ABSTRACT
The so-called Passio Marculi, written in Africa during the late fourth century, praises its hero for abandoning the slanderous practice of secular rhetoric (he was a lawyer) and instead applying himself to the holy ‘school of the Church’ and its teacher, Christ: ‘As soon as he [Marculus] began to take in the rudiments of the blessed faith, he immediately rejected worldly education… he began to despise the false dignity of secular knowledge’. 1 Here, we are concerned more specifically with the lawyer’s profession relinquished by Marculus; this profession – the culmination of rhetorical education – stands for pagan education as a whole. 2 Accordingly, Marculus’s renunciation of the worldly school is represented as a transition to the sanctissima ecclesiae schola and a different, new teacher: Christ. 3
