Solemn Orations in Praise of the Divine Elector Princes of Saxony, Maurice and Christian I

ORATION I.

might be selected to be submitted to the instruction and discipline of faithful teachers, either at Pforta or Meissen. In the year 50, a third illustrious school was added, which Elector Maurice wished to be open to the sons of those parents who have their seats in the Electoral dominion. It is at Grimma on the Mulde original: "Grimæ ad Muldam", where once there was a Monastery of preaching Monks of the order of St. Augustine. In which 100 boys themselves are educated and prepared for the lecture halls of greater schools. Maurice ordered these three schools, which we call illustrious because of their illustrious founder, to be opened so that they might be sanctuaries of piety, chapels of the best arts, workshops of moral honesty, most pleasant gardens of useful languages, into which the tender shoots of youthful minds being planted, might gradually grow up, flourish with the passage of time, and exhale the most sweet fruit and fragrance to the whole region.

The most pious Prince understood, of course, that this is the primary duty of princely men, to found schools, to preserve them once founded, and to propagate them to late posterity with all study: and he did this moved not only by the example of sacred kings, but also of heathen men whose fame is ennobled by histories. For he was not ignorant of how celebrated the schools of the Greeks and Egyptians once were, not to mention the Romans for now: he knew well from the Republic of the Lacedaemonians exposed by Xenophon, a most famous Commander and Historian, what the wisdom of that most celebrated Lycurgus (whom Apollo himself doubted whether to call a god or a man) was in prescribing laws for youth, in erecting colleges, and schools. He learned from his own teachers what Plato; what Socrates, what Isocrates, what Aristotle, the teacher of Alexander surnamed the Great, what his successor Theophrastus, what the Roman Fabius, what Plutarch, what many others said, felt, and wrote about the utility of Schools, what they showed by the very