Chapter X: Part IV: Certain Educational Ideas and Influences (1)

While we have looked at the actual curricula and surroundings of the schools, it has been possible to treat Christian and pagan education apart. But there remain certain questions which do not directly or entirely belong to the schools, and yet are of importance for education because of the general educational principles underlying them (as in the case of history or the teaching of a strange language), or because of the ideas by which they moulded the individuality of people (as in the case of morality and art). Here the interplay of influences is such that, in the brief treatment which we propose, a strict division had better not be attempted. For not only would such a division be tedious within so limited a compass, but the merging into one another of customs and ideas makes it almost impossible. The questions we have indicated will therefore be regarded as common to either side of society.

1. MORAL EDUCATION

To get an insight into the moral state of a bygone age is difficult for two reasons. The first is that the subject is one on which people are most tempted to be hypocrites in their own case, while they delight in expatiating on the wickedness of others, and the second, that there is an extraordinary tendency for particular cases to fill the horizon and prevent us from taking a general view. In our period we have to reckon with a special form of these difficulties: the preaching habit, which, though it was essential to Christianity, was nevertheless as much open to abuse as pagan rhetoric was, especially when it was a means of combating paganism. ‘The world is wide’, said Stevenson in one of his essays, ‘and so are morals.’ But there is a standard—that of the Sermon on the Mount—which presents an ideal, though it does not give the right to condemn. In trying to follow this ideal the Christians saw pagan morality in a lurid light. How far were they justified?

The traditional trait of impulsiveness in the Gallic character suggested to many writers a proneness to immorality.[1130] Florus represents Livy as saying that the Insubrian Gauls, though brutal in spirit and abnormally large, were like their own Alpine snows: the glow of battle dissolved them into sweat, and even slight exertion thawed them like the sun. From this account Ammianus differs widely when he describes the Gauls of the fourth century as excelling in vigour and endurance irrespective of age.[1131] Yet he speaks of the ‘mollities’ of the Aquitanians.[1132] Perhaps in his description of their hardiness he was thinking chiefly of the northern Gauls, as opposed to their slacker brothers in the south. For it is against the south and against Aquitaine in particular that Salvian launches all the thunder of his denunciation. The Aquitanians need the chastisement of the barbarian invasions to kill off the worst among them and to reform the others.[1133] He rails at length against the prevailing corruption. The theatres ‘are so scandalous that no one can with modesty speak out about them’.[1134] The performances consisted of farces, ‘cotidianae obscenitates’,[1135] ‘restes dégénérés et méconnaissables du théâtre antique’ as Fauriel calls them.[1136] The Christian clergy lose no opportunity of condemning them. In contrast to pagan immorality, Salvian describes the chastity of the Goths. This he exaggerates for the sake of effect, but that there was a considerable element of truth in his description is proved by the _Codex Visigothorum_.[1137]

If the preacher gives a discouraging picture of the moral state of Gaul, so does the writer of comedy. In the fourth-century _Querolus_ much of the moral corruption pictured is due to imitation of Plautus, and we must remember that it was a comedy. Yet we can detect a strain of satire which is a criticism of existing conditions. Stealing, lying, adultery, perjury are treated as exceedingly common peccadilloes which the household god (Lar) is only too ready to pardon in a pleasing and jolly offender. Between the Plautine conception of the relation of slaves to their masters and that here portrayed we can detect no advance. On both sides morality is simply non-existent.

But if we must discount the evidence both of the preacher and of the comedy-writer, we may find a more impartial guide than either in the Law. The Theodosian Code shows that the aspect of a crime changed with the social status of the criminal. There was no consistent ethical standard. If the wife of a tavern-keeper was taken in adultery, she could be publicly accused; but if her servant girl was so taken, she might be dismissed as too cheap to worry about (_pro vilitate_).[1138] If a guardian corrupted his ward, he was punished by deportation and total confiscation of his goods.[1139] But a woman who had committed adultery with her slave was put to death, and the slave burned. So terrible did this interference with class-distinction seem that even slaves were allowed to give information.[1140] Again, in bringing a charge of treason which he cannot prove, an ordinary man is subject to torture, but a slave or a freedman is denied an audience and crucified.[1141] If a slave or freedman brought an accusation against his master (except in the case of treason), he was to be beheaded _before his charge was examined_. ‘Vocem enim funestam intercidi oportet potius quam audiri.’[1142] Again, in the law of extortion, judges who have been convicted lose the marks of imperial favour, are stripped of their office, and ranked with the worst and lowest class in the State.[1143]

In the opinion of the law, and therefore of the mass of the people, being ‘pessimus’ means belonging to the plebs, and the punishment of crime comes to consist in loss of ‘caste’.[1144] That is to say, morality becomes a matter of social position, and the corollary is that anything may be done by those whose status is high, as long as they manage to maintain that status, while those at the bottom, having no status to lose, hardly care what they do. However much we may disregard particular descriptions of moral degeneracy, the _Codex Theodosianus_ supplies a very damning commentary on the ethical standards of the time. Nor did the Christians effect any improvement in this legal respect of persons.

We have, of course, men like Paulinus of Pella who speak of the ‘sollers castorum cura parentum’[1145] which shielded him from every evil influence, and the _Parentalia_ of Ausonius indicates happy home-conditions. Lavisse notes this,[1146] and makes much of the domestic felicity and the tender love reflected by these writers and by the inscriptions.[1147] But, apart from the fact that Ausonius and Paulinus were at the top of society, it is dangerous to presume too much from epitaphs. Then, as now, convention played a great part, and the stock phrase ‘Coniugi Karissimae’ may be as formal as the constantly recurring ‘memoriae aeternae’. It was the fashion to write epitaphs in which the superlative was prominent.[1148] Besides, in most of these inscriptions there is no clue as to the dates.

