PART II PAGAN EDUCATION

A. THE GENERAL PROSPERITY OF THE SCHOOLS IN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH CENTURIES

‘Gaul’, says Norden in his monumental work,[236] ‘was destined to be, in a higher measure than the actual mother-country, Italy, the support of the ancient culture during the time of the Roman Empire and throughout the Middle Ages. Flooded with barbarians, sown with cloisters, she held aloft the banner of the traditional education to the glory of herself and the service of mankind.’

This is true more particularly of the fourth and fifth centuries. For the impulse given to education at the end of the third century continued to gather momentum during the fourth. It was a time of peace and quiet in contrast to the preceding and the succeeding centuries.[237] For more than a hundred years Aquitaine enjoyed respite from barbarian invasions. We catch a note of this restfulness in the pages of Ausonius. ‘I kept clear of party-strife and conspiracies: unmarred by them was the sincerity of my friendships’, is the happy testimony which he puts into his father’s mouth,[238] and the phrase ‘otium magis foventes quam studentes gloriae’[239] reflects the placid life of a Bordeaux professor. Gaul had been reorganized by Maximian and Constantine, and this period of peace gave splendid opportunities for the development of the imperial policy and the latinization of Gaul. The Emperors consistently supported the schools and encouraged literature, which gained such strength that it overcame even the barbarians. The Visigoths accepted its influence and attended its schools. Jullian goes so far as to say that it was only in the fourth century that the victory of Latin letters in Gaul was complete.[240]

Mamertinus, in his Gratiarum Actio to Julian, contrasts his own time (A.D. 362) with that of the Republic, of which he says ‘nullum iam erat bonarum artium studium’. Military labours and the study of law were despised, in spite of the fact that there were men like Manlius and Scaevola. Moreover, ‘the study of oratory was despised by the big men of the time as being too laborious and unpractical a matter’.[241] But now, under Julian, all this is different and the age of gold has returned.

The orator is working up to a rhetorical climax, and the first part of his picture is consequently grossly warped and exaggerated. But the central fact of the advancement of studies is clear and incontestable. Were it not true the rhetorician would not have dared to use such language to a man like Julian.

Moreover, it was the age of the ‘ecclesia triumphans’, and this meant fresh ideals and the access of energy (not always wisely spent) that comes from such inspiration. In the fourth century, and more particularly in the fifth, there was an intellectual activity in theological and philosophical subjects which produced a new interest in education and built up the rampart that saved culture from entire barbarization during the darkness of the succeeding centuries. The Church, while it rejoiced in the overthrow of paganism, and with its enmity to paganism often joined a hostility to pagan letters, was nevertheless the instrument of saving the literature and the culture which it opposed. And so, when we hear Jerome’s exultant cry at the triumph of Christianity, we hear also the victory shout of Roman civilization.

‘All the Roman temples’, says Jerome, ‘are covered with soot and cobwebs. They who once were the gods of nations are left in desolation with the owls and night-birds on the house-tops.... Now has even the Egyptian Serapis become Christian ... from India and Persia and Ethiopia we daily receive multitudes of monks; the Armenian has laid aside his quivers, the Huns learn the Psalms, the cold of Scythia is warm with the glow of our Faith.’[242] The Roman nobles, who set the fashion in education, were coming over to the Church in great numbers. ‘Gracchus, an urban prefect, whose name boasts his patrician rank, has received baptism.’[243] Paulinus of Nola, Honoratus of Lérins, Salvian, Eucherius, Sidonius, all leaders of Christianity, were all of noble rank. Even Ausonius professed[244] to be a Christian.

In these circumstances it is not surprising to find many indications of flourishing studies in Gaul during this period. Roman Gaul, enriched by its background of Greek, of Celtic, of Germanic influence, became at length greater than Rome itself. Eumenius is ready to spend his salary on the rebuilding of the Maeniana at Autun.[245] In Ausonius’s family there is much interest in education. His father gives the impression of having been a cultured physician,[246] and his grandfather, Arborius, was a student of astrology.

His aunt Aemilia lived a single life devoted to the study of medicine.[248] Herculanus, his nephew, was a teacher at Bordeaux, though he wandered from the straight path,[249] while the fame of his uncle Arborius, the rhetorician, reached as far as Constantinople.[250] In 398 Claudian could use doctus as a conventional epithet of the citizens of Gaul.[251] It had long been the custom of the Romans to employ Gallic teachers, and it is a striking testimony to the pre-eminence of the schools of Gaul that Symmachus, the crusty old patrician, conservative of the pagan conservatives, should desire to have a Gallic tutor for his son at Rome.[252] He is not ashamed to confess his debt to Gaul. ‘I must confess that I miss the fountain of Gallic eloquence. All my skill (and I know its limitations) I owe to Gaul.’[253] If Rome had retained her former importance as an educational centre, if there had been the least chance of backing her against Gaul, this ardent lover of the Eternal City would certainly have done so. But Gaul at this time was rather like Scotland from Hume to Scott: a junior partner, but with a literary culture of her own that imparted to her a superior excellence.

Turning to Christian writers, we find the same testimony to the prosperity of Gallic studies. Now this prosperity had two aspects. There was the height to which men like Paulinus and Sidonius rose in the attainment of knowledge, and there was the width to which the interest in reading the pamphlets of the Church Fathers extended. But that there was a great and increasing interest in education cannot be denied. Neither conservative haughtiness towards the provinces (as far as it survived) nor the hatred of religious zeal could ignore the fact. More than once Jerome in his Chronicle uses the word florentissime in this connexion,[254] and to Rusticus he writes that he has heard of his education at Rome, ‘post studia Galliarum quae vel florentissima sunt’.[255] Paulinus of Pella and his namesake of Nola, whom Ausonius taught, together with men like Prosper of Aquitaine,[256] leaders in the Christian world, all owed their early training to the flourishing pagan schools of Gaul.

Among the nobility letters were highly prized. Sidonius reminds Syagrius of his descent from a poet to whom letters would certainly have given statues.[257] He admires the learning of the praefectorian Paul, the subtleties he propounds, his elaborate figures, the polish of his verses, the cunning of his fingers.[258] In him he sees ‘studiorum omnium culmen’. At a dinner given on the occasion of the games, the Emperor Severus engaged in a literary conversation with an ex-consul.[259] Even Seronatus aspires to literary culture and talks about ‘Literature among the Goths’.[260] In fact, owing largely to the zeal of Ecdicius, the nobility was now becoming familiar with oratorical and poetical style.[261] Thus, in spite of the invasions, the schools of the fifth century prosper and cultivate all the branches of learning prescribed by the rhetorical tradition.[262]

Three tendencies have been distinguished among the Christian schools of this period[263]: that of Sidonius which is ‘essentially heathen with a veneer of churchmanship’; that of men like Paulinus of Nola, who ‘jealously guards his pupils from contamination by the Gentile classics’; and that of ‘the wiser and more catholic teachers’ such as Hilary of Poitiers and Sulpicius Severus (in his Chronicon), who are liberal enough to imitate and benefit by the older pagan literature.[264]

All these sides of Christian education show an activity which corresponds to that of the pagan schools and outlives it. Sidonius’s letters present an interest in literature which is very often shallow, but never slack. He is continually sending round specimens of his literary efforts to his friends, and is assiduous in writing polished epitaphs[265] or inscriptions that will live on the plate if not in the memory of men.[266] There is one thing that his friends must never neglect, the reading of many books: ‘opus est ut sine dissimulatione lectites, sine fine lecturias’.[267]

Even among the stricter Christians there was generally an interest in learning outside theology. ‘In the East and in the West’, says Montalembert,[268] ‘literary culture, without being by right inseparably attached to the religious profession, became in fact a constant habit and a special distinction of the greater number of monasteries.’ In every monastery there was established, as time went on, a library, a studio for copying manuscripts and a school. The monasteries, in fact, became schools where science and profane learning were taught, as well as theology, and where Latin was studied at the same time with Hebrew and Greek.[269] This teaching was sometimes primitive and defective, and the picture is not so glowing as Montalembert suggests; but there were, at any rate, the beginnings of better things, the interest in education, and the means of protecting a valuable culture. The letters of Jerome to the Gallic women who ask him questions about the scriptures,[270] and his letters to Laeta on the education of her daughter Paula,[271] are indications of a similar activity, no less than Caesarius’s exhortations to reading and study,[272] the Christian pamphlets on difficult points which passed from hand to hand,[273] and Eucherius’s list of answers to the questions of his son Salonius.[274] The pedagogic significance of such works of exposition is apparent.[275]

The tendencies to exclude and to imitate pagan literature sometimes merge into each other in the same writer. It was difficult for the Christian teachers to make up their minds definitely about pagan literature, placed as they were, in a time of extreme partisanship, between the attractiveness of pagan letters and the repulsiveness of pagan faith and practice. But if we are to distinguish a class of moderate men and take Sulpicius Severus as a type (though outside the Chronicon his opposition to pagan literature is aggressively stated[276]) we may maintain that the middle party, too, was interested in culture and not cooled in its ardour by the moderation it displayed. Sulpicius makes Postumianus describe how widely the Life of Martin was read. Taken from Gaul to Rome, it travelled thence to Carthage, Alexandria, Nitria, the Thebaid, Memphis. Even in the middle of the African desert an old man was found reading it.[277] The Church, therefore, had its share in Gaul’s widespread interest in education during this time.[278]

The evidence of the inscriptions is disappointing. With such a general interest in culture we should have expected more frequent references to teachers and their activities. As it is, we find only a few inscriptions, and those in Southern Gaul, that bear on the subject. There is the epitaph of a grammarian at Vienne,[279] and the lament of a woman for her foster-son, whom she had educated, in the same town.[280]

‘(Infel)icissima (qu)ae ... quem vice fili educavit et studiis liberalibus produxit, sed [iniqua stella et genesis mala!] qui se (i.e. vita matura) non est frunitus, nec quod illi destinatum erat; sed quod potuit mulier infelix et sibi viva cum eo posuit et sub ascia dedic(avit).’

At Lyons there has been discovered a reference to the martyrium, the famous Church or Church-school dedicated to Irenaeus. ‘In hoc tomolo requiiscit bone (= bonae) memoriae Domenicus (= Dominicus) innocens qui vixsit in pace annus (= annos) quinqui (= quinque) et in martirio (= martyrio) annus septe(m) obiit quinto decemo Kalendas Mar. indic(tio) decema.’[281] Dominicus studied here for seven years. Boissieu suggests that he may have been one of the ‘caterva scholasticorum’ at the feast of St. Just described by Sidonius.[282]

If Gaul as a whole was so famous for education, it is worth while inquiring which the particular centres of Gallic culture were.

