A liberal education, on an ancient and a modern understanding, promises freedom from want, from ignorance, and perhaps from convention, although this last claim especially merits strict questioning. The idea that education changes something essential about a person, even that it liberates the self, remains strong. Plutarch and Quintilian, however, as we have seen, were not writing Enlightenment essays about the self tearing itself away from its own society’s institutions. They were adapting and explaining the system of education that had spread across the Mediterranean in Hellenistic times. They might have believed, as Cicero did (De or. 3.127), that the curriculum of studies could be traced to Hippias of Elis, a Sophist remembered for his banausic and academic knowledge—showman of the liberal arts, he had also made his robe and ring. Among the Sophists, Hippias was remembered as something of an eccentric. Plato in turn had helped distinguish the self-sufficient man as the philosophical man, whose knowledge decidedly did not extend to the manual arts. The virtuosity of the Sophists, especially the ability to speak on any subject and the suggestion that there was an intellectual method to mastering the important areas of knowledge and expertise, left a strong mark on Hellenistic education. Education was believed to move students toward self-sufficiency (not necessarily novelty) of thought and expression.
The Roman “liberal arts” could trace their ancestry through the Hellenistic and classical Greek schools to that fertile period of intellectual investigation embodied in the Sophists. Yet centuries of institutionalized schooling had tamed the unconventionality of a Hippias or a Socrates while at the same time schooling remembered these figures and promised an enlightenment and expertise distinct from that of the workaday world. In the service of its elite class, education distinguished culture holders from those deemed less fully human, the illiterate and the less literate. At the same time, following Hellenistic culture, the Romans came to theorize liberal education as the literate culture that defined the Roman man. Pieces of this culture, according to some authorities, could be granted to women, and slaves could well be the best professionals and literally liberate themselves.1 The role of public speaker, that ideal type of the civilized man, would, however, not cross the barriers of class and gender.
The high value set upon the ancient speaking subject has been emphasized and even reinforced by later scholarly tradition, which knew antiquity chiefly through texts and which saw its own activity in considerable part as a return to those ancient masters of language. Friedrich Nietzsche, professor of ancient rhetoric long before his writings ensured his place as a philosopher, asserted, preposterously and perhaps ironically, that speech was the chief concern of classical culture.2 With this claim Nietzsche adopted one of the most compelling fictions of Western society: a culture aims at rational, ordered, civil discourse, and at one persona—the author-orator, the governor of his tongue and, by a metaphorical, corporal, almost sympathetic-magical logic, consequently the citizen worthy to govern others. According to the rationalization that envisions society as a culture of speech, speech other than the approved is not culturally mainstream, is deviant, and is marked so by its manifest affinities to one socially inferior subset (women, slaves, the mob). Effeminate, servile, or vulgar style supposedly cannot express, much less attain for its speakers, the high and free ideals and order that are best for the culture as a whole. In ancient terms speaking well, eu legein, is the orator’s ideal, and the laity are left eu phēmein, which idiom means not what it says, “to speak well,” but by the original euphemism, “to keep a reverent silence.” Horace repeats the expression as an imperative: favete linguis. All are to be silent, not simply before the priest but before the poet. Like Virgil, Horace offers an ideal of communication, that of the vatic poet, rival to the statesman-orator. Roman education will appropriate both the classical poet and the classical orator as models of eruditio, the skill at oral and written language that defines the good men of education. Plutarch, as we have seen in chapter 3, develops an argument that eulogics, the science and practice of educated speech and reading, overlaps and reinforces eugenics. Education thereby rises triumphant as the sole labor suited for men, while the worrisome thought that education is a Greek import imperiling the father’s heirs and house recedes as so much slander that the educated man will know to suppress.
