Herakles was-sons of God." And not less significant as an indication not only of the reaction against this kind of education but also of its prevalence, is the deprecation of it by Marcus Aurelius: "I owe it to Rusticus," he says, 1 "that I formed the idea of the need of moral refor mation, and that I was not diverted to literary ambition, or to write treatises on philosophical subjects, or to make rhetorical exhortations. . . . and that I kept away from rhetoric and poetry and foppery of speech."

II. I pass from the forms of education to its extent. The general diffusion of it, and the hold which it had upon the mass of men, are shown by many kinds of evidence.

1. They are shown by the large amount of literary evidence as to scholars and the modes of obtaining education. The exclusiveness of the old aristocracy had broken down. Education was no longer in the hands of "private tutors" in the houses of the great families. It entered public life, and in doing so left a record behind it. It may be inferred from the extant evidence that there were grammar-schools in almost every town. At these all youths received the first part of their education. But it became a common practice for youths to supplement this by attending the lectures of an eminent professor elsewhere. They went, as we might say, from school to a University.2 The students who so went away

1 i. 7.

2 This higher education was not confined to Rome or Athens, but was found in many parts of the empire: Marseilles in the time of Strabo was even more frequented than Athens. There were other great schools at Antioch and Alexandria, at Rhodes and Smyrna, at Ephesus and Byzantium, at Naples and Nicopolis, at Bordeaux and

from home were drawn from all classes of the community. Some of them were very poor, and, like the "bettelstudenten" of the medieval Universities, had sometimes to beg their bread.1 "You are a miserable race," says Epictetus to some students of this kind; "when you have eaten your fill to-day, you sit down whining about to-morrow, where to-morrow's dinner will come from." Some of them went because it was the fashion. The young sybarites of Rome or Athens complained bitterly that at Nicopolis, where they had gone to listen to Epictetus, lodgings were bad, and the baths were bad, and the gymnasium was bad, and "society" hardly existed.3 Then, as now, there were home-sick students, and mothers weeping over their absence, and letters that were looked for but never came, and letters that brought bad news; and young men of promise who were expected to return home as living encyclopædias, but who only raised doubts when they did return home whether their education had done them any good. Then, as now, they went

Autun. The practice of resorting to such schools lasted long. In the fourth century and among the Christian Fathers, Basil and Gregory, Nazianzen, Augustine and Jerome, are recorded to have followed it: the general recognition of Christianity did not seriously affect the current educational system: "Through the whole world," says Augustine (de utilitate credendi, 7, vol. viii. 76, ed. Migne), "the schools of the rhetoricians are alive with the din of crowds of students."

1 There is an interesting instance, at a rather later time, of the poverty of two students, one of whom afterwards became famous, Prohæresius and Hephaestion: they had only one ragged gown between them, so that while one went to lecture, the other had to stay at home in bed (Eunap. Prohares. p. 78).

2 Diss. 1. 9. 19.

3 Ib. 2. 21. 12; 3. 24. 54.

4 Ib. 2. 21. 12, 13, 15; 3. 24. 22, 24.

from the lecture-room to athletic sports or the theatre; "and the consequence is," says Epictetus,1 "that you don't get out of your old habits or make moral progress." Then, as now, some students went, not for the sake of learning, but in order to be able to show off. Epictetus draws a picture of one who looked forward to airing his logic at a city dinner, astonishing the "alderman" who sat next to him with the puzzles of hypothetical syllogisms.2 And then, as now, those who had followed the fashion by attending lectures showed by their manner that they were there against their will. "You should sit upright," says Plutarch, in his advice to hearers in general, "not lolling, or whispering, or smiling, or yawning as if you were asleep, or fixing your eyes on the ground instead of on the speaker." In a similar way Philo, also speaking of hearers in general, says: "Many persons who come to a lecture do not bring their minds inside with them, but go wandering about outside, thinking ten thousand things about ten thousand different subjects— family affairs, other people's affairs, private affairs, and the professor talks to an audience, as it were, not of men but of statues, which have ears but hear not."

2. A second indication of the hold which education had upon the age is the fact that teaching had come to be a recognized and lucrative profession. This is shown not so much by the instances of individual teachers,5 who

1 Пb. 3. 16. 14, 15.

