a celebrated sophist and rhetorician, was born at Antioch in Syria, in A.D. 314. After receiving his elementary education in his native city, he repaired to Athens, and while under the public tuition of several eminent masters, cultivated in private a taste for the classical writers of Greece. Leaving Athens, after a stay of four years, he travelled about for a short time, and finally settled in Constantinople, where his fame as a teacher of rhetoric attracting great numbers of students, drew upon him the envy and malice of the public professors. Through their influence with the Prefect Limenius, he was expelled from the city, and removed to Nicomedeia about A.D. 346. Here his great success in teaching, coupled, no doubt, with the native vanity of his character, was once more the cause of great hatred in his rivals. Driven by a plague from Nicomedeia, he returned to Constantinople, and lived there harassed by the enmities of his fellow sophists, yet refusing to leave it upon the offer of the chair of Rhetoric at Athens, until his declining health forced him to retire to his native Antioch. In his latter days, he was honoured with the notice of the Emperors Julian, Valens, and Theodosius. Chrysostom, and probably St Basil, were his pupils in eloquence; and towards these, as well as other Christians, his own paganism did not prevent him exercising tolerance. He died at some period after A.D. 391. A successful imitator of Demosthenes and the ancient orators, he excelled all the rhetoricians of the fourth century; but his excellence in refining his diction is often attained by the loss of strength and precision of thought.

Of the extant works of Libanius there is no complete edition. The best edition of his Ἐπιστολαὶ ὑπομνηματικαὶ (Examples for Rhetorical Exercises), his Ἀγῶνες (Orationes), and his Μορίαι (Declamations), was published by J. J. Reiske, Leipzig, 1791–97. The best edition of his Ἐπιστολαὶ (Epistles) is by J. C. Wolf, Amsterdam, 1738. Prefixed to Reiske's edition is an autobiography of Libanius.