So far I have been discussing classical teaching and learning in schools, but of course this is not its only site. Since the twelfth century, classics has also been taught in universities, usually, but not always, at a higher level than in schools. The prohibition on teaching Greek in schools enacted in the Scottish Book of Discipline (1560) led to its being taught at an elementary level in the universities. Talented scholars like the Cambridge classicist Richard Jebb (1841-1905) and his Oxonian successor Gilbert Murray (1866-1957), attracted to the chair of Greek at Glasgow by the high salary, found they had to teach the rudiments to classes of over a hundred, with ages ranging from 15 to 30. This is a useful reminder that the neat succession of educational stages we are used to today is a recent phenomenon. Modern educational systems are the creations of the nation-state, dating from the early nineteenth century in France and Germany, the end of that century in Britain. Education in classical Greece lacked our modern apparatus of dedicated buildings, educational stages, and common syllabuses. The ideas of‘‘curriculum’’ and ‘‘class’’ emerged only in the sixteenth century. They can be linked to Calvinist ideas of schooling and to the modus et ordo Parisiensis, a system that combined the subdivision of schools into classes with individual teaching (Hamilton 1989). All these ideas came out of religious concerns for the gaining and retention of faith, and had to do with disciplina, a system of controlled learning.
Since its origins in Paris in the twelfth century, the university has come to be taken for granted as a part of the life of nation-states. Yet it has taken on many different forms, as has the classics that has been taught in it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many European universities were confessional institutions in which classical learning was deeply entangled with the exposition and defense of Christian theology. The French Revolution marked a watershed, leading as it did to the destruction of some universities and the founding of others in new molds (Brockliss 1997; Anderson
2004). In some institutions, classical learning was frowned on as a symbol of the old (clerical, pre-revolutionary) order; in others it emerged under new, secular but spiritual auspices. Most notably, in the new University of Berlin the ideology of Altertumswissenschaft, the systematic study of the classical world as an integrated whole, promulgated by Friedrich Wolf, was enthusiastically expounded, an emphasis that spread to other German universities (Grafton 1983). The movement was based on the tenets of romantic Hellenism, and Greek was placed firmly above Latin in the linguistic pantheon. The contrast with France was striking: here, in a former Roman province, Latin was revered as the ancestor of French, and the ancient world was seen as the beginning of a continuous link, rather than as a lost world to be regained.
Within Altertumswissenschaft there were differences of emphasis, most famously celebrated by the disputes between Gottfried Hermann and August Boeckh and their pupils. Hermann rooted his scholarship firmly in the linguistic details of texts, while Boeckh argued for a wider vision of cultural and social history (Most 1997). What they shared was a crucial pedagogical tool, the seminar, developed originally for clerical training but now transformed into a training device for advanced work in classics. Here the professor taught his students, encouraging them to offer the results of their own research for criticism by himself and by fellow-students (Anderson 2004: 104-6). By the end of the nineteenth century, the seminar system had percolated down to the undergraduate level in both Europe and the US. It offered an alternative to the dominating monologue of the all-powerful professor, but in practice this semidivine figure often used the seminar as a source of loyal disciples. The seminar was hardly known in Britain, and its importation into Oxford in the 1930s, most notably by Eduard Fraenkel, created a culture shock of some local magnitude. Fraenkel’s classical seminar, in which Oxford dignitaries were treated like any other pupils, was described as ‘‘a circle of rabbits addressed by a stoat’’ (Horsfall 1990: 63).
The pedagogic burrow that Fraenkel invaded was based on a long tradition of one-to-one tutorial teaching (in James Garfield’s American evocation, ‘‘sitting with Mark Hopkins on a log’’) in which knowledge was imparted within a close personal relationship, a typical procedure being for the pupil to read out an essay on which the tutor then commented. This tradition was closely bound up with Greats (Literae Humaniores), the Oxford classical course founded in the nineteenth century that focused almost entirely on ancient history and on ancient and modern philosophy. The pedagogical relationship was an intimate one, and indeed Hellenism and homosexuality often went together (Dowling 1994). In Oxford, more than anywhere else, ancient culture and contemporary personal identity were fused to create a recognizable social style. In Cambridge, the central university loomed larger, the power of college tutors was curtailed, and teaching outside lectures was conducted in ‘‘supervisions’’ that typically lacked the more intense overtones of the Oxford tutorial. The typical classical graduate of Cambridge had lower and more circumscribed horizons than his Oxonian counterpart, his watchword being caution and thoroughness rather than a high-flying ambition (Stray 2001).
Nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge both offered examples of a bizarre mismatch between secondary and higher education. The schoolboys who came to Oxford after years of intense training in grammar, translation, and composition in Latin and Greek found more of the same (Honour Moderations), but then encountered Greats, for whose history and philosophy they were hardly prepared. Many scored highly in ‘‘Mods’’ and then collapsed to poor degrees, or failed, in Greats. In Cambridge, these schoolboys entered a university in which there was until 1824 no final examination in classics, and where that examination could until 1857 only be entered by those with high scores in the mathematical honors examination. In the first half of the century at least, almost nothing except classics was taught at the public (independent) schools. A pupil would often be introduced to Latin at age 6, and to Greek soon afterwards, at a junior school. The curriculum was dominated by repeated and repetitious learning of grammar, and this continued in the secondary school. There a few standard authors (Homer, Horace, and Vergil, usually) would be read, and read again in the following year - a practice common in antiquity (Cribiore 2001: 241). Exercises in verse composition were set, at first as ‘‘nonsense,’’ the meter being all-important, the meaning of words disregarded. This was followed by ‘‘sense,’’ in which meaning became a criterion. The centrality of this in some schools is illustrated by the naming of two classes at Eton: Sense and Nonsense (Clarke 1959: 74-97). The years of practice in turning Latin and Greek into English and vice versa produced large numbers of men who found it easy to tackle such tasks every day, while walking, on a train journey, in a boring committee meeting. The modern equivalents might be doodling or doing crossword puzzles, but this was in a mundane way a method of keeping in touch with the classical literature that had dominated these men’s days at school and, in some cases, university. In much smaller numbers, the system produced virtuoso composers who were revered by their contemporaries; some of them produced remarkable Latin and Greek verses, while their English poetry was jejune (Silk
2005) . An outstanding example was Richard Jebb’s translation of Robert Browning’s ‘‘Abt Vogler’’ into Pindaric verse - difficult English into difficult Greek (Jebb 1907: 215). This tradition was very different from the German, and may have contributed to the American tendency to avoid British practice in favour of the German tradition.
The image of the ambulatory (by no means pedestrian) composer reminds us that learning does not have to happen in schools or universities. Extramural learning has been made easier since the invention of printing, although the earliest books were expensive, and classical textbooks were typically owned by masters, not pupils. It was not long, however, before books were produced for autodidactic reading: the teacher and the learner were the same person. A mass reading audience in the nineteenth century was catered for by cheap books produced on newly invented steam presses, and later on stereotyping reduced the costs of printing even further. Lithography, an invention of the 1790s that spread rapidly in Europe and the Americas, enabled teachers to write short-run textbooks for their own classes. Composing on to stone or via transfer paper, they could incorporate Greek as easily as English (Stray 2002,
2006) . The working-class autodidacts of the nineteenth century had a wide variety of books to choose from, including Latin lessons in instalments and classical texts with interlinear translations. Such books were the ancestors of the ‘‘Teach Yourself’’ series of the twentieth century. Cheap books were also accessible to school children, but this was a matter for regret, even alarm, among teachers. Cribs (‘‘ponies,’’ ‘‘trots’’) were widely available and much used, though usually forbidden, in schools. Plain texts were preferred by teachers, or, failing them, school editions with notes at the back rather than on the same page as the text. When Richard Jebb’s great Sophocles edition began to appear in 1883, with its facing translation and notes in English, one critic commented that ‘‘When Professor Jebb has finished his Sophocles, we shall have to banish the plays from our schools.’’
The experience of teaching and learning is typically absorbed into mature adult engagement with the world, often in an entirely unconscious way; but on occasion a gifted writer observes, remembers, or imagines, and we catch a glimpse of the experience in a heightened form. Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky stories are by no means a simple reflection of his time at Westward Ho! (1878-82), but they do use his memories as an armature for meditations on classics, patriotism, and imperialism, especially through the teaching and learning of Horace (Kipling 1899; Medcalf 1993; Gaisser 1994; Kenney 2006). Fifty years later, in the Caribbean colony of St. Lucia, Derek Walcott learnt Latin at school and then stayed on to teach it. The uneasy weight of the classical legacy is reflected in his poem ‘‘A Latin Primer’’: ‘‘the bronze dusk of imperial palms /[curling] their fronds into questions /over Latin exams.’’ The pupil became a teacher, and ‘‘I taught Love’s basic Latin /Amo, amas, amat... The discipline I preached /made me a hypocrite; /Their lithe black bodies, beached, /would die in dialect’’ (Walcott 1988: 21-4; Greenwood 2005: 81-2). The Latin primer has served other writers as an organizing focus for meditations on learning classics. In Willans and Searle’s Down with Skool, Benjamin Kennedy is drawn by Searle as a game hunter, leading those exotic beasts the gerund and gerundive into captivity. The bars of their cages mirror the rigid lines of the tabulated pages of the primer, images of order and control. Several decades later, the poet Carol Rumens wrote ‘‘A Latin primer: for Kelsey’’ for her daughter, who was about to start learning Latin (Rumens 1987: 36). The course being used was the Cambridge Latin Course, set in a vividly recalled Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius. Rumens begins by announcing
Today, a new slave,
You must fetch and carry, obeying
Plump nouns, obstreperous verbs
Whose endings vacillate
Like the moods of tyrants
But ends by hoping that her daughter will walk ‘‘the bright streets of grammar / where poets lark and sigh.’’ If the first lines recall the exotic beasts imagined by Searle, the last lines hint at the world of Roman civilization to which Latin gives access, and the nuances of human experience (larking, sighing) that the pupil may one day be able to understand. Here Rumens had in mind the similarity of the primer’s tabulations to the grid pattern of Roman towns: the reality of the pedagogic tool, and that of the historical reality to be recalled.
World History
