ABSTRACT
The slow economic and demographic decline of Roman civilization that had begun in the second century extended to education as well. As Greco-Roman civilization aged, so the sheer weight of its intellectual past grew unmanageable. Already at the height of the Roman Empire, teachers were producing textbooks, summaries and anthologies to enable students to master the immense heritage of Greek and Roman literature. In subsequent generations, those books were in their turn condensed and simplified. By the late empire, formal education was increasingly dried out, lifeless and uncritical, based more on surrunaries and textbooks than on the great literature of the past. That
education, already in decline, fell on very hard times after the western empire collapsed. Between the late fifth and early eighth centuries the Roman schools, which taught grammar and rhetoric based on the pagan classics and were run by masters who worked for fees, disappeared in one region after another as urban life withered. 1
Even though the schools ceased to function, ancient textbooks, summaries and reference books survived to provide a starting point for later generations. Martianus Capella (early fifth century) created a basic textbook on the seven liberal arts in the literary form of a complicated allegory called The Marriage of Mercury and Philology. Mercury (Eloquence) is about to marry Philology (Learning) and Jupiter arranges a great celebration. The attendants of Mercury are the seven liberal arts who are defined and described elaborately in both verse and prose. Cassiodorus (c. 490-585), the cultured statesman who founded a monastery devoted to Christian learning, wrote the Institutes of Divine and Human Learning in the 550s. In it he synthesized precious information for later generations of monks. In book I, he included the names of the books of the Old and New Testament, the names and works of the chief biblical commentators, the major church historians and the chief fathers of the church. His Institutes has detailed information on the duties of a good scribe, including the rules of manuscript copying, spelling and book binding. In book II of the Institutes Cassiodorus gave a brief survey of the seven liberal arts, basing himself on ancient authorities. Isidore, bishop of Seville (c. 600-36), a Visigothic scholar and bishop, was a prolific author. He summarized a vast amount of ancient learning in his encyclopedia called the Etymologies, which as its name implies treated objects and institutions by analyzing the meanings of their names. In twenty sections, he treated such topics as the seven liberal arts, medicine, law, history, theology, zoology, cosmology, psychology, architecture and agriculture. His work was useful and immensely popular, a fixture in most libraries, and survives in almost 1,000 medieval manuscripts. It was on the basis of the works of Martianus, Cassiodorus, Isidore and others that the intellectual heritage of the Ancient World survived into the Middle Ages. 2
The fate of the Latin language itself had a great impact on learning and on the church. Latin was not immune to the forces that make languages change. In Italy, Spain and southern Gaul, where Latin had been the language of ordinary life for centuries, the spoken versions of the language drifted away from the written version: the Romance languages were emerging, but that meant the eclipse of classical Latin as a living tongue. By the eighth century even clergy born in Romancespeaking regions had to study in order to distinguish their spoken language from the Latin used in the books of their religion. The language of religion and the languages of ordinary life were losing touch with one another.
