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Around the end of the first century AD, a marble tombstone was set up just outside Rome.
The relief at its center, flanked by neat lines of Greek verse, showed a boy crowned
with laurel, a scroll in his left hand.
The epitaph commemorated Quintus Sulpicius Maximus, who had lived eleven years, five
months, and twelve days.
Quintus had been a budding poet, performing with distinction in a famous competition for
Greek verse.
He had perished, the inscription claimed, from studying too hard.
Quintus was far from alone in his dedication to his studies.
To mention only Roman emperors, Augustus wrote a tragedy, Claudius composed histories, and
Hadrian fancied himself a poet.
A Greek philosopher whose city had been sacked proclaimed that he had lost nothing, for he
retained his learning.
Even the spirits of the blessed in the Elysian Fields were said to while away eternity discussing
poetry and philosophy.
Educational opportunity in the classical world mapped neatly onto social status.
The rich were more likely to be educated than the poor, boys were more likely to be educated
than girls, and free children were more likely to be educated than slaves.
In most periods and places, literacy – the most fundamental skill provided by a classical
education – appears to have been restricted to about 10% of the population.
The restricted reach of education was reflected in an almost total lack of publicly-funded
schools.
Wealthy private benefactors sometimes established free academies, and many late Roman cities
appear to have maintained at least a few teachers from municipal funds.
But in general, and almost everywhere above the primary level, education was organized
privately.
Dedicated school buildings were correspondingly rare.
Most teachers taught under porticoes or in some other convenient public place, presiding
in a tall armchair over a circle of students on wooden stools.
Blackboards began to appear in the Roman imperial era, along with busts of famous authors and
even wall maps.
Especially at the primary level, teachers were poorly paid, sometimes to the point of
having to take second jobs to make ends meet.
They were equally starved for prestige: a Greek proverb for someone who had fallen on
hard times was “he’s either dead or teaching.”
In keeping with the job’s low status, there was no qualifying process.
Although employers might request a demonstration of their skills, most teachers were simply
hired on the assumption that they possessed the requisite knowledge.
This was not always the case: one Roman author mentions a grammar school teacher who refused
to believe that sheep could have more than two teeth.
Classes began soon after first light.
Part of the morning might be given to exercise.
Otherwise, lessons continued – with a break for lunch – until mid-afternoon.
Discipline was harsh; and especially in Greek schools, where students were liberated only
during religious festivals, holidays were few and far between.
Roman students, by contrast, had every eighth day off, and enjoyed a summer vacation.
Although aristocratic families had hired tutors to introduce their sons to the poets, the
lyre, and the sports of the gymnasium as early as the Greek Archaic period, the standardized
curriculum that would dominate the Mediterranean world through the end of antiquity only emerged
during the Hellenistic period.
The primary stage of that curriculum, begun when children were six or seven, taught the
basic skills of reading and writing.
Learning to read began, of course, with the alphabet, which was learned literally backwards
and forwards.
Then came syllables: every conceivable two-, three-, and four-letter pairing of consonant
and vowel.
Next, words, starting with monosyllables and working up to pentasyllabic tongue twisters.
Then, and only then, were children introduced to texts, usually short passages that they
were expected to memorize and recite.
Students learned to write using a wax tablet and stylus or reed pen.
As with reading, the process was maddeningly deliberate: a child first learned to trace
letters, then syllables, then words, and finally sentences.
Egyptian papyri preserve some of the passages students had to copy, which ranged from sober
admonitions to dirty jokes.
In some Roman schools, the agony of learning to read and write was doubled by repeating
the process in both Latin and Greek.
Although the children of wealthy families, raised by Greek nannies, might learn to speak
and read Greek before their native Latin, children from less privileged backgrounds
had to start their Greek in elementary school, where they were taught from bilingual manuals.
Saint Augustine remembered the method as both painful and ineffective.
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Back to school.
Arithmetic at the primary level seems to have consisted of little more than teaching students
to read and write the names of the numbers, though some Roman schools also covered the
rudiments of adding and dividing fractions.
A more substantial introduction to arithmetic operations and Euclidian geometry would come,
if at all, at the school of the grammarian.
Only a small fraction – perhaps 5% – of the students who learned to read and write
moved on to the school of the grammarian, the secondary stage of a classical education.
The grammarian’s task was to teach the works of the poets.
In the Greek world, the curriculum was dominated by the Homeric epics, complemented by tragedies
of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; comedies by Aristophanes and Menander; and selections
from the lyric poets.
In place of Homer, Roman students read Virgil, alongside the comedies of Terence, selections
from Horace and Ovid, and – in some cases – such prose authors as Sallust and Cicero.
After students had read a given text, the grammarian began the exhaustive and exhausting
process of explicating it.
Proceeding line by line, he pontificated on each obscure word, every eccentricity of morphology,
and any other pedantic picayune that occurred to him.
