One of the borrowings from the pagan schools which the Church found most useful was shorthand. The bishops had their ‘notarii’ just as much as the officials of the imperial Civil Service. They were employed to take down the proceedings of the Councils, the acta of the martyrs,[1070] and the speeches and sermons of the prominent clergy. Their prevalence has been the plague of commentators, and has contributed much to the formlessness of Christian writing. For the scribe would take down the bishop’s speech verbatim and copy it out as it stood. There was no revision or rearrangement, and many errors and much diffuseness was the result, as in the Homilies of Hilary of Poitiers.[1071] Hilary of Arles, Honoratus tells us, used to have a ‘notarius’. ‘Sedili mensaque apposita liber ingerebatur et retia,[1072] adstante notario. Liber praebebat animo cibum, manus nectendi velocitate currebant, notarii simul ferebantur articuli et oculus paginam percurrebat.’[1073] Evidently the possession of a ‘notarius’ did not mean a decrease in activity, mental or otherwise. Similarly, Jerome on a certain occasion was compelled by his friend Ausonius to send for his secretary and dictate a letter to the bereaved Julian, and ‘as the words fell swiftly from his lips, they were swiftly overtaken by the hand of the writer’.[1074] Again, he describes the vigour of his secretarial department in terms of martial ardour and excitement: ‘ecce noster Ausonius coepit schedulas flagitare, urgere notarios, et hinnitu ferventis equi, ingenioli mei festinus arguere tarditatem’.[1075] That shorthand was connected with the schools is clear enough from Prudentius.[1076] He tells us of a tablet in a church at Forum Cornelii representing the martyr Cassianus who had been a teacher of stenography.
Praefuerat studiis puerilibus, et grege multo
saeptus magister litterarum sederat.
verba notis brevibus comprendere multa peritus
raptimque punctis dicta praecipitibus sequi.
Transcribers of books were patronized by wealthy families, and apparently sent from one house to another. Sidonius[1077] recommends to Ruricus one who had copied out the Heptateuch, and had on sale also a copy of the Prophets, which he had edited. The man was evidently of low social standing, for Sidonius leaves it to Ruricus to fix the price of the work; yet he must have had a considerable education to have been able to edit the Prophets. We hear also of a citizen of Clermont who had wormed out of the copyist or bookseller (scriba sive bibliopola) of Remigius at Rheims a copy of the latter’s Declamations,[1078] which shows that the scribe was sometimes also the librarian.
In arithmetic, the strict monastic rules for silence, which made it necessary, for example, to ask for things at meals by signs,[1079] increased the Roman tendency to finger-computation. How elaborate a system was thus worked out we may see from Bede’s work on the subject.[1080] Great stress was laid on the ‘Computus’, a set of tables for calculating astronomical events and the movable dates of the calendar. It was regarded by Cassiodorus as indispensable for the clergy.[1081] The ‘calculus’ of Victorinus of Aquitaine, who invented a new Paschal calendar about the middle of the fifth century, was frequently used.[1082] The idea of mystical numbers, derived from Pythagoras, led to much fanciful nonsense in the Middle Ages, as we may see from Alcuin’s letter to his pupil Gallicellulus,[1083] in which he compared the numbers mentioned in the Old Testament with those of the New.
We have seen that monastic education, where, as at Lérins, the abbot was sympathetic, extended beyond the range of theological or church subjects. The Chronicle of Lérins insists on this,[1084] and its statements are borne out to a certain extent by the inscriptions, which show how strongly Vergil’s influence survived among the Christians. Several times we find on the tombstones:
Abstulit atra dies et funere mersit acerbo,
and the words ‘Subiectasque videt nubes et sidera caeli’[1085] in an inscription on a Bishop of Arles recall the verse describing the apotheosis of Daphnis. An inscription of Narbonne, belonging, probably, to the fifth century, has the phrase ‘summi rector Olimpi’.[1086] As for the Fathers, they are constantly bursting forth into Vergilian language. Paulinus, in the midst of his tirade against the pagan Muses, in the heat of his appeal to turn to the Christian God, slips into ‘inania murmura miscent’,[1087] and Jerome, while urging Julianus to become a monk, ends with a Vergilian quotation: he must follow the example of the Holy Vera, ‘et sit tibi tanti dux femina facti’.[1088] Thus the Christian writers by their own words prove the folly of the extreme anti-pagan point of view, even when they themselves have held it.