educational forces of
Europe. For a long period after Alexandria had become established as a
great centre of learning, Athens was really the centre of education in
the East, and this city held her sway in educational affairs down to
the second century. The influence of the traditions of great teachers
and the encouragement and {357} endowments given by emperors kept up a
school at Athens, to which flocked the youth of the land who desired a
superior education.

Finally, when the great Roman Empire joined to itself the Greek
culture, there sprang up what was known as the Greek and Roman schools,
or Graeco-Roman schools, although Rome was not without its centre of
education at the famous Athenaeum. In these Graeco-Roman schools were
taught grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic, music, arithmetic, geometry,
and astronomy. The grammar of that day frequently included language,
criticism, history, literature, metre; the dialectic considered logic,
metaphysics, and ethics; while rhetoric contemplated the fitting of the
youth for public life and for the law.

But these schools, though dealing in real knowledge for a time,
gradually declined, chiefly on account of the declining moral powers of
the empire and the relaxation of intellectual activity, people thinking
more of ease and luxury and the power of wealth than of actual
accomplishment. The internal disorganization, unjust taxation, and
unjust rule of the empire had also a tendency to undermine education.
The coming of the barbarians, with their honest, illiterate natures,
had its influence, likewise, in overthrowing the few schools that
remained.

The rise of Christianity, which supposed that all pagan literature and
pagan knowledge were of the devil, and hence to be suppressed, opposed
secular teaching, and tended to dethrone these schools. Constantine's
effort to unite the church and state tended for a while to perpetuate
secular institutions. But the pagan schools passed away; the
philosophy of the age had run its course until it had become a hollow
assumption, a desert of words, a weary round of speculation without
vitality of expression; and the activity of the sophists in these later
times narrowed all literary courses until they dwindled into mere
matters of form. Perhaps, owing to its force, power, and dignity, the
Roman law retained a vital {358} position in the educational
curriculum. The school at Athens was suppressed in 529 by Justinian,
because, as i