Whether it was the fault of the teachers or of the pupils or of the social conditions, it is clear that lawyers had a bad name in the fourth as well as in the fifth century. The vivid and caustic description of Ammianus is well known.[502] He is suspicious of legal cunning and has the soldier’s impatience of rhetoric. We must therefore allow something for his prejudices. But his analysis cannot be wholly false. We may discount his language when he describes the profession as consisting of ‘violenta et rapacissima genera hominum’, but when he enumerates these classes and gives each its special characteristics, we feel that he may exaggerate but that he does not invent. The first class consists of mischief-makers and robbers, ‘odia struentes infesta’. Their oratory is empty and artificial: ‘eloquentiam inanis quaedam imitatur fluentia loquendi’. The second class consists of fraudulent people who make a superstition and a mystery of the law, increasing its entanglements, ‘velut fata natalicia praemonstrantes’, in order to enhance their own importance. Thirdly, there are the unscrupulous advocates who are always ready to sacrifice truth to money or fame. Finally, we have ‘a shameless race, perverse and ignorant—men who, having run away from school too young, scurry about in the nooks and corners of various states’.[503] Cicero is the ideal—‘excellentissimus omnium Cicero’—and Ammianus regards the practice of his day as erring from the good of the past.
Confirmation of the point in this criticism which most nearly touches education comes from an unexpected source. Sidonius, the rhetorical, the obscure, the vendor of subtle argument, associates ‘obscurity’ with the lawyers as a special characteristic.[504] Nor does he seem to think them particularly helpful. He sends a man, who has a case about a will, to Bishop Leontius, and begs him to see that justice is done, using his episcopal authority, if the lawyers will not help the client.[505]
Finally, there is medicine. When Denk maintains[506] that there was no faculty of medicine in the provinces, he cannot mean to exclude medical study as a subject of secondary education. There was probably no separate school of medicine,[507] but Ausonius definitely mentions the ‘medica ars’ as one of the Bordeaux professors’ titles to fame.[508] In former days Massilia had given to Gaul the medical tradition of the Greeks, just as Greece had given it to Rome. A certain Crinas, who lived in the reign of Nero, is said (though apparently only by Bulaeus) to have been the first to advance the study of medicine at Massilia, and we gather from Pliny that he introduced astrology into his medicine and gained an immense name and fortune.[509] Galen twice mentions Claudius Abascantus[510] of Lyons, who probably flourished under Augustus, as a doctor of prominence, and Eutropius of Bordeaux appears among the writers on medicine in the fourth century.[511] Julius Ausonius, the father of the poet, was the court physician of Valentinian I. At the beginning of the fifth century we find Marcellus Empiricus[512] of Bordeaux composing a book of prescriptions, ‘compositiones medicamentorum’. He gives many Celtic plant-names, Druidical beliefs, and a large number of ἅπαξ εἰρημένα and provincialisms.[513] As in the case of astrology, superstition plays a large part: certain herbs are to be picked with the left hand, or while muttering some magic formula like ‘rica, rica, soro’.[514] It is partly for this reason that Ausonius refers to the ‘libros medicinae’ as books closed to the vulgar, and that his eccentric aunt took up the study of medicine.[515] There seems to have been no organized system of medical study, and we do not even possess any details of the procedure in a particular case. It seems reasonable to suppose that the practical part of the profession was acquired by apprenticeship, while the rhetor confronted the student with such parts of the medical theory as could be found in the writings of Galen (who was the central authority) and his successors.
The frequent grouping of the doctors with the teachers in the Theodosian Code suggests that the public State-paid physicians taught as well as practised their art. Reinach[516] warns against certainty on this point, but it is at least probable. The wording of Constantine’s law[517] of September 27, 333, confirms the supposition. Doctors and teachers are proclaimed exempt from military service and public burdens so that they may have leisure to train others in their art—‘quo facilius studiis liberalibus et memoratis artibus multos instituant’. Of the original five classes of archiatri paid by the State—those of the court, those belonging to the municipalities, the heads of the medicine guilds, those in charge of the public gymnasia, and those who attended the Vestals—it was probably the second, the municipal doctors, who were the teachers of their profession.
If this is so, it proves that Rome was not the only place where doctors could be trained, as Denk seems to think.[518] Indeed, the provinces were more interested in medicine than Rome herself. Pliny[519] said in a broad and general way that for six hundred years Rome had got on without doctors, and it is well known that the Roman doctors made no important contribution to the science. Egyptians, Greeks, Gauls—these were the physicians of Rome. Pliny writes to Trajan asking him to give the citizenship to a doctor from whom he had derived benefit: ‘est enim peregrinae condicionis, manumissus a peregrina’.[520] The doctor who attends Hadrian on his death-bed is a foreigner.[521] Ammianus describes the growing fame of the Alexandrian school of medicine during the fourth century, as such, that a man, even if his actual work turned out badly, need only say that he had been trained at Alexandria in order to gain commendation.[522]
Then, as now, it was a lucrative profession, according to the proverb ‘Galenus dat opes’;[523] nor did the benefit to the sick always correspond to the doctor’s gain.[524]
A word may perhaps be added on the agrimensores, who represent the department of science among the Romans that was most scientifically employed, though all their mathematics came from Hiero of Alexandria.[525] Their work was partly military (the marking out of camps and locating of positions for the army) and partly civil (the surveying of colonies and provinces for revenue purposes). In cases of ‘controversia de loco’, the Theodosian Code appoints them judges.[526] At first they were free to practise where and when they could, but in our period they were attached to guilds, and stood under a ‘primicerius mensorum’.[527] This organization of the ‘agrimensores’ implies a certain amount of training and a professional test of proficiency.[528]
Their connexion with Gaul is not very clearly attested, but can hardly be doubted. Frontinus in his De Controversiis Agrorum, speaking of the well-known question as to the ownership of the old bed of a river which has flowed out of its course into another man’s land, says ‘Hae quaestiones maxime in Gallia togata moventur’.[529] Again, in speaking of certain technical surveyor’s terms, he says ‘Hae vocabula in lege quae est in agro Uritano, in Gallia ... adhuc permanere dicuntur’,[530] which shows that surveying had long been connected with Cisalpine Gaul. In view of the laws of the Theodosian Code of our period about surveyors, it seems possible that in Transalpine Gaul there may have been schools for the training of agrimensores.
A question that comes into one’s mind on reading Ausonius is whether, in the methods of the Gallic master, mnemonics did not play an important part.