THE CAMBRIDGE MEDIEVAL HISTORY I 051

Eastern Thought in the West

4-2. Eastern Thought in the West

The Empire was well provided with what we should now call universities. Rome, Milan, and Cremona were seats of higher learning for Italy; Marseilles, Bordeaux, and Autun for Gaul; Carthage for North Africa; Athens and Apollonia for Greece; Tarsus for Cilicia; Smyrna for Asia; Beyrout and Antioch for Syria; and Alexandria for Egypt. The number of foreign students to be found at each was remarkable. Young Romans enrolled themselves at Marseilles and Bordeaux. Greeks crossed the seas to attend lectures at Antioch, and found as their neighbours men from Assyria, Phoenicia, and Egypt. At Alexandria the number of students from distant parts of the Empire exceeded largely those from the neighbourhood. At Athens, whose schools were the most famous in the beginning of the fourth century, the crowds of Barbarians (for so the citizens called those foreign students) were so great that it was said that their presence threatened to spoil the purity of the language. Everywhere, in that age of wandering, the student seemed to prefer to study far from home and to flit from one place of learning to another.

Nor were the professors much different. They commonly taught far from their native land. Even at Athens it became increasingly rare to find a teacher who belonged by birth to Greece. They too travelled from one university seat to another. Lucian, Philostratus, Apuleius, all who portray the age and the class, describe their wanderings

Missionaries of new cults went about in the same way. Bands of itinerant devotees, the prophets and priests of Syrian, Persian, possibly of Hindu cults, passed along the great Roman roads. Solitary preachers of Oriental faiths, with all the fire of missionary enthusiasm, tramped from town to town, drawn by an irresistible impulse to Rome, the centre of power, the protectress of the religions of her myriad subjects, the tribune from which, if a speaker could only ascend it, he might address the world. The end of the third and the beginning of the fourth century was an age of religious excitements, of curiosity about strange faiths, when all who had something new to teach about the secrets of the soul and of the universe, hawked their theories as traders their merchandise.

This mixture of peoples, this new cosmopolitanism, this hurrying to and fro of religious teachers, brought it about that Oriental faiths, at first only the religions of groups of families who had brought their cults with them into the West, made numerous converts and spread themselves over the Roman Empire. These Oriental religions prospered the more because from the middle of the third century onwards Rome was looking to the East for many things. From it came the deftest artisans and mechanics who gave to life most of its material comforts. It largely contributed to feed Rome with its grain. Its philosophy (for most of the greatest stoical thinkers were not Greeks but Orientals) gave the substructure to Roman Law; and the most famous Law School in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries was not in Rome but at Beyrout. Ulpian came from Tyre and Papinian from Syria.

The greatest non-Christian thinkers of these centuries were neither Greeks nor Romans but Orientals. Plotinus was an Egyptian; lamblichus, Porphyry, and Libanius were Syrians; Galen was an Asiatic Oriental ideas were slowly changing Rome's political institutions themselves, and the Princeps of a Republic, as was Octavius, became, in the persons of Diocletian and Constantine, an Oriental monarch.

Rome, by the discipline of its legions, by the mingled severity and generosity of its rule, by the justice of its legislation, had conquered the East. Eastern thought, wedded to Hellenism, was in its turn subjugating the Empire. Its religions had their share in the conquest.

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