It is evident that Aquitaine was the most distinguished of the provinces. We have seen that Jerome expressly mentions its teachers;[283] and Sulpicius Severus makes the Gaul in his Dialogues apologize for the rusticity which Aquitanians must needs find in his speech.[284] Aquitaine was the focus of Roman culture, the marrow of Gaul, as Salvian calls it.[285] Symmachus mentions a certain Dusarius, a professor of medicine in Aquitaine,[286] and many of Ausonius’s professors taught there: Staphylius at Auch,[287] Tetradius in Angoulême,[288] Anastasius[289] and Rufus[290] at Poitiers, and Arborius at Toulouse, on the border.[291] But the most famous city of Aquitaine, the intellectual capital of Gaul during the fourth century, was Bordeaux. There had been a gradual evolution of schools to the West.[292] Massilia, with the schools of the South-East, which were largely dependent on her influence, was declining, and her power passed to the West, and, in a lesser degree, to the North. Bordeaux had been a great commercial centre[293] in the three previous centuries. It was the point at which goods were transhipped for the river traffic to the Mediterranean.[294] It had a flourishing trade with Spain and Britain, and many visitors came from Germany and the East. This traffic brought riches and the bustle of commerce. Buildings and monuments sprang up. But there comes a change. Towards the middle of the third century, when the emperors were weak and military discipline slack, the Barbarians renewed their attacks. For some twenty years Gaul defended herself; but the imperial protection grew feebler, and in 273 she was abandoned to the invaders. They arrived in Aquitaine in 276 or 277, and Bordeaux shared in the general devastation. The ruin was terrible; though not described by the historians, its traces remain to the present day. ‘L’œuvre de trois siècles disparut en quelques jours.’[295]

From the ruins a new Bordeaux rose. Her previous activities were suspended; her commerce failed. The desire for money was changed into a desire for knowledge, and there was no loss of intensity. Jullian[296] remarks on the frequency of such a transformation among the great cities of history. Carthage, Antioch, Alexandria, Athens, Massilia passed through similar changes. The school was the last phase of their life. And so Bordeaux from being an ‘emporium’ became an ‘auditorium’.

There is no doubt that the school of Bordeaux (about which we naturally know more than about all the rest together) became famous in the fourth century, but when exactly it was founded we cannot tell. There must have been many elementary schools previously, though no trace is left. Funeral monuments show children carrying the rolls of the grammarian’s school; but they may be representations of slave-teachers attached to the household. Probably the school of Bordeaux was founded by Maximian and Constantius at the beginning of the fourth century. For then, particularly, after the failure of imperial protection, it was a necessary part of imperial policy to revive the confidence and goodwill of the Gauls. It may be noted, too, that the professors whom Ausonius commemorates had mostly died during his lifetime; which seems to show that the professorial régime at Bordeaux belonged to the fourth century;[297] for Ausonius in the Preface and the Epilogue to his Commemoratio certainly gives the impression that he is going through the whole list of the ‘professores Burdigalenses’ as a duty (officium[298]) which is inspired by ‘carae relligio patriae’.[299] Thus it was that Aquitaine became ‘le dernier refuge des lettres antiques’.[300]

If Bordeaux was the intellectual, Trèves (and afterwards, Arles) was the political capital of Gaul during this period; and the presence of the emperors in those cities naturally fostered education, for education (as has been pointed out) was part of the imperial programme. As the fourth century went on Trèves eclipsed Autun ‘sedem illam liberalium artium’,[301] which had flourished exceedingly under Eumenius at the beginning of the century, but seems to have declined after his death. The imperial decrees were particularly partial to Trèves. It is as though the emperors felt the need of an intellectual as well as a military outpost on the German frontier. But in spite of every favour and facility, in spite of a brilliant court and fine buildings, this object was never accomplished. Owing to its mixed and fluctuating population and its position on the border, it remained a predominantly military town.[302] Nevertheless its schools were famous, and Ausonius associates it with Roman rhetoric:

It is curious to find that at the beginning of our period, in which we have tried to demonstrate the supremacy of the Gallic schools, there was a tradition that the Gauls were dull and slow of understanding, and that this opinion persists in the writings of Jerome.

The case of the ‘advocatus diaboli’ may be briefly put. Julian, in his satire on the citizens of Antioch, constantly speaks of the boorishness of the Gauls, whom he calls[304] Κελτοί or Γαλάται. To Alypius, the brother of Caesarius, he writes of the barbarous Muse of Gaul (ταῦτά σοι Γαλλικὴ καὶ βάρβαρος Μοῦσα προσπαίζει), and in the Misopogon the Celts (and he is thinking of the Gauls among whom he had lived) are classed with Syrians, Arabs, Thracians, Paeonians, and Mysians—a stock which is utterly lacking in culture—ἄγροικον, αὐστηρόν, ἀδέξιον ... ἂ δὴ πάντα ἐστὶ δείγματα δεινῆς ἀγροικίας.[305] Referring to his residence among the barbarous Celts like a hunter surrounded by wild beasts,[306] he says he is ἀγριώτρος than Cato in proportion as the Celts are more uncivilized than the Romans; and the Antiochean is represented as flinging the taunt into Julian’s face: ταῦτα ἐνόμισας Θρᾳξὶ νομοθετεῖν ... ἤ τοῖς ἀναισθήτοις Γαλάταις.[307]

Now all these references are sarcastic: ‘the boorish Gauls could put up with my eccentricities, but Antioch, forsooth, was too polished and cultured to tolerate them!’ The satire does not deny the barbarism of the Gauls; it merely establishes the vanity of the Antiocheans. But the passages quoted show the ἄγροίκοι is accepted as the current estimation of the Gauls; and even if Julian did not really believe it, obviously there was a body of opinion which did. Nor is it mere ἀγροικία, lack of culture, which may be due to lack of opportunity, that is imputed to them: it is also ἀναισθησία, dullness, with which they are charged. This part of the tradition finds support elsewhere. Martial had called Bordeaux ‘crassa’,[308] and Gallic credulity was proverbial.[309] Jerome says in his commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians[310] that it was no wonder they were so stupid, seeing that their ancestors, the Gauls, had that reputation—‘cum et Hilarius Latinae eloquentiae Rhodanus, Gallus ipse et Pictavis genitus, in Hymnorum carmine Gallos indociles vocet’. The et is significant, and also seems to imply a tradition to the effect that the Gauls were stupid. It is interesting to find that a French scholar and patriot, who has studied the schools of Gaul with care, is inclined to accept Martial’s judgement for the smaller towns.[311]

In estimating the worth of this opinion, we must first of all discount a good deal of what Julian says. His mind was saturated with Hellenic philosophy and Hellas was the passion of his life. Hence he naturally despised Roman culture, and still more the Gauls whom the Romans contemned. The Greek idea of βάρβαροι would be strong in a mind like Julian’s. He did not mingle with the provincials; by the liberality of Eusebia, he says,[312] he was constantly surrounded by Greek books, so that Gaul and Germany became for him a Μουσεῖον Ἑλληνικόν. He would therefore be distinctly prejudiced, and incapable of appreciating the qualities or the culture of the Gallic mind.

Moreover, there is another and an opposite tradition. Caesar distinctly testifies to their exceptional cleverness: ‘est summae genus sollertiae atque ad omnia imitanda atque efficienda, quae a quoque traduntur, aptissimum’,[313] and Diodorus is as clear: ταῖς δὲ διανοίαις ὀξεῖς καὶ πρὸς μάθησιν οὐκ ἀφυεῖς.[314] Clement of Alexandria, in his attempt to show that the Greeks by no means had the monopoly of philosophy, even went so far as to say, with manifest exaggeration, that the Gauls preceded and instructed the Greeks in philosophy,[315] and Claudian, disagreeing at any rate with the charge of dullness, in so far as slowness of spirit is suggested, applied to Gaul the adjective animosa.[316]

Caesar tells us that the Gallic liveliness of spirit manifested itself in a curiosity about distant lands, an eagerness to learn from travellers, whom they detained, even against their will, plying them with many questions on every subject. In the towns a crowd would gather around some newly arrived merchant and compel him to describe the countries of his travel and their affairs.[317]

This is the kind of curiosity that makes for knowledge and science, and it is hard to reconcile with the characteristics of dullness and stupidity. The width and general soundness of Caesar’s observation gives to his testimony a value which the other statements lack, for they are mostly founded on hearsay or particular cases. With regard to Hilary’s statement, Jung points out that the Pictavi seem from Ausonius to have been very backward in letters. Eight epigrams are directed against Rufus, rhetor at Poitiers, jibing at his lack of culture,[318] while another Pictavian teacher, Anastasius, was not much of a success.[319] ‘Can we wonder’, he concludes, ‘that Hilary calls the Gauls unteachable in the singing of hymns, when he himself was born at Poitiers?’[320]

But a tradition applied to a whole nation, and dating from the early days of the Empire, cannot be explained by a few particular cases. The motives that prompted particular writers to accept the tradition may be particular, but its origin must be sought in some more general principle. It was an attitude of mind, an habitual way of looking at things that was responsible. It was the ingrained pagan idea of ‘barbari’ (increased, perhaps, in the case of the Gauls by their reputation for warlike impetuosity),[321] the idea which Christian writers like Paul and Clement of Alexandria set themselves to combat, the idea of a chosen people and a chosen culture. It was a habit of mind which did not imply enmity or hatred: sometimes it did not even imply contempt. It was just the tradition of superiority (largely true), grown customary in the minds of a ruling people whose customs and language other nations accepted. But just because it had an element of truth in it, there was a danger of its being made universal, a chance that it might blind the ruler to the individuality of the subject and preclude a sympathetic study of the provincial. It is this attitude, and its attendant misunderstanding, together with the general impression which the large number of country people would make on the dweller in the metropolis, that are responsible for such judgements as Martial’s crassa. But there can be no doubt that during our period this surprising opinion must have been less commonly held and less generally applied, in view of Gaul’s growing importance as a teacher of the Empire.

B. INSIDE THE SCHOOL

(i) The Substance and Methods of Primary Education

The tradition of the Roman schools was so old, and had been so whole-heartedly accepted by the Gauls, that we find only scattered references to the actual details of instruction, and those of a superficial, allusive kind. For even when we have a man like Ausonius who deals directly with education, the assumption always is that the reader is thoroughly familiar with the practical facts of the schools, and the aim is generally to impress by style or rhetorical device, and never to give a serious exposition. We must be content, therefore, to fill in the account with the known facts of Roman education.