We must conclude, then, that there was much for the Christians to educate, in society and in themselves, if they wanted to fulfil the Christian code of morals.

Turning to the question how far an attempt was made in the pagan schools to train the moral nature, we find that it is precisely this side of pagan education that Juvenal and Tacitus criticized. The old Roman tradition of strict moral education at home was impaired under the Empire by the influx of foreign elements, and the decline is familiar from the authors of the first century A.D. Seneca could see in the education of his day no moral element,[1149] and his criticisms apply to the scholars of Gaul as much as to those of Rome. How could there be (he argued), when the masters were so utterly corrupt? ‘The grammarians’, he said, ‘taught merely antiquarian stuff, not ethics. They asked whether Homer was older than Hesiod, and inquired into the ages of Patroclus and Achilles, or the wanderings of Ulysses.’ ‘Quid horum ad virtutem viam struit?’ The geometricians teach how to survey estates, but ‘what does it profit me to know how to divide a plot of land, if I do not know how to share with my brother? You know what a straight line is. What good is it, if you do not know what is straight in life? O man of learning, let us be content with the simpler title: man of virtue.’[1150] The burden of the cry is for perspective, for an ethical basis, without which education was seen to be like an anchorless storm-tossed ship.[1151]

This need continues to be felt through the following centuries. We have seen what stress Julian laid on the moral qualifications of the teacher. His ideal was Hellenic purity. Before him, Eumenius, on whom the imperial injunction was laid: ‘ut ... ad _vitae melioris_ studium adulescentium excolas mentes’,[1152] proclaimed the ideal of practical morality advocated by Cicero. Similarly, the emperor in his zeal for education stressed the moral side as well as the intellectual (so at least his panegyrist maintained), and realized that letters were the basis of virtue.[1153] These virtues, he says, grow up in youth, and in manhood form the strong support of all the various duties of citizenship, whether in peace or war. And so letters are the cradle ‘of all diligence and all praise’.

To a certain extent this demand for moral education was met in the pagan schools. When Paulinus speaks of learning ‘dogmata Socratus’ at the age of five, what he probably means is a selection of well-known sentences chosen for their moral teaching.[1154] The didactic nature of the fables and rhetorical exercises has been noticed, and we cannot doubt that they played a considerable part in the moral theory of the pagan schools. An inscription of Limoges, belonging probably to the second century, contains the figure of a man with a scroll in his right hand, and the following words:

‘Artis Grammatices Doctor Morumqꝫ Mag .. ter Blaesianus
Biturix’.[1155]

The inference is that the popular conception of the grammarian’s task included moral training. We find that ‘Grammatica’ was regarded as the nurse of the virtues. A training is obtained through it for practical life. Not only the orator but the soldier was supposed to be thus formed. It is the school of the grammarian that trains the soldier whom the Campus Martius receives. ‘Grammar’ has fired him with imaginary battles, taught him courage by accustoming him to the apparatus of war even among the blandishments of peace, and so will make him obedient to the actual trumpet call.[1156] All this is claimed for the school. Such was the theory, but what sort of training was given in practice? It was of little use that fables with moral tags were put before the child if there was not at the same time the living example. And Seneca’s objection to the character of the ‘grammatici’ seems to have held to some extent in Gaul during our period. The disgusting picture of social vice which Ausonius gives in the latter part of the _Epigrams_ applies in part also to the teachers. Eunus, the pedagogue, figures prominently in the list, and Ausonius himself speaks quite naturally about things that directly contradict the Christian morality which he professed. There was a hollowness in the teaching of the ‘grammaticus’ which logically followed from the attempt to maintain the precept without the example. The objections to the low ethical standard of the gods in Homer, which were urged in the fifth century as in the time of Plato and Cicero, were unheeded by the teachers, says Augustine, even when a man of their own school (_ex eodem pulvere_) proclaimed that Homer had transferred human qualities to the gods.[1157] A barbarism or a solecism was of more account than a moral offence: to forget the _h_ in _homo_ was more serious than to forget to love a fellow man.[1158]

‘Liberales Artes’, Seneca had said, ‘non perducunt animum ad virtutem, sed expediunt.’[1159] We must be content if the school-training merely creates a disposition of mind favourable to virtue. The Christian schools went further. They insisted on correlating theory and practice, and prescribed definite lines of action. As against the hollowness of the pagan moral teaching (and here again we can detect a reaction), the Christian teachers on the whole not only tried to practise what they taught, but saw to it that their pupils carried out their commands. They were exhorted to do so in the Canons of the Church. They put before men a personal ideal, and, if their methods of striving after it were sometimes crude and exaggerated, their sincerity can hardly be doubted. So obsessed were they with the idea of working out their own salvation that their teaching tended to become oppressively moral. The long disquisitions of Jerome or Tertullian on the minute points of moral behaviour are sometimes positively unhealthy. But we must remember that they represented a reaction from an extreme. And in this reaction the seeds of a higher ethical standard were being sown. Not as the lightning lighteth the heavens, but as the growth of the mustard-tree, the stern teaching of the monks who saw a higher vision and fled the world for its sake penetrated and leavened the mass of society, whether that society called itself Christian or not. Already in the fifth century a better public opinion was being formed. We find Sidonius, half-pagan as he was, commending his villa at Avitacum because of the absence of immoral pictures and scenes—‘non hic per nudam pictorum corporum pulchritudinem turpis prostat historia, quae sicut ornat artem sic devenustat artificem.... Absunt lubrici tortuosique pugilatu et nexibus palaestritae (wrestlers) quoram etiam viventum luctus, si involvantur obscenius casta confestim gymnasiarchorum virga dissolvit.’[1160] So in his letter to his son,[1161] he praises him for loving purity and adopts the tone of the moral educator.

