Three Vignettes
In the summer of 44 B.C., an aristocratic youth studying in Athens wrote his father’s agent assuring him, a bit too eagerly, that all was going well with his Greek philosophy teacher. The man no longer seemed so severe and now even dropped by unannounced for dinner. Could the agent send the young man a trained slave, preferably a Greek, to transcribe notes? Three months earlier the youth had been visited by a friend of his father on the way out from Rome to serve as a short-lived governor of Asia. Trebonius wrote back to the father to report that the son was living modestly and devoting himself to his studies. The father clearly was not so sure: he had managed to get his son to dismiss one professor of rhetoric, a bad sort according to a later historian, and was tightening the purse strings.1
Three centuries later in a city of the northern Roman Empire, where Greek was still known, but where trousers and beer were more common than togas and wine, a first reading exercise imagines a boy writing an account of his daily routine. He calls for his clothes, breakfasts, and still in the cool of dawn walks to school with a slave retinue—pedagogue, book-bag porter, perhaps others. He returns home for lunch and greets his parents and the extended familia. He writes too of breaking away from his studies to go to the forum or the baths with his pals.2
A century and a half later, across the Mediterranean in North Africa, a teenager fresh from school realizes his mother’s dreams by setting up as a teacher of rhetoric. School had been traumatic, or at least emotional. He was beaten but still failed to learn Greek. Yet Virgil moved him: he wept for Dido as Aeneas sailed away, leaving her to die by her own hand.3
The three students are Cicero’s son Marcus, an anonymous youth in Marseilles, and the young Augustine. Each in a different setting pursued a liberal education, the training befitting a freeborn Roman. Liberal education bound them to the great texts and men of the past, marked them as participants in the culture of free men, and anticipated their adult rights and roles. The connection of past, present, and future men of learning helped constitute a sense of identity. The identity of culture is not a historical reality but a fiction, an imaginative act that takes the student beyond his place, present abilities, and even background. If the differences among the students strikes the historical observer, the students themselves were united by a fierce pride in their literacy and knowledge. Students in the late empire believed their educational culture bound them to the long-perished republic and its literary masterpieces. The young Cicero, however, would have found the Latin of the students from Africa and Gaul barbaric, their poor Greek disgraceful. Roman students for at least the first five centuries A.D. read the Aeneid of Virgil and tried to write speeches like Cicero’s, yet their education was a fluid, dynamic practice rather than a uniform experience dictated by a conservative tradition among an elite. Schools, curriculum, pedagogy, the status of teachers, and the demographics of teachers and students changed in response to the evolving needs of literate classes, to the impulse of new literatures, new religions, and new governors, and to the rediscovery of old texts.
To take the very long view, Roman education is situated just past the midpoint in the history of formal, literate education. The earliest evidence for training in literacy skills comes from Sumer and the subsequent users of its cuneiform script and script-teaching systems, the Babylonians. Throughout the ancient Near East and in Egypt, boys have left records of their arduous preparation to enter a scribal class for service in an extended court bureaucracy. The curriculum of lexical lists was also, as has been recently emphasized, an introduction into a culturally specific organization of knowledge. Petra Gesche’s critical study of Babylonian education reminds the reader that the Western ideas of the development of the individual and an individual ethical outlook are not found in the ancient Near East.4
For Romans of the classical period, education was a Greek import, and they somewhat mistily contrasted an education founded on literary texts and conducted by Greek speakers beginning in the third century B.C. with an older, native primitivist and paternal training in the manly arts.5 That many of the first teachers in the middle and late republic were Greek-speaking slaves and freedmen aggravated the muddled contrast in this view.6 Educators in the Greek world had innovated by adapting training originally designed for a scribal class to a citizen class. Roman education had ventured its own new adaptation, which an emphasis on continuity with the older and grander intellectual culture of Greece has obscured. The connections with Italic cultures from the eighth century on and, in particular, with Etruscan culture were little understood, either by the Romans who wrote of their own institutions or by later students of culture, predisposed to discover decisive cultural transfers from one great civilization to the next. In particular, “school” may have seemed a familiar and unproblematic term that linked great civilizations, including those of the European historians of classical or medieval education. But a classical paideia was a shifting construct, and the school of Athens (or better, the many schools of the Hellenistic cities from North Africa to the Black Sea) was not the school of Rome.7
In their haste to move from the classical Greeks to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, histories of liberal education have tended to belittle the Romans. The Romans sometimes are treated as placeholders, intermediaries who provided a synthesis of learning, the seven liberal arts, so that it might be preserved by the Middle Ages, until the Renaissance restored the original, Greek complexity and fullness of literature, philosophy, music, and so forth. In fact, the Romans educated on a vast scale, instituted bilingual education, and developed rhetorical training significantly, with a variety of teachers, students, materials, and methods that reflected the diversity of the empire itself.8
From the third century B.C., prominent Roman families had attached to their family circle various Greek experts, philosophers, cooks, doctors, and poets, and among these specialists trainers in grammar and rhetoric also found receptive patrons. A system of school practices modeled on the Greek resulted, not from the enactment of laws or citywide policy, but from the keen interest of the elite in the skills and substance of a Hellenistic education. The adaptation of education to Roman ends was part of the city’s fascination with Greek culture, which was encountered anew in the military conquests of the third and second centuries B.C.
