Libanius was a teacher of rhetoric of the Sophist school in the Eastern Roman Empire. His prolific writings make him one of the best documented teachers of higher education in the ancient world and a critical source of history of the Greek East during the 4th century AD. During the rise of Christian hegemony in the later Roman Empire, he remained unconverted and in religious matters was a pagan Hellene.
Libanius as imagined in an eighteenth-century woodcut
A sophist was a teacher in ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Sophists specialized in one or more subject areas, such as philosophy, rhetoric, music, athletics and mathematics. They taught arete, "virtue" or "excellence", predominantly to young statesmen and nobility.
Socrates was lampooned by Aristophanes in The Clouds as a pedantic wordsmith who lived in a basket. Later philosophers such as Plato and Xenophon sought to distinguish Socrates' ethical teachings from this comic portrayal of a sophist.
Isocrates, one of the later sophists, was critical of the education practices of his predecessors