There is not, I think, any noteworthy list of the liberal arts to be found in any ancient author after Sextus, till we come to St. Augustine. In his _Retractiones_, written about 425, he tells us (I, 6) that in his youth he undertook to write _Disciplinarum Libri_ (the exact title of Varro's work!), that he finished the book on (1) Grammar, wrote six volumes on (2) Music, and made a beginning with _other five_ disciplines, (3) Dialectic, (4) Rhetoric, (5) Geometry, (6) Arithmetic, (7) Philosophy. It has frequently been assumed that we have here, for the first time, the Seven Liberal Arts definitely fixed; but there is nothing whatever in the passage to justify this assumption. The author does not say "_the_ other five disciplines," but merely "other five." Among these five, moreover, is named Philosophy, which, though certainly a "discipline," was never, so far as I can discover, called an art, liberal or otherwise. There is not the smallest reason for tracing back the Seven Liberal Arts to St. Augustine, who surely was incapable of any such playing with numbers. He does not, indeed, recognize the "Seven." It is in the fantastic and superficial work of Martianus Capella, a heathen contemporary of Augustine's, that they first make their appearance, and even there no stress is laid upon their number. They are (1) Grammar, (2) Dialectic, (3) Rhetoric, (4) Geometry, (5) Arithmetic, (6) Astronomy, (7) Music. These, no doubt, were the branches taught in the better schools of the Roman Empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, when, on the whole, the Greek liberal curriculum had supplanted the Roman rhetorical one. There is not the slightest ground for supposing that Capella had anything to do with fixing the curriculum which he celebrates. His work is a wretched production, sufficiently characterized by its title, _The Wedding of Mercury and Philology_. He wrote about seven arts because he found seven to write about. Attention was first called to the _number_ of the arts, and a mystical meaning attached to it, by the Christian senator, Cassiodorus (480-575) in his _De Artibus et Disciplinis Liberalium Litterarum_. He finds it written in Prov. ix, 1, that "Wisdom hath builded her house. She hath hewn out her seven pillars." He concludes that the Seven Liberal Arts are the seven pillars of the house of Wisdom. They correspond also to the days of the week, which are also seven. It is to be observed that he distinguishes the "Arts" from the "Disciplines," or, as they said later, the _Trivium_ from the _Quadrivium_. The pious notion of Cassiodorus was worked out by Isidore of Seville (died 636) in his _Etymologiæ_, and by Alcuin (died 804) in his _Grammatica_. Of course, as soon as the number of the arts came to be regarded as fixed by Scripture authority, it became as familiar a fact as the number of the planets or of the days of the week, or indeed, as the number of the elements. About A.D. 820