It is not suggested that the pagan efforts to advocate morality were worth less than the Christian, or that there was a steady and abiding advance in morals from this time onwards. Only, there are two facts to bear in mind: the moral state of Gaul was bad, and paganism as a motive to morality had failed. Where then was the incentive to come from? Without claiming for the Church any special virtue, and realizing its many grievous errors, we must answer that the moral inspiration for the future came at this time through Christianity. And the Church and her schools were the channels by which this inspiration reached the people. Thus once more Christian education supplemented the work of the pagan schools.

* * * * *

One of the ways in which Christianity exercised its moral influence consisted in raising the status of women; and this was done, to a large extent, by making education more general among them.

In answering the question whether girls attended the schools at Bordeaux, Jullian[1162] says that this was probably the case. We may omit the ‘probably’. It would have been strange indeed if this had not been the case, seeing that at Rome girls’ schools go back possibly to the time of the unfortunate Virginia[1163] (449 B.C.), while in the Ciceronian period Hortensia belonged to the orators, Lesbia wrote poetry, and girls are mentioned as attending school with the boys by Martial[1164] and Ovid.[1165] Moreover, Ausonius says quite plainly to his grandson, referring to the ordinary school course:

Haec olim genitorque tuus _genetrixque_ secuti ...[1166] and tells us that his aunt was a student of medicine, though he indicates that this was not the usual thing (_more virum_ medicis artibus experiens).[1167] Sometimes the mother taught her daughter literature:

Latios nec volvere libros (says Claudianus of the bride),[1168]
desinit aut Graios, ipsa genetrice magistra.

But such home-education was probably rare and confined to the upper classes. We hear of no such instance in Gaul. Yet we know that there was sufficient interest in the classics and in knowledge generally on the part of the Gallic women to elicit a lament from Claudius Marius Victor. For among the signs of corruption of his day he notes their preference for pagan authors. Moreover, they show a knowledge of abstruse questions and a desire to know which is truly monstrous:

Quae ... Deo tantum sunt nota, recondita cunctis,
scire volunt (heu grande nefas!) et scire videntur.

But it is all the fault of the men, he says (_sunt nostri crimina sexus_). Without the example of the husband, the wife would never have strayed into such ways of wickedness:

Sic exempla virum uxores accepta sequuntur.[1169]

Eulalia, the wife of Probus, was fond of reading the involved writings of Sidonius,[1170] who does not think it too much to expect from a wife that she will be interested in literature. For he reminds a friend that marriage need not interfere with his studious habits: have not Marcia, Terentia, Calpurnia, Pudentilla, Rusticiana, and many others ‘held the light for those who read’?[1171] We may conclude, therefore, that while a large number of girls received a home-education, chiefly in spinning and household crafts,[1172] many of them attended the schools and became interested in literature.[1173]

If there was an increasing liberalism about women’s education in pagan circles (to take the references from Ausonius and Sidonius under this head), the principle of a woman’s right to education assumed much wider and more active proportions among the Christians.

The spread of monasticism naturally affected a large number of women. Marcella was the first of the noble ladies at Rome to take the veil, and set an example which was so extensively followed that by 412 Jerome could boast ‘crebra virginum monasteria’.[1174] Avitus in 517 called together a Church Council at Epao (a small village south of Vienne), which regulated in one of its canons the admission to the ‘monasteria puellarum’,[1175] and he refers elsewhere to the cloister founded by Leonianus where Remilia was brought up (_sub regulari disciplina nutrita_).[1176] The nuns learnt weaving and spinning,[1177] but the various ‘Regulae’, though somewhat later than our period, make it probable that a portion of their time, at least, was spent in reading and writing.

From these scattered data the point that emerges is that there was a change of attitude towards the education and intellectual capacity of the ordinary woman.

Jerome showed quite clearly that he had no contempt for the feminine mind as such. He considers Paula and Eustochium competent judges of his Latin translation of the Bible, and treats their suggestions as coming from intellectual equals.[1178] The number of books dedicated to them is remarkable, though not when we remember that they inspired the translation.[1179] They, and many other women like Blaesilla, Felicitas, and Fabiola were adepts in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and frequently consulted Jerome on points of interpretation, as did women from all parts of the Empire, including Gaul. For if the rhetorical tradition was one and universal in the West, Christian teaching in the fifth century was almost more so. ‘If Augustine from his retreat at Hippo dictated a new treatise against the heresies of his time, all the churches of Italy, of the Gauls and of Spain listened with attention. Thus, at first sight, we can only discover one sole Latin Literature which, so to speak, began the education of all the races of the West.’[1180]

Sedulius, who had taken the side of liberalism in the matter of pagan literature, when discussing the dedication of his _Carmen Paschale_ makes Macedonius mention many learned presbyters. ‘Nor need you be ashamed’, he continues, ‘to follow the example of Jerome the interpreter of the divine law, the student of the library of heaven (_caelestis bibliothecae cultoris_), in submitting to women, high born and of known high character, women in whose minds the passion for sacred reading has built the sober home of wisdom, the documents of your inmost reasoning. Who would not wish, would not be ambitious, to please the superb judgement of a Syncletice...?’ And he goes on to describe Perpetua, whose wisdom (_gemina resplendens lampade_) lends lustre to that of her sister.[1181]

