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THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. 139/
suasion, artifice and often even force, held drinking bouts
and feasts and, on occasion, gave vent to the furious
passions of youth. There was, indeed,- no lack of out­
rageous and insolent conduct and deplorable excesses. In
Antioch it happened once that the students wrapped in a
rug a pedagogue who had incurred their dislike, and tossed
him in the air and caught him again such a number of times
that he finally fainted away. The philosopher LlBANlus,
who occupied a professorial chair at the same time and
place, admonished his pupils who had probably participated
in this rough sport in the following terms: " Bad enough
were it for students to lay hands on ordinary citizens, to
insult a goldsmith, to provoke a shoemaker, to beat a
carpenter, to kick a weaver, to maul a shopkeeper, or to
threaten an oil merchant: but to ill-use a pedagogue is an
injury to one occupying a most respectable and useful
position and deserves chastisement with the rod and the
whip."*
For the rest, the students were subject to strict laws.
According to an ordinance of VALENTINIAN (370 A.D.) they
were obliged on entering upon their studies to produce
testimonials from the magistrates of their native towns, and
their names, addresses and the position of their parents
were entered on a public register. They were forbidden to
waste their time in pleasure-seeking. If they transgressed
these injunctions they rendered themselves liable to
corporal punishment and could be expelled from the
school. The prefect of the town made a yearly report
upon the ability and behaviour of the students to the
superior imperial authority, f
With the twentieth year of age the studies had to come
to an end. It thus appears that they began pretty early.
In the Isagoge in artem medicam% falsely ascribed to
* LIBANIUS : Orat. et declamat. Ed. J. J. REISKE, Altenburg 1795, T. iii,
p. 254, 259 (crept TOV rawifroq).
t Cod. Theodos. L. xiv, T. 1, 1.
X VAL. ROSE: Anecdota graeca et graecolatina, Berlin 1864, ii, p. 169, 244
et seq.