EDUCATION

Early in Roman history, and particularly before Rome's overseas conquests, formal education was conducted by the father, who taught his son whatever he thought was necessary. The stern patrician Cato, for example, personally taught his son to read, write, use weapons, and swim. In this period, a basic level of literacy and military training was the totality of education thought necessary. Education was primarily restricted to male children.

The great change in Roman education happened, as did so many other major changes, when Rome conquered Greece. Exposure to Greek literature and culture raised expectations of what an aristocrat should know. Thereafter they would be expected to know both Greek and Latin, to be familiar with the literature of both cultures, and to be able to give formal orations in public.

The hundreds of thousands of Greek citizens who were enslaved by Rome provided a ready source of teachers. From this time on, the structure of Roman education was such that the student, who was almost always male, passed through a series of teachers, and the highest goal toward which all their education aimed was to produce an eloquent speaker.

The first of these teachers was known as the paedagogiis. This was a household slave to whom the young boy was entrusted. Ideally the paeda-gogus was an educated Greek slave who could give the boy his preliminary instruction in Latin and Greek. Technically, the main duty of the paedagogus was to look after and protect the child. Thus, whenever the boy went out in public, he was always accompanied by his paedagogus. Another of his duties was to restrain and discipline a mischievous child, usually either by twisting his ear or beating him with a cane. Depending on their relationship, Romans tended to look back on their paedagogus with either fondness or hatred. There are many instances of men who, once they became adults, freed their old tutors out of gratitude. The emperor Augustus is one example.

Around the age of six or seven, the student began to go to a more formal type of school. The new teacher was not a family member but rather was a man who made individual contracts with parents to instruct their children in reading, writing, and arithmetic. He was known as the Htterator. Often, a boy would go through a series of these teachers so that he might learn basic reading, writing, and counting from one, more sophisticated knowledge of the same subject from a second, and then go to a third who would emphasize literature. A teacher of the more advanced levels was called a grammaticus.

On a typical school day, classes began at dawn, so the boy had to get up long before this, get dressed, eat a simple breakfast, and then, accompanied by his paedagogus, walk to wherever the school was being held. If the boy was very young, he might be carried on the shoulders of the slave.

There were no actual school buildings, so classes might be held anywhere. Sometimes a teacher would rent a shop or an apartment, or he might set up his school in a corner of the Roman Forum or in a colonnade. This would certainly have made for a distracting academic environment, since the teacher and students might have found themselves trying to hold classes surrounded by the bustle of people buying and selling or officials conducting state business and trials. The teacher sat on a thronelike chair, while his pupils sat on simple benches gathered around him. There were no chalkboards or paper; instead, students had small, wooden tablets with a shallow indentation filled with wax to write upon. Into this wax, they scratched out their lessons. The instrument they used to write with, a metal cylinder pointed at one end and flattened at the other, was called a stilus. For doing math, they might employ an abacus.

Since texts were extremely expensive and fragile, only the teacher would likely have any. Therefore, much of Roman education consisted of fhe teacher reading aloud from fhese texts and the students memorizing long passages by heart. The lack of visual aids could sometimes be overcome by imaginative teachers. One grammaticus who specialized in teaching the alphabet had a large troop of slaves, each of whom had a giant wooden copy of one of the letters of the alphabet strapped to his back.

Classes lasted from dawn until noon, but there were some holidays when the students got off from class. The main break was summer vacation, which usually started around early June and lasted until the middle of October. This was not a fixed schedule, however, and depended on fhe individual teacher; one particularly zealous grammaticus kept his students in class almost all the way through July.

The two main characteristics of this phase of schooling were endless amounts of memorizafion reinforced by brufal beatings whenever a student failed to perform properly. The teacher had a wide range of punishments available. The most common and simplest was to have the student hold out his hands or lay them flat on a piece of wood, and the teacher would then beat them with a cane made of reeds. For more egregious offenses, fhe teacher would beat the student's body with a whip consisting of mulfiple sfrips of leather. The ultimate punishment was the cntomus, for which the student was stripped naked and stretched out across the backs of two other students, one of whom would grasp his legs and the other his arms. The unfortunate victim was then savagely flogged with a wooden stick by the teacher. In view of this, it is not surprising that many Romans' memories of school were not pleasant and that they often referred to their old teachers not by their names but instead by suggestive nicknames such as "The Whacker."

The last couple years of this instruction focused on literature, particularly on FJomer, and Roman historical literature, including Virgil. This phase of education usually ended around the age of 13 or so.

There were no colleges or universities. The wealthiest, most ambitious, or most promising students went on to a third class of insfructor known as the rhetor. The rhetor was a specialist in training students to be effective public speakers. Oratory, or the art of public speaking, was a central component of the career of anyone who wanfed to be in the Roman government or army. Since everything about Roman life was public, fhe ability to get up in public and persuade others of your opinion was a highly prized talent.

The students began by composing and delivering short speeches about mythological topics. These were simply descriptive essays. In the next phase, they prepared comparisons. Some topics included comparing Homeric heroes such as Achilles and Odysseus, seafaring with agriculture, or town versus country life. The next step up in complexity was for the students to put themselves in the place of a famous mythological character and compose a speech he might have given in a certain situation. This exercise emphasized psychological insight and imagination. One popular topic was Achilles talking over the body of his dead friend Patroclus. The ulfimate level of their training involved doing the same thing using real historical events, as this was felt to be the best preparation for fhe speeches they would actually have to give.