We have no lively picture of the Gallic boy going to school, such as Lucian gives us in the case of Greece. But in our period we possess something similar in the orations of Libanius, the sophist of Antioch. He describes how the boy began his day’s work at Antioch in the fourth century. Having rubbed the sleep from his eyes (ἀφυπνίσας) the paedagogus wakes the boy and leads him to his studies (ὑπάγει τῷ λύχνῳ). A great deal depends on these paedagogi, and respect is due to them (οὕς αἰδεῖσθαι νόμος ἦν). They are next to the teachers in honour (ἐν τιμαῖς οὗτοι μετὰ τοὺς διδασκάλους), and in some ways their work is more important; for, whereas the teacher sees the pupil only during school-hours, the paedagogue is always with him, protecting him from evil influences (φρουροὶ τῆς ἀνθούσης ἡλικίας ... ἀπελαύοντες τοὺς κακῶς ἐρῶντας), sharing his labours and taking the father’s place when the latter has to be away on business for the whole day. He repeats the boy’s lessons with him, shouts at him, shows him the rod, shakes the strap, and reminds him by his efforts of the lesson which the master has taught him (reading ληφθέν). When his charge is ill, he acts as nurse (μικρὸν γὰρ ἐἰπεῖν τροφούς), sits by the bedside and supplies his wants. The grief of the paedagogi at the death of their charges is described, and we hear of memorials erected by them in honour of their wards.[322]

How far exactly all this applied to the Western Empire in general, and to Gaul in particular, it is impossible to say. But the general similarity of educational methods throughout the Empire makes a supposition that something of the kind was found in Gaul in our period almost certain. Much less vivid and intimate is the picture in Ausonius’s epistle to his grandson, for it is almost entirely concerned with stereotyped things—like discipline and school-subjects. Sidonius gives an epitome of a typical education, in the schools of the Gallic aristocrats. He marks the literary and poetic home-atmosphere of the cultured noble. Writing to Constantius he says with rhetorical and unintentionally humorous exaggeration: ‘And you the Muses took squealing from your mother and dipped into the glassy waters of Hippocrene. There, beneath the babbling stream, you then drank liberally letters—not water.’[323] Then came the actual school: ‘all the training of the grammarian, and all the instructions of the rhetorician.’ The crown of imperial service was set upon this training: ‘the court of the prince brought the young man into prominence.’[324] And, finally, fame was sought in military duties. Comfort and the charm of delicate and varied delights smiled upon the boy. Sidonius is enthusiastic about the stories at the dinner-table, the lampoons and the gaiety of this social atmosphere, the mingled wit and serious talk[325] which filled the home, and he rejoices in the games with which it abounded—ball, and hoop and rattling dice:

The home influence of the Gallic nobleman in creating a literary interest in his son was probably considerable, in view of the general honour in which letters were held. Sidonius taught his son comic metres from Terence and Menander, and apparently the resulting enjoyment was mutual.[327] When Paulinus of Pella expresses his debt to his parents for their skill and zeal in educating him, his references are touched with genuine emotion.[328]

The constant discussion of literary topics such as we find in Ausonius and Sidonius must have made the homes of their class as much of a ludus litterarum as the schoolroom, just as among the Christians of lower social standing the lively interest in theological discussion must have given an impetus in many cases to the thought of the child. Heredity, too, must have played a part. Families in which the rhetorical education had become traditional produced children whose minds were naturally inclined to take an interest in study.

For the sons, therefore, of these noblemen (and in dealing with the Gallic schools it is with the nobility, chiefly, that we have to do) home circumstances were an incentive to the activities of the school. But what, precisely, were these activities? Paulinus of Pella gives a general description.[330] From his earliest years (ipsius alphabeti inter prope prima elementa[331]) he was taught the meaning and the value of culture, the ten special marks which distinguish the uneducated, and all the faults of unsocial or uncultured boorishness (vitia ἀκοινονόητα).[332] He was trained in the classic education of Rome (Roma ... servata vetustas) and found pleasure in it as an old man, though his age witnessed its decline.[333] He went to school (the school of Bordeaux made famous by Ausonius) in his sixth year, and was made to read ‘dogmata Socratus (Σωκράτους) et bellica plasmata Homeri’ together with the wanderings of Ulysses. Then he passed on to Vergil, which he found difficult because he had been accustomed to speak his native Greek to the servants of the house.

At fifteen[335] we find him still at the school of the grammarian:

It was just about the age at which he should have passed on to the rhetorical school, but a fever laid him low, and left him so weak that the doctor ordered a complete rest.

Such is the general impression that the primary education of the day made on an ordinary boy; and we may verify his account by comparing with it the statement of a teacher. After the foundation subjects of the elementary school comes the faculty of ‘Grammar’. ‘Grammatikê’ is the art which deals with ‘grammata’ or letters. These mankind invented, ‘trying to escape from his mortality’, and seeking to get beyond the tyranny of the passing present. ‘Instead of being content with his spoken words, ἔπεα πτερόεντα, which fly as a bird flies and are past, he struck out the plan of making marks on wood or stone or bone or leather or some other material, significant marks, which should somehow last on charged with meaning, in place of the word that had perished.’[337] The injunction of Ausonius to his grandson[338] ‘perlege quodcumque est memorabile’ is the motto of this faculty. Almost any subject could fall under it, but the chief emphasis was laid on the poets and on the orators. Ausonius recommends starting with Homer[339] and Menander,[340] with Horace, Vergil, and Terence to follow.[341] A study of the kind of authors read in the schools shows that the poets were more frequently used than the prose writers. Mythology, accordingly, loomed so large that Tertullian made its excessive study one of the chief charges against the pagan schools.[342] Vergil is the influence which permeates the style of everybody, the mainstay of the grammarian, the genius of the schoolroom. Commentators have exhausted themselves in piling up the Vergilian references in Ausonius, Paulinus of Pella,[343] Sidonius, Macrobius, and in every writer of note during this time, pagan as well as Christian. Indeed, it would not be unfair to say that Vergil, with Homer and Varro, ruled the school. Sidonius refers particularly to Terence,[344] whom he loves to quote, while Horace,[345] Plautus,[346] Menander,[347] and a host of others are mentioned as familiar friends.

The poets, then, in a broad sense, form one big division of ‘Grammar’: Ausonius further recommends History, ‘res et tempora Romae’.[348] He evidently considered these two divisions important, for at the end of the Commemoratio Professorum[349] he again mentions ‘historia’ and ‘poeticus stilus’ at the head of a list of subjects in which the teachers of Bordeaux attained renown. It seems strange, at first sight, that the orators are not mentioned[350] in Ausonius’s scheme. But Ausonius meant them to be included under ‘historia’ (how could they read the Catilinarian conspiracy without Cicero?), and it is apparent from the frequent and familiar references to Cicero in Sidonius and Ausonius (not to mention Jerome), and the direct imitation of him in the Panegyrists, that ‘Tully’ as well as Demosthenes was extensively studied. Philosophy came in as a make-weight in the midst of this literary atmosphere.[351]

Thus the concurrence of a master and a pupil of Bordeaux gives us an idea of the general scope of primary education. When we try to look a little closer, we find it difficult to get a detailed view. In elementary education especially there is a general reticence, an assumption that the things that existed before continued to exist, and who is ignorant of the order which the Roman tradition prescribes? In this order the school of the litterator or elementary master came first, then the school of the grammaticus, and, finally, that of the rhetor.[352]

Quintilian was the last great Roman writer on pedagogy, and his influence may be traced on pagan and Christian masters alike. He was regarded as the model of school-eloquence. Ausonius addresses the most famous of the Bordeaux professors, Minervius, as

and he speaks of the distinguished sons of Gaul as having been students under Quintilian’s system of education:

Even Jerome said that he owed part of his education to Quintilian,[355] and the affected Ennodius thought so much of him that he called him ‘eloquentissimum virum’, and thought that though against lesser men one might argue a fictitious case, it was still a question whether it was right to do so against Quintilian.[356] As an authority on style he was evidently much respected. Sidonius means to pay the very highest compliment when he says of the rhetor Severianus:

and Jerome tells us that Hilary of Poitiers imitated the style and the number of Quintilian’s twelve books.[358]

This being the position of Quintilian in the educational world of Gaul, we are not surprised to find traces of his influence everywhere. According to his precept,[359] the master still held the hand of the little one as he traced the letters on wax,[360] and afterwards on papyrus or parchment.[361] The children still went to school, no doubt, as Horace tells, carrying their tablets in their satchels (loculi, capsae), which were borne, in the case of wealthy parents, by a capsarius.[362]

There were special masters (librarii) to teach book-copying. A marble tablet found at Auch[363] bears an inscription to one Afranius Graphicus (skilled in writing), a teacher, and in particular a teacher of copying, who numbered among his accomplishments proficiency in the game of draughts, and Marquardt[364] quotes a number of instances from the Corpus. Very important among the various forms of writing for the fourth and fifth centuries—the age of bureaucratic officialdom—was stenography. Here, too, there were special masters (notarii) who at the same time practised it as their vocation. Again, the Corpus has frequent references.[365] Ausonius composed a poem on his shorthand writer, whose skill was evidently great,[366] and when Sidonius made his epigram on the towel there was a scribe at hand (apparently a notarius) who took down his words.[367] As far as the method of reading was concerned, Quintilian’s counsel no doubt still held good. He had advised learning the sound and the form of the letters simultaneously,[368] and the use of the synthetic method, passing from the letter to the syllable, from the syllable to the word, from the word to the sentence.

The last subject of the elementary school was Arithmetic, a favourite subject with the hard-headed Romans. Counting on the fingers was common in olden times, and as late as the seventh century we find Bede writing a work ‘de loquela per gestum digitorum et temporum ratione’,[369] which points to an elaborate system of computation on the fingers. There were special teachers (calculatores) for advanced pupils, and the instruments used were the abacus or tabula, a board marked with lines which signified tens, hundreds, thousands, &c., according as the counters (calculi) were put on them. Figures were sometimes drawn on a board sprinkled with sand.

