47. The University established by Constantine was mainly instituted with a view to theological study,' though enjoying also the highest reputation for eminence in philosophy and jurisprudence.' Here also, as in the academic schools of earlier antiquity, instruction was communicated in the usual propaedeutic subjects composing the Trivium and Quadrivium. The body of teachers consisted of twelve regularly ordained priests (oikovμEVIKO?) under the supervision of a rector, or president (oikovμevikòs didáσrados). The last mentioned office was naturally regarded as a post of the highest dignity and honor. It conferred the rank of privy counsellor of the empire, and led immediately to an archbishopric or the patriarchate.

LAW SCHOOLS OF ROME AND BERYTUS.

48. The primary importance thus assigned to the highest of all professions in the University of Constantinople soon drew after it the entire adoption of the same principle of academic study in the school of Rome. In the establishment of both these institutions, political motives, and a regard for the interests of the state seem to have weighed largely with their imperial founders. The paramount necessity on public grounds of providing for the presence of a clergy qualified by the highest degree of learning and intelligence to maintain their position, as instructors of the people, has been already alluded to. Next in importance to the priesthood stood the class of public officials, to which, in a despotism so strongly centralized as that of the later empire, all the particular and ordinary functions of government were necessarily intrusted. To every one who intended to follow the career of the public service, an acquaintance with the legal system which it would be his future duty to interpret and apply was, of course preeminently indispensable. We find accordingly that the school of the Capitol, which had been originally established for the purpose of providing the state with a class of able and well educated

and in truth (εἰ καὶ ἀλλήλοις ἀνόμοιοι εἶναι δοκοῦσιν, τῷ γένει γε καὶ ὅλῃ τῇἀληθείᾳ ὁμολο γοῦνται· ἢ γὰρ ὡς μέλος, ἡ ὡς μέρος ἢ ὡς εἶδος ἢ ὡς· γένος εἰς ἓν συνέπεται· ἤδη δὲ καὶ ἡ ὑπάτη ἐναντία τῇ νεάτῃ οὖσα, ἀλλ ̓ ἄμφω ἁρμονία μία· ἔν τε ἀριθμοῖς ὁ ἄρτιος τῷ περιττῷ διαφέρε ται, ὁμολογοῦσι δ' ἄμφω τῇ ἀριθμητικῇ · ἄταρ καὶ ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ παντὶ τὰ μέρη σύμπαντα κἂν διαφέρηται πρὸς ἄλληλα τὴν πρὸς τὸ ὅλον οικειότητα διαφυλάττει. p. 349.

...

1. Gräfenhahn Gesch der class. Phil. III, p 30.

2. Bernhardy Gr. der Gr. Litt. I, pp. 440, 449. Its greatest celebrity as a school of law dates in all probability from a period considerably later than that treated of in the text, and when much of what is there described had undergone very considerable alterations. In the reign of Theodosius II. (A. D. 425,) the school of Constantinople seems to have been transformed into a counterpart of that of the Capitol. We find it described as containing 28 teachers of Greek and Latin literature, 1 philosopher, and 11 jurists. (L. 3. C. Th. de stud. liberal. urbis Romae et Constant. 14, 9. cited by Savigny Gesch. des R. R. I, p. 460.)

3. Liban. Ep. 1016.

officials, received under Theodosius the completion of its design in the appointment of two professors (antecessores') of Roman law." This circumstance seems to have given this institution a certain priority of rank over those schools which existed in other parts of the empire. Rome is invariably mentioned as the resort of all persons in the provinces who were desirous of obtaining a systematic acquaintance with legal studies.3 This superiority was confirmed by Justinian, who in the sixth century suppressed all schools of law with the exception of Rome, Constantinople, and Berytus. The same measure was completed in its effects by the withdrawal of the salaries hitherto paid to the philosophers and grammarians of Athens. The University of that city as established by Hadrian and Aurelian, though severely shaken by the incursion of the Goths in the middle of the third century, had, as we have already seen from Libanius, in a measure recovered its former prosperity. The salaries of its professors, which had been interrupted under the Christian Emperors, were afterwards renewed through the liberality of private benefactors.5 Under Justinian, however, the schools of Athens were finally closed, and those of its instructors who persisted in their adherence to the ancient faith were compelled to seek an asylum at the court of Chosroes, king of Persia. Berytus had for more than a century and a half before the reign of Justinian attracted large numbers of students in consequence of its renown as a school of jurisprudence,' and the importance assigned to the study of Roman law in the Basilica, or Capitolium of Constantinople, is attested in the poems of the epigrammatists of the day.

