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The system of education in the early Middle Ages, that is, from the time of Gregory the Great (c. 600) to the intellectual revival of the eleventh century (c. 1 050), was a lineal descendant of the education that had been brought to perfection in the ancient classical civilization. As with so much that was of value in the realm of ideas and in the training of the mind and character, it had come to maturity in the century that elapsed between the ascendancy of Pericles at Athens and the death of Alexander the Great - between the birth of Plato and the death of Aristotle - and in the subsequent millennium, although its sphere of influence had broadened immeasurably and its technique had been perfected, it had gradually but steadily lost much of its original rich content and dynamic force. Even when the western world had become the theatre of human activities of a very different kind from those of the Athenian or even of the Alexandrian, the aims and practices of education had acquired very little that was new.

Greek education, as it first appeared in history, was essentially aristocratic in character. It was the culture of the few, the sons and daughters of men of rank and wealth, and was directed neither to the acquisition of a skill, trade or profession, nor to the cultivation of science, art, or philosophy, but to the formation of a full personality adapted to a particular way of life. So far as it consisted of instruction, as opposed to imitation and admiring recognition, it comprised athletics and music, both vocal and instrumental, but its core was literary tradition, with the Homeric poems as the text-books alike of letters and of life. This education, which in intention was ethical and psychological rather than technical or economically helpful, was that which came to be regarded by conservatives of the golden age of Athens, such as Aristophanes and at least one facet of Plato's mind, as

the training that had produced the great men of old, the pristine honour and simplicity of the city.

This unprofessional and untechnical education was finally challenged and ousted, towards the end of the fifth century B.C., by a

class of teachers, representatives of the new spirit of discussion, enquiry and criticism, known as the sophists, a term ambiguous even in its Greek form, and quite untranslatable into any single word of a modern European language. Both in their own day and since the sophists have come in for a great deal of criticism and abuse, some of it no doubt justified, but when we remember that Socrates was considered by many of his contemporaries to belong to the class, that Thucydides and Euripides were among the early pupils of the new masters, and that !socrates, one of the greatest educationalists of history, was a sophist par excellence, we may hesitate before framing a sweeping judgement upon them.

The aim of the sophists was frankly practical: to fit a young man of brains (and few Athenians lacked mental agility) to take a leading part in the struggle for power and influence that was going on in every city-state of Greece and Magna Gr�cia. They were often opportunists and sceptics with regard to metaphysical and moral problems, and their enthusiasm for rhetoric and dialectic, the arts of debate and persuasion, led them to pay attention to what was useful rather than to what was virtuous, and to what was currently accepted rather than to what was true, but many of them were men of worth as well as talent, and their cult of versatility and urbanity was a characteristic, not of themselves alone, but of the genius of the Greek race throughout its history. Their abiding achievement was, in general, to make education primarily a training of the intellect, and, more particularly, to put rhetoric, the art of speaking well and persuasively, at the very heart of Greek education, and thus at the heart of all subsequent higher education until the rise of the medieval university.

At the time, however, it was not clear that the victory was to lie with !socrates and his friends. His exact contemporary, Plato, had a very different ideal of education, which he elaborated in his masterpiece, the Republic, and put into practice in part at least, in his foundation, the Academy at Athens. In Plato's scheme education not only took on a moral and a civic aspect, to make it the nursing mother of good men and wise statesmen, but had also a transcendental value as an essential instrument in the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom and as a preparation of the soul for its immortal destiny. According to Plato's design, the literary and musical training of childhood was followed 54

by a testing time of physical endurance; this in its turn was succeeded by the mental discipline of mathematics (i.e., geometry) and finally, after a space devoted to the practical life of government, by the dialectic of philosophical enquiry. The Republic is indeed a text­ book for the establishment of a good society and for the ordering of a man's whole life; but in the sphere of education it marked an epoch, for Plato's scheme, and his own practice, made a clear distinction for the first time between primary and secondary education, and between education as a preparation for an active, practical life, and the highel education of philosophy, the attainment of moral and intellectual truth.

The scheme of !socrates was less ambitious and more directly practical. With him the literary and mathematical stages were both preparatory; they were followed by a training in 'eristic' or the technique of disputation and argument, and this led on to what was the crown of all, the art of speaking well and persuasively. The two short generations (390-320 B.C.) in which Plato, !socrates, and Aristotle were, either together or in succession, teaching and writing in Athens were perhaps the most genial and influential in all the history of education. In them Western mental training in all its essentials came to maturity both in theory and in practice. It is significant and fitting that the material buildings in which Plato and Aristotle taught, the Academy and the Lyceum, should have given their names in almost all Western languages to institutes of higher education.

