Between the century of the first teachers (roughly 240–140 B.C.) and the efflorescence of literary activity in the first centuries B.C. and A.D., a small hint of the variety of Roman schooling is provided in a notice about a single school. The innovative methods of a rhetorician had so offended the censors of 92 B.C. that they issued an edict of disapproval. The identity of the teacher, the nature of his offense, and the motives of his critics are, in fact, not easy to discern, but the sense of crisis is palpable. The censors’ disapproval left a strong mark on the Romans of the late republic and early empire, in great part because major literary figures—Cicero, Suetonius, and Quintilian—commemorated the event as a perilous moment in the history of education.
The intended target, Plotius Gallus, may not have inaugurated the practice of training advanced students in making speeches in Latin (without the use of Greek study materials or Greek practice speeches), but this practice, or perhaps his students’ success, drew official ire. The censuring of Gallus’s school itself constitutes important evidence for the rise of the institution of schooling and its check by official and traditional institutions. Yet Gallus’s Latin-only curriculum anticipates later Roman practice. Despite the censure, such techniques would prove successful and lasting.
In keeping with their biographical understanding of the rise of education, the Romans stigmatized individuals rather than reporting debates of educational method. The strong criticism of the school of Plotius Gallus has masked the conditions of education at the turn of the second and first centuries B.C. In his dialogue De oratore (On the Orator), Cicero has cast one of the censors, Crassus, both as the spokesman for opposition to upstart innovation and as a champion of the compendious expertise and civic responsibility that reflect Cicero’s first-century ideal. The complaint repeats a polemical commonplace: innovation, attributed to an individual, often a social inferior, threatens ancestral ways. This nativist history of education ineluctably associates educational practice with social change and social discipline. When a practice typical of Hellenistic education—the training of the voice for oratorical performance and practice in mock legal speeches on contemporary themes—becomes invested with issues of the corruption of youth and the health of society, the historian will have good reason to proceed with caution. In addition, Cicero’s characterization of these issues seems disingenuous: in fact, he had found the methods of the school enticing. The portrayal of the issues in the De oratore may well be an act of revisionism.
Criticizing academics is a sport of long tradition. The foolish professor or self-absorbed student is an endless source of fun. Amid a string of ancient jokes at the expense of the clueless student, the scholasticus, the following is typical: “A student was going to sell his house and so sent around one of its stones as a sample” (Philogelos 41: Skholastikos oikian pōlōn lithon op’ autēs eis deigma periepheren). 1 The humor depends on the contrast between the school and the community at large, especially the contrast between the specialized language of the one and the generally received and readily intelligible expression of the other. Here the word for “sample” or “demonstration,” deigma, has an academic ring: the student has sent around a sample proof or literary foretaste rather than an architectural drawing or advertisement.2
Socrates himself provided the model for the seriocomic schoolman who transgresses (or is it transcends?) the divide between the scholastic and the public (as also the mercantile and the civic) spheres of the city. Unlike the scholasticus, who was the butt of jokes, he at least had a sense of irony and the self-conscious knack of using a term current in both a specialized and a general sense (a cobbler and a statesman have aretē, or so they may think). Socrates’ portraits in Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon, for all their differences, enshrined the educator of the young as a problematic character.3 The question of whether the teacher is a prattler or a sage, an innovative corrupter of the community’s youth or its most important source of values and skills, did not die with Socrates.
Plotius Gallus was no Socrates, but in his case too the conflict that arose ostensibly over issues of educational method masked larger social or even political issues. Gallus has not received sufficient attention in educational history because the ancients disparaged him as a vulgar pleader and because the theorists, especially Cicero and his great admirer Quintilian, advocated a Greek-intensive, long, theoretically informed, and graduated training of the orator.4 In fact, Cicero dominates the ensuing discussion of Gallus. In reconstructing his early education, Cicero has Gallus play the role of the road fortunately not taken. On the subject of his own formation, the great author and speaker merits a certain skepticism. The customary anachronism of Cicero’s dramatic dialogues, where speakers of antiquity are summoned for the sake of their authority and not for their genuine sentiments, is compounded by the tendency of the educational treatise to idealize curricula of the past. The rhetorical manuals earlier than Cicero’s De oratore or Quintilian’s hefty treatise—the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero’s own youthful (and later regretted) De inventione (On Invention), a lightly polished version of lecture notes from a rhetorical school—offer a less polemical and idealizing insight into the educational milieu at the beginning of the first century B.C. These earlier texts, and, one suspects, the schools from which they sprang, like that of Plotius Gallus, held out the promise of oratorical excellence through the medium of Latin.
In 161 B.C. a senatus consultum gave the praetor the legal authority to expel rhetoricians and philosophers from Rome. A different senatus consultum, in either 173 or 154, was directed at two individuals, Epicurean philosophers who were thereby banished. Individual philosophers and poets did suffer from legal opposition; in addition to the anonymous Epicureans already mentioned, it is possible that the edict against philosophers and rhetoricians had specific targets. The praetor’s authority to expel academics was a legal power, which the year’s praetor could apply at his discretion, not the generalized policy of a modern, bureaucratic state.5 In his study of astrology at Rome, Frederick Cramer referred to the various official edicts against the astrologers as “emergency measures.”6 Certainly, no evidence suggests that Tiberius Gracchus’s tutor or the other Greek experts attached to the great houses were forced from the city.
