The School of Rome: Latin Studies and the Origins of Liberal Education
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The School of Rome: Latin Studies and the Origins of Liberal Education
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| ISBN-13: | 9780520948402 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 04/27/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 294 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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The School of Rome
Latin Studies and the Origins of Liberal Education
By W. Martin Bloomer
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94840-2
CHAPTER 1
In Search of the Roman School
The centuries-long efforts and activities of students, teachers, parents, and patrons in Roman schools will be explored in this book as an important and innovative component in the making of Roman culture, with significant consequences for the methods and agents of education in the West. Histories of education tend to celebrate founders and revolutionaries. In such dramatic narratives, the Greeks have fared better than the Romans. No matter that the the notions of "Greeks" and "Romans" are rather vague, and, in our period, overlap; that the Greeks too were transmitters (and modifiers) of techniques and institutions of the training of children in literacy and numeracy; and that the broad strokes of this understanding reflect an Enlightenment prejudice that reduces to nearly unself-conscious mediators any, especially the Roman and the medieval, who stand between the Greek founders and the European spiritual and cultural revivers and heirs of early modernity. Modernity, however, should not take all the blame. The Romans themselves furnished the outlines for a history of education that misappraised their own roles. This chapter traces the origins of the underestimation of the Roman contribution to schooling and depicts the early centuries of schooling at Rome as a complex and thriving period.
The narratives and anecdotes of early schooling display the strong colors of an institution's and a society's mythmaking. Roman schoolmen reflected on the origins of their cherished institution, and, more generally, writers from the late republic and early empire investigated their past with complex presuppositions about the transfer of culture from Greece. Typically, they imagined a native hardiness and simplicity, long since lost or even spoiled by luxury and civil discord. This chapter recalls what Roman cultural etiology and archaeology forgot—the existence of schools before the influx of Hellenistic teachers after Rome's successful wars of the third and second centuries. Scholarly investigation has revealed that Roman archaic culture was bound to a broader Italic cultural community. The native history of the school, rich in symbolic contrasts and dramatic beginnings, deserves serious attention both for its influence and for its insight into the thinking of Roman educators. As mobile, flexible, and impermanent places and as an institution of and for children, Roman schools have left only a small imprint in the historical record. What is clear, nonetheless, is that the model of sudden cultural transfer is flawed and partial; that the Romans' reluctance to adopt gymnastic education during the third century can be explained; and that the educational milieu that the Hellenistic experts encountered and exploited needs to be differently, and better, understood.
Suetonius, most famous as a historian of the emperors, also included grammarians and rhetoricians in his study of famous men. In his biographies of the grammarians he noted that the old Romans had neither studied nor esteemed grammar and that its first teachers were those half-Greeks Ennius and Livius Andronicus. Suetonius had little to say of them and began his account of the origins of schooling with the first theoretical grammarian whose presence at Rome he could verify, the learned Crates of Mallos. The better-documented teaching of the internationally famous Crates appealed to Suetonius far more than did that of the republicans Ennius and Livius, of whom he knew much less, perhaps only a few anecdotes, which he could have drawn from Cicero and the early Latin poets' versions of Greek tragedies and of Homer's Odyssey, more unusual Hellenistic texts like the Epicharmus, and the works on Roman subjects, such as the Annales. The achievements of poets from Virgil through Lucan, Martial, and Statius had eclipsed those of the early poets. Crates' embassy to Rome in 168 formed instead a concrete and more dramatic point of origin—the bringer of culture arrived fully laden.
Writing ca. A.D. 100 in the Quaestiones romanae (Roman Questions) (59), a work of decidedly antiquarian flavor, the Greek scholar Plutarch similarly imagined a point of origin that inaugurated the history of Roman schooling as a cultural transfer of Hellenistic education to Rome. Plutarch identified Spurius Carvilius as the first teacher to have a school of letters in the city of Rome. He was probably wrong, but no more so than the Romans themselves. He chose the freedman of the consul of 235 B.C., Spurius Carvilius Maximus, because Spurius Carvilius was the first to charge for his services.
