Rome found herself tottering with senile steps in the same path when the Empire and the ancient world lay in ruins about her.
Basil was not studious.

Long ago he had forgotten his 'grammatical' learning--except, of course, a few important matters known to all educated men, such as the fact that the alphabet was invented by Mercury, who designed the letters from figures made in their flight by the cranes of Strymon.

Though so ardent a lover, he had composed no lyric or elegy in Veranilda's honour; his last poetical effort was made in his sixteenth year, when, to his own joy, and to the admiration of his friends, he wrote a distich, the verses of which read the same whether you began from the left hand or the right.

Nowadays if he ever opened a book it was some historian of antiquity.

Livy, by choice, who reminded him of his country's greatness, and reawakened in him the desire to live a not inglorious life.
Of his latter boyhood part had been spent at Ravenna, where his father Probus, a friend as well as kinsman of the wise minister Cassiodorus, now and then made a long sojourn; and he had thus become accustomed to the society of the more cultivated Goths, especially of those who were the intimates of the learned Queen Amalasuntha.