Ancient literature, as we have seen, was nearing its nadir when Christianity was becoming supreme in the decadent Roman Empire; and with the formal extinction of classic paganism came the virtual extinction of fine letters, science, and philosophy, in the Byzantine State no less than in the West. The last Christian writers of any philosophic importance were really products of classic culture and the ancient civilization. When that civilization had been outwardly transformed to a Christian guise, the mental life shrank to the field of theology, with a few fenced and meagre plots of scholastic drilling-ground. Of the decayed discipline of ancient culture Christian civilization preserved only the most mechanical formulas; and the mental training of the Dark Ages consisted in a few handbooks (notably those by Martianus Capella and Cassiodorus) of what was then encyclopedic knowledge--the rules of Latin grammar, dialectics or elementary logic, rhetoric, music, arithmetic, elementary geometry, and some traditional astronomy. The first three constituted the trivium or introductory course in the medieval schools; the others the quadrivium: together "the seven liberal arts." The larger Encyclopedia of Isidore of Seville, the standard authority for centuries, is as mechanical, as devoid of living thought, as empty of scientific knowledge, as any of the others. In the way of literature, there was left to most Westerns little beyond a few of the later Latin writers, such as Boethius, who could pass muster as being Christians. Gregory the Great had set the note of theological anathema against the pagan poets and philosophers; and classic history survived only in bad abstracts. Wherever in the Dark Ages we meet with any power of thought, it is to be traced either to the influence of Saracen contacts or, as in John Scotus, to the Greek scholarship that had been preserved in Ireland while the western empire was being dissolved in barbarism. The English Alcuin, who had loyally aided Charlemagne in his efforts to spread education in the new "Holy Roman" empire, got his culture in an atmosphere where that influence had partly survived. Beyond this, the Latin world had preserved from the past, in the law schools which never wholly died out in Italy, a professional knowledge of the Justinian code, which the Lombards and Franks had allowed to subsist for those who claimed to be judged by it, and which remained the proper law of the papal territory after Charlemagne. In the sphere of such special knowledge, though it was strictly monopolized, there was doubtless an intellectual life largely independent of religion; and there some classical culture probably always flourished.