To detect, describe, and explain the changing educational culture of the Roman world would require a work of many volumes, several lifetimes, and a community of scholars.9 As a contribution to the study of Roman education, this book asks what the ancients thought education would do to and for children, and what in practice it offered students.10 Roman theorists of education certainly provided rationales along with description of practices, but claims about an institution, stemming from the elite of that institution, while good evidence for the mentalité of its agents, offer an insufficient account of methods and purposes. The theory and practice of education are like an old married couple whose differences, plastered over for polite society, break through unasked and unpredictably, and so vehemently that one wonders what their relationship to each other could possibly be. Roman education was not simply the ideal script of progress from unruly illiteracy to mastery of self and speech that the theorists present. Concrete skills of reading, writing, speaking, and thinking were won by boys and girls with what all agreed was hard work.
That work included arithmetic and geometry. Dancing was taught, although the elder Scipio and others disapproved. Music, science, and more advanced mathematics could be learned from expert teachers but had been removed from the typical curriculum. Physical education was also a casualty as the Hellenistic cycle of civic education in school, gymnasium, and palaistra was replaced by the Roman schools of literacy. From Hellenistic education the Romans adopted above all the expert preparation in reading, writing, and speaking. Quintilian described the ideal Roman education—what he wished a student in the greatest school of Rome (his own) would accomplish. He wanted the grammar-school teacher to teach grammar only and leave the rhetorical exercises to the rhetorician. The strict division of Roman schooling into three separate institutions—elementary literacy and numeracy at the school of the litterator or ludi magister, reading of the poets and historical and oratorical prose along with some composition exercises at the school of the grammaticus, and then training in speech and debate (declamation) at the rhetorician’s—is inaccurate. We can imagine, following Quintilian’s guide, that the Roman boy or girl came to grammar school at age seven, eight, or nine already knowing the alphabet. Reading, writing, and arithmetic were learned here. The child would learn to write and then read Greek; Latin followed. After basic literacy (including memorization and recitation) the child learned grammar, mythology, and literary criticism all together while reading a poetic text and listening to the teacher’s exposition. The grammar-school teacher would deliver a brief opening lecture. The child might recite an assigned passage. The teacher would proceed to comment on the spelling, diction, and rhetorical figures of the passage (the scholiasts, particularly Servius on the Aeneid and Priscian in his Partitiones, give an idea of the qualities of this instruction). A set of exercises from the aphorism to fable and description, up through a series of increasingly complex narrative building blocks, led to the finished speech. At the final stage, known as declamation, the advanced student learned a system of composition and delivery of mock deliberative and legal speeches.11
The avowed ideal of this education was the orator, who embodied the expressive speech capacities that the Roman elite needed as lawyers, politicians, diplomats, governors, and generals and the receptive capacities needed by the friends, counselors, and audience of these. Only the rare boy would become a Cicero or Julius Caesar or even enter the cursus honorum, the itinerary of high public office. Rhetorical education had other, less grand aims. Students of rhetoric learned to understand and criticize speeches and texts. They were also schooled in the categories and techniques for argument and exposition, advocacy and attack, and conflict resolution and the bringing of grievance. Thus Roman education trained jurors as well as senators, women as well as men.