Ennodius also testifies to the intellectual activity of women at the close of the fifth century. In counselling his correspondents to leave grammar and rhetoric, he recommends certain teachers. Among these he mentions with enthusiasm ‘domna Barbara, Romani flos genii’. She seasons her speech with a simplicity that is at once natural and artistic, and her eloquence is enhanced by her clarity of thought. There is also Stephania ‘splendidissimum catholicae lumen ecclesiae’.[1182] One of the points that emerge in the _De Ordine_ of Augustine is that ‘Monica is not to be kept from discussing philosophy because of her sex’.[1183]

On the whole, we must say that though there had been an Aspasia in the time of Pericles, and though Hypatia taught at Alexandria at the beginning of the fifth century, there had never been such a general interest in education on the part of women as in the Christian circles of the Western Empire at this time. The references to educated women in pagan authors is slight when compared with those in the Church Fathers. Of all Symmachus’s letters not one is addressed to a woman, and neither Ausonius nor Sidonius (except for one letter to his wife) had a female correspondent; whereas not only Jerome, but Augustine, Cyprian, Tertullian, Ambrose, all followed Christ’s example when he taught the woman of Samaria. Yet when all is said, we feel that the extent of female education is still small, and that Ovid’s words still apply:

Sunt tamen et doctae, _rarissima turba_, puellae.

But we also feel that there is an interest which contains a promise for the future:

Altera non doctae turba, _sed esse volunt_.[1184]

2. HISTORY

If a consideration of the state of moral education is necessary to show how far teaching had an ethical basis, we may find in an inquiry into the position and purpose of history in the schools an indication of the political basis of education. We have seen that in the pagan schools education as a whole was directed by, and aimed at the fulfilment of, the imperial policy. In considering the sort of value attached to historical study, we may see in greater detail how far the scientific attitude of mind was entertained, and how far it was abused for the sake of politics. For there is no subject which illustrates more clearly these two possibilities.

The general outlook of history in our period was not very encouraging. There were no historians except Ammianus. It was a time when a writer like Suetonius was taken as a model. There were, however, numerous compilations. Eutropius, for example, wrote an abbreviated history of Rome towards the close of the fourth century. Chronography was a science started by Sextus Julius Africanus early in the third century, and his example was widely followed. Eusebius, and his translator and expander Jerome, carried on the tradition. Prosper of Aquitaine took up the record where Eusebius had left off, and Prosper’s work was continued by Idatius. Sulpicius Severus illustrated the same tendency, while Rufinus, the adversary of Jerome, did important work in translating and continuing the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius. Dry and formless as these chronographies were, they had the merit of giving a truer perspective of history by introducing the cold lucidity of dates.

Corresponding to this activity there had appeared on the Christian side the records of the _Acta Martyrum_. Many of these Acta were of a legendary character, and though they were useful for their local colour, they are certainly less valuable from a scientific point of view than the bare chronicles.

This was the general position of history. Its position in the Gallic schools was not more satisfactory. Throughout the ancient educational tradition, from the ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία, of Posidonius to the ‘seven liberal arts’, there had been no place for the study of history. From Dionysius Thrax to Quintilian it is consistently treated as a side issue.[1185] Blümner says that when Quintilian assigned ‘historias exponere’ as one of the tasks of the grammarian, it only meant that the teacher commented on such historical facts as turned up in the course of his reading, since history was not a school-subject.[1186] Yet this is not always true.[1187] For from what Ausonius says in the _Protrepticon_, it appears that at Bordeaux, at any rate, history determined the course of the reading and not vice versa, and that it was a school-subject to this extent that definite books were included in the course for its sake. For Ausonius prescribes for his grandson certain periods of Roman history: the conspiracy of Catiline, the twelve years after the events connected with Lepidus and Catulus, the Sertorian war.[1188] Among the encyclopaedic attainments of Staphylius, the Bordeaux teacher, is a knowledge of Livy and Herodotus.[1189] In the library of Ausonius there are

ὀκτὼ Θουκυδίδου, ἐννέα Ἡροδότου,

and in his invitations to Paulinus he advises him to leave behind

Historiam, mimos, carmina....[1190]

We must, however, be careful how we interpret ‘historia’. It was an elastic term. In the _Technopaegnion_, for example, Ausonius has a piece ‘de historiis’,[1191] but the subject-matter is almost entirely in the shadowy realm of mythology—the ‘history’ of Narcissus, Juno, and Philomela; and when the grammarians Crispus and Urbicus are said to be ‘callentes mython plasmata et historiam’, we feel that the juxtaposition of the two subjects is significant. ‘History’, Quintilian had said, ‘is akin to the poets, a sort of prose poetry.’[1192] The interest in the actual facts of history and their meaning is small. A teacher like Ausonius takes very little notice of contemporary events. He refers vaguely to ‘tempora tyrannica’,[1193] and to the residence of Constantine’s brothers at Toulouse.[1194] But of all those contemporary events which we should have expected a man in Ausonius’s position to mention, the declaration as emperor in Gaul of the German Magnentius (350), the campaigns of Julian against the invading Franks (357-8), the crossing of Maximus to Gaul after having been declared emperor in Britain (383), and the affair of Arbogast and Eugenius (392)—these and many other contemporary events of importance do not appear in the pages of Ausonius.

