ABSTRACT
Discussions on late antique rhetoric are often characterised by attempts to come to grips with the broad questions of ‘break and continuity’ in sophistic culture and paideia in general. Studies on the ‘Second Sophistic’ usually take their endpoint sometime between 250 and 300 CE, the so-called ‘third-century crisis’, which consisted in administrative disorder and material decline after the Antonine emperors. In the late fifth century, Aeneas of Gaza is the first tangible Gazan intellectual, after the more shadowy Zosimus, for whom the sources are unclear, though he belongs to the period of either Emperor Zeno or Emperor Anastasius. The decades around 500 mark the heyday of rhetorical culture in Gaza with Aeneas, Procopius and Choricius as central figures. An idealised setting requires idealised sophists. In his funeral oration on Procopius, Choricius remarks on the qualities of such a sophist and how Procopius matched them.