Indeed, the intellectual history of Rome from 170 to 140 can be described in terms of the Greek luminaries who came to Rome at this period: Crates of Mallos, Diogenes the Babylonian, Carneades of Cyrene, Critolaus of Phaselis, and Panaetius of Lindus.7 The arrival of the philosophers makes a dramatic story, but the educational historian must look at the more humdrum tutors and teachers, and those who were not well received. To the list of oppressed literati we might add the poet Naevius, imprisoned by the rivals of his patron, apparently for his plays’ political wit.8 As always in the republic, the foreign man of letters was a client who needed a citizen patron to prosper. Whereas Terence and Polybius succeeded in this regard, Roman literature abounds with the envy that the competition for patronage generates; and despite a strong literary tinge to the author’s complaint that he or his work is slighted, writers faced threats more material and damaging than unkind criticism or malicious gossip. The foreign intellectual client made a convenient, substitute target for the patron. Naevius and later the poet Archias seem targets of opportunity.9 Romans’ ambiguous feelings about Greek intellectual culture, and indeed about the influence of the teacher, would likewise continue.10 The nativist posturing that contrasted innate Roman morality with learned Greek philosophy was not limited to Cato. Cicero indulges in it when it suits his purpose: thus in the De oratore he makes the philhellenic Crassus, the censor who passed the decree of 92, a curmudgeonly critic of the influence of Greek culture.11
The senatus consulta of 161 and 173/154 intimate the senate’s reaction to cultural experts without communicating any details of the state of education or the growth of philosophical instruction at Rome in the 160s. Indeed, these actions of the senate are better compared to other exclusion orders than to the notices, treated above, of Roman nobles’ contact with Hellenistic cultural experts. The senate had intervened in the introduction of foreign technologies (astrology, cult practice, education) most famously in the restriction of the Bacchic cult in 186. The targets of exclusion make a fascinating who’s who of enemies of the Roman order throughout its history: Bacchus’s new priests, priests of Isis, Jews, and astrologers.12 Cato advised his estate manager (and all the readers of his agricultural manual) not to consult astrologers. Two centuries later, when the second emperor, Tiberius, excluded astrologers, Rome was not rid in any systematic way of this group of experts. No doubt the politics of his day, in which a horoscope could be part of the propaganda wielded by an aspirant to the throne, brought about the emperor’s order.13 While the restriction of the Bacchic cult and the disorder that accompanied it were severe, these measures had a strong proportion of the symbolic and, for our period especially, should probably be associated with other strongly symbolic legislation, such as the difficult-to-enforce sumptuary legislation that limited the amount of jewelry a woman could wear.14 The assertion of control over freeborn, elite women and children is an index of change, perhaps both of the public style of the (nonadult male) familia and of the set of citizens who are in fact displaying their wealth and status. Education, like dress, may offend not because it makes some bold change but because more and different people are sporting it.
Whereas the senate did not have the apparatus of coercion that in the twentieth century has successfully directed what a citizen is to wear or who his teachers are to be, the Roman senatus consultum did invest the praetor with the power to banish. This distinguishes it from the censors’ decree of 92, which had no such administrative bite. The senate seems to have shared Cato’s aversion to Epicureans. Two Epicureans were banished. Similarly, Cato had objected to the lectures of an individual philosopher (the skeptic Carneades). Certainly, the senatus consulta and Cato’s admonitions betray an anxiety about the influence of some of the teachers who were coming to Rome in increasing numbers.15 Paulus’s, Cato’s, and Cornelia’s advertisement of direct supervision of their children’s studies seems to recommend the avoidance of education through slaves, freedmen, and schools. But the actions of great families did not constitute policy statements advocating homeschooling; rather, they seem motivated by the fact that family status depended upon a number of exclusive, expensive, and visible distinctions, which included a segregated education.16 For those lower down the social ladder, such as the students of the school of Chilon, the children of the Scipios or the Gracchi might represent an ideal. The more modest might have to comfort themselves with the thought that they too pursued a Greek-style education. Whereas Cicero would come to articulate a counterplan to Gallus’s methods, attainable for the wider public who could read his dialogues, second-century opposition to techniques and practitioners of education seems episodic, even symbolic, not systematic or theoretical. Further, the evidence suggests a vibrant and diverse educational culture—in recognizably Greek disciplines.