If mythology was a danger for history on the one side, there was antiquity on the other. In the former the tendency was to wander away from facts altogether, in the latter there was a temptation to concentrate on bare facts too much. The historical facts which Sidonius sometimes enumerates sound very much like an inventory.[1195] Staphylius, who is noted for his knowledge of history, was steeped in the six hundred volumes of Varro,[1196] and the antiquarian Victorius dug deep into the musty documents of antiquity, spending on unexplored fields a keen intellect and a tenacious memory.[1197] Ausonius remarks that this meticulous encyclopaedism had made Staphylius neglect Cicero and Vergil,

et quidquid Latia conditur historia.[1198]

Victorius had the scientific spirit, but no use can be made of it for history, which, to Ausonius, means something much nearer to the brilliance of the rhetor than to the patient study of a Victorius or a Staphylius, whom he regards with an airy smile of contempt. The ‘prompta studia’ of the ordinary teacher who glibly talked the traditional stuff are separated with an air of respectability from the work of such cranks as indulge in dusty research.[1199] Rocafort rightly suspects that these students ‘irrisioni, sicut Ausonio, ita cunctis Burdigalensibus fuisse’.[1200] A practical sign of this is the low position which Victorius held: he was not even a grammarian but merely an assistant (_subdoctor sive proscholus_),[1201] poorly paid, ‘exili nostrae fucatus honore cathedrae’. The subsidiary position of history is indicated by Augustine when he says that it was an accessory to ‘Grammar’, and its mythological and artificial character is criticized in the remark that it was more worked at by grammarians than actual historians.[1202]

It is quite clear that history was studied in a very haphazard way. Even a teacher of sufficient prominence to deliver several[1203] panegyrics before the emperor, such as the Gallic author of the speech to Constantius, talks in a very vague way about some of the best-known statements of Herodotus. ‘Xerxes, _ut audio_, _Persarum rex potissimus_, pedicas iecit aureas in profundum....’ Unfamiliarity with Greek history is implied both on the part of the speaker and on the part of the audience. When Ausonius tells us that he wrote a Roman History for his son (_ignota aeternae ne sint tibi tempora Romae_[1204]), we get the impression that he did it largely because his name appeared in the list of consuls, and to urge his son to follow his footsteps.

Scire cupis qui sim? titulum qui quartus ab uno est
quaere: leges nomen consulis Ausonii.

And,

Exemplum iam patris habes, ut protinus et te
adgreget Ausoniis purpura consulibus;[1205]

and again, to Proculus:

Mille annos centumque et bis fluxisse novenos
consulis Ausonii nomen ad usque leges.[1206]

It is a pity that the main part of the work is lost, but probably its author merely followed the tendency of the age to epitomize, as he did in the summary of Suetonius’s lives of the Caesars. The study of history, in fact, was merely ancillary: ‘ut aliquid nitoris et copiae orationi afferrent (_sc._ _historiae studia_) et aliquid materiae carmini.’[1207]

The models followed by the historians are chosen chiefly for their literary brilliance. Sallust is the most famous, and he plays a large part in Ausonius’s syllabus. Orosius was greatly influenced by Tacitus, and Arnobius by Lucretius.

The truth is that the ancients always regarded history more as an art than as a science. The books of Herodotus came to be called by the names of the Muses, Sallust and Tacitus strove predominantly after stylistic effectiveness, and even Thucydides gave oratorical technique a much more important place than would now be accorded to it. Rhetoric had cast her spell over the historians as over all the other intellectuals. Polybius alone resisted, and suffered, in consequence, at the hands of the critics. ‘The only ancient historian’, Norden writes of him,[1208] ‘who opposed with all his might the influence of rhetoric on the writing of history, and who, therefore, is most closely related to the modern point of view, belongs, according to the judgement of Dionysius of Halicarnassus ... to those dull authors whom nobody can bear to read through.’ So far had rhetoric asserted its sway over history, that Cicero, to whom we look for the sane and balanced conception of rhetorical education, could say that it was permissible for a rhetor to falsify history for the sake of style,[1209] and could describe the function of the historian as essentially rhetorical (_unum ... oratorium maxime_).[1210] A custom that gave special scope to this view of history was the insertion of imaginary speeches such as we find in Herodotus, Thucydides, Sallust, and Tacitus. And not only speeches, but letters and documents were set down in a fictitious form. Against this practice Quintilian, like Polybius, had warned. The orator’s task, he maintained, was different from that of the historian. ‘Id quoque vitandum, in quo magna pars errat, ne in oratione poetas nobis et historicos, in illis operibus oratores aut declamatores imitandos putemus. Sua cuique proposita lex, suus cuique decor est.’[1211] But the warning was in vain. The historians were still trained in the rhetor’s school, and the rhetor frequently used historical subjects. When Ammianus wrote his history, he stood in the great tradition of Asiatic rhetoric. Thus history continued to wear the fetters of oratory.

As time went on these fetters became more and more galling. Just as the Athenians ceased to produce genuine history when their day of national greatness passed with the failing Empire and the inefficient democracy, leaving their learning and their civilization to be overgrown by the weeds of rhetoric and sophistic, so now the Gauls of the transition choked whatever history there was with an abundant growth of words. When the panegyric becomes fashionable in Gaul, we see how history develops into an instrument of imperial policy. Not merely beauty of form and the following of traditional rules, but the narrower purpose of praising the emperor becomes the goal. The facts of history are loosely and wildly used.[1212] Alexander the Great (with the old argument that he conquered merely ‘imbelles Asiaticos’), Hannibal, Augustus, are great names for these Epigoni to juggle with and to mingle promiscuously with the incense of adulation. Of Caesar it is said: ‘ille Graeculos homines adortus est, tu (Constantine) Subalpinos’.[1213] So far did the travesty of history go.

