A type of formal position was later established, but these were positions
which the philosophers themselves did not control, and which did not consti-
tute schools in the organizational sense. In the period from 250 to 500 c.e.,
there were municipal chairs of philosophy at Athens, Alexandria, and (after
330) Constantinople. These were filled and paid for by the municipal authori-
ties, occasionally by the emperor (CHLG, 1967: 274). Usually there was one
chair, occasionally two, for a Platonist and an Aristotelean. The origins of this
practice seem to go back to 176 c.e., when Marcus Aurelius established four
chairs at Athens, for Platonic, Aristotelean, Stoic, and Epicurean philosophy,
with an annual salary of 10,000 drachmas (Dillon, 1977: 233).^29 The variety
of chairs dwindled down to the first two schools, and eventually only to
Platonists; we know of no more living exponents of Epicureanism anywhere
after about 200 c.e. or of Stoicism after 260 (DSB, 1981: 14:606).
For the most part, incumbents of these municipal chairs were undistin-
guished. Formal control by lay authorities was not conducive to intellectual
innovation, a situation paralleling the performance of the official Preceptors
of the Han dynasty. The number of positions was small and fixed. The Imperial
Academy at Constantinople, enlarged by the emperor Theodosius II in 425,
had some 31 chairs, all but one of them in grammar and rhetoric, and these
were granted a monopoly on teaching in the city (Jones, [1964] 1986: 999;
CHLG, 1967: 483–484). Private schools were allowed alongside the municipal
ones; most positions, both official and private, were in grammar and rhetoric,
not philosophy. Many of the philosophers of later antiquity, from Apuleius
and Herodes Atticus (ca. 150) onwards, were rhetoricians by profession; this
was particularly true of the Christian philosophers, especially before their
conversions. Augustine, trained in the famous rhetoric school at Carthage
(where Apuleius had studied two hundred years before) acquired the important
position of municipal professor of rhetoric at Milan; since this was the capital
city, his duties included delivering official panegyrics on the emperor and
consuls each year (Brown, 1967: 69). This was also the weakness of such
positions: florid verbal demonstrations in an archaizing style were valued over
acuteness judged by an intellectual community.
The big stimulus to intellectual life in later antiquity was not these munici-
pal lectureships but the autonomous organization of the growing Christian
Church. This new kind of organization underlay the shift to sharper doctrinal
stances in late antiquity, provoking greater definition on all sides of the oppo-
sitional space. The impetus was not the new religious movements per se. The
Gnostic movements which spread at the same time as early Christianity over-
lapped the milieu of freelance intellectuals, and had much the same syncretizing
style. By 200 c.e., the training of Christian priests became increasingly formal-
ized, and Christian intellectuals appeared, marking out their distinctive stance
amid the older philosophies. Formally organized pagan schools began to revive
Partitioning Attention Space: Ancient Greece^ •^115