ual wants and abilities, the
price appears to have varied; and Isocrates himself, who derides the
avarice of the sophists, required, in his school of rhetoric, about
thirty pounds from each of his hundred pupils. The wages of industry
are just and honorable, yet the same Isocrates shed tears at the first
receipt of a stipend: the Stoic might blush when he was hired to preach
the contempt of money; and I should be sorry to discover that Aristotle
or Plato so far degenerated from the example of Socrates, as to exchange
knowledge for gold. But some property of lands and houses was settled by
the permission of the laws, and the legacies of deceased friends, on the
philosophic chairs of Athens. Epicurus bequeathed to his disciples the
gardens which he had purchased for eighty minae or two hundred and fifty
pounds, with a fund sufficient for their frugal subsistence and monthly
festivals; [146] and the patrimony of Plato afforded an annual rent,
which, in eight centuries, was gradually increased from three to one
thousand pieces of gold. [147] The schools of Athens were protected by
the wisest and most virtuous of the Roman princes. The library, which
Hadrian founded, was placed in a portico adorned with pictures, statues,
and a roof of alabaster, and supported by one hundred columns of
Phrygian marble. The public salaries were assigned by the generous
spirit of the Antonines; and each professor of politics, of rhetoric, of
the Platonic, the Peripatetic, the Stoic, and the Epicurean philosophy,
received an annual stipend of ten thousand drachmae, or more than three
hundred pounds sterling. [148] After the death of Marcus, these liberal
donations, and the privileges attached to the thrones of science, were
abolished and revived, diminished and enlarged; but some vestige of
royal bounty may be found under the successors of Constantine; and their
arbitrary choice of an unworthy candidate might tempt the philosophers
of Athens to regret the days of independence and poverty. [149] It is
remarkable, that the impartial favor of the Antonines was bestowed on
the four adverse sects of philosophy, which they considered as equally
useful, or at least, as equally innocent. Socrates had formerly been the
glory and the reproach of his country; and the first lessons of Epicurus
so strangely scandalized the pious ears of the Athenians, that by his
exile, and that of his antagonists, they silenced all vain disputes
concerning the nature of the