The first half of this book moves from the introduction of Hellenistic schooling and the rise of the schools (chapter 1, with special treatment of the physical place of the school; chapter 2, stories the Romans told of their first schools; chapter 3, the Romans’ discovery of crisis in a change of schooling) to the theory and ideology of education as expressed by two great educators at the turn of the first and second centuries A.D. (Plutarch and Quintilian, in chapters 4 and 5 respectively). Their prescriptive works, a treatise from the circle of Plutarch entitled De liberis educandis (On the Education of Children) and the monumental work of Quintilian, the Institutio oratoria (The Orator’s Education), offer the most cohesive statements of the ideology of education in the first century A.D. (Both texts are also of tremendous importance in the history of education, including the Renaissance revival of classical education.) These works also theorize, though not always explicitly or consistently, the idea of a child and the child’s development of academic skills and intellectual capacities.12 Whereas in the past these authors have been mined for details concerning the use of letter blocks or the techniques of teaching reading, for example, and have been justly celebrated for policy, such as their common opposition to corporal punishment, in fact these roughly contemporary texts deserve a reading that generously takes them at their word: education is a treasure, and the two works powerfully exhort the reader to its pursuit. With such protreptic the heart of the educationalist justifying his institution is revealed. By looking at Romans looking back at the history, purpose, and process of their schooling, these opening chapters consider the ideas and assumptions implicit in Roman educational narratives.
The relationship of these ideas to learners is taken up in the second half of the book, which seeks to understand how the educational exercise shaped its users. School exercises maybe designed to transmit ideals of education, but they also communicate attitudes and demand skills that the teachers or theorists have not fully planned or even imagined.13 Chapters 6 (grammar and the fable), 7 (the educational precept and persona), and 8 (declamation and rhetorical habitus) treat the goal of education: the rhetorical culture that marked the Roman man as a free citizen whose words and learning merited respect. The adolescent had toiled at school to earn this recognition. His exercises had shown him many victims and the need for advocacy. The dumb animals of fable were to be given voice. The generals and statesmen of old were to be addressed again in speeches of counsel. The canonical texts were to be reread, recopied, and reperformed. Indeed, the reading of literature supplied the student with excerpts and arguments, metaphors and images, for his own writing and speaking. Among the roles that the rhetorical curriculum presented to be played, interpreted, or rewritten, I have been particularly concerned to trace the cues given the adolescent to learn, or revise his understanding of, social categories. At times the student received outright directives, as when the outline plot of a declamation required him to write of the conflicting roles of an accused man as son and soldier. At times there were more subtle conditionings of attitudes and responses, as when the young declaimer had to frame emotional responses from the characters of a conflict, such as what a freedwoman, what a stepson, would appropriately feel and do when family, social, or civic order started to unravel. That a student “needed” a slave to carry her books and mind her on the street was itself a daily practice of the divisions of labor, in turn reinforced and relearned in school exercises. In the final stage of rhetorical schooling, the young man’s declamatory speeches patched the fictional breaks in the familial, moral, and sociopolitical fabric of the Roman city. His skill in speech enabled him to emerge as the master of the personae of his fiction and the winner of applause, who could amuse and move his audience. Or perhaps he failed utterly or bored his peers or wrote a silly sententia. As throughout his education, his faults would be castigated.
