 In 425, a few years before Syrianus assumed leadership of the Academy, emperor Theodosius II and his wife Eudocia (a well-educated Christian convert and daughter of Leontius, a pagan educator at Athens who was in a sense a colleague of Syrianus’) founded what came to be the University of Constantinople. In consequence, higher education in Rhetoric, Law and Philosophy was thereby placed under the patronage—and supervision—of the court. The survival of a private institution such as the Athenian School, in contrast, depended much on the capability, personality, and commitment of its individual members. It is in this context that we have to understand the sense of excitement and relief that prevailed (as Marinus relates in his Life of Proclus) when Proclus (410/2–485), a young committed pagan intellectual, arrived in Athens to join the school in 431. At first, Syrianus was suspicious of the new arrival, but when he observed Proclus openly worshiping the Moon, he agreed to accept him. Eventually, Marinus says, Syrianus “found in him the disciple and successor he had long been looking for” (Life 12). Proclus succeeded Syrianus as head of the School in 437, at the mere age of about twenty-six, while Syrianus’ other, most talented student Domninus, who was Jewish, returned to his home town Larissa.