much the same way as a long line of literary men from other cities: "The Delphians made me a Delphian, a much-lettered[?] poet and grammarian, Naevianus, who have as my home Anazarbus, twice temple warden, ally of the Westerners, metropolis of the Cilicians."^[6] The epigram nicely balances the man's cultural status with his city's political status, and the circumstances hint at a reciprocal relation: the prosperous city of the provinces has

[4] Under Theodosius I or II: see Jones, LRE 1460-61.

nourished the individual, whose talents carry him to the center of the old Greek world, to an honor that reflects his city's glory.^[7]

Just over a century later another grammarian appears in one of the few detailed glimpses of Anazarbene life that our sources afford.^[8] The incident is set around the year 332; its main actor is Aetius. Later an important theologian of the Arian sect and the teacher of Eunomius, leader of its most radical wing, the young Aetius who appeared at Anazarbus was already marked as a talented and troubling figure. Impoverished by his father's death, he had worked as a goldsmith in his native Antioch to support his mother and himself. At the same time "the strength of his nature" drew him to "the lessons of argument" as auditor of the bishop Paulinus, to whom he devoted himself when his mother died. He became a skilled and combative debater—perhaps too skilled and combative for his own good, since after the death of his protector, Paulinus, the ill will he had accumulated caused Paulinus's successor to drive him from the city. Taking up his goldsmith's craft again, Aetius traveled north from Antioch, no doubt following the trade routes through the Syrian Gates, until he came to Anazarbus.

Approaching from the south, Aetius would first have spied a face of the great limestone tor that rises from the plain to shelter the city; then, rounding the foot of the crag, he would have passed through the city's main gate, where an ambitious arch from the Severan period still stood as a monument of the city's earlier surge of prosperity. Indeed, although burned by the Persians in 260, the city must still have been known to be prosperous, else the goldsmith would not have chosen it as a promising site for his expensive skills.^[9] It had of course changed as well, in a way that Aetius could have anticipated; for the city that had boasted the title of temple warden several generations earlier could now claim its own Christian martyrs and a regular ecclesiastical hierarchy, overseen by the Arian bishop Athanasius.^[10]

[7] The mutual honor would have been brought out all the more if, as commonly in such circumstances, a copy of the formal decree was sent by the host city to be set up in the honorand's native town: cf., for example, Labraunda 3:2.66, on the grammarian Ti. Claudius Anteros, pp. 135f.; and IGBulg . 3:2.1573; MAMA 8.418; IG 12 Supp. 248C; C. P. Jones, Roman World 60 n. 26.

[8] For the following two paragraphs, see Philostorg. HE 3.15, with Part II no. 167.

[9] Arch: Gough, "Anazarbus" 110ff.; L. Robert, "Épigraphie" 487-89, dating the arch to the reign of Caracalla; differently Verzone, "Città" 15ff., dating to s.II 3/4. Persians: Magie, RRAM 708.

[10] Martyrs: Acta SS. Tarachi, Probi et Andronici MM ., cc. 3-4 (ASS Oct. V, 575ff.), and the version now in Halkin, Inédits byzantins no. 13, cc. 14ff.; cf. Gough, "Anazarbus" 97; Halkin, Inédits byzantins 211f. For Athanasius's Arian activity before the Council of Nicaea, see Athanas. Alex. De synod . 17 (PG 26.172); and cf. the letter of Athanasius to Eusebius of Nicomedia, Epiphan. Panar. haeres . 69.6, and Theodoret. HE 1.4.

Both the old and the new were joined in the local grammarian, a teacher in the line of Naevianus and a Christian, to whom Aetius came to owe most at Anazarbus and whom he repaid least well. Spotting Aetius's talent, the teacher took him into his household: in return for Aetius's domestic services, the grammarian shared his expertise, bridging the ancient division between the banausic and liberal skills.^[11] But as a Christian, the grammarian knew the sacred texts as well as the classical and used to discuss Scripture with his pupil. It was at one such discussion that Aetius, disagreeing with the teacher's interpretation, "publicly heaped much shame upon him for his ignorance." The grammarian took Aetius's insult to be inappropriate repayment "to the household that was his benefactor" and drove him from his home. Not for the last time, Aetius landed on his feet: taken in by Bishop Athanasius at Anazarbus, he was soon in Tarsus and then in Alexandria, continuing to circulate easily among the cities of the East. Of Aetius's grammarian we know nothing more, not even his name.

Anazarbus was not one of the great cities of the empire, and it has not figured in modern accounts of ancient education. In just such cities, however, most of the history of ancient education was made, by fairly ordinary men like Naevianus or Aetius's anonymous teacher; and the lines of the sketch above will be redrawn with varying definition and shading in the following chapters, as we try to achieve a detailed picture of the grammarian's place in late antiquity. Like the two we have already glimpsed, the grammarians in the pages below will share a number of traits with many of their contemporaries, as creatures of the city, driven by a desire for honor and a loathing of shame, consciously or unwittingly participating in the play of continuity and change. Like the Anazarbenes, too, they will have a role that is very much the grammarian's, as social and cultural mediator.

The grammarian was one of antiquity's great middlemen. He might turn his talents outward, like Naevianus, to link his city with the world; more often, as with Aetius's teacher, his attentions would be circumscribed by the city walls, his skills poised between town and country, between distinct levels in urban society, between the family and the community, or between the two cultures of prestige, classical and Christian. But unlike other important middlemen with whom we are familiar—rhetoricians and bishops, for example—the grammarian found that his distinctive role was also his greatest weakness: the man whose function set him amid many vital spheres of activity most often was without a place at the center of any of them.

Many students of antiquity today are only peripherally aware of the grammarian. In this they are like the ancients themselves. To his contemporaries, the grammarian was commonly a shape spied out of the corner of the eye, a recurrent figure in the margins of a series of great murals: although the central subjects of the tableaux might change, the marginal figure persisted, in different attitudes serving different structural ends in the compositions. To understand the attitudes and the ends, we must first come to terms with their varied contexts.