Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/264

236 on the immemorial traditions of the city, and the holy sanctions of the ecclesiastical rule, that it was destined to survive and emerge into supremacy when the discordant powers which had threatened it had passed away. And that this was so was due conspicuously to the descendant of Pope Felix IV who first saw the light before the sixth century had run half its course.

Gregory was the son of the regionarius Gordianus, a rich nobleman with a fine house on the Caelian hill who held an office of organisation connected with the Roman Church. His mother was afterwards ranked among the saints, and so were two of his father's sisters. He was brought up in the life of a Christian palace, among the riches of both worlds, as a saint, says his biographer John the Deacon, among the saints. In his education none of the learning of the time was neglected, and it is with the consciousness of a wider knowledge than the stricter folk of the day would allow that his biographer calls him arte philosophus, a student of Divine philosophy, not of the degraded type of Greek word-splitting which had lingered on at Athens till Justinian closed the schools ten years or so before Gregory was born. He was taught grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, after the fashion of the day. He did not learn Greek then, or even later, though he lived six years in Constantinople. For literary elegance he never cared, and he almost boasted of the barbarisms of his style. In later life he is found reproaching a Frankish bishop for expounding grammar, perhaps even for studying it; but there was more in the reproof than the mere regret for time wasted that might be more profitably employed not only by a bishop, but, as he says, by a religious layman: it was the sense of alarm with which the Christian scholars still regarded a mythology whose morals were by no means dispossessed from their influence on men. Of Art, on the other hand, he was not ignorant: towards painting as well as music he was sympathetic throughout his life. What special training he received was, there seems no doubt, in law. When boyhood was over, he emerges into light as praefect of the City of Rome (573), holding what was at least theoretically the highest office among the citizens, one of great labour and dignified ostentation, and, even in the decay of the city's independence, of serious responsibility. That his tenure of office was distinguished by any special achievement we do not know; but his leaving it was dramatic and significant. His father was dead: his mother had gone into a nunnery: he was one of the richest men, as he was the highest official, in Rome. But the religious training of his early years had never ceased to dominate his life. Now, at the very time when political leaders were most needed, and when he was in a position to win the foremost place among them, he laid aside ambition, put off his silk and his jewels, gave his father's property for the founding of six monasteries in Sicily and in charity for the Roman poor, and turned the great palace on the Caelian hill into a house of monks, entering it