Great and permanent, even in this field, as was the influence of the two philosophers, the victory and the future lay with !socrates. His aims and precepts, though less profound and less sublime, were more practical and more comprehensible. When the age of Greece changed, after the conquests of Alexander, into the Hellenistic age, and the cities in all the countries bordering upon the eastern Mediterranean developed a Greek culture and Greek institutions, their education was a more schematized version of that of !socrates. It is a mistake to think of him as a sophist in the pejorative sense of the word. While he considered that neither philosophy nor the higher mathematical studies were very valuable pursuits for a lifetime, he was equally intolerant of rhetoric as a purely utilitarian accomplishment. He conceived of it as the noblest of sciences, to be acquired by long and careful study, and as leading not only to practical wisdom, but to the formation of a sane, broad and virtuous mind: it was indeed the humanistic ideal that has been put forward at intervals ever since the Renaissance as the aim and end of a literary, classical education.

The Hellenistic education, as has been said, was a more schematized version of that of !socrates. The three grades, primary, secondary and superior, now became universal: in the first the child learnt to read, to write and to cipher; in the second the boy absorbed the Greek classics, which now comprised a selection from the Athenian theatre and some other poetry, such as Hesiod, in addition to the Homeric corpus. At this stage a fuller technique had been evolved; Homer was now the object of systematic exegesis, in grammar, vocabulary and general meaning, completed often by an allegorical or ethical interpretation. In the third grade the youth studied geometry (i.e., Euclid), arithmetic, that is, not practical or applied arithmetic, but the study of number and its proportions, and harmony, which considered sound in all its relationships. This curriculum was a descendant of the original Pythagorean 'quadrivium' or fourfold exercise of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and acoustic, from which astronomy had fallen out to become the province of scientific experts. It was enlarged or supported by courses of information on every kind of current knowledge, then known as 'encyclopedic' trammg; the original meaning of the term 'encyclopedia' was education in the information that 'lay around' to be known; the modern sense of comprehensive or complete information dates only from the sixteenth century. When supported, as it was in the great cities of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor, by large collections of books, and facilities for research such as were supplied by the Museum of Alexandria, it was perhaps the finest system of general education that was ever to be found widespread in the ancient world. It must however be noted that it was not a university education in the modern sense of the word. Neither science nor philosophy formed part of the curriculum. These disciplines, which had come together for a brief space in the works and system of Aristotle, parted company almost at once. Science, both in its applied branches and in its mathematical and astronomical specializations, proceeded to develop in the hands of experts outside and above the ordinary educational profession, while philosophy became, and remained, a separate pursuit in the schools of Athens. Two further parts of what has been the pattern of academic discipline in the medieval and modern worlds, the medical and the legal education, remained the professional care of the practitioners in what was more like a guild than a part of university teaching.

Meanwhile, the literary elements steadily gained ground at the expense of the scientific and the mathematical, and by the middle of the third century B.C. rhetoric had conquered as the sole pursuit of the

higher education, and philosophy was beginning to take on the aspect of a way of life, almost a religion, to which the individual turned by a species of conversion, and which he studied in a personal relationship with a distinguished teacher and guide.

In the early Roman republic there was no education of the intellect. The son grew up under the tutelage of his father, learning how to follow his example and the conventions and ideals of the golden age in the past. It was not until after the conquest of Achaea, when the wars with Carthage were over, that Greek culture began to influence the higher ranks of Roman society, and Greek education was introduced at the middle of the second century B.C. Thenceforward for almost a century the full Greek system was applied. This was the happiest age of Roman education. Restricted in practice to the senatorial class and the great families, it was rhetorical, in the sense that it aimed at making a man a fluent and persuasive speaker, but it was without any taint of 'sophistry' and was fully in touch with the demands of Roman life. The Roman noble had indeed to make his way by speaking - as an advocate in the forum, as a candidate to the people in the campus, as a counsellor or consul in the Senate, and even as a general in the camp - but his career was not that of a demagogue or a barrister or a parliamentarian. He held civil and military office; he judged; he administered; he commanded an army and he ruled a province. In consequence 'oratory' included a knowledge of all arts and knowledge that a leader of men should possess - history, law, literature - and all that might enable him to be a man among men, humane and just as well as capable and versatile. The education of which Cicero gives such a full and brilliant picture in the De oratore was indeed both a literary and a practical one; the sciences, mathematics and geometry, and philosophy are not parts of it; but it must not be confused or condemned along with the rhetorical education of the post-Augustan age. The education which produced a Cicero and a C:esar, the one able to guide the State with distinction as consul, and to govern a province and lead troops without a long apprenticeship to arms, and the other able to speak as brilliantly as the greatest advocate, to show himself a gifted literary critic, and to be an authority on Latin grammar as well as to appear as the C<esar of Gaul and the great dictator, cannot be pronounced either unpractical or bookish.

