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876 29. education in the roman empire
remember, however, that here and there pockets of Greek culture survived,
particularly in southern Italy and in some church circles in Rome.
The second feature is the separation between classical culture and
Christian culture. In the Greek-speaking world much of the classical literary
heritage was quietly taken over and adapted by the fourth-century
Church Fathers, and absorbed into the Christian Greek culture of
Byzantium. In the west much of the Latin cultural heritage was marginalized,
or survived in selections as a propaedeutic to the study of Christian
literature and thought. Virgil, Horace, Terence, Lucan, Sallust and other
classical authors were read, but by fewer and fewer people, and even then
in the safety of the schoolroom. 65
The third common feature was that, as secular schools became fewer, it
became more difficult to find literate candidates for training as clergy.
Consequently bishops and sometimes priests were obliged to take over
what had previously been the work of the ludi magister and the grammarian,
and teach boys and young men themselves. This led to the first beginnings
of what were to become the cathedral schools and parish schools of the
Middle Ages. This movement was perhaps most marked in Gaul, but the
same need led to the same solution in all other regions of the barbarian
west. From the end of the sixth century this rather jejune culture was gradually
enriched by the influence of monks from Ireland and England, where
some features of classical culture had been better preserved than in continental
Europe. But the old educational system was never revived.
In the Greek east, contact with Latin culture was not so immediately lost.
There were many Latin-speaking communities in the territories ruled from
Constantinople – Africa after 533, Sicily, much of Italy, much of the northern
and western Balkans. And there were many Latin speakers in
Constantinople itself, beginning with the emperors Justin I and Justinian,
and including influential refugees from Africa and Italy and their entourages
and descendants. Latin remained the language of the law, the army, the
central administration and the imperial court, either exclusively or along
with Greek, until the end of the sixth century. So it is scarcely surprising
that public and private teachers of Latin were to be found in the capital
throughout the fifth and most of the sixth century. Priscian was the greatest
of these, but at least twenty-one others are known to us by name. It may,
however, be no accident that we have no certain attestation of the presence
of a Latin grammarian in Constantinople in the second half of the sixth
century. Fewer Latin rhetoricians are known. What emerges from this is
that it was possible to obtain a literary education in Latin in Constantinople
up to the death of Justinian in 565, and probably later. There must therefore
still have been a demand for such an education. Nevertheless, it is clear
65 Kaster, Guardians of Language 72ff.
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