As a social institution, ancient education developed compelling modes of reassurance, no doubt responsive to the unusual network of interested parties—teachers, parents, students, civic authorities. Such reassurance ranged from a grammarian’s explanation of the purpose and value of an exercise to the great treatise of Quintilian and even to legislation. Inevitably, educational ideology was implicated in ideas and practices of the wider society. Perhaps the most direct challenge to the time-consuming practice of education was to articulate the rationale for having elite children do no labor, and this laborless activity had to be defended as the right of the freeborn, indeed the qualifying characteristic of their right to rule. Consequently, in defenses of education, notions of agency are particularly important. To its credit, the institution of education was trying to create a specific social actor. In order to impart a sense of social and educational distinction, the materials and procedures of the classroom had to vaunt the end product—that wonderously articulate governor who could solve ethical, familial, social, and political disputes—and to range against him various rivals and foils. Here schooling manifestly reflects key attitudes of the elite, but in doing so it does not simply replicate social norms (preeminently, the natural right of the free to govern the unfree, the poor, and the female) or mystify them (as a mental freedom different from the impulses that drive the noneducated) but modulates them so that schooling itself rises as a social desideratum. Beyond what one may term the wish ideology of the institution, such educational ideology encourages in the student a sense of distinction and subjectivity. The skills of a school exercise can also be techniques of identification. In reading, writing, memorizing, explaining, and recasting the proverbial material of the Distichs of Cato, a student comes to take on the identity of the wise old man. All the school’s methods can thus be strategies of participation (even where that participation is compelled). If the puer educandus thinks of himself not as the victim of tasks, threats, blows, precepts, and sermonizing but the agent, writing, reading, speaking, and fashioning his own style, delivering his own imperatives, saving the family and the city from the threat of pirate, rapist, and adulterer, this boy becomes a Roman adult. Others can be whipped or even caned; the educated boy has escaped from being an object of education by speaking of and for the wronged. He tells the stories of the raped girls and maimed boys or men (the blinded, the handless males) and restores what is right. He thus distances himself from those who would only repeat the dicta of fathers, which, whether the unexplained proverb or the unembellished statement of inflexible declamatory law, are his starting point.
The display of stylized speech involves more than class solidarity or a contest among the elite for distinction, since reflections upon the proper use of language, both those within and outside the school, practice a kind of social testing and idealization.3 The mechanisms that train children how to produce and how to evaluate language help police an elite. In this organization of power, elite and nonelite are to a degree complicitous. The freedmen teachers of the Roman schools, like the freedmen who have left their tombstones, were proud of their literacy and their culture. Roman education practiced speaking about and for them, too; they were a part of liberal education much as girls participated in an education that presented the student as the puer educandus. It is not the case that the nonelite or the female was invisible in liberal education; rather, their participation had an obliqueness that left the commanding voice to the freeborn male. Their presence, as pedagogues and teachers, as fellow students, and as characters in composition exercises, impelled the boy to speak. Such a training prepared all the participants of the school for the society’s adult systems of patriarchy, patronage, and imperial bureaucracy.
In detecting freedmen’s pleasure in their status as citizens or the schoolchild’s satisfaction in his or her growing literate capacities, we are not simply witness to the strength of Roman institutions—formidable though they were—in winning allegiance and ensuring social replication. To have faith in education is not to be a dupe to the patterns and structures of a society’s ideology. Roman declamation reveals, and not simply to the scholar two millennia removed, the violence at the heart of familial, social, and political relations. Imagining what is not and what should be can be potent—not with the inevitable consequence of social or political reform but with the probable consequence that an individual’s way of understanding the world will change. To consider how someone different in important social ways may think is a step toward a theory of mind—the understanding that other subjects think and hence act differently from oneself.
Imagining appropriate sentiments and penning convincing characters are not the same as ethical action. Imagination and schooling remain ludic activities. In declamation the Romans imagined a society of law where the occasional tyrant threatened justice, but no emperor held sway. In Roman reality no emperor was swept from power, no republic restored, on the goad of declamatory indignation. Yet Romans would continue to speak, write, and think of themselves and their society in the categories of free men, freely speaking, deciding through law and equity how to maintain the great achievements of their ancestors. Equity is a most important category; for if declamation imagines a society of law, equally it imagines that law cannot govern all situations and all peoples. It needs humane administrators and champions. To speak of law and justice, to know the ancestors’ code, and to pity the aggrieved are the way Roman men govern—even, ideally, the essential way Roman men conduct themselves.
A genuine pleasure comes with gaining literacy, not because the child is hoodwinked by the theorists’ claims and the schoolmasters’ practice. Growth in communicative competence and in the analysis of emotions and motives brings delight, a sense of change, of improvement. Most immediately, the adult world is more responsive to these modes of communication, and so the child has accomplished more than winning the praise of teacher or parent. He enters into the discourse of adults. Training in role playing leads to an understanding of the subject’s developing roles. Contriving speeches and plots, like reading literature—especially where that “reading” tends to probe the morality of individual characters’ actions, to require the reader to memorize speeches, and to compose similar speeches in character—also has the pleasure of fantasy and creation. The Roman schoolchild’s identification with the Aeneas or Ascanius of Virgil’s epic is thus of a different order from that of the modern, silent, hurried reader.