These two accounts of the origins of the Roman school serve as intimations of the understanding of the category "school" in the year A.D. 100 rather than as an archaeology of education in the city. School was what Suetonius and Plutarch had been to and what a scholar such as Crates represented—the Hellenistic grammatical and literary curriculum taught by a man for pay. It is instructive that neither Plutarch nor Suetonius wrote of a building or a place.
Young Romans learned to read and write, do arithmetic, and deliver advice and speeches. They may have attended a place of instruction outside the house for at least some of their lessons. In understanding the beginnings of their cultural history, Romans of the late republic, who not only served as the chief sources for Roman scholars in the imperial period but still hold a privileged place among modern historians, focused on a period of innovative cultural practices. They traced the theater, literature, schooling, and scholarship back to the arrival of Greeks captured in the Punic Wars or visiting in the aftermath of these wars or, especially, the Third Macedonian War. Their adventitious archaeology of culture had some truth: like Toynbee in the nineteenth century, contemporary classicists follow Livy and Sallust in recognizing the important legacy of the Punic Wars for the Romans. Contemporary scholars, however, do not stigmatize renewed Greek cultural influence as the introduction of luxury; rather, like Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, modern scholarship asks about the effect of imports upon Roman social and political life.
Is schooling, then, another luxury introduced to Rome by the Greeks as late as the mid-third century B.C.? If so, for what end? Was it merely to create and nourish Roman taste or cosmopolitan feeling? We might ask also, Did schooling contribute to the aristocracy's sense of self (and if it were a matter of social distinction, who were the uncultivated)?Were the Romans adopting schooling awed by Greek culture? Did it, like the theater, have native or Italic antecedents all but forgotten by the Romans of the middle and late republic? These schematic questions, all of which assume that Greek culture was a belated and accidental visitor to the city that would be great, hardly do justice to the complexities of Roman social life or the traditions of Italic literacy and cultural systems. But in asking these questions, we imitate the ancients themselves, most especially Suetonius, who tells us that Livius Andronicus and Ennius, the first practitioners of Latin literature, were also the first to keep school at Rome. He knew that one Plotius was the first to have a school of rhetoric (and we have seen that, in Plutarch, Spurius Carvilius was the first to have a grammar school). No doubt, Suetonius, writing a sort of biographical encyclopedia ca. A.D. 100, recorded the best information he had. His sources were all documentary and primarily literary. He knew Livius and Ennius were Rome's first poets, and somehow had an additional item of information: they had taught in both Greek and Latin in their own homes and outside their homes. The second notice of place (foris) may imply a public place or may simply mean that they taught at other people's houses. At any rate we have an early notice of two categories of place devoted to teaching. For Suetonius, "school" seems to mean not so much a particular space dedicated to instruction as a master, a distinct curriculum(in grammar, rhetoric, or philosophy, i.e., on the Greek model), and a number of students.
Roman writers of the late republic and the early empire remembered the origins of their schools in clear and forceful stories. The lack of apposite written sources before the third century and changes in the Latin language and in the institutions of the city go some way toward explaining why Romans did not recall their early schooling, but stories of schooling have particular ideological characteristics. They speak of the training of youth in a society's or a class's values, and this symbolic weight can easily lead to idealizations and associations that have more to do with the present and with a wished-for identity, and less with the past as a historical reality. The Roman stories reflect lines of imagination of simple, fundamental contrasts: of old, Roman fathers had educated their sons at home. Greek-style education, with a literary curriculum, paid teachers, and a school outside the home for social peers of different families, came to Rome in the recent past, the third and second centuries B.C. Here too were to be found the origins of Latin literature. The Romans' interest in their own institutions apparently arises in the same period. The poet and teacher Ennius wrote a work entitled Origines. The states man Cato, who looms large in accounts of early Roman schooling, consistently contrasted Roman customs and institutions with the recently arrived and corrupting Greek.
