324 Outlines of European History in preparing textbooks of the " liberal " arts and sciences, — grammar, arithmetic, logic, geometry, rhetoric, music, and as- tronomy. His treatment of these seven important subjects, to which he devotes a few pages each, seems to us very silly and absurd and enables us to estimate the low plane to which learn- ing had fallen in Italy in the sixth century. Yet these and similar works were regarded as standard treatises and used as textbooks all through the Middle Ages, while the really great Greek and Roman writers of the earlier period were forgotten. Between the time of Theodoric and that of Charlemagne three hundred years elapsed, during which scarcely a person was to be found who could write out, even in the worst of Latin, an account of the events of his day.-^ Everything con- spired to discourage education. The great centers of learning — Carthage, Rome, Alexandria, Milan — had all been partially destroyed by the invaders. The libraries which had been kept in the temples of the "pagan gods were often burned, along with the temples themselves, by Christian enthusiasts, who were not sorry to see the heathen books disappear with the heathen religion. Shortly after Theodoric's death the Emperor at Constantinople withdrew the support which the Roman gov- ernment had been accustomed to grant to public teachers, and closed the great school at Athens. The only important historian of the sixth century was the half-illiterate Gregory, bishop of Tours (d. 594), whose whole work is evidence of the sad state of affairs. He at least heartily appreciated his own ignorance and exclaims, in bad Latin, " Woe to our time, for the study of books has perished from among us." The year after Theodoric's death one of the greatest of the emperors of the East, Justinian (527-565), came to the throne at Constantinople. He undertook to regain for the Empire the provinces in Africa and Italy that had been occupied by the Vandals and East Goths. His general, Belisarius, overthrew 1 See Robinson, Readings in European History^ I, chap, iii (end), for histori- cal writings of this period.
