2. A second indication of the hold which education had upon the age is the fact that teaching had come to be a recognized and lucrative profession. This is shown not so much by the instances of individual teachers,[37] who might be regarded as exceptional, as by the fact of the recognition of teachers by the State and by municipalities.
The recognition by the State took the double form of endowment and of immunities from public burdens.
(a) Endowments probably began with Vespasian, who endowed teachers of Rhetoric at Rome with an annual grant of 100,000 sesterces from the imperial treasury. Hadrian founded an Athenæum or University at Rome, like the Museum or University at Alexandria, with an adequate income, and with a building of sufficient importance to be sometimes used as a Senate-house. He also gave large sums to the professors at Athens: in this he was followed by Antoninus Pius: but the first permanent endowment at Athens seems to have been that of Marcus Aurelius, who founded two chairs in each of the four great philosophical schools of Athens, the Academic, the Peripatetic, the Epicurean, and the Stoic, and added one of the new or literary Rhetoric, and one of the old or forensic Rhetoric.[38]
(b) The immunities of the teaching classes began with Julius Cæsar, and appear to have been so amply recognized in the early empire that Antoninus Pius placed them upon a footing which at once established and limited them. He enacted that small cities might place upon the free list five physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; that assize towns might so place seven physicians, three teachers of rhetoric, and three of literature; and that metropolitan cities might so place ten physicians, five teachers of rhetoric, and five of literature; but that these numbers should not be exceeded. These immunities were a form of indirect endowment.[39] They exempted those whom they affected from all the burdens which tended in the later empire to impoverish the middle and upper classes. They were consequently equivalent to the gift from the municipality of a considerable annual income.
3. A third indication of the hold of education upon contemporary society is the place which its professors held in social intercourse. They were not only a recognized class; they also mingled largely, by virtue of their profession, with ordinary life. If a dinner of any pretensions were given, the professor of Belles Lettres must be there to recite and expound passages of poetry, the professor of Rhetoric to speak upon any theme which might be proposed to him, and the professor of Philosophy to read a discourse upon morals. A “sermonette” from one of these professional philosophers after dinner was as much in fashion as a piece of vocal or instrumental music is with us.[40] All three kinds of professors were sometimes part of the permanent retinue of a great household. But the philosophers were even more in fashion than their brother professors. They were petted by great ladies. They became “domestic chaplains.”[41] They were sometimes, indeed, singularly like the chaplains of whom we read in novels of the last century. Lucian, in his essay “On Persons who give their Society for Pay,” has some amusing vignettes of their life. One is of a philosopher who has to accompany his patroness on a tour: he is put into a waggon with the cook and the lady’s-maid, and there is but a scanty allowance of leaves thrown in to ease his limbs against the jolting.[42] Another is of a philosopher who is summoned by his lady and complimented, and asked as an especial favour, “You are so very kind and careful: will you take my lapdog into the waggon with you, and see that the poor creature does not want for anything?”[43] Another is of a philosopher who has to discourse on temperance while his lady is having her hair braided: her maid comes in with a billet-doux, and the discourse on temperance is suspended until she has written an answer to her lover.[44] Another is of a philosopher who only gets his pay in doles of two or three pence at a time, and is thought a bore if he asks for it, and whose tailor or shoemaker is meanwhile waiting to be paid, so that even when the money comes it seems to do him no good.[45] It is natural to find that Philosophy, which had thus become a profession, had also become degenerate. It afforded an easy means of livelihood. It was natural that some of those who adopted it should be a disgrace to their profession. And although it would be unsafe to take every description of the great satirist literally, yet it is difficult to believe that there is not a substantial foundation of truth in his frequent caricatures. The fact of their frequency, and also the fact that such men as he describes could exist, strengthen the inference which other facts enable us to draw, as to the large place which the professional philosophers occupied in contemporary society. The following is his picture of Thrasycles:[46]
“He comes along with his beard spread out and his eyebrows raised, talking solemnly to himself, with a Titan-like look in his eyes, with his hair thrown back from his forehead, the very picture of Boreas or Triton, as Zeuxis painted them. This is the man who in the morning dresses himself simply, and walks sedately, and wears a sober gown, and preaches long sermons about virtue, and inveighs against the votaries of pleasure: then he has his bath and goes to dinner, and the butler offers him a large goblet of wine, and he drinks it down with as much gusto as if it were the water of Lethe: and he behaves in exactly the opposite way to his sermons of the morning, for he snatches all the tit-bits like a hawk, and elbows his neighbour out of the way, and he peers into the dishes with as keen an eye as if he were likely to find Virtue herself in them; and he goes on preaching all the time about temperance and moderation, until he is so dead-drunk that the servants have to carry him out. Nay, besides this, there is not a man to beat him in the way of lying and braggadocio and avarice: he is the first of flatterers and the readiest of perjurers: chicanery leads the way, and impudence follows after: in fact, he is clever all round, doing to perfection whatever he touches.”
4. But nothing could more conclusively prove the great hold which these forms of education had upon their time than the fact of their persistent survival. It might be maintained that the prominence which is given to them in literature, their endowment by the State, and their social influence, represented only a superficial and passing phase. But when the product of one generation spreads its branches far and wide into the generations that succeed, its roots must be deep and firm in the generation from which it springs. No lasting element of civilization grows upon the surface. Greek education has been almost as permanent as Christianity itself, and for similar reasons. It passed from Greece into Africa and the West. It had an especial hold first on the Roman and then upon the Celtic and Teutonic populations of Gaul; and from the Gallican schools it has come, probably by direct descent, to our own country and our own time.
Two things especially have come:
(i.) The place which literature holds in general education. We educate our sons in grammar, and in doing so we feed them upon ancient rather than upon English literature, by simple continuation of the first branch of the mediæval trivium, which was itself a continuation of the Greek habit which has been described above.