THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYimportance of archaeological evidence for any study of late antiquity, but we
can also see in some scholars of the period, prominent among them Jas Elsner,
an attempt to break down the gulf between textual and visual evidence. Given
the wealth of visual evidence for late antiquity and the important develop-
ments that can be discerned, this needs to be taken much further.^9
The survival of traditional structuresIt remains methodologically diffi cult to integrate these different approaches
to late antique culture, and to accommodate both the religious and the secular;
a further problem, less often acknowledged, is how far the huge quantity of
religious evidence, or the processes of religious change in the period, can actu-
ally be reduced to matters of social or cultural history. First, however, we must
ask to what extent the traditional high culture was still maintained, a question
which is very much connected with urban civic culture.
Late antique secular education was maintained in cities all over the empire,
and at the higher level in important centres such as Athens, Antioch, Alexan-
dria, Constantinople and Berytus, the latter a particular centre of legal studies.
Well-to-do parents sent their sons to leading teachers and to particular cen-
tres: Augustine was first taught in his home town of Thagaste, then sent with
the help of a rich neighbour to Madaura, and then to Carthage. Much of his
education was in the Latin classical authors, though he also learned Greek, and
he went on to teaching posts in Thagaste, Carthage and Rome, from where
he was appointed as a teacher of rhetoric in Milan in 384, to be joined there
by his Christian mother Monica and several North African friends who were
teachers or lawyers. His education included study of philosophy, and he was
personally drawn to questions of natural philosophy, astrology and religion.
For nearly ten years he was a Manichaean, and before his dramatic conver-
sion back to Christianity under the influence of Ambrose in Milan he was also
drawn to Platonism and belonged to an intellectual circle in which serious
discussion of both Platonism and Christianity was the norm. The story of his
early years story, vividly told in his Confessions, gives us an idea of education
and intellectual life in the late fourth century.^10 The pattern did not change
very much during the fifth century for people like him who came from the
better-off classes in urban centres,^11 and was reinforced by the founding of
the ‘University’ of Constantinople in 425 at the Capitol (not a university in
a modern sense, but rather the establishment of teachers in both Latin and
Greek in the main fields of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and law).^12 In the
sixth century east, Gaza was a major centre of teaching in addition to Con-
stantinople, Athens (see below) and Alexandria; and Berytus remained the
main centre of legal studies until hit by a major earthquake in 551.^13 Teachers
attracted their own followings, and students whose families could afford it
chose their centre of higher education according to its teachers.
Student life could be rowdy, and at times there was trouble between
Christian and pagan students, as in late fifth-century Alexandria, where the