Paetow — Negle&t of the Ancient Classics. 317 
cians and the chirurgeons of Paris as enemies of the good old 
authors. The competition of law with the classics is especially 
apparent, even at Paris. Gerald de Barri recalled how he once 
heard a certain professor at Paris proclaim before a multitude 
of students that the evil days had come which the sibyl had 
foretold in her prophecy, “The days will come, woe to them, 
when law will obliterate the study of letters.” If such was 
the effect of law on literary studies at Paris what must it have 
been at Bologna ! The absence of the classics at that great 
Italian university during the thirteenth century must in the first 
instance be attributed to the overwhelming importance of law. 
We have already seen how Orleans, renowned for classics in the 
first half of the thirteenth century, in the fourteenth Was known 
only for law. 
Closely related to law, although not a part of it, was another 
competitor of the ancient classics, namely the ars dictaminis or 
the art of writing letters and formal documents. This too was 
a lucrative study since it prepared its votaries for positions in 
the chanceries of church and state. At Bologna it gradually 
usurped almost the whole field of the arts. In France also it be¬ 
came very popular. Students at Orleans deserted classical 
poetry and even theology to devote themselves to it. Ponce de 
Provence, a famous itinerant professor of the art came to Or¬ 
leans about 1250 promising his students that he would pass 
by the fables of the authors and lead them directly to that pearl 
of knowledge, the ars dictaminis. 
(5) After all, however, the most important cause of the de¬ 
cline of the classics and of purely literary pursuits generally 
was the rise of dialectics to undisputed eminence among the 
arts. This is true especially because the reign of Aristotle be¬ 
came most absolute in northern France where the humanistic 
tendencies had been strongest. 
At first there was no active antagonism between dialectics and 
the authors. Abelard himself had a due regard for the achieve¬ 
ments of classical times and probably first awakened in his fa¬ 
mous pupil, John of Salisbury, a sense of the importance of 
ancient literature. But the interest in speculative thinking 