When the boy had got beyond this elementary training, he entered upon the studies of the grammaticus. Now the school-training as a whole after the fourth century is said to have been based on the seven liberal arts of Martianus Capella, described in his marriage of Mercury and Philologia. This work had for its foundation Varro’s ‘IX libri disciplinarum’, and had an influence which went down through the Middle Ages. But in the department of the grammarian there were no neatly divided compartments for Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music, each with its special master. Grammarians specialized in one branch or another (as Victorius at Bordeaux in antiquarian research[370]), and the edicts of the emperors speak of special masters in shorthand, book-copying, arithmetic, architecture.[371] But there is no ground for thinking that these were to be found in the ordinary school: it is much more likely that they existed to train slaves or specialists for particular posts in the imperial offices. It is hardly conceivable that Ausonius should have dealt with some thirty Bordeaux teachers (of whom several were grammarians) without indicating such a division, had it existed.

The actual method of conducting the lesson is indicated by Eumenius. ‘Ibi’ (in the new schools of Autun) ‘adulescentes optimi discant, nobis quasi sollemne carmen praefantibus.’[372] The teacher would select a passage and read it out slowly to his pupils with proper attention to punctuation, pronunciation, expression, and metre.[373] Clearness and effectiveness of intonation were specially practised with a view to the later rhetorical declamations. But the reason for the universal stress on elocution in antiquity went deeper than the exigencies of practical life. The written words had a soul which the grammaticus by reading strove to revive. ‘The office of the art “Grammatikê” is so to deal with the Grammata as to recover from them all that can be recovered of that which they have saved from oblivion, to reinstate as far as possible the spoken word in its first impressiveness and musicalness.’[374] Such, as Professor Murray points out, is the doctrine of the official teachers. Dionysius Thrax (who was the first to write a τέχνη γραμματική), in enumerating the six parts of Grammatikê, mentions as the most essential reading aloud κατὰ προσῳδίαν, ‘with just the accent, the cadences, the expression, with which the words were originally spoken, before they were turned from λόγοι to γράμματα, from winged words to permanent letters’.[375] Ausonius makes a special point of it to his grandson:

This was the framework of every lesson.

The reading was followed by the exposition (enarratio), grammatical, historical, philosophical, scientific, artistic, or literary. The master would tell his class the substance of the passage, and require them to turn verse into prose.[377] Books were not always forthcoming, and then dictation (practised also for its own sake) would be resorted to. At this time it was, perhaps, less common than in Horace’s day[378] owing to the multiplication of books. Learning by heart and writing exercises (sententiae, chriae) such as were practised in the rhetor’s school were among the obvious methods employed.

Philology, of course, was in its infancy. It was based on Varro who had propounded such theories as ‘testamentum a testatione mentis’, ‘lucus a non lucendo’. There were two tendencies: that of the Romanists, who wished to derive everything from the Italian languages, and that of the Hellenists, who sought to prove that the origin of all words was Greek. There were also the ‘Anomalists’, who believed in the principle of change, and, like Horace, referred everything to custom, the controller and corrupter of words, and the ‘Analogists’, who believed in the principle of immobility, and proposed to subjugate custom to a fixed law of reason which operated by analogy.[379] How much in the dark even the best and soberest of grammarians were on the subject may be judged from Servius’s commentary on Vergil: on Georg. i. 17 ‘Maenala, mons Arcadiae, dictus ἀπὸ τῶν μήλων, id est ab ovibus’; on Georg. i. 57 ‘Sabaei populi ... dicti Sabaei ἀπὸ τοῦ σέβεσθαι’; on Aen. i. 17 ‘“thensa”[380] autem cum aspiratione scribitur ἀπὸ τοῦ θείου’.

Literary criticism, the κρίσις ποιημάτων of Dionysius Thrax,[381] also played a part. The discussions in Macrobius represent an advanced stage of the sort of thing which was begun in the schools. Servius[382] discusses whether Vergil wrote ‘Scopulo infixit’ or ‘Scopulo inflixit’, and in Aulus Gellius we have questions raised as to Vergil’s use of tris and tres, and Cicero’s use of peccatu and peccato, fretu and freto.[383] Again, Servius considers Probus’s doubts as to Vergil’s invocation to Jove as ‘hominum rerumque aeterna potestas’.[384] But, on the whole, such a critical attitude is rare. The commentator, and therefore the grammarian, is chiefly concerned with a mass of rather simple and diffuse exposition. The references are mainly to Lucretius, Horace, Pliny, Terence, Hesiod, and, most of all, to Homer. Grammatical notes, especially figures of speech, and geographical references are frequent and ample. Historical allusions, on the other hand, are rather slight. The critical faculty, then, was not very much alive. Indeed, one would hardly expect it to be from the general tone of the age, and from Servius’s own statement of the teacher’s duty. ‘In exponendis auctoribus haec consideranda sunt: poetae vita, titulus operis, qualitas carminis, scribentis intentio, numerus librorum, ordo librorum, explanatio.’[385] The grammarian thus moves on a fairly low plane. To him, ‘intentio Vergilii haec est, Homerum imitari, et Augustum laudare a parentibus’. The higher thought, the fundamental inspiration of the poem, ‘tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem’, is omitted altogether.

Of the text-books used, by far the most famous[386] was that of Donatus, who taught Jerome about the middle of the fourth century.[387] He was the model of succeeding writers and his name became a synonym for grammar. His work consisted of (1) an ars minor for the elementary school, containing the parts of speech; (2) an ars maior, divided into three parts (a) ‘de voce, de littera, de syllaba, de pedibus, de tonis, de posituris’ (punctuation); (b) another treatment of the parts of speech; (c) ‘de barbarismo, de solecismo, de ceteris vitiis, de metaplasmo (grammatical irregularity), de schematibus (figures of speech), de tropis’.[388] We hear of a ‘Donatus provincialis’[389] which was used in Gaul, and it may well be that Jerome’s influence in the provinces served to spread the popularity of Donatus, especially when supported by the Roman tradition, though his work must have obtained a footing in the schools even on its own merits.

Agroecius (fifth century), whose ‘disciplina’ is praised by Sidonius,[390] wrote a book on orthography,[391] which was intended to supplement a work on the same subject by Flavius Caper. And we hear of Dositheus’s Chrestomathia or collection of passages from literature, intended for Greek students and written in both languages,[392] as a common text-book of the later Empire. Jerome mentions Sinnius Capito as an authority on antiquities who was still read in his day,[393] and therefore, considering the universality of the rhetorical tradition, probably used in the schools of Gaul. Some of his fragments may be taken as typical of the scope and character of the grammarian’s teaching. ‘Docet (Sin. Capit.) “pluria” Latinum esse, “plura” barbarum. Pluria sive plura absolutum esse et simplex, non comparativum.’[394] A solecism is defined as ‘impar atque inconveniens compositura partium orationis’. He does not neglect derivation: ‘pacem a pactione condicionum putat dictam Sinnius Capito’,[395] and in his philology a place is given to phonetics. ‘De syllabis, “f” praeponitur liquidis, nulla alia de semivocalibus; nam praeponitur liquidis duabus sola “f”; praeponitur “l” litterae, si dicas Flavius ... est libellus de syllabis, legite illum ... Sinni est liber Capitonis.’[396]

Grammar, in the narrow sense, was naturally part of the grammarian’s work. ‘Nec coniunctionem grammatici fere dicunt esse disiunctivam, ut “nec legit nec scribit”, cum si diligentius inspiciatur, ut fecit Sinnius Capito, intelligi possit eam positam esse ab antiquis pro non ut et in XII est....’[397] His remarks on the verse of Lucilius,[398] ‘nequam aurum est’, &c., are an example of the ordinary exposition so plentifully illustrated in Servius, handed down from one generation of grammatici to another. His opinion is quoted also on historical questions: ‘Sardi venales (alius alio nequ)ior. Sinnius Capito ait Ti. Gracchum consulem, collegam P. Valeri Faltonis, Sardiniam Corsicamque subegisse, nec praedae quicquam aliud quam mancipia captum....’[399] Constitutional history interests him: ‘Tertia haec est interrogandi species, ut Sinnio Capitoni videtur, pertinens ad officium et consuetudinem senatoriam; quando enim aliquis sententiam loco suo iam dixerat, et alius postea interrogatus quaedam videbatur ita locutus....’[400]

Nor did he omit antiquarian tradition: ‘Sexagenarios (de ponte olim deiciebant): exploratissimum illud est causae quo tempore primum per pontem coeperunt comitiis suffragium ferre, iuniores conclamaverunt ut de ponte deicerentur sexagenarii qui iam nullo publico munere fungerentur ...’,[401] and he is invoked as an authority on traditional law: ‘Sinnius Capito ait cum civis necaretur, institutum fuisse ut Semoniae res sacra fieret vervece bidente....’[402] Such were the shapers of the material taught in the schools. They epitomized the learning Varro had left, and boiled down the Vergilian commentaries of Servius, Macrobius, and Fulgentius. And if we do not know their number and their works too precisely, we may be fairly sure of the trend of their teaching. We may therefore leave them, adding just a word about dictionaries. M. Verrius Flaccus, the head of the court library under Augustus, had written a work De Verborum Significatu in alphabetical order. Each letter took up several volumes. And in the middle of the second century, Pompeius Festus made an extract of this in twenty volumes, of which only a small part has been preserved, the original being wholly lost.[403] Verrius’s work was a standard one, as is shown by the frequent references to it in the grammarians.[404] It was frequently amplified and revised. ‘Scribonius Aphrodisius’, Suetonius tells us,[405] ‘was a teacher and a contemporary of Verrius, whose books on orthography he edited, criticizing his scholarship and his character.’ But it remained the foundation, and modifications of it must have been used by the teachers of the Gallic schools.