‘There’, said Eumenius of the Maeniana, ‘let the flower of our youth learn ... to praise the deeds of the mighty emperors—_quis enim melior usus eloquentiae?_’[1214] The school must teach them the proofs, varying with the different places, that establish the exploits of the prince; and as the news of victory comes hotly in from time to time, the teacher must point out the land concerned on the map—the double river of Persia, the parching fields of Libya, the curving ‘horns’ of the Rhine, the many-flowing mouths of the Nile. All these several exploits must mould the mind of youth to a sense of imperial greatness, while he envisages the Pax Romana throughout the erstwhile troubled world, ‘for now, now at length we may look at the map of the world with joy, seeing in it naught that is foreign’.[1215]

This imperialistic use of history made men afraid to tamper with it, lest indiscretion should mar their fortunes. In the fifth century there was no longer a Domitian to put historians to death, but there was a tradition to bind and intimidate. When Leo, the minister of Euric, advised Sidonius to occupy himself with history during his banishment, the reply was: ‘turpiter falsa, periculose vera dicuntur’.[1216] In this sort of work, says Sidonius, the mention of the good wins scant credit, the mention of the great, unbounded enmity. ‘The writing of history’, he maintains, ‘seems to be the last thing a man of my class ought to undertake, for to begin it means envy, to continue it, trouble, and the end of it is hatred.’ The attitude of mind which made men write to order was spreading: Ausonius is an outstanding example. At the same time the rhetorical tradition in history was persisting. Sidonius wants Leo to undertake a history and the argument for his fitness refers merely to style: ‘nemo te celsius scripserit’.[1217]

The all-pervading imperial atmosphere, therefore, was not encouraging for the historian. We hear of histories begun but never finished. Symmachus tells of one Protadius, a nobleman, who set about writing a domestic history.[1218] Sidonius had been asked by Bishop Prosper to write a history of the war with Attila, and actually set to work on it but gave it up.[1219] It was not only on the tax-payer that the Empire weighed heavily.

It may be, too, that the emperors interfered with the selection of the material for the historical course, such as it was. In the list given by Ausonius (Jung remarks) much stress was laid on the history of insurrections, and this was done by way of an object-lesson to the Gauls ‘quo magis rebellionem audientes detestarentur’.[1220] Whether this was actually the case, or whether the remark is a mere scholastic refinement, we cannot with certainty say. The imperial authorities were quite capable of such an act, but, on the other hand, the evidence is not conclusive. We are inclined to give the emperors the benefit of the doubt.

With the reaction against the superfluities of rhetoric in the Christian schools, there followed important results for history. Christian writers, as we have seen, reinforced and developed, especially in Gaul, the tendency towards chronography. This was part of the reaction against the domination of Form in historical writing, and it proved to be a valuable antidote from the historian’s point of view. But another and a greater service resulted. The Christian reaction, as we saw, affected thought as well as style, and the Christian historians, with their renewed interest in theology and philosophy, began to look for first principles in the series of events. The universality of the Christian religion made them look not only to single nationalities (though the Church fostered nationalism),[1221] but to the whole world. They tried to see all things in relation to their conception of the divine. Thus they tended to produce a philosophy of history, which, though often distorted and biased, set history on a much more markedly philosophic basis than before. As instances we may remember Augustine’s _City of God_, which was written to justify the fall of Rome, and the universal history of Orosius (who wrote with far less balance than his master Augustine), which attempted to prove that ‘there’s a Divinity that shapes our ends’. Filled with the same note, and poignantly real, are the _de Providentia Dei_ and the _ad Uxorem_, written in Gaul after the great invasion at the beginning of the fifth century had forced men to reconsider their philosophy of life.

We can hardly claim, however, that the Christian elementary schools were much affected by these contributions of Christianity. History was still very much of a subsidiary subject and its standard was low. Yet its extent was widened by the addition of Bible-history, which often, no doubt, ousted pagan history altogether; but the interest of men like Augustine in secular history, and the use they made of it to reinforce Christianity, would have prevented its disappearance from the more advanced Christian schools. Bible-history had the advantage, moreover, of not having an imperial policy behind it, and the greater simplicity and sincerity of the Christian ideal must have produced something nearer to historic truth (the absence of which Augustine deplores in the pagan schools) than the frills and draperies of rhetoric would generally allow. Bias and misrepresentation, born of the fervour of conversion, were responsible for a great many distortions, and the growing formlessness did much damage to the artistic side of history; but it cannot be denied that there was a greater desire for truth in the eager questions of the early Christian than in the smug complacence of the glib rhetorician.

History, in the hands of a skilful master, may become one of the very finest instruments of education. It has a legitimate use in inspiring patriotism. The deeds of a man’s ancestors become part of his individuality, and may be a source of high and noble action. Similarly, in proportion as a man realizes his national unity with his people, their history may become a motive and a driving force in his life. Now the Roman Empire set before the schoolboys of Africa and Italy and Gaul the events of the Roman republic and the deeds of the emperors. But the area was too wide. The Gallic schoolboy could not feel the value and the force of things so far distant, different from his own conditions, and so slightly connected with them. He could not feel that he was a responsible member of an Empire which could not defend him. Moreover at this time nationality was coming to be more and more clearly realized under the influence of the Church:[1222] each province sought to uphold the specific doctrines of its leaders, and bishops waged fierce controversial warfare for the traditions of their country,[1223] especially in Africa. There is a dim individuality to be seen in Spain,[1224] and Salvian’s attacks on the Empire had an aspect which pointed to the beginning of Gallic nationality. The Roman Empire was beginning to feel the strain of national individuality. In these circumstances, history, being hedged in as we have seen by imperial persons and questions, must have become more and more artificial. The lack of citizenship which was so prevalent at this time increased for lack of an inspiring national or international ideal. And such an ideal might have come partly through a method by which history would have become more vivid and real to the children in the schools.

