Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

non-literary education 881
rose to the highest positions. Libanius laments the favour shown to shorthand
writers and castigates fathers who have their sons taught shorthand
rather than rhetoric. Shorthand seems to have been taught not only by specialist
teachers but also by some elementary schoolmasters. What information
we possess on the teaching of shorthand comes mainly from contracts
between fathers – or owners of slaves – and teachers recorded in Egyptian
papyri, which tell us nothing about teaching methods or assessment of
qualifications. Most of what we do know about teachers of these ‘subliterary’
subjects comes from sources much earlier than the period under
review. But there is no reason to suppose that teaching institutions and
methods, or the social status of practitioners of these crafts, were any
different in the fifth and sixth century except that the preference given to
shorthand writers in the imperial service began to be reduced after the
death of Constantius II in 362.
Finally, in a society more and more permeated by Christian ideology, one
asks how theology was taught. The short answer is that it was not taught at
all, or at least not in any systematic way. Children of Christian families and
converts to Christianity might receive elementary instruction in doctrine and
behaviour from the local bishop or one of his priests. This could be well
done, badly done, or not done at all. We are curiously ignorant of the content
and methods of such catechetical teaching in the fifth and sixth century. But
it seems very rarely to have risen to the level of systematic instruction in
theology. One systematic treatment of Christian theology in Greek is that
embodied in the four books of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, probably
written about 500. But this attempt to formulate Christian doctrine in
Neoplatonic terms, though it enjoyed immense influence in later centuries,
was ill-adapted to serve as a textbook for budding clerics. Bishops were
responsible for training clergy in their dioceses. Their teaching, which no
doubt varied greatly in thoroughness and clarity, seems to have been based
on reading of the scriptures and their exegesis by the church Fathers. John
Chrysostom, Severianus of Gabala and Theodore of Mopsuestia all commented
at length on books of the Bible in homilies or treatises in the fourth
and early fifth century. In the period at present under review, the principal
exegetes were Theodoret of Cyrrhus (died 457/8), Hesychius of Jerusalem
(died after 451), patriarch Gennadius I of Constantinople (458–71), Cyril of
Alexandria (412–44), Olympiodorus (sixth century), Oecumenius (sixth
century) and Andrew of Caesarea (563–614) – both of the latter wrote commentaries
on the Apocalypse. These often extremely lengthy commentaries
were in many cases not intended as textbooks. But soon collections of
excerpts from them were compiled and systematically arranged as variorum
commentaries or catenae on the various books of the Bible, intended both for
teaching purposes and for private study. An early compiler of catenae was
Procopius of Gaza (c. 475–528), a teacher of rhetoric by profession. His
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