Two of the subjects over which the grammarian paused in his exposition may be noticed. Blümner remarks[406] that geography was not a school subject, and Bernhardy draws attention to the traditional weakness of the Romans in it.[407] Yet considerable and increasing attention must have been given to it with the extending operations of the Roman army and the growth of commerce with distant lands. Maps were in use even in early times. Varro[408] mentions a ‘picta Italia’ in the temple of Tellus, and Propertius testifies that he was compelled to learn by heart the countries of the world painted on the map.[409] The elder Pliny[410] mentions Pytheas, the famous Gaul, who lived probably at the time of Alexander the Great, and was a writer on geography, ‘praesertim Geographiae notitia illustris, commendatus ... ab omnibus gentibus’.[411] Aethicus Hister tells us in his Cosmographia of a measurement of the Roman world which was ordered by Julius Caesar and carried out by the ablest men of the day, and there were writers on geography like Poseidonius and Mela.[412] In our period we find the subject being used as part of the imperial policy. ‘Moreover’, says Eumenius, ‘let the young see in the porticoes of the new schools all countries and all seas and whatever of cities or races or tribes the invincible princes either restore or overcome by their valour or bind down by the fear they inspire.’[413] And again, since children learn better by eye than by ear,[414] ‘the situation, the extent and the distances of all places have been marked and the names given, the source and the mouth of every river, the bend of the coast-lines, the curves of the sea where it flows round the land or breaks into it.’[415] In Ausonius we are struck with the accuracy and extent of the author’s geographical knowledge, due, no doubt, to the fact that he had to practise it in his school. He refers directly to maps in the Gratiarum Actio.[416] He wants to put in a compact form all the emperor’s praises, as the geographers do with the earth (qui terrarum orbem unius tabulae ambitu circumscribunt). Such a ‘tabula’ Millin reports at Autun, on the site of the Maeniana, containing the outline of Italy with the boundaries of Gaul and towns like Bononia, Forum Gallorum, Mutina.[417]

Astronomy, in an elementary way, was quite popular among the ‘savants’ of Gaul. Ausonius’s grandfather, Arborius, dabbled in it,[418] and Sidonius mentions it frequently. It was one of the accomplishments of Claudianus Mamertus that he could wield the horoscope with Euphrates and explore the stars with Atlas.[419] When Sidonius describes Lampridius’s superstition in consulting astrologers (for superstition was intimately connected with the few scientific facts of the subject which had been ascertained), he mentions technical terms such as ‘climactericos’, ‘thema’, ‘diastemata zodiaca’, which indicate an organized body of astrological tradition, of which Julianus Vertacus and Fullonius Saturninus were the founders, according to Sidonius (matheseos peritissimos conditores).[420] He writes to his friend Leontius[421] of one Phoebus, the head of whose college can surpass in argument not only musicians, but also masters of geometry, arithmetic, and astrology. For no one knew more accurately than he the astrological significance of stars and planets in their varying positions. These references give us some idea of the extent of astronomical knowledge, which cannot have included much more than elementary facts about the zodiac, the solstices, the equinoxes, and the revolution of the planets. The more strictly astrological developments were, no doubt, confined to such as cared to make a hobby of them, but some knowledge of the stars was imparted in the schoolroom and considered necessary to the pupil for the understanding of poetry,[422] as it was for practical purposes, by no less an authority than Quintilian. For time was largely computed by direct reference to the sun and the stars.

(ii) The Substance and Methods of Secondary Education

From the grammarian the boy passed into the hands of the rhetor and studied ‘Rhetoric’. We must be careful in our interpretation of this term. Just as ‘Grammatikê’ covered a large number of subjects, so ‘Rhetorikê’ was not confined to the theory of speaking. ‘On apprenait des rhéteurs l’art de bien parler et de bien écrire, non pas seulement sur la littérature ou la poésie, mais aussi sur l’histoire, la morale, la science même.’[423] The characteristic thing about the rhetor’s school was discussion and declamation, and the end in view was oratory or oratorical composition; the characteristic thing about the grammarian’s school was exposition and interpretation, and the immediate end in view was encyclopedic knowledge. But the subjects treated in either case were very much the same; only, the emphasis was shifted. The grammarian used his knowledge to expand the text, the rhetor his imagination. The grammarian’s method was prosaic, the rhetor strove to be poetic.[424]

The rhetor chose some subject from imagination or from literature (from the books which the grammarian had been reading with his class) for his pupils to exercise their ingenuity upon. Three stages may be distinguished[425] in the schools of the later Empire. First, the Vergilian stage (locus Vergilianus), at which the students paraphrased some speech in the Aeneid. The point was to portray as closely as possible the emotions of the original speaker. ‘Proponebatur mihi negotium animae meae’ (says Augustine) ‘ut dicerem verba Iunonis irascentis et dolentis quod non posset Italia Teucrorum avertere regem.’[426] Next there came the Dictiones Ethicae—soliloquies which persons in history or mythology would have made on certain occasions: e.g. Juno’s words when she saw Antaeus matched with Hercules, or Thetis before the body of Achilles. Ennodius gives several examples of this type: ‘Verba Didonis cum abeuntem videret Aeneam,[427] Verba Menelai cum Troiam videret inustam,’[428] and so forth. Thirdly, there were the Controversiae, nearer to the oratory of public life, on some more general subject, e.g. against an ambassador who betrays his country, against one who refuses to support an aged father, against a tyrant who has honoured a parricide with a statue, ‘in eum qui in lupanari statuam Minervae locavit.’[429]

The influence of Vergil did not decline with the entry into the rhetor’s school. The rhetors of Ausonius’s day could hardly write a page without a Vergilian reminiscence. And Servius[430] tells us of the rhetors Titianus and Calvus that they chose all their subjects from Vergil, adapting them for rhetorical exercises. They gave as examples of the controversia the speeches of Venus and Juno in Aeneid x. 17 and x. 63. When Venus says to Juno: ‘A cause of peril hast thou been to these whom Fate has granted the land of Italy,’ she is using the ‘status absolutivus’. Juno, in her reply, uses the ‘status relativus’.

This passage gives a single instance of that intricate system of technical terminology which the study of rhetoric had elaborated. But in our period there is no writer who explains that system in any way. It had become traditional, covering a large space of time; it had become almost universal, covering a large part of the Roman Empire. The text-books we hear of belong to a previous time: Cicero’s Rhetorica, the anonymous Rhetoricorum ad Herennium libri quattuor, and Quintilian. The work of C. Chirius Fortunatianus,[431] it is true, dates from the fifth century, and that of Sulpicius Victor[432] from the fourth. But Fortunatianus drew mainly from Quintilian and Cicero, and Sulpicius Victor, in the fragments of his book that survive, professes his dependence on the traditional statement of the subject. ‘I have set in order’, he says, ‘the general rhetorical principles that have come down to us, and have been taught me by my masters. Yet I have reserved the right to pass over points as I thought fit, adhering in the main to the traditional substance and order, and inserting from other authors a number of points which I considered necessary.’[433] In fact, all the fourth- and fifth-century writers on rhetoric (in that age of summaries) are merely compilers or epitomizers. Solid and persistent is the body of tradition which runs through the centuries. The precepts and examples[434] which we find in Seneca, the rhetorician, are almost identical with those of Ennodius at the end of the fifth century; and Quintilian is found again in Hilary of Poitiers.

In these circumstances it need not distress us that there is no contemporary account of the activities of the rhetor’s school. We do not even possess the title of a declamation at Bordeaux, and the very silence is significant: the rhetorical system was too widespread and too well known to need special mention or explanation. Not only the Latin rhetoricians were bound together by this common tradition: the Greek of the East shared in it as well. Libanius is on familiar terms with Symmachus,[435] who loved pagan oratory next to pagan religion, and mentions the books of Favorinus who was a native of Arles, and lived in the time of Hadrian.[436] One of the Theodori to whom Libanius wrote, was, according to Ammianus, a Gaul,[437] and so was Rufinus, the ‘Praefectus praetorio’, of whose praises the letters are full. Intercourse between East and West was free and frequent. But the most convincing proof of the unity of the tradition is found in a comparison of the Greek rhetoricians with men like Quintilian or Seneca: there is hardly any difference of importance.[438] But the Rhetores Graeci give us a much more detailed and lively picture of means and methods than any other body of evidence.

In imparting his facts the grammarian had to work up to that educational consummation represented by the rhetorical school. ‘Ratio dicendi’ is quite distinctly laid down by Quintilian as one of his duties.[439] In giving his exercises, therefore, he would endeavour to give such information on technical and traditional points as would prepare the pupil for his course of study in the senior school. Sometimes the pupil went for further preparation to a special master.[440] Sometimes a whole course—the famous ἐγκύκλιος παιδεία—in which special stress was laid on music and geometry[441]—was put in between the grammarian’s and the rhetor’s schools. How far these practices were customary in Gaul we have no means of ascertaining; but it is certain that there must have been exercises preparatory to the rhetorical training, and it is these which are recorded by the Greek rhetoricians, and which give us a unique insight into the methods of that training. Προγυμνάσματα they are called by the rhetors, and defined by one of them as ἂ πρὸ τῆς ὑποθέσεως (i.e. before declaiming from a given subject) ἀναγκαῖόν ἐστι εἰδέναι τε καὶ ἐπιεικῶς ἐγγυμνάζεσθαι.[442]

Aphthonius was a sophist of Antioch, a pupil of the great Libanius, and flourished during the second half of the fourth century. He is mentioned by Libanius[443] as a teacher of boys. Of his many works we possess only the Progymnasmata and the Fables. Closely associated with his name are those of Theon and Hermogenes. Hoppichler has demonstrated[444] how similar their works are. Theon is clearly the oldest,[445] and Aphthonius is younger than Hermogenes.[446] From a scholiast who says that after Aphthonius had published his work, that of Hermogenes came to be looked on as ἀσαφῆ πως καὶ δύσληπτα, it is equally clear that Aphthonius was the most recent of these writers. That he was also the best and most enduring is shown by the many commentaries and scholia on his work (which is often verbally quoted by later rhetoricians like Nicolaus), and by the fact that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries his book was still used in schools and universities. Indeed, the form of school exercise which he suggests persists up to the present day.[447]

Aphthonius, then, may be taken as the best representative of the rhetorical school at Antioch.

His first chapter[448] deals with fables. They are widely and frequently used by teachers to point a lesson (ἐκ παραινέσεως), e.g. the story of the ants and the cicadas. He proceeds to expound the treatment of the subject, and deals first with narration (διήγημα), of which there are three kinds: (1) poetic (δραματικόν), which has to do with fictitious subjects; (2) historic, which has to do with the past; and (3) civil, dealing with controversial cases. In every narration, again, there are six elements: agent, act, time, place, manner, cause; and the four virtues of narration are: clearness, brevity, probability (πιθανότης), and purity of language (ἑλληνισμός). The example given, telling why the rose is red, has at least the virtues of brevity and clearness. It may be noticed that Quintilian assigns narrationes poeticas to the grammarian and narrationes historicas to the rhetor.[449]

Of the collection of fables made by Aphthonius some were apparently written by himself. These are rather less pointed than those of Aesop, and more directly applied to school conditions. Such is the story of the goose and the swan.

‘A rich man kept a goose and a swan, but not for the same purpose: for the former he kept for his table, and the latter for the sake of its singing. When the time came for the goose to be killed (which was his proper end), the man, not being able to distinguish the one from the other in the darkness of night, took the swan instead of the goose: but by singing the swan showed his nature, whereupon by the sweetness of his song he escaped death.’

The general moral is that music provides respite from death, and the particular application, that boys should love eloquence. Similarly, in the story of the provident ant it is pointed out that laziness in youth means distress in old age (οὕτως νεότης πονεῖν οὐκ ἐθέλονσα, παρὰ τὸ γῆρας κακοπραγεῖ).

