had ceased, and the newly founded University of Constantinople had not yet begun, to attract the best intellects—but it was the all-absorbing institution of the city. Athenian trade had gone on decaying, and under Constans, the son of Constantine, the people of Athens were obliged to ask the Emperor for the grant of certain insular revenues, which he allowed them to devote to the purchase of provisions. So Athens was now solely a University town, and the ineradicable yearning of the Greeks for politics found vent, in default of a larger opening, in such academic struggles as the election of a professor or the merits of the rival corps of students. These corps, each composed as a rule of students from the same district, kept Athens alive with their disputes, which sometimes degenerated into pitched battles calling for the intervention of the Roman governor from Corinth. So keen was the competition between them, that their agents were posted at the Piræus to accost the sea-sick freshman as soon as he landed and enlist him in this or that corps. Each corps had its favourite professor, for whose class it obtained pupils, by force or argument, and whose lectures it applauded whenever the master brought out some fresh conceit or distorted the flexible Greek language into some new combination of words. The celebrated sophist Libanios, and the poetic divine, Gregory of Nazianzos, respectively the apologist and the censor of Julian, have left us a graphic sketch of the student life in their time at Athens, when the scarlet and gold garments of the lecturers and the gowns of their pupils mingled in the streets of the ancient city, which still deserved in this fourth century the proud title of “the eye of Greece.”