Amid the spotty chronology of official responses to teachers and declarations of social discipline, the edict of the censors Crassus and Domitius Ahenobarbus properly returns us to the history of the school. Here Suetonius’s notice of the censure of those conducting and attending Latin schools and Cicero’s recreation of the issues agree that an innovation had been introduced into the curriculum. In 92 B.C. the censor Domitius Ahenobarbus joined his colleague, with whom he seems to have been in near-constant disagreement, to issue an edict castigating one particular school. They did not, as is often stated, close the school.17 Suetonius, in describing the difficult fortunes of the teachers of rhetoric at Rome, cites the censors’ edict:
We have been informed that there are persons who have established a novel sort of instruction and that the youth gather at their school; that these people have styled themselves “Latin rhetoricians,” and that young persons idle away whole days there. Our ancestors established what manner of things they wished their children to learn and what manner of schools they wished them to attend. These new practices, which do not accord with ordinary custom and the way of our ancestors, are vexatious and wayward-seeming. Therefore we have determined to make our judgment plain both to those who preside over these schools and to those who have become accustomed to attending them: we do not approve.18
The censors did not approve, and neither did the subsequent, written Roman tradition. Practice was a different matter. The distinguished authority of the critics has perhaps distorted a proper appreciation of both the innovation and the success of the school, or its approach. Cicero has Crassus, set as a character in the dialogue devoted to the training of the perfect orator, explain his opposition. Tacitus, in his account of the new style and the new proper orator, recalls Cicero’s Crassus and the dialogue’s words: this establishment was “a school of impudence.” Suetonius includes one more important detail: in a letter he had read but which has not survived, Cicero said that he had wanted to attend this school, but that he had been dissuaded by friends.19
A thicket of scholarly opinion has grown up around the school and its critics. Plotius Gallus and his school have been understood to represent demagogic forces, with the censors in turn understood as conservative optimates. A second political analysis has seen the event as an attempt by the senatorial class to restrict access to the practice of oratory. Bonner argued that the objection of the censors was moral not political,20 but the moral, aesthetic, social, and political certainly supplement each other in explanations of why human beings cleave to one group. Erich Gruen has recently pruned the assumptions of these approaches, by demonstrating in detail that the alleged demagogic agents involved, the teacher and Marius, had no such connection (in fact, in the 90s Marius was making connections with Crassus); further, Crassus’s political allegiances cannot be classified as “optimate.” Indeed, the mutual hostility of Ahenobarbus and Crassus raises the important question, What coincidence of interest could move the censors to brand publicly one particular teacher a moral threat? The thorough study of Roman political interests and familial allegiances splinters the old divide of Roman cultural history into pro-Hellenic and pro-nativist camps or, as in this case, the demagogic and the senatorial.21
The threat perceived in Gallus’s school and curriculum deserves additional study. The essential question remains, Why did a training for oratory through the medium of Latin exercises draw the condemnation of these two customarily fractious censors? To this must be added, Why did Cicero’s advisers counsel him not to attend, and why did the issue of this particular school remain important in histories of the rise of Roman oratory and Roman schooling? In brief, the school of Gallus represented an innovation in curriculum, one that was effective and that, importantly, despite the censors’ and Cicero’s and Tacitus’s invective, did not go away. In fact, the currency of setting speeches in Latin with Roman contexts is paralleled in the Rhetorica ad Herennium and would prove a hallmark of Roman declamation. To disentangle the strains of memory and polemic we must consider Cicero’s reconstruction of Crassus’s opposition and of his own early education.
When Cicero had finished his grammatical studies, that is, after he and his brother had come to Rome for school, where he had as classmates the young Atticus and his cousins and would prove a great success, he thought of attending a new school.22 Older friends, including L. Crassus, dissuaded him from attending the rhetorical school of Plotius Gallus. Instead, he served as a sort of apprentice to a famous Roman jurist.23 The precise chronology of Cicero’s early schooling is not clear: for instance, in the Brutus (207) Cicero tells that he studied under Stilo, the famous Roman grammarian and antiquarian. This may mean simply that he attended the old man (as a dependent friend, a client); certainly, Stilo set no course of study. We do not know at what age Cicero first called on Stilo or how long the relationship continued.
The Brutus typifies the difficulty of interpreting Cicero on the early history of Cicero, and hence the difficulty of assessing his reliability as a source for the history of schooling at the beginning of the last century B.C. The dialogue sketches the history of Roman oratory but as a narrative series of great men in which Cicero seeks to enshrine himself.24 One way to advertise status was to mention friends (Romans did the same in their wills and forensic speeches). When, for instance, Cicero comes to defend the Greek poet Archias, he mentions as friends of the defendant, it would seem, all the leading men of Rome he can (Arch. 6—at 20 Cicero recalls Marius’s strong devotion to Plotius). Cicero does not mention famous names indiscriminately, nor should we believe that in a speech delivered to a Roman jury he could fabricate contemporary relationships. His list of mentors reveals patterns both of social relations—centering on Crassus and politically conservative—and of his own abiding intellectual interests: the old Roman poets, Roman law, and Greek intellectual culture. Cicero would become a true expert in Roman law, and no doubt his interest was nurtured by the early encounter (from 90 B.C.) with the famous jurist, the octogenarian father-in-law of Crassus, Q. Mucius Scaevola.25 As with Stilo one is tempted to conclude that had there been significant lessons given and learned or significant patronage from the older mentor, Cicero would have details to relate. Perhaps, as Elizabeth Rawson has suggested, Cicero met his lifelong friend the scholarly T. Pomponius Atticus at Scaevola’s.26 Scaevola died during the Social Wars, when Cicero served under Pompeius Strabo, father of the famous Pompey. To the everlasting confusion of students, Cicero then attached himself as a “student” to Scaevola’s cousin, the like-named pontifex maximus Q. Mucius Scaevola (see Amic. 1 and Rawson 1983, 16–17), a friend of Crassus. The list of scholarly influences could be continued (Cicero’s introduction to Greek philosophers occurs at this time), although biographers naturally emphasize his three prosecutions as the formative events of his early career. In this same period he took lessons in oratory from the Greek Molo (with whom he would later study at Rhodes), perhaps after his first treatment of the science of speaking, the De inventione.27 As an ambitious orator and intellectual, Cicero sought out those with expertise and power. The connections he cites reflect the flexibility of his training and the volatility of Roman politics. No single institution, no single alliance, served to prepare him or perhaps to satisfy him, but the more general conclusion for Roman education is that for the Roman elite opportunities and experts abounded.
