Note 423 — Chapter III

Vespasian began the endowment of professorships of rhetoric (Suetonius, Vespasian, 18). As to the Antonines, see Gibbon, ch. ii, note, near end; and cp. Hatch, Influence of Greek Ideas upon the Christian Church, 1900, pp. 38-39; and Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme, i, 166. Vespasian's endowments, it should be noted, were given only to the professors of rhetoric. The philosophers (presumably the Stoics, but also the astrologers) he banished, as did Domitian. On this cp. Merivale, History, vol. vii, ch. 60.