The foundations for the extraordinary literary productivity of Vandal Africa were laid by the educational system within the kingdom. Education continued to mean a great deal in Vandal North Africa. In the 470s or 480s, the polymath Martianus Capella composed a long allegorical treatise on the seven liberal arts entitled On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury.41 In one particularly memorable passage, Martianus illustrates the power of learning through the personification of Philology herself:
The girl strained hard and with great effort retched up the weight that she was carrying in her breast. Then that nausea and forced vomit turned into a stream of literature of all sorts. One could see what books and great manuscripts and the works of how many languages flowed from the mouth of the maiden. There were some made of papyrus which had been smeared with cedar oil, other volumes were woven of rolls of parchment, and a very few were written on Linden bark. . . . But while the girl was bringing up such matter in spasms, several young women, of whom some were called the Arts, and others the Disciplines, were straightaway collecting whatever the maiden brought forth from her mouth, each one of them taking material for her own essential use and her particular skill.42
This repulsively compelling episode reveals Martianus’ conviction that learning should not just be stored away as an anonymous dead weight, but should be transmitted through scholarship, instruction and publication.43
Indeed, the whole of Martianus’ long project could be read in these terms. The Marriage of Philology and Mercury provides an entertaining and compelling overview of the seven traditional subjects of the classical curriculum, namely the three principal disciplines of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric (the trivium), and the four supplementary subjects of geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and music (the quadrivium). If a work as ambitious as this could be written in Vandal Africa, clearly education remained a prized asset. Martianus clearly knew his stuff, was capable of presenting it in a compelling manner, and evidently expected to write for an audience with tastes similar to his own.
A good education had long been essential for any member of the Roman provincial elite of the western empire if they desired a career in either the civil service or the law.44 At the most basic level tuition was undertaken by a grammaticus who taught his young charges correct Latin usage and familiarized them with a number of key works of literature of which by far the most important were those of Vergil. As well as Latin, students would also gain some familiarity with Greek language and literature although the extent of their proficiency in the language in Late Antique North Africa is open to question.45 Later these young men would come under the guidance of a rhetor who would instruct them in the art of public speaking which involved studying text books and set exercises.
The institutionalization of North African Christianity during the fourth century saw this curriculum change, but did not remove the pagan classics from the schoolroom. Prominent churchmen like Augustine certainly regarded the old canon with mixed feelings, and reflected upon the power that the grammaticus wielded over impressionable young minds. There was Vergil:
Who is read by small boys precisely so that when their minds are steeped in this great and most famous and best of all poets, he may not easily be abolished into forgetfulness; as Horace says 'new vessels long retain the taste of what they first contained’.46
Even the more mechanistic arts of rhetoric and grammar were considered by some Christian authors to be potentially dangerous because of their ethical and philosophical underpinnings. They were means through which young Romans learned how to obey the laws of civilized life.47 Indeed, many of the rhetorical exercises with which schoolboys were presented contained difficult moral problems which they were expected to explore comprehensively.48 Quodvultdeus discusses this ambivalence in his sermon On Barbarian Times in which he implies that the lessons of the schoolroom had left a generation ill-prepared for the brutal realities of contemporary life:
But if even the lessons that you recited by rote in the schools, and that to this day you have heard your children reciting, cannot recall you from your vainglory and ungodliness, then may the present age teach you a lesson.49
Yet it was precisely this training in rhetoric and dialectic which had provided the Christian Church with its firmest intellectual foundations, and nowhere was this debt more apparent than in North Africa. Augustine himself, who was by then bishop of Hippo, had been the recipient of a first class education at Thagaste and had previously served as the chief rhetor in Milan.50
