ABSTRACT
Due to the period's social, political and religious developments, the Later Roman Empire saw the creation and expansion of large inter-provincial networks of influence that could only be forged and maintained through extensive travel and carefully cultivated lines of communication. The growth of Christian networks paralleling and promoting the growth of the Church is the most obvious example. It is hardly surprising that most of our great Late Antique letter-collections were written by bishops.3 Libanius' corpus was also produced to service a vast network of connections, though it is directed to a quite different social and religious milieu, namely, the traditional, still predominantly pagan, provincial aristocracies of the Greek East. His letters suggest quite clearly that travel and the maintenance of social networks between cities and across whole provinces were both increasingly obligatory in the fourth century for prominent families who wished to maintain their wealth, status and power.
