[L. (f. tri-, TRI- + via way), a place where three ways meet; in med.L. in sense 1 below.]
1. In the Middle Ages, the lower division of the seven liberal arts, comprising grammar, rhetoric, and logic. (Cf. QUADRIVIUM.)
1804. Ranken, Hist. France, III. iv. 308. They included all learning in the seven liberal arts; of which grammar, rhetoric, and dialectics, formed what they called Trivium.
1837. Hallam, Hist. Lit., I. I. i. § 3. 3. The trivium and quadrivium, a course of seven sciences, introduced in the sixth century.
1886. S. S. Laurie, Rise Universities, 63–4. The much and deservedly lauded course of instruction given by Gerbert at Rheims, about 1000 A.D., seems to have been simply a full and extended trivium.
2. Zool. The three anterior ambulacra of an echinoderm. (Cf. BIVIUM.)
1870. Rolleston, Anim. Life, 142. To divide the five rays [in Asterias] into a ‘bivium,’ between which the madreporic tubercle lies, and a ‘trivium,’ the two lateral arms of which lie on either side of the arm which is opposite to that tubercle.
1877. Huxley, Anat. Inv. Anim., ix. 570. In the fossil genus, Dysaster, this separation of the ambulacra into trivium and bivium exists naturally.
