Libanius was a teacher of rhetoric during the fourth century AD whose school was in Antioch. He left behind an immense corpus composed of 64 orations, 51 declamations, 57 introductions to the speeches of Demosthenes, some school exercises and about 1544 letters.
Beginning as a simple spreadsheet which catalogued the different editions and translations of all of the works of Libanius, this project quickly grew into something much bigger. It now stands as a database that catalogues as much metadata about the letters of Libanius as possible. A second goal was quickly added to this project, which is to represent spatially the distribution of Libanius’ letters across the Roman Empire. A third goal was recently added to this database, which is to create a digital prosopography on the people that are involved in Libanius’ epistolary network. This project, much like this website, is still in its infancy however, but letters and prosopographical information are added on a somewhat regular basis. This simple website attempts to link together all of the aspects of this big project.
Visit the site The Letters of Libanius