Roman adoption of Hellenistic education
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Something of these original characteristics was to survive always in Roman society, so ready to be conservative; but Latin civilization did not long develop autonomously.
It assimilated, with a remarkable faculty for adaptation, the structures and techniques of the much further evolved Hellenistic civilization. The Romans themselves were quite aware of this, as evidenced by the famous lines of Horace: “Captive Greece captivated her rude conqueror and introduced the arts to rustic Latium” (“Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio” [Epistles, II, i, 156]).
Greek influence was felt very early in Roman education and grew ever stronger after the long series of gains leading to the annexation of Macedonia (168 bce), of Greece proper (146 bce), of the kingdom of Pergamum (133 bce), and finally of the whole of the Hellenized Orient. The Romans quickly appreciated the advantages they could draw from this more mature civilization, richer than their own national culture. The practical Romans grasped the advantages to be drawn from a knowledge of Greek—an international language known to many of their adversaries, soon to be their Oriental subjects—and grasped the related importance of mastering the art of oratory so highly developed by the Greeks. Second-century Rome assigned to the spoken word, particularly in political and legal life, as great an importance as had Athens in the 5th century. The Roman aristocrats quickly understood what a weapon rhetoric could be for a statesman.
Rome doubly adopted Hellenistic education. On the one hand, it came to pass that a Roman was considered truly cultivated only if he had the same education, in Greek, as a native Greek acquired; on the other hand, there progressively developed a parallel system of instruction that transposed into Latin the institutions, programs, and methods of Hellenistic education. Naturally, only the children of the ruling class had the privilege of receiving the complete and bilingual education. From the earliest years, the child, boy or girl, was entrusted to a Greek servant or slave and thus learned to speak Greek fluently even before being able to speak Latin competently; the child also learned to read and write in both languages, with Greek again coming first. (Alongside this private tutoring there soon developed, from the 3rd century bce, a Greek public education in schools aimed at a socially broader clientele, but the results of this schooling were less satisfactory than the direct method enjoyed by the children of the aristocracy.) In following the normal course of studies, the young Roman was taught next by an instructor of Greek letters (grammatikos) and then by a Greek rhetorician. Those desiring more complete training did not content themselves with the numerous and often highly qualified Greeks to be found in Rome but went to Greece to participate in the higher studies of the Greeks themselves. From 119 or 118 bce onward the Romans secured admission to the Ephebic College at Athens, and in the 1st century bce such young Latins as Cicero were attending the schools of the best philosophers and rhetoricians at Athens and Rhodes.
Roman modifications
The adoption of Hellenistic education did not proceed, however, without a certain adaptation to the Latin temperament: the Romans showed a marked reserve toward Greek athleticism, which shocked both their morals and their sense of the deep seriousness of life. Although gymnastic exercises entered into their daily life, it was under the category of health and not that of sport; in Roman architecture, the palaestra or gymnasium was only an appendage of the public baths, which were exaggerations of their Greek models. There was the same reserve, on grounds of moral seriousness, toward music and dance—arts suitable for professional performers but not for freeborn young men and least of all for young aristocrats. The musical arts indeed became integrated into Latin culture as elements of the life of luxury and refinement but as spectacle rather than as amateur participation—hence their disappearance from programs of education. It must be remembered, however, that athletics and music were in Greece itself survivals of archaic education and had already entered upon a process of decline.
This education in a foreign language was paralleled by a course of studies exactly patterned upon those of the Greek schools but transposed into the Latin language. The aristocracy was to remain always attached to the idea of private education conducted within the family, but social pressure brought about the gradual development of public education in schools, as in Greece, at three levels—elementary, secondary, and higher; they appeared at different dates and in various historical contexts.
Education of youth
The appearance of the first primary schools is difficult to date; but the use of writing from the 7th century bce implies the early existence of some kind of appropriate primary instruction. The Romans took their alphabet from the Etruscans, who had taken theirs from the Greeks, who had taken theirs from the Phoenicians. The early Romans quite naturally copied the pedagogy of the Hellenistic world: the same ignorance of psychology, the same strict and brutal discipline, the same analytical method characterized by slow progress—the alphabet (forward, backward, from both ends toward the middle), the syllabary, isolated words, then short sentences (one-line moral maxims), finally continuous texts—the same method for writing, and the same numeration, rather than computation.
