Greece Meets Rome: Resistance

In 161 BCE, in the consulship of Gaius Fannius Strabo and Marcus Valerius Messalla, the praetor Marcus Pomponius sought the advice of the senate on the matter of

Greek philosophers and rhetoricians at that time present in Rome. Discussion was held - we sadly have no details regarding the length, heatedness, or content of such - and at the end of the proceedings Pomponius was charged with arranging and providing for their expulsion from the city (animadverteret curaretque... uti Romae ne essent, Suet. Rhet. 25.2). It is an expulsion that is unlikely to have been fully successful (cf. Kaster 1995: 272).

Some sixty years later, in 92, a second edict - of which Suetonius is again the source and which would appear to survive verbatim - was passed. As this latter edict will play an important role in subsequent chapters in this volume it is worth looking at in full:

Renuntiatum est nobis esse homines qui novum genus disciplinae instituerunt, ad quos iuventus in ludum conveniat; eos sibi nomen imposuisse Latinos rhetoras, ibi homines adulescentulos dies totos desidere. maiores nostri quae liberos suos discere et quos in ludos itare vellent instituerunt: haec nova, quae praeter consuetudinem ac morem maiorum fiunt, neque placent neque recta videntur. quapropter et iis qui eos ludos habent et iis qui eo venire consuerunt visum est faciundum ut ostenderemus nostram sententiam: nobis non placere. (Suetonius, De Rhetoribus 25.2)

We have been informed that there are men who have established a new sort of learning and whom the youth visit in their school; that these fellows call themselves ‘‘Latin rhetoricians,’’ and men of an impressionable age while away whole days there. Our forefathers established what they wished their children to learn, and what schools they wished them to frequent: this new knowledge, which accords neither with our practice nor that of our forefathers, is neither pleasing nor seemly. We have therefore deemed to make our judgment known both to those who oversee these schools and to those who are wont to attend them: we do not approve.

McNelis provides a detailed examination of the role and status of Greek grammarians and rhetoricians in Rome, focusing especially on the period of the early empire (see chapter 21). McNelis starts with a brief discussion of the edict of 92, and then moves to a detailed discussion of the gradual, but significant, upward shift in status of professional grammar and rhetoric in the first centuries bce and ce. What emerges from his discussion is precisely that as much as censors of 92 might not have ‘‘approved’’ of the formal schools of Latin rhetoric operating in Rome at the beginning of that century, the presence of professional rhetoricians and their schools, far from ceasing or declining in popularity, continued to gain in popularity and favor. In this section, then, and in order to lay the foundation for why the strong censure in 92 was replaced by a state-sponsored position for Latin rhetoric under Vespasian, it will be useful to consider the edict, and the concerns that may have produced it, in broad conceptual terms.

Although the edicts of 161 and 92 appear almost back-to-back in Suetonius, and although they appear to form for him, as much as they might for us, a kind of parallel expression of early disapproval of rhetoric as a whole, these measures differ from each other on two important grounds. First, the edict of 161 directs itself at the philosophi and rhetores of Greek origin (as the titles must indicate) at Rome at the time; the edict of 92, however, directs itself at a class of decidedly ‘‘Latin rhetoricians’’ and its somewhat impressionable but obviously Roman students. Secondly, whereas the earlier edict seeks the expulsion of Greek intellectuals who, we are invited to imagine, were practicing their trade in some way that did not include the formal establishment of schools (a kind of private instruction on a patronage model is likely), the edict of 92 seeks not to expel the professionals of the first century, or even to close their schools, but only to express deep censure of the practice in which they were engaged.

Although the first edict addresses an early stage in the reception of, and formal resistance to, the presence of Greek philosophers and rhetoricians at Rome, the measure as we have it (the form must be abbreviated) tells us little or nothing of any real level of hostility felt toward Greek intellectuals as a whole (cf. Kaster 1995: 272). Indeed, if anything, the measure would speak to the wild popularity of these individuals and their disciplines (Gruen 1990: 171-5). The second edict, by contrast, represents a significantly later stage in the incorporation of a Greek-influenced style of formal rhetorical teaching to Rome - although it is likely that professors were teaching rhetoric in Latin before the late 90s, Cicero indicates that formal schools were established only in 93 (cf. De Or. 3.93) - and so can give us something more to go on in our effort to get at the early resistance to a practice that would later gain universal, or at least imperial, approval. This edict too, far from indicating a corporate resistance against the teaching of rhetoric in Latin, points rather to an overarching (and likely already increasing) popularity and acceptance of the ludi (‘‘schools’’). And as it sought neither to check the spread of such schools nor to shut them down, we must imagine that both the schools and the practitioners of this ‘‘new’’ style of rhetoric continued to enjoy broad success - fully in spite of an edict that would wish it were otherwise.

