BYZANTINE EDUCATION 201
Theodore the Syceote, son of a prostitute in a Galatian inn,
went to the village school. The fourth-century philosopher
Themistius, indeed, said that one could learn as well in a
small town as a large; Brehier has, however, shown that rural
education was by no means completely organized.1 The
parents of St. Simeon Stylites only had him taught to mind
sheep; St. Joannicius was too busy tending his father's pigs
to acquire even the rudiments till at forty-seven he became a
monk; St. Euthymius when he entered a monastery could
neither read nor write.
Naturally it is chiefly from the biographies of famous men
that we can learn some details of educational practice. About
obscurer boys we know next to nothing, and in the case of
women we can only infer, from scattered hints, that handi-
crafts and a knowledge of the 'sacred writings* learnt at
home were usually, even for a scholar's child like Styliane,
daughter of Psellus, considered education enough. East
Roman girls apparently went neither to school nor to
university. Attention must therefore perforce be concen-
trated upon the education of a few outstanding personalities.
Although the Byzantines were eager to call themselves
Romaioi and to claim for their own a Roman tradition, their
training was purely Greek. Libanius in the fourth century
neither studied nor taught 'barbarian* Latin, and though
Theodosius II in A.D. 425 appointed to his University in
Constantinople both Latin and Greek teachers, the latter
outnumbered the former. Justinian, who published in Latin
his Code, Digest, and Institutes of Roman law, yet issued his
later constitutions in the Greek language that they might
more readily be understood. In 1045 Constantine IX had to
stipulate that the head of his new Law School must know
Latin, and this knowledge was probably purely academic, as
we have no evidence of spoken Latin in eleventh-century
Byzantium. From the fourth century the language and
the substance of education in the Eastern provinces of the
Empire was Greek. Only in the last two centuries of the
Empire's history the attempts to unite the Churches of
West and East necessitated a knowledge of Latin. There
1 L. Brehier, *Les Populations rurales an ix« siecle d'apres Thagiographie
byzantine', Byxantion, vol. i (1924), pp. 177-90, at p. 182.