Another possibility that was missed was that of using history to see the logical and psychological connexion between events. With the narrow conception of the subject that was entertained at the time this was impossible. The only sort of causal chain that the student was induced to see was that, if you did not please the emperor, so much the worse for you. Not only the reason, but also the critical faculty, was thus left undeveloped in this age of adulation and prescription.

In the same way the moral significance of history was overlooked, and here again the cause was restriction. For in order to realize the influence of character on the march of events, a wide, and, if possible, a comparative study of the subject must be undertaken, and the values attached must not depend on a gilded imperial figure, but on ethical truth. Again, it was impossible to judge of the various aims and theories of men in the past age, to form some sort of opinion of the development of political theory, to be interested in truth and progress, as long as rhetoric, the handmaid of a rigid Imperialism, reigned supreme.

3. THE POSITION OF GREEK

When Ephorus called the Celts philhellenes,[1225] he was doubtless thinking of the Greek influence which Massilia (as we have seen) so effectively spread in Gaul. This influence survived in the south as late as the seventh century and even later,[1226] but Massilia’s influence had long been waning. During the fourth and fifth centuries Latin had more and more become the language of the upper classes,[1227] so that the impetus to Greek studies from this quarter was becoming almost negligible. But tradition still counted for something. The Aquitanians, who boasted of the legend which connected their origin with Greece and Bordeaux, kept up commercial relations with Greece[1228] during the fourth century. It is they who are the most faithful to Greek and among whom we find most traces of Hellenism.

Now Julian had created a sort of contrast between Greek learning and Christianity. Hellenism came to be identified with paganism, and so tended to fall into disrepute as Christianity gained ground in the fifth century. The inscriptions show remarkably few traces of Greek. Where they occur they are usually very short, as in the case of the one found in the Alps near Vienne and belonging probably to the fourth century:

Εὔστοχι (vocat. case) ζήσαις,[1229]

or else they refer to some foreigner, as the one at Trèves Οὺρσίκινος ἀνατολικός[1230] (i.e. from the land of the rising sun, eastern), who was probably one of those traders called in a general way ‘Syrians’.[1231] Conrad Celtes speaks of Greek inscriptions in Gaul which he had seen there in the fifteenth century:

Graecis vidi epitaphiis
inscripta busta,

but these could not have been very many. Altogether we have only nine Greek Christian inscriptions in Gaul.[1232] Nor are the Greek remains on the pagan side more numerous. That Greek was declining is abundantly evident from other sources too. The Greek of Autun in the north shows signs of decadence even at the end of the third century. But it needed less than a century for the neglect to spread even to the Grecized south. Eumenius found it necessary in a formal and imperial speech to explain the word ‘Musagetes’ to his audience.[1233] He himself, of course, and many of his fellow teachers were familiar with Greek. Greek forms like ‘Heraclen’, ‘Pythiados’ are often used, and the orator of Oration VI, who was a Gaul, could quote Homer.[1234] Ausonius says in his quaint mythological style of Harmonius, professor of Greek at Trèves, that he was the only one who mingled Greek wine with Italian.[1235] But the subject was fast becoming a schoolmaster’s acquisition. By A.D. 376 it was not even that; for the emperors, in speaking of the appointment of a Greek rhetor, add dubiously ‘if any one worthy of the post can be found’.[1236] It was partly this neglect of Greek, no doubt, that made Julian refer so often to ἡ τῶν Κέλτων άγροικία.[1237]

As the grandfather of Eumenius was an Attic Greek,[1238] we cannot suppose that it was the un-Greek atmosphere of his surroundings, but rather personal disinclination or disability that allowed Greek to dwindle in the schools. Ausonius says that his father’s Latin was halting:

Sermone impromptus Latio, verum Attica lingua
suffecit culti vocibus eloquii,[1239]

and the verses are a commentary on the swiftness of the decline. Ausonius himself, in spite of his confession that he neglected Greek at school,[1240] is quite familiar with the language, and loves to display his knowledge of it—‘magnopere sibi videtur placere graecissando’.[1241] He drags it in pedantically in his epistles and the capers he cuts with it are merely annoying.[1242] But whenever he addresses the general public he finds it necessary to translate even the simplest words and phrases, as in the _Ludus septem sapientum_ when the pantomime player (_ludius_) speaks.[1243] And he admits that Greek was not very successfully taught, though the Greek grammarians were industrious enough.[1244] There was not much enthusiasm for the language and its literature, as there had been in past times. To Citarius, the Sicilian teacher of Greek, Ausonius says that he would have gained as much glory for learning as Aristarchus or Zenodotus among the Greeks were it not that the scale of values had changed.[1245]

Still lower did Greek sink in monastic education. There was opportunity in the south for learning Greek, but it was exceptional to do so. About the middle of the fifth century Eugendus came as a scholar to the monastery at Condat on the Jura mountains, and the record says of him that he learned the Greek authors as well as the Latin, _such was his enthusiasm for study_.[1246] But a certain elementary knowledge of Greek was necessary. The ‘Litterae formatae’, letters of commendation given to travelling priests by their bishops, according to the councils of Nicea (325), Laodicea (366), and Milevis (402), were sometimes drawn up in Greek. The decrees of the bishops were marked with certain Greek letters to indicate their authenticity. The work of Dositheus (Ἑρμηνευμάτων libri III), a sort of motley lexicon interspersed with extracts and dialogues, chiefly of a juridical character, was used by those who, like the Northern Gauls, found Greek difficult. We have referred to the low standard of the Books of Instruction written by Eucherius for his son Salonius, who was neither very young (about twenty) nor very stupid (he was made bishop, and could, as we have seen, ask profound theological questions). As far as the study of language is concerned, we need to remember that philology is a comparatively modern science: but such exposition (consisting mostly of mere translation) as that of talentum, obol, drachma, Theos, Christus, Hagios, Angelus, &c., under the heading ‘Quaestiones difficiliores’, must point to a surprising ignorance of Greek even among the intellectuals of the day.

