On entering you would find the sanctuaries and monasteries to your left ; and on the right of the large sanctuary stood the grammar-school for orphans collected from every race, in which a master presided and the boys stood round him, some puzzled over grammatical questions, and others writing what are called grammatical analyses. There could be seen a Latin being trained, and a Scythian studying Greek, and a Roman handling Greek texts and an illiterate Greek speaking Greek correctly. And Alexius’ interest in a training in logic was just as great. But the art of grammatical parsing was an invention of younger men of our generation.
Lofty matters and of the poets
I pass over the Styliani and those called Lombards, and all who employed themselves collecting names of every kind, and the Attici and the members of the ecclesiastical college of our great church, whose Dames I omit. But now the study of these lofty matters and of the poets and historians and the wisdom to be gained from them do not receive even secondary attention ; but the absorbing occupation is the game of draughts and other unlawful things. I say this because I am grieved at the absolute neglect of general education and it makes me glow with anger because I myself spent so much time over the same things.
And when I was released from that childish teaching and betook myself to the study of rhetoric and touched on philosophy and in between these sciences turned to the poets and historians, by means of these I polished the roughness of my speech, then with the aid of rhetoric I felt that the highly complex complications of grammatical parsing were to be condemned. I had to add these few words, not as being outside the subject, but as a corollary to my argument.
VIII After this, in the course of the years of his reign, a very great cloud of heretics arose, and the nature of their heresy was new and hitherto quite unknown to the church. For two very evil and worthless doctrines which had been known in former times, now coalesced; the impiety, as it might be called, of the Manichaeans, which we also call the Paulician heresy, and the shamelessness of the Massalians. This was the doctrine of the Bogomils compounded of the Massalians and the Manichaeans.
Read More about Zheravna Festival