49. Fortunately for the best interests of mankind the wise and humane rule of the Ostrogoths long ensured to the learned institutions of Italy a happier lot than seems generally to have befallen those of the eastern empire. Even the rudest infancy of the Germanic nations is distinguished by qualities the very reverse of those which characterize the genuine barbarian. The simple vigor and pregnancy of moral meaning in their social life and national institutions had long before caused them to be studied with deep interest and sympa

1. Equivalent to the προεστώτες, οι προηγούμενοι of the Athenian schools.

2. Heeren Gesch. der class. Litt. im Mittelalter. I, p. 26.

8. Savigny Gesch. des Röm. Rechts im Mittelalter. I, p. 460.

4. Heeren Gesch. der class. Litt. im Mittelalt. Procopius Hist. Arcana, quoted by Zumpt über den Bestand der philosoph. Schulen in Athen, p. 87.

5. Wyttenbach ad Eunap. p. 45.

6. Heeren Geschichte der class. Philol. im Mittelalt. p. 63.

7. Libanius Ep. 1123. The writer in another letter (1555) speaks of the fees at Berytus as being extravagantly high but as compensated by the career opened to those acquainted with Roman law.

8. Anthol. III, 139. Jacobs.

thy by one of the noblest of the Romans. In the present instance their reverential susceptibility for all that contained the grounds of thought and inward vitality marked them out as the people peculiarly destined to reillumine the world, and in new and characteristic forms to resuscitate the sublimest aims and energies of antiquity. Not only had the Goths accepted Christianity with surprising facility and readiness, but the abstruse and intricate studies of biblical criticism had been entered upon by their clergy at an incredibly early period." In Italy the University of the Capitol seems to have been an object of peculiar care to the princes of the Ostragoths. From the convulsions by which the empire had long been shaken to its foundations, and the perpetual transferance of the sovereign authority from one illiterate invader to another, the maintenance and supervision of this school seems to have lapsed into the hands of the senate, in a manner analogous to what had always been the case with similar institutions in provincial towns. In a rescript of Athalrich, quoted by Heeren,❜ the senate is called upon to take such measures as should secure to every teacher in the schools of liberal arts, whether grammarian, rhetorician, or jurist, the enjoyment of the salary of his predecessor without diminution; and also to guarantee to all such individuals the possession of their appointments as long as they continued capable of discharging their duties with efficiency. In a subsequent portion of this edict it is further ordained that the payment of such officials shall take place at half yearly intervals, "ne cogatur de alieno pendere fastidio cui piaculo est horarum aliquo vacasse momento." higher learning, which existed most probably in some nection with this school, occur in Rome so late as the the Great (A. D. 590—604.).

age

Vestiges of distant conof Gregory

1. The marked and peculiar fondness for the subject with which Tacitus lingers over all his descriptions of the characteristic features and nascent institutions of the Germanic nations was very far from originating, as is sometimes supposed, in any disposition to exalt the imaginary virtues of the savage state over those of civilized life. It is a mistaken theory which would impute to so thorough a specimen of the matured judgment of a people cast in the very sternest mould of manhood, the faintest tendency to that abject and disgusting deification of the semibestial varieties of mankind, of which (a few sporadic cases excepted) none seem capable but the most addleheaded and incurably crotchety portion of our own public. Tacitus, we fancy, would have had little reverence for Jean Jacques Rousseau, and still less for the orators and audiences of Exeter Hall. His love and sympathy with the childhood of the Germanic races may be compared-mutatis mutandis-with the almost patriotic admiration and enthusiasm which renders Polybius the most eloquent, as well as the most accurate of modern Roman historians. Even and unbelieving author of the "Decline and Fall" seems to have been moved to a momentary forgetfulness of the mean scepticism which then passed for philosophy, by the simple and heroic virtues of the bold, yet gentle and deep-souled Germanic race. Few passages in his great work are more agreeably written, and do him greater honor as a historian and as a man, than that in which he treats of the character of the ancient Lombards, as exemplified in the story of Autharis and Theudalinda (Vol. VIII, c. 45.).

2. Neander Ch. Hist. III, p. 182.

3. Gesch. der class. Litt. im Mittelalt. I, p. 68. See also Cresoll. Theatr. Rhett. IV. 3. and Savigny Gesch. des R. R. im Mittelalt. I, p. 460.