Some very familiar fables are included in Aphthonius’s collection: the crow and the cheese, the ass and the lion’s skin, the sick lion, &c. These were taken over from Aesop and are found, polished and versified, in Avienus.

Aphthonius next defines the Chreia as a pointed saying, applied to some person or thing. It is so called because it is ‘useful’ for moral and intellectual lessons. There are three general classes: (1) the Word-Chreia, found only in speech; (2) the Act-Chreia (e.g. Pythagoras, on being asked how long a man’s life was, answered by appearing for a short time and then disappearing. A scholiast adds the example of Tarquin and the poppies); (3) the Mixed Chreia. The divisions of every Chreia are: (1) praise, (2) paraphrase, (3) cause, (4) the contrary (i.e. the pupil states what would happen if the opposite were true), (5) simile (the same sort of thing in other spheres), (6) example (instances of the same thing in recorded history—generally in the poets), (7) testimony of the ancients (appeal to similar teaching in older writers like Hesiod), (8) short epilogue (a summary of the argument). Then follows an example of the Word-Chreia, illustrating all the divisions. The saying of Isocrates that the roots of education are bitter, but its fruits sweet, is worked up into a little essay. The mediaeval scholiasts go copiously into all the minor points raised by the various Chreiae, and give biblical examples from Genesis and Ecclesiastes in which Juvenal, Hesiod, and Menander curiously intermingle.

Next comes Sententia (γνώμη), an aphoristic saying of a hortatory or enunciatory kind. Unlike the Chreia, it is found only in speech. Examples are:

and

There are three kinds: hortatory (προτρεπτικόν), dehortatory (ἀποτρεπτικόν), enunciatory (ἀποφαντικόν). Further divisions are: simple and composite, or probable, true, and hyperbolical. All of these are amply illustrated. The same divisions hold as for the Chreia, and they are exemplified by developing the protreptic gnomê that death is better than poverty:

There follows a chapter on Refutation (ἀνασκευή). The first step is to attack your opponent (τὴν τῶν φησάντων διαβολήν), the next, to give a statement of his case (πράγματος ἔκθεσιν), the third, to refute this statement under the following heads: (1) Obscurity, (2) Incredibility, (3) Impossibility, (4) Illogicality, (5) Impropriety, (6) Inexpediency. Take, for example, the statements of the poets about Daphne. In his διαβολή the student says that it is needless to convict the poets of folly: they stand discredited by what they say about the gods. He then briefly narrates the story of Phoebus and Daphne, and is ready for the refutation. Under the heads of Obscurity and Improbability, the difficulties of Daphne’s birth from Ladon and Terra are discussed in a forced and perverse way. ‘If a human being is born from a river, why not a river from a human being?’ ‘What name are we going to give to a union of a river and Earth? In the case of men it is called “marriage”, but Earth is not a human being’, &c.

Under the head of the Impossible, he contends: ‘But granted that Daphne was the daughter of Terra and Ladon—who brought her up? That’s a poser! If you say her father, well, human beings just don’t live in rivers: he would unwittingly have drowned her. If you say her mother, it means that she lived under the earth: therefore, her charms would be hidden, and she would have no admirers.’

There is also the head of Impropriety. Granted even that she could have been brought up, it is absurd to attribute love to a god: ἔρως τῶν ὄντων τὸ χαλεπώτατον (a moral note for the boy’s benefit). It is wrong to connect such terrible things (τὰ δεινότατα) with the gods.

Illogicality. How could a girl beat Phoebus in the race? Men are better than women, and a fortiori gods must surpass them. Why did her mother help her? Surely she could not have feared a ‘mésalliance’! Either, therefore, she was not her mother, or else she was a bad mother.

Inexpediency. There is no point in Earth taking away her daughter and offending Phoebus, and then giving him the laurel with which he crowns his tripods. Nature has separated the human and the divine: it’s no good having a god matched with a mortal maid.

Peroration. All poets are fools; avoid them. But we must stop talking about poets, lest like them we talk nonsense (πέρας ἔστω τῶν ποιητῶν, μὴ κατὰ ποιητὰς δόξω φθέγγεσθαι).

Confirmation (κατασκευή) is the next subject. The method is to praise the man who makes the statement which is to be confirmed, to state the case to be established, and to ‘confirm’ it under the following heads: (the opposites of those mentioned under Refutation) the manifest, the probable, the possible, the logical, the proper, the expedient. Taking the same thesis, the credibility of Daphne’s story, he attempts to prove, with considerable ingenuity, the opposite conclusion: ἐπὶ τούτοις θαυμάζω τοὺς ποιητὰς καὶ διὰ τοῦτο τὸ μέτρον (the poem) τιμῶ.

Again, there is the locus communis (κοινὸς τόπος), a speech which emphasizes the good or evil in a person or thing, and which is so generalized that it can be applied to all persons or things of that class or in those circumstances. Thus a locus communis about traitors would fit all who do treacherous deeds. It has the following divisions:

(1) By the contrary (ἐκ τοῦ ἐναντίου). (2) Exposition of the subject. (3) Comparison—which shows the person denounced to be worse than others, or the person praised, better. (4) Opinion (γνώμη)—denouncing or praising the intention of the agent. (5) Digression—conjecturally (στοχαστικῶς)—reviling the past life of the man. (6) Exclusion of pity. (7) Finally, the following heads: the legitimate, the just, the expedient, the possible, the honourable, and the conclusion from the results obtained. A conclusion on the well-worn subject of tyrants is, that after all a democratic jury is all that is needed to destroy their power.

The subject of Praise (ἐγκώμιον) is next treated. Praise is of persons or of things, and a list of praiseworthy subjects is given. It may be applied to one of these subjects as a group, e.g. the Athenians, or individually, e.g. one particular Athenian. The divisions given for the praise of a person are:

(1) Prooimion. Quality of subject to be praised.

(2) Class to which subject belongs: race, country, ancestors, parents.

(3) Education of subject: training, art and laws of his environment and education.

(4) Achievements (main division):

(a) Qualities of soul: courage, prudence, &c.

(b) Qualities of body: beauty, strength, &c.

(c) Qualities of fortune: rank, friends, &c.

(5) Comparison—to the advantage of the subject.

(6) Epilogue, in the nature of a prayer.

These heads are illustrated in panegyrics on Thucydides, and on an abstract thing like wisdom, where the divisions are naturally modified and curtailed.

Corresponding to the chapter on Praise is that on Censure or Vituperation (ψόγος), which starts with a bad quality and expands it. It does not raise moral issues or propose penalties (differing herein from a locus communis), but merely attacks (μόνην ἔχειν διαβολήν). An example, with the same divisions as in the previous chapter, is given of a vituperation of Philip of Macedon. Here, as in the case of praise, there is a mass of illustrations by the mediaeval scholiasts.

Comparison (σύγκρισις) of persons or things admits of ψόγος or ἐγκώμιον or both. Large wholes should not be compared, but rather similar parts, e.g. one head with another. The divisions, which are the same as in the previous chapters, are illustrated by a comparison of Hector and Achilles, to the advantage, naturally, of the latter.

The characterization of a person, by putting a speech into his mouth (ἠθοποιία), was another department of exercise. It is defined as μίμησις ἤθους ὑποκειμένου προσώπου. Three types are given, not very clearly distinguished from one another:

Εἰδωλοποιία—when a well-known character no longer living is made to speak, as in the Δῆμοι of Eupolis. (Apparently only local or political people are meant.)

Προσωποποιία—when both words and speaker are imagined.

Ἠθοποιία proper—when the person is known from literature, and words are put into his mouth to illustrate his character.

The classes of Ethopoeia proper may be described as:

Emotional (παθητικαί), e.g. the words Hecuba would have uttered on the fall of Troy.

‘Ethical’ (ἠθικαί), e.g. what a man who had never seen the sea would say on beholding the Mediterranean.

Mixed, e.g. what Achilles would have said over the body of Patroclus. The style is to be clear, and the sentences short, ‘flowery’ (ἀνθηρῷ),[450] antithetical, without adornment or involved figures. An example of Emotional Ethopoeia, illustrating the divisions past, present, and future, is given by a speech put into Niobe’s mouth on the death of her children.

Next comes Description (ἔκφρασις) of persons or things. Descriptive extracts from Homer and Thucydides are given, with the general counsel that the describer must adapt himself to his subject in every way. Only two classes are suggested: simple (descriptions of actions) and complex (descriptions of action and place). The citadel of Alexandria is the stock example.

By ‘Thesis’ Aphthonius means the study of a question in the course of a speech. There are two kinds: (1) ‘civil’, e.g. must one marry? and (2) contemplative, e.g. are there more worlds than one? The divisions are: ἔφοδος or prooemium, and the heads: the legitimate, the just, the expedient, the possible. The example given (εἰ γαμητέον) is interspersed with the objector’s remarks (ἀντιθέσεις) and the replies of the speaker (λύσεις).

Some grammarians consider the method of supporting or opposing a law (συνηγορία and κατηγορία) a subject for a school exercise. After the prooemium comes a consideration of objections (τὸ ἐναντίον) and the treatment of the subject takes the same form as in the preceding chapter. Again we have the alternation of ἀντιθέσεις and λύσεις.

Such is the course of exercises by which the adolescent boy was prepared for the speeches of the rhetor’s school, and of public life; and from them we gather a fairly definite impression of the main activities that succeeded those of the grammarian.

These activities were eked out by several ‘senior’ studies, which must be briefly considered. It has been disputed that there were any subjects in the rhetor’s school at all except rhetoric.[451] Now it is true that Gratian’s famous decree about teachers in 376 does not specially mention philosophers, and that there is very little official recognition of them, though we are told that Antoninus Pius gave salaries to rhetors and to philosophers ‘per omnes provincias’.[452] But whether in our period philosophy was an organized subject or not, there can be no doubt that it had its place in the schools.

