Antony of Tagrit and his Teaching. Patristic Quotations in the Treatise On Rhetoric

This paper discusses the presence of patristic quotations in the ninth-century treatise On Rhetoric, composed by the West Syrian teacher Antony of Tagrit. The treatise, composed as a handbook for students, testifies to the emergence of rhetoric as an academic subject in Syriac schools and provides information on how this teaching developed and, most importantly, on which sources it was based. Notably, Antony employs material coming from non-Christian literature as well as patristic quotations, the so-called “popular philosophy” and the Bible. The paper offers some insights into Antony’s unique perspective as a West Syrian teacher who lived in Abbasid Iraq, where he taught a topic that was inherited from the Greco-Roman paideia but that somehow turned out to be “inherently Syriac”. The (Syriac) Christian perspective seems to play a distinctive role in Antony’s teaching, although the connection to the classical past is not hidden, as testified both by Antony’s quotations from Greek non-Christian authors and the influence played by progymnastic texts.