volume 2, pages 279-281.

EDUCATION: Higher Education under the Empire.

"Besides schools of high eminence in Mytilene, Ephesus, Smyrna, Sidon, etc., we read that Apollonia enjoyed so high a reputation for eloquence and political science as to be entrusted with the education of the heir-apparent of the Roman Empire. Antioch was noted for a Museum modelled after that of the Egyptian metropolis, and Tarsus boasted of Gymnasia and a University which Strabo does not hesitate to describe as more than rivaling those of Athens and Alexandria. There can be little doubt that the philosophers, rhetoricians, and grammarians who swarmed in the princely retinues of the great Roman aristocracy, and whose schools abounded in all the most wealthy and populous cities of the empire east and west, were prepared for their several callings in some one or other of these institutions. Strabo tells us ... that Rome was overrun with Alexandrian and Syrian grammarians, and Juvenal describes one of the Quirites of the ancient stamp as emigrating in sheer disgust from a city which from these causes had become thoroughly and utterly Greek. ... That external inducements were held out amply sufficient to prevail upon poor and ambitious men to qualify themselves at some cost for vocations of this description is evident from the wealth to which, as we are told, many of them rose from extreme indigence and obscurity. Suetonius, in the still extant fragment of his essay 'de claris rhetoribus,' after alluding to the immense number of professors and doctors met with in Rome, draws attention to the frequency with which individuals who had distinguished themselves as teachers of rhetoric had been elevated into the senate, and advanced to the highest dignities of the state. That the profession of a philologist was occasionally at least well remunerated is evident from the facts recorded by the same author in his work 'de claris grammaticis,' section 3. He there mentions that there were at one time upwards of twenty well attended schools devoted to this subject at Rome, and that one fortunate individual, Q. Remmius Palaemon, derived four hundred thousand sesterces, or considerably above three thousand a year, from instruction in philology alone. Julius Caesar conferred the citizenship, together with large bounties in money, and immunity from public burthens, on distinguished rhetoricians and philologists, in order to encourage their presence at Rome. ... That individuals who thus enjoyed an income not greatly below the revenues of an English Bishopric were not, as the name might lead us to imagine, employed in teaching the accidents of grammar, but possessed considerable pretensions to that higher and more thoughtful character of the scholar which it has been reserved for modern Europe to exhibit in perfection, is not only in itself highly probable, but supported by the distinctest and most unimpeachable evidence. Seneca tells us that history was amongst the subjects professed by grammarians, and Cicero regards the most thorough and refined perception of all that pertains to the spirit and individuality of the author as an indispensable requisite in those who undertake to give instruction in this subject. ... The grammatici appear to have occupied a position very closely analogous to that of the teachers of collegiate schools in England, and the gymnasial professors in Germany."

_E. Kirkpatrick, Historical Development of Superior Instruction (Barnard's American Journal of Education,