The year 2014 is the first centenary of one of the most devastating conflicts in world history. At the same time, it is the seventeenth centenary of the birth of Libanius (ad 314–393), one of the most influential authors of late antiquity. That World War One is being commemorated universally whilst almost nobody remembers Libanius is obvious. After all, the sophist from Antioch has been almost completely forgotten by the wider public, and is little studied even within the world of Classics today. There were times when this was different: Libanius, whose life spanned the entire ‘short fourth century’ from Constantine through Julian to Theodosius, communicated with the most powerful people of his day, provided model writings for generations of Byzantine scholars, became a popular figure in the Western Middle Ages, was the object of a large-scale forgery by one of the leading humanists, and seemed to be known widely enough even in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to be included as a character in Henrik Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilaean and, about a century later, Gore Vidal’s Julian. In a sense, Libanius has remained incontournable for classicists and ancient historians until this very day: few studies on Late Antiquity fail to mention the author who is often our best or even our only source on particular aspects or people of fourth-century society. But what has often gone unnoticed is that he is much more than that: an influential public figure with a unique personal network, a pivotal point in the history of ancient rhetoric, (auto)biography and epistolography, and a highly debated figure in the struggle for the reception and interpretation of the clash between Graeco-Roman and Christian culture.