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The use of academical designations as titles is also Greek it was written upon a man's tombstone that he was "philosopher" or "sophist," "grammarian" or "rhetorician," as in later times he would be designated M.A. or D.D.1 The most interesting of these designations is that of "sophist." The long academical history of the word only ceased at Oxford a few years ago, when the clauses relating to "sophiste generales" were erased as obsolete from the statute-book.

The restriction of the right to teach, and the mode of testing a man's qualifications to teach, have come to us from the same source. The former is probably a result of the fact which has been mentioned above, that the teachers of liberal arts were privileged and endowed. The State guarded against the abuse of the privilege, as in subsequent times for similar reasons it put limitations upon the appointment of the Christian clergy. In the case of some of the professors at Athens who were endowed from the imperial chest, the Emperors seem to have exercised a certain right of nomination, as in our own country the Crown nominates a "Regius Professor;"2

1 Instances of this practice are: (1) grammaticus, in Hispania Tarraconensis, Corpus Inser. Lat. ii. 2892, 5079; magister artis grammatica, at Saguntum, ibid. 3872; magister grammaticus Græcus, at Cordova, ibid. 2236; grammaticus Græcus, at Trier, Corpus Inscr. Rhenan. 801 (2) philosophus, in Greece, Corpus Inser. Græc. 1253; in Asia Minor, ibid. 3163 (dated A.D. 211), 3198, 3865, add. 4366 t 2 ; in Egypt, ibid. 4817; sometimes with the name of the school added, e.g. at Cheronea, piλóσopov IIλaTwviкóv, ibid. 1628; at Brundisium, philosophus Epicureus, ibid. 5783.

2 Marcus Aurelius himself nominated Theodotus to be "Regius Professor of Rhetoric," but he entrusted the nomination of the Professors of Philosophy to Herodes Atticus, Philostrat. V. S. 2. 3, p. 245; and Commodus nominated Polydeuces, ibid. 2. 12, p. 258.

but in the case of others of those professors, the nomination was in the hands of "the best and oldest and wisest in the city," that is, either the Areopagus, or the City Council, or, as some have thought, a special Board.1 Elsewhere, and apparently without exception in later times, the right of approval of a teacher was in the hands of the City Council, the ordinary body for the administration of municipal affairs.2 The authority which conferred the right might also take it away: a teacher who proved incompetent might have his licence withdrawn.3 The testing of qualifications preceded the admission to

1 Lucian, Eunuchus, 3, after mentioning the endowment of the chairs, says, ἔδει δὲ ἀποθανόντος ἀυτῶν τινος ἄλλον ἀντικαθίστασθαι δοκιμαστ θέντα ψήφῳ τῶν ἀρίστων, which last words have been variously understood: see the treatises mentioned above, note 1, p. 38, especially Ahrens, p. 74, Zumpt, p. 28. In the case of Libanius, there was a Výpoμa (Liban. de fort. sua, vol. i. p. 59), which points to an assimilation of Athenian usage in his time to that which is mentioned in the following note.

2 This was fixed by a law of Julian in 362, which, however, states it as a concession on the part of the Emperor: "quia singulis civitatibus adesse ipse non possum, jubeo quisquis docere vult non repente nec temere prosiliat ad hoc munus sed judicio ordinis probatus decretum curialium mereatur, optimorum conspirante consilio," Cod. Theodos. 13. 3. 5; but the nomination was still sometimes left to the Emperor or his chief officer, the prefect of the city. This has an especial interest in connection with the history of St. Augustine: a request was sent from Milan to the prefect of the city at Rome for the nomination of a magister rhetorica: St Augustine was sent, and so came under the influence of St. Ambrose, S. Aug. Confess. 5. 13.

