Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

the structures of government 179
chairs; imperial grants of appointment and salaries seem to have been
rather unsystematic, exemplifying patronage of individuals and cities rather
than any long-term educational policy. Julian, in decreeing that town councils
should appoint their own teachers, remarked, ‘I cannot be present in
person in all the municipalities.’ 63 The expectation that rhetorical training
would supply the empire with lawyers and civil servants seems genuine
(though Gratian’s registers may never have proved workable), but it is less
prominent in the sources than a more generalized concern for literary skills
and the upper-class moral values which that training was supposed to inculcate.
The extensive involvement of emperors in the education of the aristocracy
may illustrate the extent to which the imperial system and the
empire’s ruling class were identical, with no division between state and individual;
then, as now, education was a public utility, which the state was prepared
to fund in return for perceived benefits. The most consistent and
important form of teachers’ pay was indirect – namely, immunities from
curial and other burdens – which demonstrates that education was seen as
one form of the liturgic duties which citizens in general owed to their cities
and the empire. Education was interwoven with the traditions of civic life,
with the winning of praise among one’s peers in the forum, so that the
transformation of the classical city would affect both education and imperial
administration. 64
Other professions appear in the same light. Public doctors were similarly
maintained in the cities by a mixture of civic and imperial funding and
immunities. There were also, however, court doctors who were granted
official rank as counts, with duties of supervision and technical advice for
the medical profession, whereas teachers do not seem to have been
attached to the palace in this regular fashion. Emperors likewise, though
more spasmodically, used immunities to encourage the teaching and practice
of architecture, and even of crafts and fine arts. 65
Office in the church was increasingly supervised by emperors, and
exploited for local administration and as a channel for benefactions – to
such an extent that, by the reign of Justinian, the church seems almost a
government militia, while Gregory the Great looks, at times, like a second
exarch in Maurice’s Italy; in the 630s patriarch Cyrus of Alexandria was
simultaneously governor of Egypt. 66 Yet the church was never formally
a department, but, like the other professions, experienced grants of
immunities, privileges, occasional subventions, and spasmodic regulation
of appointments; the church could be seen as another alternative to liturgic
service of the community. Significantly, pope Gregory usually refers
63 C.Th. xiii.3.5. 64 Cass. Variae viii.31.4–6. 65 Cass. Variae vi.19.3–7; Jones, LRE 1012–13.
66 On bishops, urban corn supplies and taxation, see Durliat (1990a) 131–56, 316–17 (perhaps overstated).
Benefactions: M. Sartre in IGLS xiii.1.210–11, discussing Justinian and the archbishop of
Arabia.
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