Libanius was born in Antioch, located near the modern-day city of Antakya, Turkey.
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Libanius was born into a deeply cultured and once-influential family that had experienced substantial recent decline.
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Libanius' family fell out of favor and his grandfather was executed.
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Libanius' father died when he was eleven, leaving his upbringing to his mother and maternal uncles, who were in the process of rebuilding his family's reputation.
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Libanius studied in Athens under Diophantus the Arab and began his career in Constantinople as a private tutor.
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Libanius was exiled to Nicomedia in 346 for around five years but returned to Constantinople and taught there until 354.
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Libanius used his arts of rhetoric to advance various private and political causes.
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Libanius attacked the increasing imperial pressures on the traditional city-oriented culture that had been supported and dominated by the local upper classes.
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Libanius is known to have protested against the persecution of pagans in the late Roman Empire.
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Libanius's first Oration I is an autobiographical narrative, first written in 374 and revised throughout his life, a scholar's account that ends as an old exile's private journal.
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