By this point Cicero’s education has advanced far beyond the rhetorical curriculum treated by the present book, and in significant ways far beyond the curriculum Cato Licinianus or, in its focus on developing an integrated but distinctive Roman oratory, even Scipio Aemilianus had pursued some six or seven decades earlier. Cicero now left Rome (79 B.C.), by his own account for his health, although historians have often suspected political caution hurried him from the city—Plutarch alleged that following the prosecution of Roscius Cicero feared Sulla.28 Cicero explains his departure exclusively in medico-rhetorical terms. His physicians and friends counseled that should he persevere in his forceful delivery of law-court speeches he would ruin his health. Cicero was capable of dissimulation especially in regard to his own motives, but he was of a rhetorical temperament: he saw the voice as a specimen of the body’s condition and as an index of character; he trained himself with physical exercise and a regimen of diet and massage understood to be beneficial to one’s abilities as a speaker.29 In addition, he did work very hard; he is known to have been frail; and his style of speaking did change from the sustainedly overwrought manner of his early speeches. He would in turn send his own son to Greece for study at the same stage of life.30 The medical reasons are credible, perhaps especially so given the stress and peril of remaining in Rome.
In trying to determine why Plotius Gallus became for Cicero a failed candidate, one might speculate that Gallus’s school and expertise did not have the status or the curriculum as Cicero prepared to enter public life. The orator was always in search of good teachers, but the best teachers were the free men who taught in their native Greek cities.31 By implication, the freedmen at Rome were second-class teachers; and while there is patent social snobbery in this preference, in truth Rome at this time paled as a center of Hellenistic learning. Not until the great patronage of Augustus and the further spread of empire and peace would Rome become a rival to Athens, Rhodes, or Alexandria. Plotius Gallus probably did not have the expertise of a great rhetorician. He may have been a freedman, which perhaps with the plebeian form of his name, Plotius, rather than Plautius aroused social snobbery and so contributed to his disqualifications.32
Plotius’s style of speaking sounds like it was of the unremitting and unvaried quality, with its attendant physiological effects, that so worried Cicero’s friends.33 Cicero may have been far closer to this teacher or his style than he would later have his readers know. Gallus would then have been part of the problem, not the cure. Cicero’s recollection in the De oratore, which forgets his attraction to the school, smacks of revisionism. The evidence for the curricular practice in this school depends preeminently on Cicero, and upon a particular kind of Ciceronian voice within a literary dialogue.
The practice of Plotius’s students has been deduced from what Cicero has Crassus say in the dialogue De oratore. Interlocutors press the old man on how the young should form themselves into the perfect orator. The literary pattern where a dialogue depends on the last oral recollection of an old-timer is meant to convey an air of authority and authenticity. Crassus serves as a symbolic linchpin, between young and old, Cicero and the early orators, and Greek-infused culture and an alleged, prior Roman nativism. The dialogue’s recommendations, however, neatly concur with Cicero’s theory and practice. As in the more historically oriented Brutus, Cicero here represents proper oratory as the perfect fusion of Greek and Roman.34 By this he means more than that Greek rhetorical theory gradually wormed its improving way into Latin practice. The study of Greek language and literature affords the orator the copia that he needs to meet all contingencies of any given speech situation. In the De oratore Crassus also outlines a practice of imitative performance and translation that we know to have been Cicero’s own: the orator must declaim in Greek and translate this performance into Latin.35 Cicero has Crassus provide the rationale for such double translation or double performance: first, reading a speech in Greek and repeating it trains the memory, then one’s Latin style is developed by translating and reperforming it in Latin. Translation from Greek to Latin works better than reading, then reciting, and finally recasting in one’s own words a Latin speech of Gracchus or a poem of Ennius (his earlier practice—or so Crassus of the dialogue confides) because at times Gracchus and Cato have used the proper words and one is forced in the effort at variation to employ a less apt Latin expression.36 Working from the Greek has the further advantage, Crassus says, that one enriches Latin vocabulary. Again, Crassus’s guidelines directly reflect Cicero’s practice, one that he theorizes when speaking of the difficulty of writing his philosophical dialogues in Latin.37 The De oratore purposefully intervenes in or even deforms the history of speaking at Rome.38 Cicero’s dialogue presents a genealogy, complete with archetypes and antitypes, that with a revisionist simplicity discovers a history that seems on critical inspection to reflect Cicero’s biography, or the autobiography he chooses to present.
