216	BYZANTINE EDUCATION
any wide learning and the preservation of the literature of
classical Greece was, it would seem, due for the most part to
lay scriptoria. Monks would copy and illuminate theological
works and would paint the icons which held so outstanding a
place in the devotion of the East Romans. In the monasteries
were written those chronicles which for some periods are
our only sources for the history of the Empire,, and it is to the
monasteries that we owe the works of the Byzantine mystics
which to-day are being studied with a new interest and a
fuller understanding.
(ii) The University of Constantinople—unfortunately
omitted by Rashdall from his study of medieval universities
—depended directly upon imperial initiative and the support
of the State, It is probable that Constantine founded in his
capital the school where Libanius and Themistius subse-
quently taught: it is certain that in a.d. 425 Theodosius II
appointed thirty-one professors paid by the State, freed from
taxation, and strictly distinguished from private teachers.
While Alexandria was famed for its school of medicine,
Constantinople, together with Rome and Berytus, was a
centre for legal study. The Eastern capital often drew its
professors of Latin from Africa. In the fifth century the
teachers of philosophy were frequently pagans: it was only
with Justinian that pagan teachers were finally banished from
the university.
Under Phocas (a.d. 602-10) all culture suffered, but
with Heraclius there was a renewed interest in learning. It
was in the metropolitan university that Cosmas a century
later acquired that vast learning which he imparted to St.
John of Damascus. Here, too, St. John the Psichaite
'despised' the curriculum which his biographer gives in full:
grammar, classical literature, rhetoric, secular philosophy,
dialectics, astronomy, geometry, and arithmetic.
Of the fortunes of the university under the Iconoclasts
we have no certain knowledge. The statement, made by late
writers who sought to blacken the memory of the Iconoclasts,
that Leo III closed an institute of higher studies and burnt
alive its professors is now generally regarded as a legend
without historic foundation. We cannot use this report in
any attempt to reconstruct the history of the university in