The Vandal occupation of North Africa left the educational infrastructure of the region relatively unscathed. There were certainly some educated individuals among the exiles who fled from Carthage in 439, and some schoolboys may have found their lessons interrupted by the barbarian invasion, but they were ushered back into the classroom soon enough.51 Indeed, the pupils of this generation were soon joined by some unfamiliar faces. The poet Dracontius was educated during the early years of the Vandal kingdom, and he was later to recall Roman and ‘barbarian’ youths rubbing shoulders in the lecture theatre of his teacher, Felicianus.52 We know from Victor of Vita that at least one member of the Hasding family was sufficiently well-educated to earn the respect of the historian, and such a background may not have been unusual.53 Other evidence for continuity in education seems conclusive. Luxorius dedicated a collection of his poems to his own teacher Faustus, and included an angry grammaticus among the subjects of his epigrams.54 Another anonymous verse gently mocks an elementary school teacher (magister ludi) who was unable to keep order amongst his students. Although we may doubt whether some of these teachers were anything more than the conceits of playful poets, the literary training that lay behind these compositions was not imagined. Rightly could the poet Florentinus celebrate the Vandal city as ’Carthage adorned with schools and teachers’.55
Fulgentius ‘the Mythographer’, who was probably educated during the last years of the Vandal kingdom, not only reminisced about the state of his swollen hands after the beatings meted out by his teacher, he also presented Vergil as a rather grumpy grammaticus wearily trying to teach a school student in a short study of the great poet’s work.56 Fulgentius’ cheeky plea that Vergil, still the mainstay of the school curriculum during this period, only teach ‘the slight things that schoolmasters expound, for monthly fees, to boyish ears’, would surely have brought a smile to the lips of his readership who would have endured a similar pedagogic regime.57 Moreover, Fulgentius was clearly anxious to prove that he was the beneficiary of a good education in other more subtle ways. He peppered his work with scholastic Latin and little vignettes in Greek, which added little to the general argument but rather acted as a reminder to his readership that they were in the presence of a well-schooled author.58 All of the writers of the period were writing for an audience who must have been expected to pick up on these clever rhetorical tricks and learned allusions which suggests that the standard of education, at least amongst the elite, was still high. Indeed one gets the impression of a rather self-contained world where members of the literati read each other’s work and dedicated books to one another.59
In many cases, the poets themselves may well have been grammatici when they were not composing their verses.60 The majority of Vandal-era poets collected in the Latin Anthology were representatives of the educated Romano-African elite. Superscriptions on the manuscript inform us that Luxorius was a vir clarissimus et spectabilis, a rank which had traditionally been reserved for the highest senatorial class within the empire, and two other poets are described as viri clarissimi. By the fourth century ad, these titles were commonly used by members of the North African municipal elite, and increasingly marked educational achievement, as well as social standing.61 A law of 425 preserved in the Theodosian Code states that grammatici who had taught with distinction for 20 years service in a noted school could be rewarded with similar promotion.62 A number of the Latin Anthology poets might have received their titles in this way.
For others, social standing could be taken for granted, but education could still be an important mark of status. Fulgentius of Ruspe was born into the upper echelons of African society, but nevertheless benefited from a first-class education. According to the Life of the saint, Fulgentius was initially educated at home, because his mother wished him to have a firm grounding in Greek, which could no longer be provided by the public schools. Nevertheless, Fulgentius too went on to study under a grammaticus, and Ferrandus’ account implies that this was perfectly normal among the African aristocracy.63
Outside the urban elite, the importance of education is rather less clear. The Bir Trouch ostraka and the Albertini Tablets clearly indicate that a documentary culture was very much alive within Vandal North
Africa at the end of the fifth century and was probably widespread. Internal evidence within the Albertini Tablets themselves, moreover, suggests that a significant minority (over 15%) of the community at the remote farming community at Tuletianos in Byzacena had at least basic literacy. Moreover at least nine scribes are attested on the sales documents and two parties who identify themselves as magistri might well have been the local school masters.64 If comparable patterns may be assumed from elsewhere in the Vandal kingdom, the image of educational continuity seems impressive.
Some suggestion of the nature of education in this period is provided by the work of Pompeius, the author of a commentary on the fourth-century grammarian Donatus. Although much of his treatise was clearly plagiarized and peppered with embarrassing howlers, it highlights just how important a Classical education still was for the elites in North Africa in the late fifth and early sixth century ad.65 As well as holding forth on numerous points of grammar, Pompeius stands as a convincing example of a society where exuberant rhetorical style was still highly prized even when used in rather dry discussions of points of grammar:
Don’t let anyone tell you, ' If we sometimes use an adverb as a noun, we are also obliged to decline the adverb itself.’ Impossible! For when a nomen is put in place of an adverb, it maintains its cases; but when an adverb passes into place of a nomen, there’s no way that it can take on a
66
Case.