Beyond his genuine admiration for Greek culture and the high artistry of Greek oratory, Cicero has recognized the special challenge posed and reward gained by bilingual performance. Translation puts pressure on the target language. Certainly, one comes to understand the original language better (here, we are talking of advanced understanding: neither Cicero nor Crassus learned Greek as students learn Greek even now with the help of a bilingual crib). Literary Latin, as many of the vernaculars in the Renaissance, was enriched by the work of translators. Cicero’s reading of Latin literature was also informed by the sensibility of a reader experienced with translation and of an author adept at translation.39 The early Latin poets were not simply producing translations but versions of Greek originals.40 An educated Latin reader like Cicero was such a double reader—he read Ennius with Homer and Euripides in his memory. In addition, Cicero was a translator in his own right (of Aratus and Plato, especially). The declamation of a Greek original with immediate Latin translation, practiced in the company of a select few, is something between an educational practice and professional maintenance. Other evidence points to the fact that Cicero maintained his art privately and publicly. Thanks to Suetonius (Gramm. 7.3) we know that Cicero went to the school of Gnipho even during his praetorship (in 66 B.C.), where there was declamation on market days (every ninth day). The historical Cicero demonstrates a range of interest in schools of speech that is not consonant with the censorious pronouncements put into the mouth of Crassus in the De oratore.
Cicero’s own practice presents a model without parallel in Greek literary culture, and one at odds with Plotius’s transferal of Greek educational practice to Rome. The declamation in one language followed by translation into another does have parallels in the subsequent history of Latin pedagogy, as for instance in Roger Ascham’s recommendation that the Renaissance English gentleman practice double translation, turning his Latin into English and then retranslating the English into Latin.41 Ascham pushes the fluidity of expression one step further. Turning one’s native language back to the original surely trains the memory as well as the command of diction, idiom, and syntax. Ascham’s method shows two great affinities with Cicero’s and Quintilian’s approaches. First, as a composition exercise, it is extremely liberating. There is no need for invention or analysis. The topic is given and no interpretation asked, which features together allow the learner to focus all effort on the verbal surface. This focused stylistic exercise in variation owes much to the Hellenistic curriculum, which set a number of exercises on the same theme or the same text. The theme of a familiar fable could be given, and the student asked to produce his own version. A paraphrase of a developed passage or the expansion and ornamentation of a plain passage could be set. Verse could be turned to prose and vice versa.
All of these exercises develop stylization—where the student concerns himself with the how and not the what or why of discourse. A crucial innovation was that at Rome stylization was associated with translation. The Hellenistic student always worked from Greek to Greek (although Homeric and Thucydidean Greek were a far cry from his or her daily speech). Cicero’s recommended practice sprang from the Hellenistic grammatical-rhetorical exercises in stylization and at the same time reflected the concern of a bilingual culture. The linguistic complexity is even greater since the curriculum included Greek of various periods, dialects, and genres; Roman students were also learning to speak Hellenistic Greek; and they were fashioning a literary language of their own. Of course, the individual student did not determine the rules for his performance, but composition did occur in this complex of linguistic codes and registers. A fundamental principle of this schoolwork (and of the literary practice for which it prepares) is the conviction that an authoritative original merits multiple versions. The performance and re-performance that move from the set version to one’s own are also actions of play that treat language as a primary medium and object. Language is to be varied for its own sake. Authoritative Latin versions (Cato or Gracchus or Ennius) are less useful, on Cicero’s judgment, because they hamper the student’s freedom.
A slightly utopian, fantastic quality colors the recommended pedagogy. Cicero’s instructions smack of an idealized classroom where time and talent are so ample that inconsequential things, a long dead speech or poem, can be taken up, cast this way or that, discussed, poked, and played with. The remove of time, of language, of seriousness or at least of closeness to daily life and pressing affairs, encourage the play with form. We have entered the school of virtuosi. Plotius Gallus offends against this entire literary sensibility. His exercises are in Latin and are practical (related to Roman contexts), distinctly not literary. Cicero and his peers have the time and resources for such play and for the deferred return on investment that such intensive training promises. The idealized leisure stands purposefully distant from the workaday, successful training of speakers practiced by Plotius Gallus.