It was not only in Gaul that schoolboys of that age found Greek difficult. Augustine had the same trouble in Africa, and his complaint in the _Confessions_ is well known.[1247] He was by nature romantic, and instinctively hated drudgery. The hateful repetition of the elementary school ‘unum et unum duo, duo et duo quattuor’ bored him beyond words. What he liked was to read about the wanderings of Aeneas and the distress of Dido. But this was not the whole reason for his difficulty with Greek. The prevailing conception of discipline made things unpleasant. He was urged ‘saevis terroribus ac poenis’. Yet this does not explain the matter, for it applied to Latin as well. He himself could hardly understand what was wrong. Why should he have hated Greek so much? ‘Quid autem erat causae cur Graecas litteras oderam quibus puerulus imbuebar, nec nunc quidem exploratum est’;[1248] and again ‘Cur ergo Graecam ... grammaticam oderam?’[1249] The difference between Greek and Latin could not lie in the different material of the books read, because they were Vergil and Homer; and if he liked Aeneas why did he not like Odysseus?

Rocafort,[1250] in his study of the life of Paulinus of Pella, is struck with the extent of Greek in the curriculum of the Bordeaux schools. ‘Here too we must note how great a place was given to Greek literature in that scheme of studies. For from the Greek poets, orators, and philosophers the children learnt poetry, eloquence, and philosophy at one and the same time as from the Latin; or rather, they learnt from the Greek first. To such an extent had the conquered captured the conqueror.... Of the public schools in Gaul, not a single one neglected Greek (_publicarum scholarum, quae in illa provincia_ (Gallia) _erant, non fuit una in qua Graecae litterae neglectae fuerint_). The schoolboys of that time, he argues, must have been well versed in Greek ‘because in the schooldays of Ausonius there were those who could compare the Greek verses of the schoolmaster Citarius with those of Simonides, and the Greek speeches of Urbicus, also a schoolmaster, with those of Ulysses and Nestor’.[1251]

But the author forgets that the official acceptance of a tradition, the mere inclusion of Greek-texts in the syllabus, the mere following out of the traditional order, does not indicate thoroughness or efficiency. Paulinus talks of studying ‘dogmata Socratus’ at the age of five, but this does not mean that the wealth of Greek philosophy was opened up for the scholar. Indeed, we have evidence that the reverse was the case. And where we learn from both scholars and teachers (as we do) that the results of Greek study were barren and fruitless, it is surely wrong to draw from the prominence of Greek books in the school the inference that Greek studies were in a flourishing state. Moreover, if Paulinus seems to have appreciated his Greek, we must remember that he was born at Pella, and that when he came to Gaul the household servants habitually spoke Greek to him.[1252] He is therefore a special case in the sense that Greek was his mother-tongue. The fact that the literary products of Citarius and Urbicus were compared to those of great men need not mean anything. We have seen with what elaborate and artificial courtesy the ‘litterati’ of Gaul treated one another at this time. They called one another Ciceros and Vergils on the slightest provocation.[1253] As for the argument that Greek was taught first, it may appear that this was to its detriment rather than in its interest. The quite abnormal difficulty which Augustine found in learning the new language (he compares it to gall embittering the sweetness of the poem) is not explained.

Nor can we very well account for Augustine’s distaste for the language by reference to national antipathies. ‘He detested the Greeks by instinct’, says M. Bertrand.[1254] ‘According to Western prejudice, these men of the East were all rascals or amusers. Augustin, as a practical African, always regarded the Greeks as vain, discoursing wits.... The entirely local patriotism of the classical Greek authors further annoyed this Roman citizen, who was used to regard the world as his country: he thought them very narrow-minded to take so much interest in the history of some little town.... It must be remembered that in the second half of the fourth century the Greek attitude ... set itself more and more against Latinism, above all, politically.’ This may be all very well for the educated citizen who could appreciate the considerations of politics and cosmopolitanism, but it hardly applies to the time of life at which we find the complaints against Greek, namely childhood. What we should expect from this thesis is that in later life, with a fuller realization of these things, the men of the West would have shunned Greek. Yet we know that it was precisely then that Ausonius took to Greek, and Augustine, judging from his frequent references to Greek authors, must have done the same.

We need some other explanation, and we begin to find one when we realize that it was not so much the intrinsic difficulty of Greek as the way of teaching the _second language_ that was the real problem. The relation of the one to the other is pronounced unsatisfactory by Paulinus of Pella, who was educated at Bordeaux. He complains that this ‘double learning’ is all very well for the more powerful minds to whom it gives a ‘double glory’, but in the case of the duller boy like himself this scheme is too difficult.[1255]

A proof of this unsatisfactory training we find in the verses he writes. There are many _anacolutha_, and, as his editor Brandes remarks, ‘metricae artis ita expertem se praestiterit ut nullam paginam foedis maculis non conspergeret’,[1256] though much of this must be attributed to the illness which put a stop to his studies at fifteen,[1257] just when he was beginning to make good progress.[1258]