Last date for submission of paper: unknown; Contact person: CRASSH; Convenors Aaron Kachuck (University of Cambridge) Lea Niccolai (University of Cambridge) Summary This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to re-assess the shape and make-up of classical culture in the context of the fourth-century transformation of the literary, philosophical, and theological past of Greece and Rome. The structure of the event is conceived as an experiment in form. The touchstone of each panel will be the life and writings of one of the most complex, heterodox, and polyvalent figures of the time: Synesius of Cyrene. Politician, poet, rhetorician, philosopher, (reluctant) bishop, consecutively (or simultaneously) pagan and Christian, Synesius, self-confessed heir to a vast classical tradition, represents in his eclecticism an ideal way to understand the strange new forms that the cultural canon that he received was to take in his hands and in the traditions that followed him. A descendent (or so he claimed) of the ancient Spartans, he was born in Libya, educated in Alexandria of Egypt, posted for three years to Constantinople, railed and fought against the barbarians: he represents the cross-roads of impulses deriving from both the core of the Greco-Roman empire, as well as its far-flung peripheries, not only around the Mediterranean littoral, but also across the Near East. Each panel will explore a different theme central to Synesius