Stages in Education

As in nearly every period of Greek and Roman antiquity, there was no state control in the Roman republic over schools, teachers, or curriculum (Morgan 1998: 25-33). Students would have begun their education with the rudiments of grammar and reading in Latin; the ideal offered in texts is that this instruction would have been overseen by the parents and then, later, by tutors hired in the home (Bonner 1977: 20-33). As contact with Greek culture increased in the third century bce, so too did the desire for acquiring facility in Greek language and rhetoric. This training in Greek would have been available strictly to those families with the means to acquire native speakers, either slaves or freedmen, to teach their children. As a result, it is probable that members of the nonwealthy classes were rarely trained beyond basic literacy and numeracy (Corbeill 2001: 269-70). Beyond this level, education continued with the student mastering a series of preliminary exercises that served to prepare him for the practice of oratory. These exercises, supervised by either the teacher of literature (grammaticus) or the more advanced teacher of rhetoric ( rhetor), included rote types of learning that ranged from the retelling of well-known narratives (particularly from myth) with developing degrees of sophistication to the memorization of commonplaces and gnomic sayings; in the final stages students would participate in preliminary debates on set themes divorced from any particular legal or historical context (e. g., ‘‘whether country or city life is more desirable’’; Webb 2001).

As one would expect, this form of education allowed little room for individual thinking by the pupil, involving as it does principally the reception and reproduction of traditional information (Morgan 1998: 223-5). Moreover, as Morgan notes, the type of moral precepts used in this early stage differed from that among the Greeks; whereas in the Greek system uncontextualized gnomic sayings are used to instill ethical values, at Rome ‘‘there was a stronger tradition of looking to the words and deeds of great men of the past for values and instruction’’ (Morgan 1998: 144-5, citing Quint. Inst. 12.2.30). The values inculcated through these preliminary exercises when viewed as a whole are what one would expect for pre-teen males of the upper levels of Roman society: a respect for preserving social order and the promotion of self-control as an ideal for the individual (Webb 2001: 303-5). The desire for maintenance of the social status quo that one sees in this early stage of instruction will also constitute a motif of our extant Roman declamatory texts, where normally revered values are publicly contested and, usually, reaffirmed.

Suetonius, in the introduction to his discussion of famous teachers of rhetoric at Rome, asserts that Romans of the second century bce were initially resistant to introducing the teaching of Greek-style rhetoric into their culture (Rhet. 25.1). This opposition was, however, only apparent, since eventually these Greek teachings grew to characterize the Roman elite: there is no clear evidence that any schools existed before 93 bce that provided publicly available instruction in Greek or Latin (Schmidt 1975: 192-4). Furthermore, of the thirty-nine private teachers of grammar and rhetoric known at Rome, approximately thirty seem to have been either slaves of prominent Romans, or freedmen with close ties to their former masters (christes 1979: 179-92). These circumstances indicate that the Roman elite used education as a means of distinguishing itself from those members of society unable to gain exposure to rhetorical theory and practice. It is in this context that one can best understand the much-discussed censorial edict of 92 bce that expressed disapproval of the teaching techniques of the so-called ‘‘Latin rhetors’’; education in the Latin language made available teachings hitherto restricted to the elite and such a move toward democratization needed to be checked (Corbeill 2001: 268-75).

During the republican period, another important component of rhetorical training involved the observation of established orators and politicians. Cicero tells us that, beginning in his mid teens, he was constantly in the Forum and listening ‘‘nearly every day’’ to orators in criminal court cases and to magistrates addressing public assemblies (Brut. 304-5). A more formal process in shaping the nascent orator was also one more restricted in access than a simple visit to the Forum. In the so-called tirocinium fori, elite Roman adolescents accompanied well-known politicians - either relatives or friends of the family - and were taught by example how to express opinions among peers and discern between competing sides of an issue. During this stage of education, the already privileged are initiated directly into the ranks of power through personal observation (David 1992: 311-407). A further aspect of education that benefited primarily the children of the ruling elite was the opportunity to travel in the east and study in particular rhetoric and philosophy - a stage in the educational process that by the final generation of the republic ‘‘was perhaps almost obligatory for young men of the upper class’’ (Rawson 1985: 9-12). Each facet of rhetorical education during the republic - its dominance by Greek both at home and abroad, the apprenticeship with experienced politicians - ensures that rhetorical power remains primarily in the hands of the established elite. It is now time to turn to one particular aspect of the content of this instruction - the declaiming of set themes - to show what types of social values were propagated by these declaimers, and how they may have changed as Rome moved from a republican form of government to one ruled by an autocratic emperor.