It was only between the 3rd and the end of the 1st century bce that Latin secondary education developed, staffed by the grammaticus Latinus, corresponding to the Greek grammatikos. Since the principal object of this education was the explication of poetry, its rise was hindered by the slowness with which Latin literature developed. The first-known of these teachers, Livius Andronicus, took as his subject matter his own Latin translation of the Odyssey; two generations later, Ennius explicated his own poetic works. Only with the great poets of the age of Augustus could Latin literature provide classics able to rival Homer in educational value; they were adopted as basic texts almost immediately after their appearance. Thereafter, and until the end of antiquity, the program was not to undergo further change, the principal authors being first of all Virgil, the comic author Terence, the historian Sallust, and the unchallenged master of prose, Cicero. The methods of the Latin grammarian were copied directly from those of his Greek counterpart; the essential point was the explication of the classic authors, completed by a theoretical study of good language using a grammar textbook and by practical exercises in composition, graduated according to a minutely regulated progression and always remaining rather elementary. Theoretically, the curriculum remained that of the seven liberal arts, but, as in Greece, it practically neglected the study of the sciences in favour of that of letters.
It was only in the 1st century bce that the teaching of rhetoric in Latin was established: the first recorded Latin rhetorician, Plotius Gallus, appeared in 93 bce in a political context—namely, as a democratic initiative to counter the aristocratic education given in Greek—and as such was soon prohibited by the conservative party in power. It was not until the end of the century and the appearance of the works of Cicero that this education would be revived and become normal practice. First, Cicero’s discourses offered the young Latin the equivalent of those of the Greek Demosthenes, and, second, Cicero’s theoretical treatises provided a technical vocabulary obviating the need for Greek manuals. But this instruction was to remain always very close to its Hellenistic origins: the terminology used by Rome’s greatest educator, Quintilian (c. 35–c. 100 ce), was much more impregnated with Hellenism, much less Latinized, than that which Cicero had proposed. At Rome, too, rhetoric became the form of higher education enjoying the greatest prestige; as in Greece, this popularity outlived the elimination of political eloquence. More than in Greece, legal eloquence continued to flourish (Quintilian had in mind particularly the training of future advocates), but—as in the Hellenic milieu—Latin culture became predominantly aesthetic: from the beginning of the empire, the public lecture was the most fashionable literary genre, and the teaching of rhetoric was very naturally oriented toward the art of the lecturer as the crowning achievement.
Higher education
Because the oratorical art was incontestably the most popular subject of higher education, the Romans did not feel the same urgency to Latinize the other rival branches of knowledge, which interested only a small number of specialists with unusual vocations. To be sure, the philosophical work of Cicero had the same ambition as his oratorical work and proved by its existence that it was possible to philosophize in Latin, but philosophy found no successors to Cicero as rhetoric did. There was never a Latin school for philosophy. Of course, Rome did not lack philosophers, but many used Greek as their means of expression (even the emperor Marcus Aurelius); those who, like Cicero, wrote in Latin—Seneca, for example—had taken their philosophy studies in Greek. It was the same in the sciences, particularly in the medical sciences; for long, there were no medical books in Latin except encyclopaedias on a popular level.
On the other hand, Rome created in the school of law another type of higher education—the only one that had no equivalent in Hellenistic education. The position of law in Roman life and civilization is, of course, well known. Perhaps even more than rhetoric, it offered young Romans profitable careers; very naturally, there developed an appropriate education to prepare them. At first elementary in character and entirely practical, it was given within the framework of apprenticeship: the professor of law (magister juris) was primarily a practitioner, who initiated into his art the group of young disciples entrusted to him; these listened to his consultations and heard him plead or judge. Beginning in Cicero’s time and undoubtedly under his influence, this instruction was paralleled by a systematic theoretical exposition. Roman law was thus promoted to the rank of a scientific discipline. True schools were progressively established and took on an official character; their existence is well attested beginning with the 2nd century ce. It was at this same time that legal education acquired its definitive tools, with the composition of systematic elementary treatises such as the Institutiones of Gaius, manuals of procedure, commentaries on the law, and systematic collections of jurisprudence. This creative period perhaps reached its peak at the beginning of the 3rd century ce. The works of the great legal authors of this time, which became classics, were offered by the law professor with much interpretation and explication—very similar to the way in which grammarians offered literature.
