Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

non-literary education 877
from the use of Greek in most of Justinian’s Novels and from other indications
that effective communication throughout the eastern empire required
the use of Greek. The Latin-speaking community in the capital may have
become progressively marginalized and isolated, as were the speakers of
Syriac and Coptic. The future pope Gregory the Great spent seven years,
from 579 to 586, as papal apocrisiarius in Constantinople without learning a
word of Greek, or so he claims.
non-literary education
Doctors in late antiquity learnt their craft either by a kind of apprenticeship
under a senior doctor, or by a formal course of study, or perhaps in
both ways. Most large cities had one or more public doctors, who received
both a salary from the state or from the city authorities, as well as fees from
their wealthier patients. These public doctors appear to have been under an
obligation, perhaps customary rather than legal, to teach pupils. This was
probably the way in which the majority of doctors learnt medicine. When
they had completed their training to the satisfaction of their teacher, they
received a letter of attestation or testimonial. The formal study of medicine
was pursued above all in Alexandria, where a school of medicine
existed until after the Arab conquest in the mid seventh century. The
subject was regarded as a branch of philosophy, and several of the teachers
of medicine there are described as philosophers. The link between medicine
and philosophy was an old one; Galen had already observed that no
one could be a good doctor unless he had studied philosophy. David, head
of the Alexandrian school of philosophy in the early sixth century, wrote
a commentary on Hippocrates’ Prognostica. 66 Asclepiodotus (late fifth
century), a polymath with a touch of charlatanism, studied medicine in
Alexandria and taught both medicine and philosophy in Aphrodisias and
later in Alexandria. There was also formal teaching of medicine in
Constantinople, probably in the fifth century. Agapius, a native of
Alexandria, where he studied and probably taught medicine, went to
Constantinople in the mid fifth century as a teacher of medicine, perhaps
in the framework of the revived ‘university’ of Theodosius II. 67 Hesychius
of Damascus practised and taught medicine in the capital about the same
period. 68 His son and pupil Iacobus was comes et archiatrus there in the reign
of Leo I. He is said to have lived on his official salary and to have charged
no fees. He was an advocate of therapy by cold baths, whence his nickname
Psychristos (‘Cooled’). 69 He numbered among his patients both Leo I and the
philosopher Proclus, and statues of him were set up in Constantinople and
Athens.
66 Westerink (1964). 67 PLRE ii.32. 68 PLRE ii.554. 69 PLRE ii.582–3.
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