In fact it appears that Pompeius’ targeted readership were not schoolboys but those that taught them. Pompeius clearly saw himself as the school masters’ school master. Texts like this may imply that education was not what it had once been in the golden age of Roman Africa, but it clearly remained an important social reality for many. Thus many of the examples that he gave were clearly intended to resonate with his pedagogic audience, and included images such as teachers scuttling off across the town square to their classes, choosing which texts to lecture on and conducting question and answer sessions with pupils.67
Again, Dracontius and the poets of the Latin Anthology suggest how wide-ranging the African curriculum is likely to have been. As well as containing a number of poems that can definitely be attributed to Vandal North Africa, the Latin Anthology also includes a number of anonymous works and others by poets such as Vergil, Propertius, Ovid, Petronius, Seneca and Martial.68 These were all names which would have been familiar to Dracontius, and his various works allude to earlier profane
Latin writers, particularly Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, Statius, Juvenal and Claudian, as well as Christian writers such as Prudentius, Paulinus of Nola, Augustine, Tertullian and Ambrose.69 In his long De Laudibus Dei Dracontius self-consciously borrowed a number of expressions from Vergil’s Georgies and Aeneid as well as Ovid’s Metamorphosis. In the Satisfactio, in which the poet implored Gunthamund to release him from prison, it was Ovid’s Tristia, the series of poems written begging the emperor Augustus to recall him from his Black Sea exile, that provided much of the frame of reference.70 Moreover Dracontius’ version of the story of Orestes had clearly been based on the original Greek tragedy rather than excerpts or summaries, suggesting that his command of that language must have been good.71 Further evidence of the continuing strength of the rhetorical schools can be seen in his use of controversia (set exercises based on seemingly intractable problems) in a number of his poems.72
Continuity within the educational system of North Africa is also demonstrated by the surprising efflorescence of professional training throughout this period. Late Roman North Africa was particularly well-endowed with medical writers, for example, and this tradition continued under the Vandals. The venerable Vindicianus was known to the young Augustine in the 370s or early 380s and was also the tutor of Theodorus Priscianus, author of the influential Latin Euporista in the early years of the fifth century.73 This tradition was continued in the work of Caelius Aurelianus and later Cassius Felix who wrote under the Vandal Kings.74 The latter’s extant work De Medicina (On Medicine) was written in ad 447 as a working medical text on the different diseases of the body and their cures. Cassius was probably born in Cirta (Constantine), although his work was probably composed in Carthage: at the start of the text, Cassius defines the human head as the ‘capital city’ (summa civitas) of the body.75 Volumes such as these were the mainstay of medical education in this period. A poem of the Latin Anthology mocks a mixer of medicines who spent more time in the brothel than at his books; another jokes about the instruction of students in Hippocratic practice (through a laboured pun on hippos = horse), and a third makes fun of an impotent doctor.76
Lawyers, too, remained perennial figures of fun within the Vandal kingdom. Included among the most scurrilous verses of the Anthology are two poems concerning Filager, a lawyer from Vita who enjoyed tender intercourse with his own horse, others concerning an advocate who was mocked for his effeminacy and a third who had a concubine with the pet-name ‘Charity’.77 That the African legal system survived well enough to be generating its own ‘lawyer’ jokes into the sixth century should not be surprising. It was certainly fully operational at the time of the Vandal conquest, and was probably in better shape than virtually anywhere else in the western empire. In the 420s and 430s, when the compilers of Theodosius II’s great legal code set about piecing together the legislation of the previous century and a half, they relied particularly on the rich archives of the North African cities.78 Some of these lawyers did not remain long in Africa: many fled the region at the time of the Vandal invasion and one of Valentinian’s edicts relates to their future property rights.79 But others stayed, and legal professionals proved to be a resilient group.
Evidently, the educational system of Vandal Africa remained in a relatively healthy state, at least in the larger cities, and probably remained so down to the Byzantine occupation. At the time of the reconquest, Justinian insisted in his legislation that Carthage should be provided with two rhetors and two grammarians at the public expense.80 Evidently, these new teachers were not intended to reintroduce formal education to a region which had forgotten the practices of the schoolroom. Justinian, it would seem, was offering his official support to an unusually healthy feature of North African society.
World History