2 Ib. 1. 26. 9.

3 De audiendo, 13, vol. ii. p. 45. The passage is abridged above. 4 Quis rer. div. heres. 3, vol. i. p. 474.

5 For example, Verrius Flaccus, the father of the system of "prize essays," who received an annual salary of 100,000 sesterces from

might be regarded as exceptional, as by the fact of the recognition of teachers by the State and by municipalities.

The recognition by the State took the double form of endowment and of immunities from public burdens.

(a) Endowments probably began with Vespasian, who endowed teachers of Rhetoric at Rome with an annual grant of 100,000 sesterces from the imperial treasury. Hadrian founded an Athenæum or University at Rome, like the Museum or University at Alexandria, with an adequate income, and with a building of sufficient importance to be sometimes used as a Senate-house. He also gave large sums to the professors at Athens: in this he was followed by Antoninus Pius: but the first permanent endowment at Athens seems to have been that of Marcus Aurelius, who founded two chairs in each of the four great philosophical schools of Athens, the Academic, the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic, and added one of the new or literary Rhetoric, and one of the old or forensic Rhetoric.1

Augustus (Suet. de illustr. Gramm. 17). The inscriptions of Asia Minor furnish several instances of teachers who had left their homes to teach in other provinces of the Empire, and had returned rich enough to make presents to their native cities.

1 The evidence for the above paragraph, with ample accounts of additional facts relative to the same subject, but unnecessary for the present purpose, will be found in F. H. L. Ahrens, de Athenarum statu politico et literario inde ab Achaici fœderis interitu usque ad Antoninorum tempora, Göttingen, 1829; K. O. Müller, Quam curam respublica apud Græcos et Romanos literis doctrinisque colendis et promovendis impenderit, Göttingen (Programm zur Säcularfeier), 1837; P. Seidel, de scholarum quæ florente Romanorum imperio Athenis exstiterunt conditione, Glogau, 1838; C. G. Zumpt, Ueber den Bestand der philosophischen Schulen in Athen und die Succession der Scholarchen, Berlin (Abhandl. der Akademie der Wissenschaften), 1843; L.

(6) The immunities of the teaching classes began with Julius Cæsar, and appear to have been so amply recognized in the early empire that Antoninus Pius placed them upon a footing which at once established and limited them. He enacted that small cities might place upon the free list five physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; that assize towns might so place seven physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; and that metropolitan cities might so place ten physicians, five teachers of rhetoric, and five of literature; but that these numbers should not be exceeded. These immunities were a form of indirect endowment.1 They exempted those whom they affected from all the

Weber, Commentatio de academia literaria Atheniensium, Marburg, 1858. There is an interesting Roman inscription of the end of the second century A.D. which almost seems to show that the endowments were sometimes diverted for the benefit of others besides philosophers : it is to an athlete, who was at once "canon of Serapis," and entitled to free commons at the museum, νεωκόρον τοῦ μεγά[λου Σαράπιδ]ος καὶ τῶν ἐν τῷ Μουσείῳ [σειτου]μένων ἀτελῶν φιλοσόφων, Corpus Inscr. Græc. 5914.

1 The edict of Antoninus Pius is contained in L. 6, § 2, D. de excusat. 27. 1: the number of philosophers is not prescribed, "quia rari sunt qui philosophantur:" and if they make stipulations about pay, "inde iam manifesti fient non philosophantes." The nature of the immunities is described, ibid. § 8: "a ludorum publicorum regimine, ab ædilitate, a sacerdotio, a receptione militum, ab emtione frumenti, olei, et neque judicare neque legatos esse neque in militia numerari nolentes neque ad alium famulatum cogi." The immunities were sometimes further extended to the lower classes of teachers, e.g. the ludi magistri at Vipascum in Portugal: cf. Hübner and Mommsen in the Ephemeris Epigraphica, vol. iii. pp. 185, 188. For the regulations of the later empire, see Cod. Theodos. 14. 9, de studiis liberalibus urbis Romæ et Constantinopolitano; and for a good popular account of the whole subject, see G. Boissier, L'instruction publique dans l'empire Romain, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, mars 15, 1884.