50. The principle of academic education as exemplified in the Universities of modern Europe is accompanied with much less of what is ambiguous and perplexing than during the period of which we have hitherto treated. The social importance and distinctness of position attained by the priesthood and clerisy naturally contributed to give a corresponding prominence and precision of outward form to those learned institutions upon which their existence so mainly depended. In the antique world, moreover, from the universal prevalence of a very high degree of civilization, the learned class did not stand out in any remarkably strong contrast to the rest of society. Higher schools arose in every city of importance, and in most instances attracted notice rather in consequence of peculiarities which they presented when compared with other institutions of the same kind, than as distinguished from the general condition of the world around them. The tendency of ancient learning was towards the widest distribution. It came to the surface easily and everywhere as the manifestation of a mental habit completely permeating the whole social system. No pressure from without occasioned that coalition and combination of learned interests which we notice in the Universities of early modern Europe. Few circumstances could well be adduced which more closely exhibit how faint was the line of distinction separating the learned body from the mass of the community, than the existence of the class of itinerant sophists (λavra) parallel to those who occupied chairs in the Universities (radiato). The former traveled about from city to city, lecturing upon subjects apparently identical in nature with those which entered into the regular course of academic teaching. Even professors of jurisprudence are said to have imparted instruction in the same peripatetic manner. This practice was put an end to by Justinian.1

51. In the condition of society which existed throughout the nations of western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire this state of things was in every respect completely reversed. The extreme rudeness of the great body of the population caused those who possessed any share of enlightenment to stand out in the boldest relief from the rest of the community, and to rank almost as a superior order of beings amongst their contemporaries. The hopeless isolation to which the individual scholar found himself condemned, in the coarseness and barbarism by which he was surrounded, naturally compelled those who were possessed by higher impulses, to seek each others society with the instinctive eagerness of actual self preservation.

1. Cresoll. Theatr. Rhet. III.

Knowledge in the ordinary circumstances of the times had become so little less than impossible, that active and aspiring minds of every type and description were drawn together from all quarters, by an affinity infinitely deeper and more powerful than that of the forces of material nature, around some common rallying point, where sympathy, assistance, and intellectual advancement could be looked for.' The vast extent and unanimity of the movement, which then set in towards new centres of spiritual life, is especially evident in the marvellous blending of national differences which we notice in the great universities of those ages. Oxford, to be sure, gives the most decided proof of English pith and spirit in the vigor and effect with which it threw itself into all questions of enlarged and national import. Paris, on the other hand, is simply the all-embracing school of the one universal church, and exhibits not a trace of the distinctive peculiarities of the people in whose midst it was established. Its most illustrious personages are almost invariably Germans, Englishmen, or Italians. Scarcely a single Frenchman is mentioned in the long list of renowned doctors who have rendered it eternally famous. It is not until the departure of its ancint glory and importance, that a predominance of French feeling and modes of thought begins to be perceptible."

52. This secession of the sons of light had, of course, in accordance with the downright, healthy, unaffected nature of those days, quite as much of hatred as of love in it. Their strength of fraternal affection for each other was one with the heartiest antipathy and contempt for the grosser elements with which they had parted company. No where in the ancient world, unless perhaps in the records of the old Pythagorean bond, do we meet with any traces of that inextinguishable hostility between town and gown which forms so prominent and characteristic a feature in the academic history of modern Europe.'

1. Savigny Gesch. des R. R. im Mittelalter III, p. 139. The diametrically opposite character of Monachism in the eastern and western empires, arising from causes similar to those above mentioned, has been pointed out by Guizot in his Histoire de la civilization en France, I, p. 405. 2. Ritter, Gesch. der christl. Phil. II.

3. With the exception perhaps of Athens, which seems during the fourth century to have been a sort of scholastic Donnybrook fair, Oxford in the most flourishing period of its history stands quite without a rival in the records of academic turbulence. Constant affrays between the antagonistic nationalities of north and south English, outbursts of impatience against unpopular men in authority, and pugilistic encounters between Nominalists and Realists (in which, by the by, the contending dialecticians succeeded in taking their will of each other far more effectually than in their attempts to grapple in the region of pure metaphysics) lent a due admixture of comic vivacity and variety to the more serious tenor of ordinary University exist

ence.

Above all, the clerks of Oxford, though the favorites of the nation generally, seem to have been on anything but good terms with their immediate neighbors of the town. We can well imagine that, feeling all the conscious importance belonging to the sole proprietors of intelligence and refinement, they were at no pains to conceal the most supercilious disdain for those