[1] Rhetoric played an important role throughout the ancient world, not only in poetry and the art of persuasion but also directly in the training of lawyers, orators, historians, scholars, politicians and judges.
[4] The city also boasted an important library that could to a certain extent compete with Athens, Alexandria, Beirut and Constantinople, and in which the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caeserea wrote a scandalous biography of the empress Theodora.
[5] Scholarly and rhetorical output of the School at Gaza included traditional Hellenic forms common to the classically educated Christian elite of the era.
[5][9] Historian Nur Masalha argues that the Rhetorical School at Gaza helped turn Byzantine Palaestina into "one of the most important centres of learning and intellectual activity in Late Antiquity," even eclipsing other major cities in the Mediterranean region, namely Athens and Alexandria.
[12] He writes that the "soft power" represented by the school and the contemporary Library of Caesarea-Palaestina afforded Palestine a degree of local autonomy in the Byzantine era.