In the grammarian’s school it was touched on in a superficial way: Paulinus of Pella talks of learning ‘dogmata Socratus’ at the tender age of five.[453] But there could have been no serious appreciation of the content of philosophy before the pupil had reached the rhetor’s school. Ausonius mentions ‘dogma Platonicum[454]’ as one of the avenues by which a Bordeaux professor reached renown, and Nepotianus[455] is ‘disputator ad Cleanthen Stoicum’. That there was some sort of philosophic discussion we gather from the Eclogues, though, no doubt, it was mainly rhetorical. Speaking of the ΝΑΙ ΚΑΙ ΟΥ ΠΥΘΑΓΟΡΙΚΟΝ Ausonius says that these two words (Yes and No) form the basis of philosophic discussion. ‘Starting from them, the school also, in harmony with its gentle training, gently debates philosophic questions, and with them as a basis the whole tribe of logicians holds debate’.[456]

It is clear from Sidonius that the subject was popular among the ‘litterati’ of fifth-century Gaul. Logic is often mentioned,[457] and the description of the ‘septem sapientes’ shows a comprehensive knowledge of the history of philosophy.[458] Eusebius,[459] a professor of philosophy at Lyons, gathered around him a number of students who were eager to discuss problems. The Categories of Aristotle are especially mentioned as subjects of study. The philosopher was the president of the company, holding a sort of ‘seminar’, in which he appointed a spokesman and discussed points with each in turn. He was very learned, and ‘was as pleased as could be when some very obscure and involved problems happened to arise, so that he could scatter abroad the treasures of his learning’.[460] Plato dominated contemporary thought. There was a Platonic club, ‘collegium conplatonicorum’.[461] Faustus (Sidonius tells him) has married a fair woman and borne her off with strong passion, and her name is Philosophia. She has abjured worldly wisdom and belongs to the Church of Christ, but none the less, also, to the Academy of Plato.[462] ‘On voit que les Gallo-Romains du cinquième siècle,’ says Fauriel, ‘cultivaient avec ardeur une certaine philosophie qu’ils prenaient pour celle de Platon.’[463]

There was a tendency to give a wide and vague meaning to the word ‘philosophy’. For its proper study, knowledge of the sciences was postulated. Music and astrology are spoken of by Sidonius as ‘consequentia membra philosophiae’.[464] So in the fourth century philosophy ‘was regarded as incomplete unless it included some knowledge of natural phenomena to be used for purposes of analogy’.[465] Hilary of Poitiers, for example, in the De Trinitate and the Commentaries, refers to facts of animal birth, life and death; to medicine and surgery; to the natural history of trees and animals; and we know of a lost work of his against the physician Dioscorus which may have been a refutation of materialistic arguments.[466]

When we attempt to look at the purely pagan side of philosophy in this period, the impression made by the scanty data is not one of greatness. Agricola, indeed, in a previous century, could say of his Gallic studies ‘se prima in iuventa studium philosophiae acrius, ultra quam concessum Romano ac senatori, hausisse’,[467] but he had been at Massilia, which was different from the rest by reason of its Greek spirit. And his very words indicate the general Roman attitude to philosophy, the inflexibility of a positive and practical mind which resulted in a superficial conception of the subject. To a certain extent it seems reasonable to say that the provinces accepted this attitude as part of the Roman tradition. The Gaul of the fourth century certainly seems to have done so. For Ausonius, though he makes a fine show of technical terms and learned allusions, is far from suggesting any depth of thought. We instinctively agree with a commentator[468] who regards him as ‘tritis et vulgivagis sententiis ex usu scholastico ditatus’. His philosophical verses[469] in the Eclogues are translations and only the first part strikes a deeper moral note; the rest, like the ΝΑΙ ΚΑΙ ΟΥ ΠΥΘΑΓΟΡΙΚΟΝ, is all more or less trifling. It is significant that he calls himself a Christian, yet he gives no sign of Christian thought, and shrugs his shoulders about the question of immortality. Again and again he dismisses the matter with a query.[470] Even Sidonius, who is a semi-Christian and touched to some extent by the impetus which Christianity was at that time giving to thought, is diffident about independent thinking and fearful lest the Roman tradition[471] should be impaired, especially by a provincial. He uses the technical terms which Cicero had introduced from the Greek.[472]

Jung thinks that the comparative neglect of philosophy was part of a definite imperial policy, which remembered the fact that the stirring teaching of the Druids (actuosa doctrina), regarding the immortality of the soul, urged the Gauls to warfare and made them reckless in rebellion.[473] But this appears to be founded rather on the fancifulness of an exaggerated nationalism than on a general consideration of existing conditions. For slackness of thought and lack of thinkers was a common characteristic of the time, and it had its roots in the general paralysis produced by the imperial system and the rhetorical form of education (factors which will be more fully considered at a later stage), rather than in a measure aimed at philosophy for so special and so antiquated a reason.

The contention that there were none except teachers of Rhetoric in the secondary schools of Gaul, seems to rest on better evidence in the case of Law. In spite of Juvenal’s well-known allusion to Gaul as a school of forensic eloquence[474] and his contention: ‘Gallia causidicos docuit facunda Britannos’, and Lucian’s reference[475] to the famous lawyers of Massilia, Menecrates, Charmolus, and Zenothemis, Ausonius mentions no professors of law, though there are those among the Bordeaux teachers whom ‘forum ... fecit nobiles’.[476] The studious Victorius investigates ‘ius pontificum’, the resolutions of the people and the Senate, and the codes of Draco and Solon, but only as the grammarian would and from the antiquarian point of view. It is worm-eaten and ancient manuscripts that he studies rather than more obvious and accessible works.[477]

In the fifth century there are indications of considerable interest. And this is what we should expect. For the publication of the Theodosian Code in 438 made the study of law more accessible, and tended to eliminate the superstitious and the sacramental element in it. So Fauriel says that jurisprudence attracted more men of distinction then than in previous centuries.[478] Sidonius mentions particularly the learned Leo of Narbonne who was more learned in the Twelve Tables than Appius Claudius himself,[479] and he calls Marcellinus ‘skilled in laws’.[480]

Arles, the seat of the prefect of the Gauls and of the emperor, naturally became a centre for the study of Roman law. It was there that Petronius[481] practised his profession.

It appears, however, that while the Gauls were famed for legal knowledge and ability, Rome was still regarded as the school of jurisprudence. It is not mere rhetoric when Symmachus calls Rome ‘Latiaris facundiae domicilium’,[482] and Sidonius ‘Domicilium legum’.[483] Rutilius extols Rome with unaffected enthusiasm for her law: ‘Thou hast also embraced the world with thy law-bringing triumphs and makest all to live by a common bond.’[484]

The belief in Rome’s eternal sway[485] is for him connected chiefly with her law. ‘Stretch forth thy laws that are destined to live into the Roman ages, and do thou alone unafraid regard the distaff of the Fates,’[486] and poetic vision is aided by the lawyer’s foresight.[487] He tells of a Gaul, Palladius, who went to study law at Rome:

And we are told that St. Germanus who, according to the life claimed to be by his pupil Constantius, was born at Auxerre towards the end of the fourth century, had a similar training. To set the crown upon his literary education in Gaul he went to study law at Rome.[489] Rome, in fact, maintained her supremacy in this branch longer than in any other, and her professors attracted students from all parts of the Empire.[490]

The connexion between jurisprudence and imperial matters is clear. For a study of Rome’s great contribution to the world could not but stimulate admiration for the imperial city. By examining the law, the provincial realized more clearly the advantage of the pax Romana. One of the panegyrists[491] declared to Maximian in 293 ‘iustitia cognitione iuris addiscitur’,[492] and it is clear that his appreciation of the moral benefits of Roman order is more than mere rhetoric. Perhaps Rome’s rulers perceived this, and made it their policy (as Jung[493] suggests) to attract students of law to Rome, that they might see things from Rome’s point of view, and facilitate the government of the provinces by applying the law according to the Roman tradition. For as the Empire had grown and its administration increased, there had arisen a need for officials who would carry out the law with ability and uniformity; and complete uniformity could only be attained by a knowledge of law seen as the Roman saw it.[494]

Justinian, in the preface to the Digest which he addresses to the teachers of law in the Empire, reviews the study of jurisprudence in the past. It was hopelessly deficient. Only six books were studied and those intricate, confused, and partly obsolete (iura utilia in se perraro habentes). Among the six books were the Institutes of Gaius, but they were not consecutively studied, many parts being omitted as superfluous. The teaching, in fact, was entirely haphazard; Gaius was given to the first-year students, ‘passim et quasi per saturam collectum et utile cum inutilibus mixtum’. Only in their second year did they learn the first part of the Institutes, and it was an unheard of thing to go into details. They also learnt certain ‘tituli’, and more of these in their third year, when they were initiated into the ‘responsa’ of the great Papinianus (ad sublimissimum Papinianum eiusque responsa iter eis aperiebatur). But here, too, their training was imperfect, as they only read eight books. The students read the ‘Pauliana responsa’ for themselves in a slipshod fashion (per imperfectum, et iam quodammodo male consuetum inconsequentiae cursum). This was the end of their theoretical training throughout ancient times. Justinian is resolved that there shall be an improvement and proceeds to outline a scheme by which the youth of the future may be better instructed. This syllabus, however, lies beyond the limits of our period.

The emperor is at pains to kindle enthusiasm for jurisprudence. He exhorts the students to exert all diligence, so that on the completion of their studies the glorious hope of governing the Empire may be theirs.[495] For, as Gibbon remarks, ‘all the civil magistrates were drawn from the profession of the law.’[496] Antecessores[497] or lecturing lawyers were appointed throughout the Empire, and the places where they taught were called ‘stationes’.[498] The course, at any rate in the time of Justinian, lasted five years (Constitution, ‘Omnem Reipublicae’, § 5). Learned lawyers like Antistius Labeo under Augustus lectured for six months and devoted six months to writing.[499] When the students dispersed themselves through the provinces there was no lack of opportunity to practise their profession. The court of the Praetorian prefect of the East alone required the services of one hundred and fifty advocates,[500] and the rewards so liberally promised by Justinian for the ‘laudabile vitaeque hominum necessarium advocationis officium’[501] must have created a vast interest in the study of law.

Whether it was the fault of the teachers or of the pupils or of the social conditions, it is clear that lawyers had a bad name in the fourth as well as in the fifth century. The vivid and caustic description of Ammianus is well known.[502] He is suspicious of legal cunning and has the soldier’s impatience of rhetoric. We must therefore allow something for his prejudices. But his analysis cannot be wholly false. We may discount his language when he describes the profession as consisting of ‘violenta et rapacissima genera hominum’, but when he enumerates these classes and gives each its special characteristics, we feel that he may exaggerate but that he does not invent. The first class consists of mischief-makers and robbers, ‘odia struentes infesta’. Their oratory is empty and artificial: ‘eloquentiam inanis quaedam imitatur fluentia loquendi’. The second class consists of fraudulent people who make a superstition and a mystery of the law, increasing its entanglements, ‘velut fata natalicia praemonstrantes’, in order to enhance their own importance. Thirdly, there are the unscrupulous advocates who are always ready to sacrifice truth to money or fame. Finally, we have ‘a shameless race, perverse and ignorant—men who, having run away from school too young, scurry about in the nooks and corners of various states’.[503] Cicero is the ideal—‘excellentissimus omnium Cicero’—and Ammianus regards the practice of his day as erring from the good of the past.