A great change came over education, as over all else, within a decade or two of the deaths of C<esar ( 44 B.C.) and Cicero ( 43 B.C.) The change was twofold. On the one hand, under the Principate of Augustus all reality finally disappeared from the republican

institutions. Careers were now either strictly professional and carefully graded in the army and civil administration, or directed by the choice of the princeps who controlled domestic and foreign policy, and to some extent even the judiciary. Oratory was no longer a prime necessity for public life, and open debate was no longer a preliminary to all decision. The change was not completed at once, but its progress was inevitable. The only use in practical life for the set speech was in the law-court, and there the speaker was no longer the orator, young or old, making his career or revisiting the forum as a inan of reputation to aid a friend or client, but the professional barrister (causidicus) or persuasive pleader (rhetor). Eloquence moved from the forum and the senate to the lecture-hall and the private salon; the set declamation took the place of the speech or the political debate.

Concurrently, another great change was coming about. Cicero and his contemporaries had been nurtured on Greek literature and trained in Greek schools of rhetoric and philosophy. But within the fifty years following Cicero's entrance into public life (70-20 B.C. ) a great

flowering of genius had given Rome a native literature, if not as copious and as sublime, at least sufficiently notable to form a substitute for Greek in a consciously patriotic age. There was, within a generation, an almost complete change-over of language, literature and teachers. Cicero replaced the Greek orators and philosophers, Virgil stood for Homer, Livy and Sallust for Herodotus and Thucydides, Horace and Ovid for the Greek lyric poets and dramatists, until Seneca supplied a further need, and the list of school textbooks was augmented by every new arrival of acknowledged merit in the Silver Age. As a result, higher education lost throughout in vigour and life. Its product was the fluent speaker rather than the cultivated and humane man of action, the good critic rather than the good man. It is the distance between the De oratore of Cicero and the Institutio oratoria of Quintilian. Rhetoric was all in all. Law was the province of the professional, philosophy the pursuit of the few. The literary education became less and less a study of life, and more and more a pedantic and minutely erudite commentary. In the West Rome alone had teachers of law and philosophy.

From the middle of the second century of our era Roman education, while remaining unchanged in kind, became progressively more bookish and artificial. No new subjects, methods or text-books were introduced, and the rhetoric that was taught had less and less relevance to the political or social life of the times. Whether this lack of educational initiative should be regarded as a consequence of the 58

general decadence of social and official enterprise, or whether it was itself a principal cause of that decadence, may be doubtful, but the conservatism of all concerned with education, in an age which witnessed a reorganization of the Empire, the triumph of Christianity, and a series of great calamities, is very remarkable. The revival of speculative thought with Plotinus and his disciples had no effect on higher education; the Neoplatonists, in the first century of their existence, were less an intellectual force than a sect; their influence might be compared to that of the Quakers or the Cambridg� Platonists of the seventeenth century rather than to that of Hobbes or Locke, save that Neoplatonism came to have its greatest influence in aristocratic circles and to join forces with the conservative, anti­ Christian cult of the old Roman religion. We are not concerned here with the Eastern half of the Empire, which in the event was to have so little influence on the West, but it may be noted in passing that the great Greek Fathers were almost without exception familiar with philosophy from study at Athens, Antioch or Alexandria, and that this philosophy was Platonic in character.

The Christian Church in the West was for long recruited principally from the lower, unleisured strata of society. When in the fourth century it began to win the educated classes there was no opposition or rival system to the old Roman primary education based on grammar and the classics. Christian children attended the schools of non-Christian masters, while Christian masters taught all comers according to the old curriculum. There was, however, a prejudice against a devotion to an adult, intensive study of pagan literature, and it need not be said that no Christian at this time would have become, so to say, a 'practising' Neoplatonist philosopher.

The view has often been put forward in the past that the early and patristic Church was consistently hostile to secular literature, including the Greek and Roman classics. As a broad and sweeping statement this cannot be maintained; one must distinguish between regions and periods. Christianity grew to adolescence in a world in which Greek and Latin literature were both classical and living, and when Greeks and Romans of education became Christians they used all the resources of those literatures in their own thought and writings. The Greek Fathers in particular adopted more or less consistently the view that ancient philosophy and literature were in a way a fore-shadowing of, an avenue leading to, Christian theology, and we have seen something of this outlook in St Augustine.

A change came when the Church, freed from restraint, mingled freely and even victoriously with the pagan world. On the one hand,

the new monastic movement tended to be strongly puritan in its attitude to culture, while on the other hand the Church was now on an equality with, or in a superior position to, the old mythological