HISTORY OF ATHENS. 61

tained from Nero's passion for collecting statues, it
is certain that the evidence of his plundering Athens,
and specially the Acropolis, is hardly reconcilable
with Pausanias' account of the place; and it is further
remarkable, that in the numerous incidental notices
by antient writers of works of art which had been
transferred to Rome, the name of Athens hardly ever
occurs, while the names of other Greek cities are often
particularly mentioned.

We have already briefly noticed Athens as a school
of philosophy for the Romans in the time of Cicero.
It became afterwards, with Tarsus and Alexandria, one
of the great seats of education in the eastern world,
as we learn from Strabo; and it flourished also at a
later period as a school of rhetoric to which youths
resorted even from the most distant eastern provinces
of the Roman Empire. Marcus Aurelius encouraged
the school of Athens, by endowing four professorships
of philosophy and one of rhetoric, thus putting the
education of the city on a sure basis by providing for
those whose business it was to teach. This, it has been
observed, was, however, a local regulation; professors
of rhetoric or philosophy were at this period,. as a
general principle, entirely dependent on their fees,
and, as a general consequence, poor. We may rather
admire the liberality than the judgment of the-Em-
Peror in the nature of his endowment, which shows
however the class of studies on which youth at that
time were employed. A chair of political philosophy
ls also mentioned by one author as among the
endowments of M. Aurelius, but political philosophy
under the Roman Empire, if such a chair existed,
Must have been rather a limited and barren subject*.

For a further development of this subject the reader is
referred to an article in the second number of the Quarterly Journal
<j< Education, vol. i. p. 240, entitled 'The School of Athens
during the Decline of the .Roman Empire.'

VOL. I. q