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century, with the generally accepted date, according to Beck, around 820.8
Regarding his age, Photios occasionally gave indirect references. He called Patriarch Nikephoros his "con-temporary."9 In another passage he stated that he was very young when he started to write his Lexicon, 10 and very old and tired when he finished the Amphilochia between 867-869 during his first exile.
The later work was addressed to Amphilochios, the metropolitan of Kyzikos, and he refers to the time as "the times of evils".11
Also a very significant point in establishing the age of Photios is the information furnished by him concerning the anathema pronounced upon his father, his uncle Tarasios, and himself by the last iconoclastic synod, which took place in 837.12
From an early age Photios dedicated himself to scholarship. Until recently the prevailing opinion was that Photios was self-taught because he made no mention of his teachers. 13 Today, however, as we learn more about Byzantine education, especially from the lives of the saints, we can follow Photios' education in greater detail.14 It has now been established that Byzantium had a basic system of education comprised of grammar, rhetoric, logic, the trivium; and arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, the quadrivium.15 The student who desired higher education had, in all probability, to go to Constantinople. There one would go either to the school for higher education of the clergy, the Patriarchal Academy, or to the university, which was subsidized by the government. 16 Niketas, the biographer of Ignatios, says that Photios "was versed in grammar, philosophy, poetry, and rhetoric."17
In a letter to Protospatharios Michael, Photios himself defined what education meant to him. He advised his friend "to educate the children in such a way that it would be a source of pleasure to them while young and an enduring companion in their later years."18 In these words, according to Professor Tatakis, it is not Photios the patriarch or the theologian who is speaking, but Photios the lover of knowledge. 19 He is in the tradition of Aulus Gellius, of Cicero, of Isocrates,
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