The Local Scholars of Late Antique Athens

Late antique Athens is often presented as a cosmopolitan center of learning where teachers and students from across the eastern Mediterranean came to study the arts of rhetoric and philosophy. But the local teachers and students—that is, those of Achaia itself—remain understudied, as do the effects of the long period of peace within Achaia between the Heruli sack of 267 and the incursion of the Goths in 395. This study aims to rectify this by analyzing the scholars of Achaia who came from Athens, Sparta, Corinth, and elsewhere in the province. In doing so, we find that scholars from Achaia were disproportionately not exceptional individuals but rather members of scholarly families for whom education was a trade, and that peace paradoxically brought with it the decline of these local families as teachers from throughout the eastern Mediterranean increasingly settled in Athens.