Empire which was carried on by the Vandals, Goths, and Alani; "and owing to their ravages, all the learned men on this side the sea fled, and in the countries beyond sea, namely, Ireland, and wherever else they betook themselves, brought to the inhabitants of those regions an enormous advance in learning." This statement, printed from a Leyden manuscript as long ago as 1866, was, it seems, only noticed by Zimmer at the end of his life. The importance of it may be over-estimated, but cannot be denied. For the first time we have definite testimony that the culture of Bordeaux, Toulouse, Autun, Lyons – in other words, the best learning attainable in the West – did actually make its way in some shape into Ireland. And we have, besides, the reminder which was needed, that the missionaries were not solely or primarily the channels by which it came. The words throw light upon Patrick's own challenge to the rhetorici who knew not the Lord; but, more than all, they supply an explanation of the undoubted presence in Ireland in the sixth century of a certain type of learning. The fact that that learning was widely and rapidly diffused over the country was due in no small degree to this, that it went hand in hand with evangelisation. Had missionary effort not been there to prepare the soil, it is impossible to suppose that men would have been found so ready to study the grammar and rhetoric of Latin, or the elements of Greek. But when these were presented to them as part of the apparatus of the new faith, they were assured of a reception, and subsequently gained citizenship by their own merits.
It will not be possible to call attention to every indication of higher learning in Ireland; but it will be worth while to devote some space to the vexed question, how far this learning included a knowledge of Greek.
The question is not, it in be premised, a simple one. We must remember, on the one hand, that some of the most striking specimens of Irish Greek learning were produced on the Continent, and on the other, that, in and after the lifetime of Theodore and Hadrian (668-690) when Greek was made accessible to the English, there is a possibility of English influence upon Ireland. In any case it remains the most reasonable account of the knowledge of Greek on the part of a Johannes Eriugena or a Sedulius Scottus, that it was acquired in Ireland and transferred thence to the Continent.
In the first place, we can hardly doubt that Graeco-Latin glossaries had made their way to Ireland in very early times. The occurrence of Greek words in Irish writings of the sixth century is best accounted for on this hypothesis. We meet with such Greek words in the hymn Altus prosător of Columba, in that of St Sechnall on Patrick and in more than one of those in the Bangor Antiphonary. Their raison d'être from the point of view of the writers of these compositions is to deck the page. They are the spangles on the cloak, no essential part of the fabric, and they do not by themselves necessarily imply a knowledge of the structure of the Greek lan-
