Roman than Greek, successfully attracting a galaxy of brilliant students and professors who made of the academy a university and spread its fame far and wide. Legal training was then a prerequisite for holding a government office. Two names shed lustre on the academy and have been immortalized in the Code of Justinian: Papinian, whose legal erudition guided by intellectual honesty and integrity of character made him a model jurist, and Ulpian, extracts from whose perspicuous writings form about one- third of Justinian's Digest. Through the copious extracts from their writings both jurists exercised abiding influence on the systems of Europe.
Certain pieces of Syrian literature, written in barbarous Greek in the early Roman imperial period, however, have had a more enduring and far-reaching influence than all the Greek and Latin classics put together. These were, of course, the Gospels and other early Christian writings.
With the details of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, a son of a Jewish carpenter, who according to Tacitus 'had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius', this history cannot properly concern itself. That some of his followers took pains to record the teachings and doings of their master, producing the Gospels, is a minor footnote to literary history, though it proved to be of im- measurable import to all subsequent history, political, social and intellectual. No extraordinary event reported of Jesus' life — virgin birth, astral association, miracle performance, crucifixion, descent to the underworld, reappearance, exalta- tion to heaven — lacks its parallel in earlier Near Eastern religious mythology. Hardly a teaching of his was not anticipated by Hebrew prophets or other early Semitic teachers. Even his emphasis on love of God and of man and on the relation between faith and ethical living were not unprecedented, though no precursor expressed himself so memorably, or so wholeheartedly practised what he taught.