Later Romans and Greeks followed the lead of these sources in three ways: they assumed this period to be one of origins; they understood the origin of schooling to be a transfer of the superior Greek culture to their (rude and hardy) ancestors; and they ascribed the impulse to adopt a new cultural practice to a named individual. This thinking, at once etiological, cultural, and biographical, has a powerful, ideological appeal. It identifies the Romans as valid (if only recent) participants in the Hellenistic paideia—that literary culture that identifies civilization and empire and the civilized inheritors of a great tradition—and grants then something in addition, a nativist, ancestral virtue that makes the Romans superior to those who have only schooled customs and schooled virtue.
No long-enduring building or locale, or great sentimentality about the institutions of childhood, guided Plutarch in his notice of the first school at Rome. Rather, he saw education as a cultural translation. The techniques, texts, and teachers of schooling came, he thought, from Greek cities in the aftermath of the wars of the third century. A history of Roman schooling could begin only when a curriculum, if not a place, modeled on Greek practice had made its way to Rome. Further, as noted above, a biographical tendency informs the accounts of early schooling: developments are attributed to a named individual. Before that, the Romans concocted stories of paternal instruction in the manly arts of farming and soldiering, a theme that owes much to proud propaganda from the elder Cato about how he handled the training of his son (without need of the entourage of Greek experts who attended other wealthy Romans). But before we come to the stories of Cato and his generation, we need to look beyond the limits of Plutarch's knowledge.
The Roman school is a difficult place to visualize. With one noteworthy exception, archaeologists have found no Roman classroom, in part because the school did not necessarily depend on dedicated space. Many places would do, and a particular grammar school was not a long-lived institution. Searching for the places of Roman schooling requires a reappraisal of the physical requirements of a school. In contrast to the modern furniture-stuffed, well-lit, blackboard-at-one-end-behind-the-teacher's-desk plan for the schoolroom, the ancient grammar school did not prize so highly the line of sight. Instead, students came individually to the teacher to read lessons and receive instruction. In addition, the students' own slaves, the pedagogues, helped provide discipline. Similarly, acoustics were not important when students were all murmuring their own lessons, and the single student ordered to perform spoke within two or three feet of the seated master, thus—at least for a young student—at the ear level of the older man.
The school had no desks and need not have had any bookcases. Students, or their pedagogues, brought lamps, papyrus rolls in a book bucket, wax tablets, pens and styli (whose flattened end served as an eraser for writing on wax), and also perhaps ink in a handy case (see the funerary relief from Neumagen), even abaci. The teacher sat in a large chair at the front. He provided benches or perhaps, in the deluxe setting, the round-backed chairs we see on a funerary relief, sometimes wax tablets, far more commonly the instruments of punishment: the ferula or virga (the cane but not the whip—the flagellum—that the Romans reserved for slaves as the more severe and humiliating device). Children did not have school uniforms, although we are told that Plato's scholars wore a uniform. Of course, the free boys and girls who went to school wore their own version of a class uniform: the toga praetextata for boys, a tunic for girls, and for both the bulla (amulet) about their necks that signaled their free status. In the rhetorical schools older boys might well have advanced to wearing the toga virilis for declaiming in Latin and the Greek pallium for declaiming in Greek. The school could be a well-equipped place, with maps and busts of famous authors. It certainly was often crowded or close, at least to our eyes, for children bent over their reading and writing, with wax tablet or papyrus roll balanced on their knees. They read by rolling the scroll out with the left hand and taking in with the right, even steadying the roll with their chin. A slave pedagogue (tutor and mentor as well as daily companion) and perhaps a slave porter (the capsarius) attended each student.
