This project aims to reshape our understanding of Syriac intellectual culture by investigating its engagement with late antique paideia and with Aristotelian rhetoric.

Classical texts such as Isocrates, Plutarch and Themistius were available in Syriac translation from as early as the fourth-fifth centuries CE, but it is yet to be ascertained how Syriac Christians used these texts and how the curriculum of Syriac rhetorical studies emerged. This project will undertake the first systematic study of Antony of Tagrit's Syriac treatise "On Rhetoric" (ninth cent.). Antony, a teacher of rhetoric, was the first Syriac scholar to articulate rhetoric as an academic subject; his comprehensive treatise demonstrates engagement with the Syriac classics (Ephrem, Jacob of Serug), secular Greco-Roman culture (Homer, Plutarch, and the progymnasmata), Christian rhetoric (Gregory of Nazianzus) -- but also with Aristotelianism more broadly. Study of Antony's treatise will be necessary to reconstruct both the curriculum and the functioning of Syriac rhetorical teaching, but it will also be a crucial addition to our understanding of Aristotelianism in the broader context of Byzantium and Islam.

The first part of the project aims to reconstruct Antony's classroom, its curriculum, models and exercises, and its engagement with late antique paideia. The identification of Antony's sources will provide unprecedented insights into the material that circulated in late antique schools across language boundaries (Greek, Syriac, Arabic). This work will enable investigation into the complex relationship between Syriac rhetoric and Aristotelian rhetoric in the broader context of Byzantine and Islamic Aristotelianism, which will be the subject of the second part of the project.