Certainly, education in all its proscriptive modes prods and tugs the child to act and learn in set ways, and to value the process of education. Yet education’s successes do not follow unhesitantly from the series of teacher’s measures: statement of learning goals, curriculum designed to enact these, application to student. The student’s resistance is customarily treated as a stage to be overcome. Even those theories that treat education as a vehicle of social replication seem to neglect the difficulty of learning—as if social norms are learned passively or unproblematically. Identification of a student or reader with a character, theme, situation, or even a formal feature of a written or oral text is a complex process, which no doubt changes the interpretation and use of a text as well as the student’s outlook or self-assessment. Roman education was not an easy process, and students’ resentment and resistance are clear. No doubt, frustration and anger were inseparable from the gradual formation of subjectivity this book has tried to describe. The act of learning to write, first of making letterforms in wax that mimicked the master’s, was not as easy as our own. The writing of lists of nonsense syllables or the copying of epic verses, composed in a Greek at least eight centuries out-of-date, does not have the ease or allure of writing stories in language customarily used by the eight-year-old. One suspects that the child was not the waxlike, memorious, and imitative animus of Quintilian’s pages nor the sturdy growth of Plutarch’s essay. When the young Lucian was out of his teachers’ sight, he scraped the wax from his tablets and modeled little cattle, horses, and men (Somn. 2). Saint Basil advises: “Don’t be like thoughtless children who out of anger with their teacher break his tablets”; he then relates an incident that perhaps shows as much about the resiliency and optimism of children as about their piety or attitude to school: the children were happy to be let off school in order to join prayers for the relief of a famine.4
The ancient school could be more gruesome. In Egypt, a precocious Coptic beginner, Synphronios, whose writing excelled that of a boy who had started reading, had his thumbs broken.5 In late antiquity, grammar was personified and equipped with a scalprum for scraping pupils’ tongues and throat to perfect their pronunciation.6 These and similar stories attest to a knowledge that the school disciplined the body. The educated body was different and had suffered to achieve this difference. Resistance and revenge might come in subverting the school materials to objects of play, or to weapons of abuse. The stylus that carved Virgil in wax could also mark the school’s walls, as at Pompeii. Or in the sweet revenge of fantasy and school exercises, violence could become the stuff of schooling. Prudentius, the Christian poet of the fifth century, would become one of the great school poets. In his Liber peristephanon (Crown of the Martyrs) he reports a story of schoolboys’ revenge.7 Cassian of Imola had been a teacher of shorthand to a school of one hundred boys. At times he had spoken harshly. He was a Christian and was condemned by the Roman magistrate (these judges tend to have a declamatory flair: they twist Christian language or interrogate in a most declamatory manner). At Imola the judge set the boys on their master. They come styli in hand to practice their writing upon the master, asking if he can read their writing now, have they dug their letters deeply and clearly. Prudentius, who, curiously, viewed the severe teacher as the hero of his piece, had the story explained to him by a local guide after he had seen a lurid painting at the martyr’s tomb.
Roman students did not have to wait for Prudentius for violent tales of retribution. Their education thematized (literally reduced to themes for the student’s analysis and composition) conflict with rivalrous students, with teacher, and with father. Violent themes abound in school exercises. Greek children from the fourth century B.C. (perhaps earlier) could analyze culpability in the case of the boy who was accidentally killed by an errant javelin throw in the gymnasium. From fable to declamation, the protagonists evade violent threats and at times work their own violence. The utility of violence in promoting students’ participation seems well established by the longevity of such forms of school exercise. The appeal to the adolescent of plots of patricide finds a ready explanation in a range of modern psychology. Yet whether or not socialization of the young male in a patriarchal society requires such fantasy, Roman education offered a playacting of the move from powerlessness to power and of resistance not simply to father, authority, the state, or law but to the state society cast youth in: more than unenfranchised, the student was without voice and was subject to the voices of parents, pedagogue, and teachers. The exercises seem both productive of resentment (with their harsh depiction of the boy’s state and their call for him to put off revenge) and the means to escape that resentment. A vital part of those means was the control of violence, the ability to control one’s own violent impulses and the ability to depict and mediate violence through story.
The control of physical and verbal violence in this slave-owning culture, where slaves are subject to their master’s whim and yet are part of his household, important for his reputation as well as his finances, was rehearsed in the school plots that depended on the student imagining himself as the mediator of violence. At the same time, such an education encouraged the pleasures of the violent tale. Despite the talk of the orator as the ideal citizen, Rome was still a martial, if not quite a warrior culture. Verbal display of violence occurred in epic, drama, satire, even love elegy. The spectacle of punishment, the public games, drew some censure from the elite, but perhaps this too is so much verbal comment on a socially given, ineluctable theme. This elite complaint often seems to proclaim not the importance of reason but the social, cultural, and intellectual distinction of the reasoner. A liberal education did then treat serious issues, not the bombast of far-fetched cases, but the growth of the Roman man. His capacity to speak developed from the traditional, recurring challenge of ending violence in the house. The plots equate the ending of violence with the restoration of familial, social, and civic roles, all of which depends in turn on the student “speaking well.” To reach such a state of eloquence, to become like Cato or Cicero of old, took great preparation. It was a great ponos, labor, for those who had no need to work, for those who—in the conceit of the governors—deserved naturally to govern and had but to speak to win consent.