Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

education in the roman empire 869
from the Greeks in this process of acculturation was the Christian element
in late antique culture. The pagan element was largely filtered out; the few
non-Christian texts translated into one or other of these languages in late
antiquity, such as Aristotle’s logical works, were perceived as playing a propaedeutic
role to the study of Christian literature and thought, or as technical
manuals. The same process was to repeat itself three centuries later with
the creation by Cyril and Methodius and their pupils of a purely Christian
literature in Slavonic, and a system of education based upon it. This general
characterization is true, with very few exceptions, of translations made in
late antiquity. Syriac translators of the ninth century, however, working in
a very different milieu and for Muslim patrons, not infrequently translated
non-Christian works from Greek into Syriac, and often thence into Arabic.
However, although the structure and methods of schools were scarcely
affected by the Christianization of society, the spread of Christianity and
its increasingly dominant role in the culture of the age was reflected in
other ways. A new reading public was created, side by side with and overlapping
with the traditional users of books. The scriptures, liturgical texts,
devotional works, and writings of the Fathers of the church were in
demand not only by the very large body of clergymen and monks, but by
some laymen as well, though we must resist the temptation to exaggerate
the dissemination of Christian literature among laymen, as some scholars
have done. The church of late antiquity did not encourage the reading by
laymen of its basic documents, as many Protestant groups did in the sixteenth
and seventeenth century. Entirely new kinds of literature were produced
and widely read, of which the most notable were the Lives of holy
men. Athanasius wrote his Life of Antony c. 360. In turn it stimulated a vast
production of hagiographical texts in Latin, Syriac and Coptic, as well as in
Greek. These texts, particularly those in Greek, varied very much in their
literary and linguistic level. Some were clearly written for, if not necessarily
by, persons who had not had a traditional literary education, and cared
nothing for its values. Santo Mazzarino wrote thirty years ago of ‘the
democratization of culture in the late empire’. 43 It is probable that there
were far more persons who read and sometimes discussed books in the
sixth century than in the third. Whether ‘democratization’ is the best term
to describe this phenomenon is another matter. I should prefer to speak of
the growth of a new group of culture-bearers and the gradual disintegration
of an old one. In the east the new group largely overlapped and fused
with the traditional Kulturträger. In the west the two groups remained much
more distinct.
The demands of this new class of readers strained the resources of traditional
book production – which was either commercial or dependent on
43 Mazzarino (1960) 35ff.
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