And what a strange edict it is. It does not seek to expel, or disperse, or in any way punish these teachers or stop them from doing what it is they do. All it does, and indeed all it seems to be content to do, is to express the deepest moral censure of a somewhat unspecified sort of behavior (that of the Latini rhetores) that has appeared incommensurate with a similarly unspecified set of customs and expectations (those of the censors, and of the maiores, ‘‘forefathers’’). Various suggestions have been made concerning what lay at the foundation of the censors’ censure, among them that the rhetorical ludi may have undermined the techniques of the tirocinium fori (the traditional and intergenerational apprenticeship in oratory) and that by the time of the second edict Greek rhetoric had become so deeply entrenched in Roman educational practice that a new class of Latin rhetoricians may have been seen as a dilution of the prototype (Schmidt 1975: 207; Gruen 1992: 187-91; both cited at Kaster 1995: 274). Each of these suggestions carries merit and indeed, as Kaster notes, they are not mutually exclusive.

But much of what underlies the ideological and political force of this rather curious measure is to be located not so much in what it seeks to do - in practical terms, it seeks to do relatively little - but rather in the peculiarly pointed language with which it seeks to do it. For in its relatively short form, and with remarkably few words, the edict sets up a powerful two-part binary through which the underlying tension of the piece - a tension centered, as we will see, around the issues of both ‘‘professionalization’’ of speech and ‘‘textualization’’ of learning - comes to light in the somewhat repetitive use of language of newness versus tradition, and of youth versus maturity. First, the edict emphasizes novum genus disciplinae (‘‘the new sort of learning’’) that has been started by these teachers; the targets of this learning are variously called iuventus (‘‘the youth’’) and, with a peculiar diminutive phrase that marks them out as particularly susceptible, homines adulescentulos (‘‘men of an impressionable age’’). In opposition to the ‘‘new sort’’ of school established ( instituerunt) by the rhetoricians, we learn of the schools and educational models established (instituerunt) for their own liberos (‘‘children’’) by the maiores. Finally, we learn that haec nova (‘‘these new models’’) run headlong into both the traditions of the present and the standards of the past (consuetudi-nem ac morem maiorum), and so lest a new ‘‘tradition’’ arise (consuerunt is a clear echo of the earlier consuetudinem), the censors wish to make themselves clear: we do not approve.

But aside from the vaguely Aristophanic sentiment that ‘‘new learning is bad,’’ what are we to make of this somewhat trite opposition between the new and the old, the impressionable youth and the thoughtful forefathers? It is clear that the edict is crafted in response to the perceived inversion of an established model. But what is this model? Surely it is not that of rhetorical instruction. As the edict of 161 would suggest, private instruction in both philosophy and rhetoric had long been gaining popularity in Rome and the practice surely continued on past 92. But whereas the sort of instruction alluded to in the earlier edict would have been constructed on a model of patronage, in which the Greek intellectual would have served as socially inferior and definitively non ‘‘professional’’ client of the family to which he was attached, the instructional model on which the latter edict focuses raises the status of the teachers to that of professional, unconstrained by the expectations and boundaries implicit in a system of intellectual patronage. Similarly, the focus of this edict cannot be primarily that of instruction in Latin rhetoric per se. If Cicero can be taken as any kind of reliable witness, the instructional handbooks in Latin rhetoric, composed individually and circulated privately, had an established place in the Roman intellectual sphere for many years prior (cf., e. g., De Or. 1.94, 1.206, 1.208, 3.189).