These disquisitions alternated with lectures on the moral content of the poems.
Homer, in particular, was regarded as the font of all wisdom and virtue, and misinterpreted
accordingly.
The poets were also used to introduce the formal study of grammar, which began with
letters and syllables and proceeded relentlessly through all the categories, classifications,
and conjugations of the parts of speech.
The composition of short literary summaries – sometimes repeated, so that every noun
could be declined into a different case – brought the benumbed pupils to the end of their grammatical
careers, and carried a select few to the threshold of the rhetorical school, the sum and summit
of ancient education.
The rhetor – the doctor of eloquence – was a more exalted being than a mere grammarian.
The more distinguished practitioners were wealthy men, able to buy second homes in Athens,
order papyrus directly from Egypt, and build artificial islands at their seaside estates.
Their egos matched their affluence.
One of the most famous, Polemon of Smyrna, traveled in a silver-trimmed carriage accompanied
by a baggage train and packs of hunting dogs, and was said to regard only emperors and gods
as his equals.
As might be expected from an educational system that never failed to start with first principles,
students began their rhetorical training by memorizing definitions.
Each type of oration was associated with an elaborate sequence of divisions, subdivisions,
sections, and tropes, all of which had to be mastered before a budding orator could
begin to study the exemplars of Greek and Roman rhetoric.
Isocrates, the founding father of rhetorical education, had proclaimed the power of the
spoken word to generations of Athenian youths.
His works, the works of his students, and the orations of the great Demosthenes became
the foundation of the rhetorical curriculum for the rest of antiquity, complemented – in
Roman schools – by the towering figure of Cicero.
Once they had internalized these models, students moved on to the most important stage of their
training: the rhetorical exercises known as declamations.
There were two types, which the Romans called suasoriae and controversiae.
Suasoriae were faux-political speeches, intended to persuade a fictional or historical audience
to adopt a given course of action.
A student might entreat Agamemnon to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia, beg Alexander to march
onward to the world’s end, or ponder – in the persona of Cicero – whether he should
beg Mark Antony to spare his life.
Although controversiae were based formally on courtroom speeches, they dealt with imaginary
scenarios that tended to lack even a tenuous grounding in reality.
In a characteristic example, a priestess accused of violating her vows is sentenced to be flung
from a cliff.
As she topples over the fatal precipice, she calls upon the goddess Vesta.
Miraculously, she survives the fall.
Should she be flung from the cliff a second time?
The orator had to argue for or against.
Training in the rhetorical school seems to have usually lasted four or five years.
Since the most eminent teachers congregated in a few cultural centers, their schools became
the ancient equivalent of universities.
Despite their small size and informal organization, they had something of the modern collegiate
atmosphere, complete with lecture halls and tenured professors.
We read about students getting rowdy at the races, pulling pranks on their teachers, hazing
freshmen, and throwing wild parties.
After or instead of studying with a rhetor, a student who wanted to become a doctor might
attend medical school.
Although this entailed reading the treatises of Hippocrates and other authors, the training
consisted primarily of following experienced physicians as they attended patients.
The great Roman doctor Galen spent 11 years in his medical training, which took him from
the healing sanctuary of his native Pergamum to the famous school at Alexandria.
Traditionally, legal training had consisted of little more than an apprenticeship, during
which a young man attached himself to an eminent lawyer and learned by listening to him as
he met with clients and argued cases.
During the Roman imperial era, however, instruction became more formal, with law schools emerging
at Rome, Beirut, and (eventually) Constantinople.
At the Beirut law school, students spent four or five years working through the curriculum,
which began with the Institutes of Gaius and culminated in intensive study of the imperial
edicts.
Instruction in philosophy was never so systematic.
Most schools consisted of a small group of thinkers, unified by fierce devotion to a
master’s teachings.
Although students were expected to read a set of canonical texts, the essence of philosophical
training was discussion.
Teaching proceeded by conversation and debate, alternating with lectures on points of doctrine.
A classical education, philosophical or otherwise, struck some early Christian thinkers as superfluous
or immoral.
“What” thundered Tertullian “does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?”
This came, however, to be a minority view.
St. Basil of Caesarea composed a treatise explaining that young Christians should read
the Greek classics, since these texts prepared the mind to engage more deeply with Scripture.
And so, as the Roman Empire became Christian, its educational system continued to be firmly
rooted in the classical tradition.
Although the collapse of the imperial order in Western Europe would leave monasteries
as almost the sole repositories of learning, the traditional curriculum persisted in the
Eastern Roman Empire until the fall of Constantinople.
And by then, thanks to the scholars of the Italian Renaissance, the great authors of
Greece and Rome were being studied in Western Europe, and beginning to serve again, as they
had for so many centuries, as the basis of a classical education.
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