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...