The physical requirements for a grammar school were minimal: school, like any small ancient business, could be held on the street, under or above a portico, near an important public building such as a temple, or at a rented shop. A wall painting from Pompeii, now lost, showed school near a portico and decidedly amid the bustle of the city. School could be held "in private," at the teacher's home or the house of the patron. The famous schoolman Verrius Flaccus taught Augustus's grandchildren in the atrium of a villa on the Palatine (Suet. Gramm. 17). Augustine on coming to Rome in A.D. 383 held school at home ("at first" he writes; perhaps he transferred to some other facility; cf. Conf. 1.5.12).Augustine, of course, was teaching rhetoric; the home is apparently that of his host. He would move, presumably to grander facilities, when in the succeeding year he went to Milan to teach rhetoric at the imperial court. But this was the acme of the teaching/performing profession of the rhetorician.
More elaborate structures have occasionally been interpreted as educational venues. Ray Laurence has explained the second, seemingly superfluous, theater in Pompeii by reference to similar structures in Corinth, Argos, Athens, and Epidauros, which apparently were used for the performances of rhetorical or literary works. Aurelius Victor (Caes. 14.2–3) wrote that the Athenaeum at Rome, built by Hadrian, was first a school of the liberal arts. This assembly hall was later used by declaimers, but we do not know where it was. A library was attached.
Part of the difficulty in evaluating the ancient evidence for the location, design, and functions of schools stems from the plasticity of the term school, whose semantic range extends from a modest room or the corner of a street for teaching basic literacy and numeracy to a performance place for elite youth and professionals to declaim. My list of the places of Roman schools is by no means exhaustive, even for Rome, and every city had its schools. One fragment of an Egyptian papyrus letter, apparently from a wife to her husband, who has learned Egyptian letters, affords a glimpse into a modest school, or the hope for a school, which classical, literary sources would scarcely admit. The wife congratulates the addressee for now having a job prospect: he will be able to teach boys at the house of the enema doctor.
Subliterary evidence, the correspondence of the modestly literate, the graffiti on city walls, does not so much round out the evidence from literary authors as tantalize with the suggestion of a larger, less sophisticated world of literacy and schooling. The best preserved of ancient Roman cities, Pompeii, has an unrivaled breadth of graffiti that implies, like the Egyptian school at the enema doctor's house, schools and schooling that a Cicero or Quintilian would ignore. Graffiti indicate schooling took place at several locations in Pompeii and at Rome. The places of instruction are unremarkable shop stalls. Two exceptions to these modest locales merit attention, since they seem to have dedicated space and indicate an education that is decidedly not modest. The emperor's palace had a slave-training complex known as the paidagogia, and the villas of the wealthy had as part of their design semicircular recesses, or exedrae. The latter, like private libraries, are places of culture, perhaps of poetry reading or rhetorical training. Varro portrays the gymnasium and the new-style villas as exemplars of the new urbanization—part of his habitual complaint that the Romans have abandoned their ancestral agricultural ways (Rust. 2 pr.) More positively, Varro is commenting on a new lifestyle, an association of the Roman elite with Hellenistic paideia, or with physical places that evoke the great paideia of the Hellenistic cities. The civic gymnasium, the private and imperial libraries, the frescoes of poets on villa walls, and the presence of small but discrete places within the grand Roman house for reading, recitation, or education demonstrate an increasingly visible connection of the Roman elite with places of culture. The villa of course also made room for slaves, who included the expert scribes, accountants, readers, and teachers. Slaves were trained within the emperor's complex for bureaucratic positions, which no doubt centralized for the growing imperial administration what was already common practice both within elite households and in private enterprises, such as the training of slaves in literate skills by Atticus.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Three Vignettes
1. In Search of the Roman School
2. First Stories of School
3. The School of Impudence
4. The Manual and the Child
5. The Child an Open Book
6. Grammar and the Unity of Curriculum
7. The Moral Sentence
8. Rhetorical Habitus
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Bloomer has composed a compelling, insightful work. . . . [This] text deserves a wide audience."—Bryn Mawr Classical Review (Bmcr)
"A clever and sophisticated reading of [Roman] society."—London Review of Books