Confirmation of the point in this criticism which most nearly touches education comes from an unexpected source. Sidonius, the rhetorical, the obscure, the vendor of subtle argument, associates ‘obscurity’ with the lawyers as a special characteristic.[504] Nor does he seem to think them particularly helpful. He sends a man, who has a case about a will, to Bishop Leontius, and begs him to see that justice is done, using his episcopal authority, if the lawyers will not help the client.[505]

Finally, there is medicine. When Denk maintains[506] that there was no faculty of medicine in the provinces, he cannot mean to exclude medical study as a subject of secondary education. There was probably no separate school of medicine,[507] but Ausonius definitely mentions the ‘medica ars’ as one of the Bordeaux professors’ titles to fame.[508] In former days Massilia had given to Gaul the medical tradition of the Greeks, just as Greece had given it to Rome. A certain Crinas, who lived in the reign of Nero, is said (though apparently only by Bulaeus) to have been the first to advance the study of medicine at Massilia, and we gather from Pliny that he introduced astrology into his medicine and gained an immense name and fortune.[509] Galen twice mentions Claudius Abascantus[510] of Lyons, who probably flourished under Augustus, as a doctor of prominence, and Eutropius of Bordeaux appears among the writers on medicine in the fourth century.[511] Julius Ausonius, the father of the poet, was the court physician of Valentinian I. At the beginning of the fifth century we find Marcellus Empiricus[512] of Bordeaux composing a book of prescriptions, ‘compositiones medicamentorum’. He gives many Celtic plant-names, Druidical beliefs, and a large number of ἅπαξ εἰρημένα and provincialisms.[513] As in the case of astrology, superstition plays a large part: certain herbs are to be picked with the left hand, or while muttering some magic formula like ‘rica, rica, soro’.[514] It is partly for this reason that Ausonius refers to the ‘libros medicinae’ as books closed to the vulgar, and that his eccentric aunt took up the study of medicine.[515] There seems to have been no organized system of medical study, and we do not even possess any details of the procedure in a particular case. It seems reasonable to suppose that the practical part of the profession was acquired by apprenticeship, while the rhetor confronted the student with such parts of the medical theory as could be found in the writings of Galen (who was the central authority) and his successors.

The frequent grouping of the doctors with the teachers in the Theodosian Code suggests that the public State-paid physicians taught as well as practised their art. Reinach[516] warns against certainty on this point, but it is at least probable. The wording of Constantine’s law[517] of September 27, 333, confirms the supposition. Doctors and teachers are proclaimed exempt from military service and public burdens so that they may have leisure to train others in their art—‘quo facilius studiis liberalibus et memoratis artibus multos instituant’. Of the original five classes of archiatri paid by the State—those of the court, those belonging to the municipalities, the heads of the medicine guilds, those in charge of the public gymnasia, and those who attended the Vestals—it was probably the second, the municipal doctors, who were the teachers of their profession.

If this is so, it proves that Rome was not the only place where doctors could be trained, as Denk seems to think.[518] Indeed, the provinces were more interested in medicine than Rome herself. Pliny[519] said in a broad and general way that for six hundred years Rome had got on without doctors, and it is well known that the Roman doctors made no important contribution to the science. Egyptians, Greeks, Gauls—these were the physicians of Rome. Pliny writes to Trajan asking him to give the citizenship to a doctor from whom he had derived benefit: ‘est enim peregrinae condicionis, manumissus a peregrina’.[520] The doctor who attends Hadrian on his death-bed is a foreigner.[521] Ammianus describes the growing fame of the Alexandrian school of medicine during the fourth century, as such, that a man, even if his actual work turned out badly, need only say that he had been trained at Alexandria in order to gain commendation.[522]

Then, as now, it was a lucrative profession, according to the proverb ‘Galenus dat opes’;[523] nor did the benefit to the sick always correspond to the doctor’s gain.[524]

A word may perhaps be added on the agrimensores, who represent the department of science among the Romans that was most scientifically employed, though all their mathematics came from Hiero of Alexandria.[525] Their work was partly military (the marking out of camps and locating of positions for the army) and partly civil (the surveying of colonies and provinces for revenue purposes). In cases of ‘controversia de loco’, the Theodosian Code appoints them judges.[526] At first they were free to practise where and when they could, but in our period they were attached to guilds, and stood under a ‘primicerius mensorum’.[527] This organization of the ‘agrimensores’ implies a certain amount of training and a professional test of proficiency.[528]

Their connexion with Gaul is not very clearly attested, but can hardly be doubted. Frontinus in his De Controversiis Agrorum, speaking of the well-known question as to the ownership of the old bed of a river which has flowed out of its course into another man’s land, says ‘Hae quaestiones maxime in Gallia togata moventur’.[529] Again, in speaking of certain technical surveyor’s terms, he says ‘Hae vocabula in lege quae est in agro Uritano, in Gallia ... adhuc permanere dicuntur’,[530] which shows that surveying had long been connected with Cisalpine Gaul. In view of the laws of the Theodosian Code of our period about surveyors, it seems possible that in Transalpine Gaul there may have been schools for the training of agrimensores.

A question that comes into one’s mind on reading Ausonius is whether, in the methods of the Gallic master, mnemonics did not play an important part.

We find in the Eclogues verses which, on the face of them, suggest special composition for school use. The ‘Monosticha de Mensibus’[531] inevitably remind one of school rhymes:

So the verses giving the number of days in each month[532] (‘Thirty days hath September’), or the days on which the Nones and the Ides fall in the various months,[533] or the intervals between the Ides of the one month and the Kalends of the next,[534] or the order of the seasons,[535] or the names and places of the Greek games,[536] or the labours of Hercules,[537] all suggest a similar purpose.

Again, in his metrical summary of the Caesars of Suetonius, written for his son, we find ‘monosticha de ordine imperatorum’,[538] ‘de aetate imperii eorum monosticha’,[539] ‘de obitu singulorum monosticha’,[540] all of which look very much like mnemonics.

First of all, their style is such as is suitable to school children—simple, clear, and terse, and the absence of rhetoric and affectation is not less striking than the dullness of the lines.

Secondly, it was a tradition handed down by the last great writer on education, that the memory should be trained by various devices. And the fourth century was prone to be tradition-bound.

Cicero says that Simonides of Ceos was the founder of the ‘ars memoriae’,[541] i.e. the ‘techne’, the system for developing the memory, a statement which Quintilian repeats before expounding his views on the subject. This he does with care, feeling the importance of memory—as ‘thesaurus eloquentiae’.[542] Only the man who remembers well, he says, in effect (and his words have a modern ring), can ever hope to become an orator.[543] There was always a tendency among the Romans towards encyclopaedic learning, which was the main feature of the grammarian’s school. We notice it also in the ostentatious lists of authors given by Sidonius.[544]

Nor can we wonder at this. The whole educational system was calculated to produce a good memory. The grammarian’s school supplied facts which had to be remembered in declamations, and the rhetor introduced a host of technicalities which had also to be kept in memory. The declaimer had to fit into his speech as many quotations as he could possibly remember,[545] and in Ausonius’s letter to his grandson the ‘good boy’ is the one with the long memory.[546]

Bearing this in mind, Quintilian recommended that boys should learn as much as possible by heart, going over the same ground again and again (quasi eundem cibum remandendi, sc. opus). They must, therefore, begin with the poets, before going on to prose which is harder to remember.[547] Memory is a matter of pigeon-holes. What is to be remembered must be imagined in certain places, so that the order of the places will recall the order of the things to be remembered. We shall then use the ‘places’ instead of tablets, and the images associated with them as letters (ut locis pro cera, simulacris pro litteris uteremur).[548] To cultivate the memory various tricks may be tried. We learn a large subject by remembering parts of it in order; or we may take a sign to stand for the thing to be remembered, e.g. an anchor for ‘sailing’, or a weapon for ‘campaign’. Like Cicero, he lays stress on ‘loca’, imagined or actual, and on ‘simulacra vel imagines’. In the case of a long speech it is best to divide it into parts which should not be too small. Division is important. ‘Qui recte diviserit, nunquam poterit in rerum ordine errare.’ He also recommends marking a difficult passage (aliquas apponere notas).[549]

Thirdly, we may note the fruits of this training, as far as memory is concerned. Ausonius, by writing the Cento Nuptialis, proved only one good thing: that he knew the whole of Vergil by heart. Minervius[550] was noted for his memory. Ausonius spends ten lines in describing it, and clearly indicates how highly it was prized. Nepotianus, too, is specially commended for possessing this gift.[551]

In view of all this, we may not unfairly conclude that mnemonics played a considerable part in the schools of Gaul. In the history of the human race, as in that of the individual,[552] the memorizing stage comes before the development of thought. And the less advanced systems of education all over the world are characterized by their almost exclusive emphasis on learning things by heart.

(iii) Control and Arrangement of the School

(a) Discipline in primary and secondary schools.

The rhetorical tradition brought with it certain traditional methods, and one of them was the excessive use of corporal punishment. In the East, Libanius testifies to the frequent employment of this method. We have seen that the paedagogus appealed as a matter of course to the ‘argumentum ad baculum’; we find in Libanius that the rhetor, the university teacher, did likewise.

The general prospect of a schoolday may be described in terms of the rod: ἔσονται δ’ ἐνεργοὶ μὲν ἱμάντες, ἐνεργοὶ δὲ ῥάβδοι. He has a feeling that it is the only method of curing idleness. Writing to a father whose son has complained to him about a beating he had received, Libanius maintains that it is absolutely necessary to treat slothfulness in that way.[553]

In the West we have the pathetic reminiscences of Augustine.[554] No trouble was taken to explain to him the use or object of lessons; all he knew was that if he did not learn he was beaten. His prayer was to escape the rod, and very earnestly he prayed (rogabam Te parvus non parvo affectu), for his blows were to him ‘magnum tunc et grave malum’. He speaks bitterly of the lack of sympathy, which his sensitive nature felt more than the rest. He is galled by the unfairness of a system which punished faults in boys that were excused in men. ‘Maiorum nugae negotia vocabantur, puerorum autem talia cum sint, puniuntur a maioribus.’ No proper balance was kept between lessons and play.