In the ludic place of Roman education, not only were the exercises fictionalized conflicts, but as so often at school they could be repeated again and again. Turn taking and restarting, with correction, makes the player of a game better at that game. The student becomes a better student, but he and she have been told that this is a serious enterprise, a preparation for and a version of adult roles. The school exercises aim to create an elite literary subjectivity by means of a graduated curriculum that moves from the simple exercises of recasting fables or supplying an aphorism with a speaker and context so as to make the sparest of plots into a full-blown speech in character to the mock-trial speech of defense or accusation. Those habits of thought and expression fostered by the school can be deemed a subjectivity at the point that the student comes to view himself as a speaker and writer. Ancient schooling had the student read, write, recite, fragment, gloss, recombine, expand, and evaluate narratives of several kinds from an early age. The student was required to do more than read (perhaps unlike many a modern college student, who reads once or partially, and for whom the professor’s lecture and secondary reading provide replay and synthesis). He or she might have had the text modeled by teacher or by a slave pedagogue, or their own performances might have the whole or parts praised or corrected. This correction ranged from corporal punishment to the correction of the pronunciation of a word, the delivery of a phrase, or the punctuation of a dictated text. The text might be delivered as dictation or as a text to be copied (from papyrus to wax or wax to wax), or as a finished product—a papyrus roll of Virgil’s Aeneid, for example. The content of a lesson and the various formal skills required to read, write, vary, and interpret would be encountered again. Indeed, the same content and form, a fable for instance, could serve as a first writing exercise, and later as a reading exercise, become still later a prompt for a composition, then even a discussion exercise in which the student might be asked to critique the stylistics of the fable, and finally a piece to be inserted as an argument in a larger composition.
This play with narratives that pose plots of competing ethical impulses and consequences may well have had greater effect on subjectivity than the sententious moral or point of the tale.14 From a humble exercise such as the bilingual glossaries in which children practiced translation as they practiced writing commands to their slaves, the student reads and writes a narrative that portrays him at the center of a social world designed to serve him and to respond to him. The world is imagined as a series of encounters or conflicts, where the student’s own virtuosity may allow a successful, pacific outcome or at least closure. In fable, the fox may eat the sheep, but the student learns a moralizing lesson. The hero and speaker of the sayings tale, the chreia that has a famous speaker make a withering reply to some challenger, manages to evade violence or verbal attack by his wit. The disastrous consequences threatened by the facts of the declamation will be avoided only if the boy can construct some clever but plausible escape. A man speaking and writing fluently, without interruption or the interference of another’s expertise, is the ideal mode of adult behavior imagined by much of this curriculum.
With such a definition of rhetorical subjectivity, we need not imagine that education is a simple process of cultural hegemony that relentlessly replicates established attitudes and practices. We can, however, trace through the writing and speaking exercises and in the ancient pronouncements about education a process that, with difficulty and considerable effort, led a few to remarkable intellectual abilities. The difficulty of the process certainly winnowed the set of the learned governors of a society, which no doubt was doubly useful, as it served established interests and instilled in its new practitioners a sense of their distinctiveness. In that sense of distinction we witness the Roman rhetorical system at its most efficacious. The successful student believes in the lessons of schooling. He need not believe that his teachers are right and all his toil well spent; but if he imagines that he has become like the censorious Cato, whose precepts he has memorized, and Cicero, whose speeches he has studied, and that now like the old Romans he too possesses a masterful culture, then he has emerged against the threats of chastisement, correction, and rebuke as one who can speak for others. His right to speak for others is of course no right but a learned disposition that depends on and recreates a segregation of classes and genders, that understands that the violence of his world—murder (by the wolf in the fable, by Marc Antony in the historical declamation), civil unrest, robbery, adultery, infidelity—can be mediated by the educated speaker. In describing the school of Rome, then, I have tried to keep the student before the reader’s eyes, as he works his way through a curriculum, as he grows into an accomplished stylist, and as he learns to justify the very distinction his schooling has produced.
The Roman curriculum retrained the child in how to tell a story, in part by fostering a stance of objectivity—as if there were only one well-ruled way to speak, which requires systematic control of the persona of the speaker. As the student learns figured speech, he learns to reduce individuals and individual cases to formulae, to stereotypes, and to arguments (discussed in detail in chapter 7). He writes repeatedly in Greek “work hard [philoponei: love pain/toil] lest you be beaten.”15 Intellectual labor becomes an alternative world to his previous family life and also a daily practice in resolving the imagined conflicts of categories and in framing and understanding his own evolving social role. The move from fable to the morality tales of the chreia to the role playing and categorical thinking of declamation constitutes a radical training of the imagination, and this effective schooling is far more imaginative than the traditional accounts, which stress the dryness and complexity of rhetoric, have allowed. We may well reinterpret the enduring legacy of Roman education not as the seven liberal arts or a lapidary prose style or the virile texts of the canon, but as a trained habit of mind that insists that texts and tests, through a competitive display of reading, writing, and reciting, form the child into a worthy Roman.