A widow of twenty paid for Antioch's best school

ANTIOCH, Roman Syria, 349 AD — About 367 AD a new pupil took his place in the lecture room of Libanius, at Antioch. Libanius was the most admired teacher in the Roman East. He worshipped the old gods of Greece and Rome. The new pupil was Saint John Chrysostom. His father had died when he was a baby.

Antioch was the second city of the eastern half of the Roman Empire. St. John Chrysostom was born there about 349 AD. His father, Secundus, was a high-ranking officer in the Syrian army. When Secundus died, his wife Anthusa was twenty. She was left with the baby, an older daughter and a house to run on her own.

Secundus had left her enough to live on well. Anthusa sent her son to the best schools in Antioch. She paid whatever they cost. But the money her husband had left behind was her son’s inheritance, and she spent none of it. She paid the schools out of her own money instead. Some of it was property that had stayed hers when she married. Some of it was the dowry she had brought to her own wedding.

Other men asked her to marry them, and she said no to every one of them. She would not bring another husband into her dead husband’s house. Years later, when her son was grown, Anthusa told him what it had cost her. “I spared no expense which was needful to give you an honorable position,” she said, “spending for this purpose some of my own fortune, and of my marriage dowry.”

The sum Libanius did in front of the class

Libanius was a friend of the Emperor Julian, and the two men wrote letters to each other. In his lecture room the students read the greatest Greek poets and thinkers. St. John Chrysostom could still quote Homer and Plato from memory as an old man.

St. John Chrysostom was not alone on those benches. His closest friend, Basil, sat through the same lessons. Two other boys in the room, Maximus and Theodore, grew up to be bishops.

Libanius liked to know who his pupils were. One day he asked the men sitting beside him who the new boy was. One of them answered that he was a widow’s son.

So Libanius turned to St. John Chrysostom and asked how old his mother was. Then he asked how long she had been a widow. St. John Chrysostom answered that she was forty. Twenty of those years had gone by since his father died.

Libanius turned to everyone in the room and called out: “Heavens! what women there are amongst the Christians.”

St. John Chrysostom finished the studies his mother had paid for. Then he went into the law courts. The men who did best there were often put in charge of a whole province of the empire.