27 - Education and learning

Summary

In 476 the overthrow of the last emperor of the West symbolised the discrete disappearance of Rome. But during the following two centuries, this political break-up affected the economic and social structures of the Roman world only partially, and even less those of its education and culture. In fact, huge changes in these latter, compared to the Hellenistic civilisation of the paideia, had already taken place between the third and fifth centuries, during the period which we now call later antiquity. But it was only after the end of the fifth century that the last ancient schools were to disappear one by one. At least, that was true in what had been the Western Empire. For in the East, it was only in the seventh century, following attacks from Persians, Avars, Slavs and Arabs, that the transmission of antique culture and the exercise of literary creation was to suffer a true eclipse. There would eventually be a complete break in linguistic communication between the Latin world and a Greek empire in which the abandonment of bilingualism and total Hellenisation would form part of a strategy for survival.

Research over the last century has destroyed the traditional view that the political and military collapse of Rome led to the ‘barbarisation’ of a western world overwhelmed by ‘massive invasions’. What followed the collapse of Rome, ‘the Middle Ages’, was famously denigrated by Gibbon as ‘the triumph of barbarism and religion’, and that late eighteenth-century view remained largely unchallenged until the publication of a work by Pierre Riché in 1962. Riché’s Education et culture dans l’Occident barbare was more closely related to historical reality, taking up the challenge issued by Gibbon.