In Italy, as in no other country, the currents of antique education, disturbed yet unbroken, carried clear across that long period of invasions, catastrophes, and reconstructions, which began with the time of Alaric. Under the later pagan emperors, and under Constantine and his successors, the private schools of grammar and rhetoric had tended to decline. There were fewer pupils with inclination and ability to pay. So the emperors established municipal schools in the towns of Italy and the provinces. The towns tried to shirk the burden, and the teachers, whose pay came tardily, had to look to private pupils for support. In Italy there was always some demand for instruction in grammar and law. The supply rose and fell with the happier or the more devastated condition of the land. Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, re-established municipal schools through his dominion. After him further troubles came, for example from the Lombards, until they too became gentled by Italian conditions, and their kings and nobles sought to encourage and acquire the education and culture which their coming had disturbed. In the seventh and eighth centuries the grade of instruction was very low; but there is evidence of the unintermitted existence of lay schools, private or municipal, in all the important towns, from the eighth century to the tenth, the eleventh, and so on and on. These did not give religious instruction, but taught grammar and the classic literature, law and the art of drawing documents and writing letters. The former branches of study appear singularly profane in Italy. The literature exemplifying the principles of grammar was pagan and classical, and the fictitious themes on which the pupils exercised their eloquence continued such as might have been orated on in the time of Quintilian. Intellectually the instruction was poverty-stricken, but the point to note is, that in Italy there never ceased to be schools conducted by laymen for laymen, where instruction in matters profane and secular was imparted and received for the sake of its profane and secular value, without regard to its utility for the saving of souls. There was no barbaric contempt for letters, nor did the laity fear them as a spiritual peril. Gerbert before the year 1000 had found Italy the field for the purchase of books;[296] and about 1028 Wipo, a native of Burgundy and chaplain of the emperor Conrad II., contrasts the ignorance of Germany with Italy, where “the entire youth (_tota juventus_) is sent to sweat in the schools”;[297] and about the middle of the twelfth century, Otto of Freising suggests a like contrast between the Italy and Germany of his time.[298]