The poorer class of students passed from one school to another, supporting themselves by singing, begging, or stealing, and were sometimes guilty of great barbarities. The younger scholars, called "Schutzen," were compelled to perform{149} most menial duties for their older comrades, the "Bacchanten,"--much like the system of fagging still in vogue in English grammar-schools; and when the bacchantes were admitted to the university proper they were required to pass through an initiation, or hazing, which eclipsed anything known in these days; indeed, the antiquity of fagging may be traced back even to the philosophic schools of Athens. The habits of the traveling scholars led many of them into dissolute and vicious ways, though some attained respectable positions,--possibly even eminence. The students who were better situated financially; for the most part entered the Italian universities. Already mention has been made of the enormous number of students congregated during this age in Bologna and in Naples. In the small University of Wettenburg there were, in 1520, only about six hundred students; in Erfurt, three hundred, and this number dwindled two years later to fifteen; in 1500 Leipzig had four hundred students; at the same time there were about seven thousand in the University of Vienna. Students and teachers migrated from one place to another, and faculties were constantly changing. Great teachers were received with great ceremony. Bitter struggles and disputes between teachers sometimes occurred; it is related of Pistorius, who died in 1523, and Pollich, deceased in 1513, that they conceived a violent enmity toward each other because of antagonistic views relative to the epidemic or contagious character of syphilis, and both ultimately left Leipzig for other schools.