Cicero’s portrayal of Crassus’s practice shows strong affinities with his other, leading account of the development of oratory and the orator at Rome. The Brutus details the development of Latin oratorical style, a movement Cicero crafts as a linear progression from the nativist Latin of Cato through an increasingly perfect acquaintance with Greek culture to culminate with the death of Hortensius. The endpoint is significant because Hortensius was the orator second to Cicero, and more dramatically the orator who dies with the republic. The Brutus and the character L. Licinius Crassus in the De oratore share the conception that Latin oratory advances in proportion to its knowledge of Greek culture. The Brutus also shares the technique of characterization of the De oratore whereby Roman aristocrats make distinctive, individual contributions that seem to anticipate Cicero’s own synthetic virtuosity. Some scholars have argued for the historical accuracy of Cicero’s Crassus, chiefly on the grounds that Cicero would not have dared deform the attitudes of a famous speaker whom the older members of his audience might have heard.42 Yet one of Cicero’s great talents was that species of rapprochement that makes great men look similar despite their personal, philosophical, or ideological differences. This is a republican tact or knack that can make a great communicator useful, a facility not simply to draw together opposed leaders but to articulate a common ground. The same quality shaped Cicero’s historical imagination, so that despite the anachronism Roman historical characters serve as exemplary spokesmen for Greek ideas. These characters succeed within the text and as memorable confabulations because they do not simply ventriloquize Greek ideas but rather craft artfully drawn syntheses of Roman exemplarity and Greek science. Crassus may have practiced some such oratorical exercises, but the evidence points much more strongly to the fact that Cicero practiced this way in private. The mature Ciceronian understanding of the development and importance of Latin oratory left no room for a schoolteacher who was the client of demagogues.
Within the De oratore, against the high-minded and aristocratic exemplary cultivation of the oratorical self, Plotius Gallus plays a vulgar foil. Although not named in the dialogue, his style of teaching seems the target of Crassus’s disapproval (thus the dialogue gives Cicero’s version of Crassus’s opposition known from the edict). In the De oratore Crassus is asked his views on the proper kind of exercises. The question and the responses come in formulas that suggest his authoritative, even magisterial role: nunc de ipsa exercitatione quid sentias quaerimus, immediately answered with his sententia, Equidem probo ista . . . (148–49: “Now we ask your judgment of the exercise . . . ; I approve that . . .”).43 He approves the contemporary practice of setting a theme based on an actual law-court speech but immediately voices his disapproval of the end to which these exercises are at times employed: some use them for voice training and rejoice in the speed and power of delivery. Further, those addicted to this sort of speaking overvalue extemporaneous speaking; they do not properly appreciate the role of writing in good oratory. From here Crassus is off, talking about the role of writing in improving speaking. The censured speed and volume of delivery suggest that the anonymous “some” are orators similar to Plotius Gallus. Gallus was teaching declamatio, which at this point meant voice training (and not the use of suasoriae and controversiae).44
Crassus does not object to the modeling of speeches on Roman cases, nor even to instruction or performance occurring in Latin. This important point is often lost in recapitulations of the issues. He does object to the particular style of delivery that is swift and loud without reliance on written preparation. References from other sources imply that Plotius is the target here. Quintilian, immediately after mentioning that the Greeks began practicing on themes drawn from the law courts and the legislative councils in the time of Demetrius of Phalerum, asserts that the Latin teachers active at the end of Crassus’s life were the first to set exercises modeled on contemporary speeches and that Gallus was the best known of these. Quintilian here (2.4.42) cites Cicero as his authority. Still, Quintilian’s conclusion is no doubt right. Other sources associated Gallus or his students with loud delivery. A fragment of Varro’s Saturae Menippeae (Menippean Satires) (p. 157 Riese) mixes social and stylistic criticism of Gallus in his characterization of someone who “had brayed like an ox-driver in the school of Plotius the rhetorician”: bubulcitarat suggests the same mix of vulgarity and sheer decibel level that so offended Crassus. In another fragment Varro puns on the name of the schoolmaster so as to deride “this gallus (cock) who stirs up a tribe of brawlers” (p. 186 Riese). The cock produces mad dogs, not free men. Cicero strongly censures these rabidi; they are the “brawling advocate from the Forum” and “the declaimer from the schoolroom,” contrasted with the truly cultured orator. (Cic. De or. 1.202: “We are not seeking through our dialogue some nameless pleader or a shouter or a mad-dog speaker [rabulam]”; Orat. 47: “We are not seeking some declaimer from school or mad-dog speaker [rabulam] from the Forum”; at Brutus 226 Cicero characterizes P. Antistius as rabula sane probabilis; Quintilian [12.9.12] reuses the doublet, substituting latrator for Cicero’s clamator or declamator.) The mad-dog speaker is one foil to the good orator, an opposition similar to that of the actor and orator.45
Varro has here provided a valuable piece of evidence, which corroborates the picture derived almost exclusively from Cicero, and his De oratore in particular. In the dialogue Crassus’s younger interlocutor, the famous orator Antonius, described the third, worst sort of student as one who does not orate but shouts, exceeding the boundaries of good taste and his own physical abilities: “To shout beyond the limits of what is appropriate and of his own powers characterizes the man who, as you, Catulus, once said of a certain bawler, gathers as large as possible a crowd of witnesses to his own folly with the service of his own herald.”46 Here Cicero may well be interweaving a famous sententia of Catulus with Crassus’s known opposition to the school of Plotius. Again, Cicero may have tilted the balance of evidence so that we see Plotius Gallus as the convenient target of a broader opposition to demagogic and low-class speakers (he is also distancing himself from his own youthful style, that loud and unremitting delivery that threatened his health and drove him to Molo).47 Greek orators were notorious for the speed of their delivery.48 Asianist Latin orators were also criticized for their speed (and for their floridity—a vice supposedly to be checked by reliance on written preparation).49 Plotius is receiving bad press with considerable prejudice. A minority report comes from a great authority: Quintilian (11.3.143) cites his work on gesture as an authority for the obsolete custom of wearing the toga long, down to the feet.
