the basic syllabus taught in Seville and all other schools like it dated back more than one thousand years, to long before Christ was even born. It was a classical program of study that would have been just as familiar to Aristotle in the fourth century b.c. as it would have been to Cicero in the first century b.c., Marcus Aurelius in the second century a.d., or Boethius in the sixth century a.d. Its pillars were the so-called seven liberal arts (“liberal” because they were once considered suitable for free people rather than the enslaved). These were subdivided into two groups. First came the
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