But if the resistance expressed in the edict of 92 is neither instruction in rhetoric in general nor instruction in Latin rhetoric in particular, what can it be? We know that the establishment of these schools changed the status of the instructor from family-linked client to independent, and potentially quite powerful, professional (Suet. Gram. 3). We must also suspect that, since the Hellenistic professionalization of rhetoric was a direct result of the newly textual emphasis of that age, it is likely that these schools in Greek-based ‘‘Latin’’ rhetoric raised the study and production of rhetorical handbooks, as well as the publication of declamations, to a new level of cultural acceptability ( Gram. 4). This is not to say that earlier educational models were in any way aliterate; but rather earlier models of political education, including that of tirocinium fori, would have focused on practice rather than theory, and on action rather than study. Indeed, a closer look at the language of the edict would suggest that it directly points to this newly ‘‘textual’’ and theoretical focus of rhetorical training. For the observation that ‘‘men of an impressionable age while away whole days’’ at these ludi is heavily suggestive of a republican idiom in which otium (‘‘leisure’’) - alluded to here, as elsewhere, by the pejorative desidere (‘‘while away’’) - is a category of time devoted to the suspiciously apolitical reading and production of texts rather than the more politically acceptable work, the negotium, of the Forum and senate house (on otium as a literary category, cf. Cic. De Or. 1.2, Off. 2.4, 3.1-4, Tusc. 1.6; Brut. 8 contrasted specifically with desidia; Cat. 10 contrasted with the work of the Forum). The problem is not with what the young are learning; it is with how.

The sentiment is remarkably reminiscent of what Cato the Censor (234-149 bce; see chapter 5), a man who in 155 expressed worry over the effect Greek lecturers would have on Roman youth, is reported to have written to his son on the topic of the introduction and practice of Greek doctors in Rome:

Quandoque ista gens suas litteras dabit, omnia conrumpet, tum etiam magis, si medicos suos hoc mittet. iurarunt inter se barbaros necare omnes medicina, sed hoc ipsum mercede faciunt... (Pliny, Naturalis Historia 29.14)

Whenever that tribe will extend its literature, it will destroy everything - and all the more if it sends forth its doctors. They swear among themselves to slaughter all barbarians with their treatment, and they make money off it. . .

Cato ends his admonition by forbidding his son to have anything whatever to do with these new professionals ( interdixi tibi de medicis). But Pliny responds with the acutely practical observation that medicine itself is a useful tool and that indeed it was not the practice of medicine to which Cato and others had objected but rather its ‘‘professionalization’’ - not the mere fact that it existed, but the fact that it was a source of financial profit: non rem antiqui damnabant, sed artem, maxime vero quaestum esse manipretio vitae recusabant (‘‘it was not the medicine that our ancestors condemned, but the medical profession, for the most part because they opposed the making of profit from payment for their lives,’’ Plin. HN29.16); this changed the traditional Roman model of intrafamily medicine into one in which the care of the body was entrusted to external specialists.

Cato’s resistance to Greek doctors and the censors’ resistance to formal schools of Latin rhetoric are not, of course, parallel phenomena. And yet each arises in response to the expansion of the distinctly theoretical, and in Cato’s case, explicitly literary, professionalism of Hellenistic learning, and each expresses resistance toward a trend that threatened, in its Greek professionalization (Pliny’s ars) of Roman practice (Pliny’s res), established ideals of upper-class amateurism. Whereas Cato’s concern was the body, the censors’ was the mind.

In the years of the late republic, it is reasonable to suppose, there must have been a wide range of attitudes, from enthusiasm to resistance, toward Greek and Greek-influenced learning in all its variations (so Wisse 2002a: 335). The edict of 92 bce is an especially valuable piece of evidence for this range in its suggestion that the establishment of these schools and the popularity they had achieved challenged the Roman intellectual and educational status quo in two important ways. First, these schools changed the status of rhetorical instructors in a way that destabilized traditional expectations of social hierarchy. Secondly, they threatened to shift the focus of rhetorical education from the stuff of rigorous apprenticeship and one-on-one tutoring to that of idle hours spent in literary and theoretical musing at the hands of paid professionals. These challenges to novelty and authority, to enthusiasm and resistance, were met, as the remaining chapters in this volume discuss, in a variety of ways. A good place to start, however, is with the literary and intellectual acculturation initiated by Cicero in the mid 50s bce, as he turned perforce from the practical work of the Forum to the more theoretical and definitively literary work of the written treatise.