Isidore’s classroom was in Seville’s cathedral, where his elder brother Leander was bishop. However, the curriculum he studied there was not strictly Christian. In fact, 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
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