Cicero was seeking an originary moment for various phenomena in Roman public speech: the role of paid rhetoricians, Latin exercises modeled on actual Roman cases, the strong reliance on extemporaneous speaking, perhaps even Asianist style, and voice training independent of a larger curriculum—all of which he disapproved at the end of his career, and some of which he had clearly pursued in his youth. Late in life, Cicero sought to distance himself from his earlier stylistic excesses. He had overstrained his delivery and had to check this fault, indeed had to be retrained. The richer style of the Asianists he seeks to excuse as the style fit for a young man, a rich abundance to be pruned by age, judgment, and the pen. Cicero’s view of the rise of Roman oratory and his selection of a generic form, the dialogue, contribute in the De oratore to a preference for dramatic dates about which to collect the names of old orators and range them in debates strongly colored by Cicero’s own interests and career. Further, the course of oratory at Rome moves in tandem with the development of oratorical powers in the individual. Here Cicero seems guilty of that writerly fallacy of destiny wherein the present writer sees history, his own life, and the process of writing leading irresistibly to the moment of composition and likewise to the composer. Plotius Gallus deserves to be disentangled from a narrative that would cast him as the foil for Crassus’ and Cicero’s and Varro’s ire or as a misstep in the history of Roman schooling.
Plotius Gallus was neither a strictly academic rhetorician nor a humdrum teacher of shortcuts. He did write a book on delivery, which shows his interest in the practice of Roman oratory. There are two indications that he was a ghost writer for important speakers: M. Caelius, defending himself against the plaintiff Atratinus on a charge of vis, alleged that his opponent’s speech had been written by Plotius (Suet. Gramm. 26). One can imagine that this was a joke, a sneer to denigrate the style of Atratinus’s attack, but Fronto, that inveterate lover of old books, reports that he had seen a manuscript of a speech of Gracchus written in Plotius’s own hand (Ad M. Caes. 1.7.4). If Gracchus and Atratinus were patrons, Plotius was something more like a voice expert to the stars than master of upstart demagogues. We know that Tiberius Gracchus had a pipe player who would play to recall the orator’s pitch to a moderate level during his speeches.50 We should not forget the range of experts needed by the Roman citizen ambitious to become a successful orator-cumpolitician: the slaves who would know the names of all the citizenry, the masseuse, the voice expert, the physician who guided the physical regimen of the speaker, the former schoolmaster or pedagogue who continued in his ward’s later life to be a speech counselor. Cicero does not call attention to this spectrum of hired and owned help. His letters, like his dialogues, make it seem that a community of high-minded and high-status Romans discuss things with him in the privacy of his home or one of his villas. Yet the truth is that he was an avid seeker of experts: he would travel to find the best teachers; he would ask Atticus for trained specialists; he would foster and even flatter expert freedmen; and of course he depended greatly on his freedman Tiro, note taker extraordinaire.51 Plotius probably figured in the lower half of the spectrum of experts, which led from cook and masseuse up to the freeborn teacher or the Greek philosopher who might be part of the greatest family households. Plotius was not the sort of expert later sought by Cicero. Crassus disapproved of him in 92; Caelius finds him a convenient target in 56 B.C. Here again it may have been Cicero and Crassus who disapproved, for they had joined together to defend Caelius in the case of vis (itself a backlash from Caelius’s failed prosecution of Atratinus’s father, Bestia).
Perhaps we should not pursue Cicero’s and Crassus’s determined enmity any further. It would be more rewarding to consider what course of education a young man like Caelius, born ten years after the censors’ edict of 92, pursued. But no record recalls his education, at least until he has contact with luminaries. At the end of his studies he became an apprentice to Cicero, as Cicero had been in turn to the two great lawyers the jurist and the pontifex Scaevola, although the English term “apprentice” does not do justice to the personal, practical, and fluid relationship between the great man and the young men who would attend him. By the time he was admitted to the circle of friends attending the jurist Scaevola’s daily routine, Cicero had in all likelihood been to the finest teachers in Rome. At this stage, having completed what we might call the formal work of rhetoric, he seems to have been casting about and so considered Plotius’s school before being dissuaded, in all likelihood by Crassus. In the volatile years of the late republic the volatile time of young manhood for the politically ambitious can be characterized as a search for opportunities: opportunities to defend or, failing that, to prosecute some leading man; and opportunities to secure patrons. The two processes were inextricably intertwined. We are here well beyond the period of schooling. In 90/89 Cicero would serve as military legate for Pompey’s father. Caelius in turn would abandon Cicero’s patronage to try the more meteoric prospect of Catiline. The prosecution of Caelius would send him back to Cicero. Cicero’s volte-face with the choice of a schoolmaster is not so dramatic, but in retrospect he forgets how close he had come.
