The Schools from Bardas to Constantine Porphyrogennetos
ChapterXI The Schoolsfrom Bardas to ConstantinePorphyrogennetos After those great figures of learning, Photios and Arethas, who, paradoxically, have not enlightened us about their own training or the educational institutions of their day, we must come back to these institutions and try other ways of penetrating their secrets. Doubt less it is no accident that our evidence, as we shall see, relates particularly to the time of Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos. However, in the process it sheds light indirectly on the preceding half century and, to make our starting-point clear, it is a help if we go back briefly. Let us recall then that Leo the Mathematician, born probably in the last decade of the eighth century, could receive a "secondary" education, that is, in grammar and poetry, in Constantinople, but did not find any teacher there who was capable of taking him further. A self-taught man and a traveller, he returned to the capital to give private lessons for many years, and then, on the initiative of Theoktistos, to give public instruction paid for by the State, in the period prior to his nomination to the metropolitan see of Thessalonica ( 840) • Finally, at a date not known, but close to 855, 1 Bardas set him at the head of the "Philosophy School" which he was founding at the Magnaura with the four chairs of philosophy, grammar, geometry and astronomy. Some thirty years later the career of Constantine the Philosopher showed significant similarities and differences. Born in 827 in Thessalonica, Constantine was not able to obtain any education there beyond that provided by the elementary teacher, the gzea,,,nati.s tss.
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