3 This is mentioned in a law of Gordian: "grammaticos seu oratores decreto ordinis probatos, si non se utiles studentibus præbeant, denuo ab eodem ordine reprobari posse incognitum non est," Cod. Justin. 10. 52. 2. A professor was sometimes removed for other reasons besides incompetency, e. g. Prohæresius was removed by Julian for being a Christian, Eunap. Prohares. p. 92.

office. It was sometimes superseded by a sort of congé d'élire from the Emperor; but in ordinary cases it consisted in the candidate's giving a lecture or taking part in a discussion before either the Emperor's representative or the City Council.2 It was the small beginning of that system of "examination" which in our own country and time has grown to enormous proportions. The successful candidate was sometimes escorted to his house, as a mark of honour, by the proconsul and the "examiners," just as in Oxford, until the present generation, a "grand compounder" might claim to be escorted home by the Vice-chancellor and Proctors.3 In the fourth century appear to have come restrictions not only upon teaching, but also upon studying: a student might probably go to a lecture, but he might not formally announce his devotion to learning by putting on the student's gown without the leave of the professors, as in a modern University a student must be formally enrolled before he can assume the academical dress.4

The survival of these terms and usages, as indicating

1 Alexander of Aphrodisias, de Fato, 1, says that he obtained his professorship on the testimony, ὑπὸ τῆς μαρτυρίας, of Severus and Caracalla.

2 The existence of a competition appears in Lucian, Eunuchus, 3, 5: the fullest account is that of Eunapius, Prohæres. pp. 79 sqq.

3 Eunapius, ibid. p. 84.

4 Olympiodorus, ap. Phot. Biblioth. 80; S. Greg. Naz. Orat. 43 (20). 15, vol. i. p. 782; Liban. de fort. sua, vol. i. p. 14. The admission was probably the occasion of some academical sport: the novice was marched in mock procession to the baths, whence he came out with his gown on. It was something like initiation into a religious guild or order. There was a law against any one who assumed the philosopher's dress without authority, "indebite et insolenter," Cod. Theodos. 13. 3. 7.

the strength of the system to which they originally belonged, is emphasized by the fact that for a long interval of time there are few, if any, traces of them.1 They are found in full force in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries: they are found again when education began to revive on a large scale in the tenth century: they then appear, not as new creations, but as terms and usages which had lasted all through what has been called "the Benedictine era, ,"2 without special nurture and without literary expression, by the sheer persistency of their original roots.

This is the feature of the Greek life into which Christianity came to which I first invite your attention. There was a complex system of education, the main elements in which were the knowledge of literature, the cultivation of literary expression, and a general acquaintance with the rules of argument. This education was widely diffused, and had a great hold upon society. It had been at work in its main outlines for several centuries. Its

1 The last traces are in the Christian poets: for example, in Sidonius Apollinaris (†482), Carm. xxiii. 211, ed. Luetjohann, “quicquid rhetoricæ institutionis, quicquid grammaticalis aut palæstræ est ;" in Ennodius († 521), Carm. ccxxxiv. p. 182, ed. Vogel, and in Ep. 94, which is a letter of thanks to a grammarian for having successfully instructed the writer's nephew; in Venantius Fortunatus († 603), who speaks of himself as "Parvula grammaticæ lambens refluamina guttæ, Rhetorici exiguum prælibans gurgitis haustum," V. Martini, i. 29, 30, ed. Leo; but there are traces in the same poets of the antagonism between classical and Christian learning which ultimately led to the disappearance of the former, e.g. Fortunatus speaks of Martin as "doctor apostolicus vacuans ratione sophistas," V. Martini, i. 139.

2 "La période bénédictine," Leon Maitre, Les écoles épiscopales et monastiques de l'Occident, p. 173.

effect in the second century of our era had been to create a certain habit of mind. When Christianity came into contact with the society in which that habit of mind. existed, it modified, it reformed, it elevated, the ideas which it contained and the motives which stimulated it to action; but in its turn it was itself profoundly modified by the habit of mind of those who accepted it. It was impossible for Greeks, educated as they were with an education which penetrated their whole nature, to receive or to retain Christianity in its primitive simplicity. Their own life had become complex and artificial: it had its fixed ideas and its permanent categories: it necessarily gave to Christianity something of its own. form. The world of the time was a world, I will not say like our own world, which has already burst its bonds, but like the world from which we are beginning to be emancipated a world which had created an artificial type of life, and which was too artificial to be able to recognize its own artificiality-a world whose schools, instead of being the laboratories of the knowledge of the future, were forges in which the chains of the present were fashioned from the knowledge of the past. And if, on the one hand, it incorporated Christianity with the larger humanity from which it had at first been isolated, yet, on the other hand, by crushing uncultivated earnestness, and by laying more stress on the expression of ideas than upon ideas themselves, it tended to stem the very forces which had given Christianity its place, and to change the rushing torrent of the river of God into a broad but feeble stream.

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