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.
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.
On the other hand, he confesses that he was often disobedient through love of play, and admits ‘non enim discerem, nisi cogerer’.[555] Moreover, when he puts his punishments in the same category as ‘temptationes martyrum’, we are inclined to think him a sentimental prig. But there can be no doubt about the excessive severity which was prevalent, and the fact that it impressed Augustine’s mind to such an extent[556] is a measure of its wrongness. The worst feature of the system was not so much the general acquiescence in force as a scholastic panacea, but in the rigidity which made no distinctions or allowances.
Gaul was no exception to the general tradition. We find in Ausonius a fine gentleness of spirit and an elaborate courtesy; he shows an almost un-Roman sympathy with Bissula, the barbarian maid, and is fond of animals,[557] yet he is by no means thoroughly converted from the old Roman harshness. The gladiatorial games went on, and were significant of a prevalent disregard for human life and personality. The old spirit flashes forth under the veneer of culture; as when Ausonius surprises us by saying blandly to his secretary, who had been branded for running away: ‘on your branded face then, Pergamus, you have borne the marks; letters which your hand neglected are inflicted on your forehead.’[558]
When he writes a letter of exhortation to his grandson we feel that though there is something of the Greek spirit of pleasure in education, and though he says[559] that the Muses, too, must play,
and again:
yet there is an acquiescence in an almost savage system of control. Surliness and brutality on the part of the master is accepted as one of the ills that flesh is heir to. It was not always so, he says:
Chiron used to guide his pupils with gentle words (though Juvenal represents Achilles as trembling before the rod).[562] But that state of things belongs to a mythological age. The only thing to do in the circumstances is to remember Vergil’s dictum: ‘Degeneres animos timor arguit’, and face the master as a brave warrior would his enemy.[563]
He pictures to his grandson the cane, the birch, the strap, and the excited bustle of the school-benches (a confession that even the most rigorous system of force could not keep perfect order). These instruments are ‘the pomp of the place’ and the elements in its scene of fear. But the great consolation is that both his father and his mother went through the same storm of blows in their childhood—an indication that the girls were not more spared than the boys.[564]
The same assumption that flogging is the inevitable counterpart of teaching is found in Sidonius.[565] ‘Ferulae lectionis Maronianae’ becomes a synonym for education at a grammar school, and the phrase ‘manum ferulae subducere’, in the sense of attending school, goes down through the Middle Ages into modern times. Even at the universities corporal punishment was the usual thing. Eusebius, professor of philosophy at Lyons, moulds his pupils ‘castigatoria severitate’.[566]
There are signs that the finer spirits, in theory at any rate, felt that there was something wrong with all this external rigour. Partly, no doubt, they followed the lead of Quintilian, and partly, perhaps, there was a slow evolution past the stage of mere militarism. Libanius boasts ἑτέρους δὲ ἴσμεν μυρίας ῥάβδους ἀνηλωκότας,[567] but he had no need to; and experience has taught him that the desired end is not always reached in this way. ‘Now I avoided correction by means of blows, for I saw that this method often had the opposite of the intended effect.’ We gather that the applause, which was usual in the rhetor’s school,[568] often degenerated into rowdiness.[569] Yet we find that the relation between master and pupil was often very hearty. Gregory of Nazianzus tells of the farewell speeches, the laments, the tears, which used to mark the day of parting.[570]
The opposition to the regular tradition is not so clearly formulated in the West, but we find indications of a better ideal. In the letter to his grandson, Ausonius does not praise existing conditions, but rather accepts them as a necessary evil. Indeed, he describes his own teaching in words which are so contrasted with his picture of the ordinary school as to imply a direct criticism.
Paulinus of Pella has pleasant memories of his schooldays.[572] The affection with which he writes to his teacher Ausonius[573] proves that the professor’s statements about the mildness of his régime were not unfounded. He had referred to his work with Paulinus as that of a yoke-mate, and his pupil replies:
Similarly, Sidonius speaks of his master Hoënius in a way which implies at least some degree of familiarity,[575] while his general recollections of his schooldays seem to have been distinctly pleasing.[576]
The Romans were not much interested in psychology, or in the full development of personality. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that practically all the child-games we know of in the ancient world are Greek;[577] nor can we wonder that the Gallo-Romans have left us no description of the sort of things the child mind does, the way in which its personality develops, when freed from the guidance of what is called education.
The subtler African mind of Augustine, however, has left us some record of such games; and they are all so human and lifelike that they may very well have been common not only to his country, but also to his age.
He mentions ‘nuts’, handball, and bird-catching (nucibus et pilulis et passeribus).[578] Games of ball were, of course, common to the children of all countries. We find Paulinus of Pella at the age of fifteen wishing for a golden ball just arrived from Rome,[579] and Augustine describes how desperately keen he was on beating a chum in the contest of the ball.[580] As for the sparrows, ‘to capture a bird’, says Bertrand in his Life of St. Augustine,[581] ‘that winged, light and brilliant thing, is what all children long to do in every country on earth’. The same author describes the game of nuts as it is played in modern Africa. ‘A step of a staircase is used as a table by the players, or the pavement of a courtyard. Three shells are laid on the stone and a dried pea. Then, with rapid, baffling movements, hands, brown and alert, fly from one shell to another, shuffle them, mix them up, juggle the dried pea sometimes under this shell, sometimes under that, and the point is to guess which shell the pea has got under. By means of certain astute methods an artful player can make the pea stick to his fingers, or to the inside of the shell, and the opponent loses every time....’