Rome, the capital, remained the great centre of this advanced study in law. At the beginning of the 3rd century, however, there appeared in the Roman Orient the school of Beirut. The teaching there was in Latin; and, to hear it and profit by the advantages that it offered for a high administrative or judicial career, many young Greeks enrolled at the school, in spite of the language obstacle. Only a legal career could persuade the Greeks to learn Latin, a language that they had always regarded as “barbarous.”
The Roman world became covered with a network of schools concurrent with the Romanization of the provinces. The primary school always remained private; on the other hand, many schools of grammar or rhetoric acquired the character of public institutions supported (as in the Hellenic world) either by private foundations or by a municipal budget. In effect, it was always the city that was responsible for education. The liberal central government of the high empire, anxious to reduce its administrative apparatus to a minimum, made no pretense of assuming charge of it. It was content to encourage education and to favour teaching careers by fiscal exemptions, and only very exceptionally did an emperor create certain chairs of higher education and assign them a regular stipend. Vespasian (69–79 ce) created two chairs at Rome, one of Greek rhetoric and the other of Latin rhetoric. Marcus Aurelius (161–180 ce) similarly endowed, in Athens, a chair of rhetoric and four chairs of philosophy, one for each of the four great sects—Platonism, Aristotelianism, Epicureanism, and Stoicism.
Education in the later Roman Empire
The dominant fact is the extraordinary continuity of the methods of Roman education throughout such a long succession of centuries. Whatever the profound transformations in the Roman world politically, economically, and socially, the same educational institutions, the same pedagogical methods, the same curricula were perpetuated without great change for 1,000 years in Greek and six or seven centuries in Roman territory. At most, a few nuances of change need be noted. There was a measure of increasing intervention by the central government, but this was primarily to remind the municipalities of their educational duties, to fix the remuneration of teachers, and to supervise their selection. Only higher education received direct attention: in 425 ce, Theodosius II created an institute of higher education in the new capital of Constantinople and endowed it with 31 chairs for the teaching of letters, rhetoric (both Greek and Latin), philosophy, and law. Another innovation was that the exuberant growth of the bureaucratic apparatus under the later empire favoured the rise of one branch of technical education, that of stenography.
The only evolution of any notable extent involves the use of Greek and Latin. There had never been more than a few Greeks who learned Latin, even though the growing machinery of administration and the increasing clientele drawn to the law schools of Beirut and Constantinople tended to increase the numerical size of this tiny minority. On the other hand, in Latin territory, late antiquity exhibited a general recession in the use of Greek. Although the ideal remained unchanged and high culture always proposed to be bilingual, most people generally knew Greek less and less well. This retrogression need not be interpreted solely as a phenomenon of decadence: it had also a positive aspect, being an effect of the development of Latin culture itself. The richness and worth of the Latin classics explain why the youth of the West had less time than formerly to devote to the study of the Greek authors. Virgil and Cicero had replaced Homer and Demosthenes, just as in modern Europe the ancient languages have retreated before the progress of the national languages and literatures. Hence, in the later empire there appeared specialists in intercultural relations and translations from Greek into Latin. In the 4th and particularly in the 5th century, medical education in Latin became possible, thanks to the appearance of a whole medical (and veterinary) literature consisting essentially of translations of Greek manuals. It was the same with philosophy: resuming Cicero’s enterprise at a distance of more than five centuries, Boethius (c. 480–524) in his turn sought with his manuals and his translations to make the study of that discipline available in Latin. Although the misfortunes of Italy in the 6th century—including the Lombardian invasion—did not permit this hope to be realized, the work of Boethius later nourished the medieval renaissance of philosophic thought.
Nothing better demonstrates the prestige and the allure of Classical culture than the attitude taken toward it by the Christians. This new religion could have organized an original system of education analogous to that of the rabbinical school—that is, one in which children learned through study of the Holy Scriptures—but it did not do so. Usually, Christians were content to have both their special religious education provided by the church and the family and their Classical instruction received in the schools and shared with the pagans. Thus, they maintained the tradition of the empire after it had become Christian. Certainly, in their view, the education dispensed by these schools must have presented many dangers, inasmuch as Classical culture was bound up with its pagan past (at the beginning of the 3rd century the profession of schoolteacher was among those that disqualified one from baptism); but the utility of Classical culture was so evident that they considered it necessary to send their children to these same schools in which they barred themselves from teaching. From Tertullian to St. Basil the Great of Caesarea, Christian scholars were ever mindful of the dangers presented by the study of the classics, the idolatry and immorality that they promoted; nevertheless, they sought to show how the Christian could make good use of them.
