This volume presents the original text and the first English translation of the largest surviving ancient collection of “preliminary exercises” used to teach young men how to compose their own prose, a crucial step toward public speaking and a career worthy of the educated elite. Graded in difficulty, the exercises range from simple fables and narratives to discussions of wise sayings, speeches of praise and blame, impersonations of figures from myth, descriptions of statues and paintings, and essays on general propositions (e.g., “should one marry?”). It provides a unique glimpse into the schoolrooms of the ancient Mediterranean from the Hellenistic period to the Byzantine Empire, vividly illustrating how ancient educators used myth, history, and popular ethics to shape their students’ characters as they sharpened their ability to think, write, and speak. With this volume Craig Gibson has provided a great service to scholarship. His translation of the fourth-century C.E. sophist Libanius’s Progymnasmata is truly a Herculean effort: impeccable, illuminating, and very lucid. Our assessment of ancient and early modern education necessarily depends on the knowledge we can get of the methods and curricula followed by ancient teachers, and this makes Gibson’s endeavor precious and so welcomed. – Raffaella Cribiore , Professor of Classics, New York University Craig A. Gibson is to be commended for producing this first full translation into a modern language of the Progymnasmata of Libanius (and pseudo-Libanius), exercises and notional categories that were a routine part of students’ educational experience in the Roman Empire on their way to the highest level of rhetorical study. The translation is crisp and clear and equipped with the Greek text and with helpful annotations on the fourteen categories of exercise as well as on the individual pieces. This is a most welcome addition to the work that has been making Libanius more accessible in recent decades. The largest extant collection of progymnasmata , it appropriately appears in translation on the current wave of renewed and sympathetic interest in the rhetorical culture of the Roman Empire. – Robert J. Penella , Professor of Classics, Fordham University Craig A. Gibson is Associate Professor of Classics at The University of Iowa. He is the author of Interpreting a Classic: Demosthenes and His Ancient Commentators (University of California Press).