Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

non-literary education 883
to pass a preliminary entrance examination, and to live in a hostel attached
to the school, unless it was full, in which case they might seek lodgings in
the town. Attendance at classes, which lasted all day, was obligatory, except
during the summer vacation. Students must be unmarried, and were forbidden
to visit taverns or attend parties in the town. Neither students nor
teachers could engage in a trade or handicraft or take any paid employment
during the teaching season. The school possessed a library, from which
books might be borrowed under strict conditions. Crossing the frontier
into Roman territory was strongly discouraged.
The School of Nisibis evidently preserved many of the features of a late
antique school of higher education, like that of Alexandria. Junillus, probably
to be identified with the official who succeeded Tribonian as quaestor
sacri palatii in Constantinople in 542, and author of a brief introduction to
the Bible, describes a meeting with Paul the Persian, who had taught at ‘the
school of the Syrians’, where ‘divine law is taught systematically by rule by
public professors, as we teach grammar and rhetoric in secular schools’. 73
But the Nisibis school probably also owed something to Jewish educational
tradition and practice, and there was an influential rabbinical school in the
town. The School of Nisibis served in its turn as a model for the school of
theology which Cassiodorus hoped to establish, first in Rome and later at
Vivarium, but which did not outlast its founder. 74
73 PL lxviii.13b–c; cf. PLRE iii.742. 74 Cassiodorus, Institutiones praef. 1.
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