The importance of the choice of a teacher can be gleaned also from that famous story of Roman family education, that of Cornelia and her children. Plutarch has included a small detail: Diophanes of Mytilene was tutor to Tiberius Gracchus (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 8.4). Why did Plutarch here—or Suetonius more generally—think it significant to include the names of the Greek teachers of illustrious Romans? Like Cicero, they were interested parties: they too believed that Greek culture had transformed Rome and remained an essential, constitutive part of the formation of Roman youth. In addition, by commemorating a teacher, Plutarch gives his reader a piece of the moral as well as intellectual genealogy of his subject. Finally, a Roman reader sees in such notices not simply a statement of personal debt but a display of family resources and connections. The teachers of a Gracchus or of a Cicero were impressive personalities.
The school of Plotius Gallus could undermine all of these perceptions and signs of relationship. Plotius held school late in the education of a youth, perhaps a stage where school was unprecedented.52 He also took a fee for preparing speakers who, to judge from Cicero’s options, otherwise would have attended a practicing orator as client friends to a patron, where payment was inconceivable. Plotius’s school promised the same excellence in the performance of Latin speeches, an excellence that was to be won, according to Crassus and Cicero, by diligent, personal study with Greek experts in the privacy of a great home and then by consultation as a junior friend of some established, practicing upper-class Roman. Plotius Gallus’s school circumvented both sets and types of relationship.
Finally, the choice of type of education resulted in significant stylistic differences. The students of Plotius Gallus did not sound the same as someone of Cicero’s training. This does not mean that Plotius’s disciples were all low-class demagogues. Certainly Cicero felt the pull of this new school. It was exciting, and to judge from the indications of Plotius’s continued activities and from the prominence of his patrons and denigrators, the new kind of impudence was successful. The reliance on actual cases and a strong emphasis on practical training in voice and bodily delivery seem to have distinguished the speakers of this school. Despite the denigration of the loudness of this school of speakers, the school marks the first exclusively Latin, advanced curriculum, a step as important in its way as Ennius providing a Roman topic and Latin style for epic (the very stuff of grammatical schooling) or Cato providing Latin aphorisms and history in Latin.
Plotius’s school may have disappeared with him. The practice of having students focus on Latin speeches at the end of their curriculum persisted. Whereas Quintilian, like Cicero, insisted on the importance of Greek, the evidence of declamation shows a majority interest in Latin. The complaint leveled against Plotius’s voice coaching and speech training will be repeated against the declamatory training in suasoria and controversia that developed in the second half of Cicero’s lifetime. Quintilian will complain that extemporaneous speech was too highly prized and that the pen and theoretical training were proportionally despised. Complaints about the style of delivery continued, yet the style faulted by Seneca the Elder or Quintilian would change: there may be no direct inheritance from Plotius except that those disposed to lavish time and money on education would continue to snub those who took shortcuts.53
The censors’ edict against the school and Cicero’s nonattendance do not in fact constitute a crisis in schooling. They do indicate a lively, contentious community of schools, teachers, and patrons. We do not really know what tempted Cicero to or dissuaded him from attending, but he did attend a school about this time, and this too embarrassed him later in life. In the 90s Cicero went to somebody’s lectures on rhetoric, which were given in Latin. He composed, and later regretted, a short handbook on rhetorical invention, the discovery of what to say, whose similarities with the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium indicate a common origin.54 The anonymous Latin rhetorician who gave the lectures was no Plotius Gallus: he was interested in Greek theory, but like Plotius he was providing a shortcut to the traditional curriculum of study and practice in Greek. In the end Cicero would broadly and insistently advertise his connection to Crassus and the Scaevolas; later he would travel to Greece for better teachers; and in his practice he would declaim in Greek as well as Latin. Yet although he would turn against the strictly Latin and practical curriculum of the De inventione or of Plotius Gallus’s book on delivery, and eventually produce a range of Latin theoretical works on rhetoric and oratory himself, in the 90s he had all but tried two schools at Rome that offered a curriculum in Latin.
The model of education within the aristocratic home for the sons of the family was not sufficient, as it had not been for the students of Cato’s freedman Chilon. The written records tend to relate the censure of aristocrats toward the schools and so promulgate a nostalgic story of old schooling being replaced by the upstart institution. The schools of declamation at the very end of the republic and on into the empire, however, had better precedent and better continuity than a Cicero, Suetonius, or Seneca allows. Romans were not good educational historians in part because they told a story of native lore replaced by Greek expertise, thus belittling the traditions of Italic literacy. In addition, the contrast of Greek expertise and Roman ignorance could be read into the structure of schooling where the teacher was often a Greek freedmen in charge of freeborn Roman children. Each generation could read in this social reality a typology of the coming of education and culture. Paradoxically, the effort to supplant the Greek altogether, to forge an entirely Latin curriculum, would be met by the opposition of the elite, for whom Hellenistic culture had become a distinguishing badge and a cherished pursuit.