With the passage of time and the general conversion of Roman society and particularly of its ruling class, Christianity, overcoming its reserve, completely assimilated and took over Classical education. In the 4th century Christians were occupying teaching positions at all levels—from schoolmasters and grammarians to the highest chairs of eloquence. In his treatise De doctrina Christiana (426), St. Augustine formulated the theory of this new Christian culture: being a religion of the Book, Christianity required a certain level of literacy and literary understanding; the explication of the Bible required the methods of the grammarian; preaching a new field of action required rhetoric; theology required the equipment of philosophy. The synthesis of Christianity and Classical education had become so intimate that, when the “barbarian” invasions swept away the traditional school along with many other imperial and Roman institutions, the church, needing a literary culture for the education of its clergy, kept alive the cultural tradition that Rome had received from the Hellenistic world.
Henri-Irénée Marrou James BowenEducation in Persian, Byzantine, early Russian, and Islamic civilizations
Ancient Persia
The ancient Persian empire began when Cyrus II the Great initiated his conquests in 559 bce. Three elements dominated this ancient Persian civilization: (1) a rigorous and challenging physical environment, (2) the activist and positive Zoroastrian religion and ethics, and (3) a militant, expansionist people. These elements developed in the Persians an adventurous personality mingled with intense national feelings.
In the early period (559–330 bce), known as the Achaemenian period for the ancestor of Cyrus and his successors, education was sustained by Zoroastrian ethics and the requirements of a military society and aimed at serving the needs of four social classes: priests, warriors, tillers of the soil, and merchants. Three principles sustained Zoroastrian ethics: the development of good thoughts, of good words, and of good actions. Achaemenian Zoroastrian education stressed strong family ties and community feelings, acceptance of imperial authority, religious indoctrination, and military discipline.
Education was a private enterprise. Formative education was carried on in the home and continued after the age of seven in court schools for children of the upper classes. Secondary and higher education included training in law to prepare for government service, as well as medicine, arithmetic, geography, music, and astronomy. There were also special military schools.
In 330 bce Persia was conquered by Alexander the Great, and native Persian or Zoroastrian education was largely eclipsed by Hellenistic education. Greek practices continued during the Parthian empire (247 bce–224 ce), founded by seminomadic conquerors from the Caspian steppes. Thus, truly Persian influences were not restored until the appearance of a new, more sophisticated and reform-minded dynasty, the Sāsānians, in the 3rd century ce. In what has been called the neo-Persian empire of the Sāsānians (224–651 ce), the Achaemenian social structure and education were revived and further developed and modified. Zoroastrian ethics, though more advanced than during the Achaemenian period, emphasized similar moral principles but with new stress upon the necessity for labour (particularly agriculture), upon the sanctity of marriage and family devotion, and upon the cultivation of respect for law and of intellectualism—all giving to education a strong moral, social, and national foundation. The subject matter of basic education included physical and military exercises, reading (Pahlavi alphabet), writing (on wooden tablets), arithmetic, and the fine arts.
The greatest achievement of Sāsānian education was in higher education, particularly as it developed in the Academy of Gondēshāpūr. There Zoroastrian culture, Indian and Greek sciences, Alexandrian-Syrian thought, medical training, theology, philosophy, and other disciplines developed to a high degree, making Gondēshāpūr the most advanced academic centre of learning in the later period of Sāsānian civilization. Students from various parts of the world came to the academy, which advanced, among other subjects, Zoroastrian, Greek, and Indian philosophies; Persian, Hellenic, and Indian astronomy; Zoroastrian ethics, theology, and religion; law, government, and finance; and various branches of medicine. It was partly through the Academy of Gondēshāpūr that important elements of Classical Greek and Roman learning reached the Muslims during the 8th and 9th centuries ce and through them, in Latin translations of Arabic works, the Schoolmen of western Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries.
Mehdi K. Nakosteen