It may be, too, that there were battles in which they took sides as Carthaginians and Romans or Greeks and Trojans.[582] Augustine loved to listen to fairy tales and was passionately fond of watching plays and performances (curiositate magis magisque per oculos emicante in spectacula, ludos maiorum).[583] The spirit of adventure sometimes led him (as it has led children of all ages) to break the laws of property, as the incident of the pear-tree shows.[584]
Of the organized sport of youth and manhood we derive considerable information from Sidonius, who frequently mentions indoor games such as the duodecim scripta, a sort of backgammon,[585] fritilli[586] and pyrgus[587] (in which dice [tesserae] were used), as well as outdoor games. Paulinus of Pella tells us how he was taken ill with fever at the age of fifteen, and his parents, thinking his health more important than ‘doctae instructio linguae’, followed the doctor’s advice and removed him from his school at Bordeaux. Among the pleasures that were planned to speed his recovery was hunting, which his father resumed for his son’s sake.[588] The equipment of a well-to-do Gallic huntsman is described. The young Paulinus wishes for a fine horse with extravagant saddle and bridle adornments (faleris ornatior), a tall groom, a swift hound, and a smart hawk. Fine clothes and scent from Arabia are also objects of his desire.
The main details of the chase may easily be filled in from Sidonius. From the description of Theodoric’s hunting skill, we gather that spears were used as well as bows,[589] and that the unsportsmanlike Roman habit of driving the game into nets was practised in fifth-century Gaul.[590] The hawk was regarded as an indispensable item.[591] There is river and lake fishing,[592] either with nets or with lines laid before nightfall,[593] and we hear of boat-racing[594] on lakes.
The game of ball, which is so frequently mentioned in Sidonius, was undoubtedly the most popular outdoor game. It was played by two persons,[595] or four,[596] or more than four,[597] and we gather that there was a good deal of running about. That is practically all we know of its rules, so that it is, strictly speaking, an assumption to call it ‘tennis’.[598] There were professional ball-throwers or jugglers, and there is an epitaph, found at Narbonne, to one Capito, a ‘pilarius’.[599]
The games of the circus were still popular. Majorian held them at Arles,[600] and they are frequently mentioned in inscriptions, as in the one at Arles in which some thousands of sesterces are given ‘from the interest on which athletic or circus games are to be given yearly’.[601] At St. Pierre (Narbonne) a well-preserved inscription was found to a man who had been ‘flamen’ of Augustus and curator of the gladiatorial games, and had been honoured ‘for his exceptional munificence in providing games’.[602] A Massilian inscription mentions ‘agonothet(ae) agoni(s)‘,[603] and it is not impossible that the tradition of public games in Gaul received an initial impetus from the Greek city of the south.
Against these athletic displays there seems to have been a good deal of feeling. Pliny tells us that they were abolished at Vienne by Trebonius Rufus, whose judgement, when appealed against, was upheld by Junius Mauricus, who added ‘Vellem etiam Romae tolli posset’. The reason given was a moral one. ‘Mores Viennensium infecerat, ut noster (agon) hic (Romae) omnium’, says Pliny,[604] voicing the traditional Roman opinion on the subject. For Ennius had maintained: ‘Flagiti principium est nudare inter civis corpora’;[605] and Cicero had followed up the objection with ridicule: ‘Iuventutis vero exercitatio quam absurda in gymnasiis’.[606] Seneca[607] excludes gymnastics from his liberal studies, the main reason being ‘that they do not make for virtue’. Quintilian is more moderate. He has no objection to those who give them some little attention—‘paulum etiam palaestricis vacaverunt’. But those who overdo it, who spend part of their life in oil and part in wine, and so cloud the intellect, he would keep at the greatest possible distance.[608] There was a feeling that the ‘Graeculus magister’ who took charge of the exercises, instead of the old Roman veteran, was largely responsible for the degeneration.[609]
Now the question arises whether gymnastic exercises were part of the school programme, as in Greece, and whether there was anything corresponding to the State-governed training of the ‘ephebi’. There seems to be considerable confusion of thought on this point.
Denk[610] writes of the school buildings of Autun that they ‘lay in the shadow of trees, in the neighbourhood of murmuring fountains, the water of which was utilized by means of canals for bathing and swimming establishments, while the Gymnasium and the Palaestra provided for physical training and fitness’. For this he quotes Bulaeus.[611] But the reference is wrong. Elsewhere[612] this unreliable author vaguely mentions a palaestra in connexion with Autun, but cites no authority for his statement. Nor does Tacitus,[613] whom he quotes, refer to anything of this kind at Autun.
On the other hand, there is the fact that neither Ausonius, who was interested in education, nor Sidonius, who was interested in games, says a word about gymnastics in schools.
It is true that Sidonius, in describing the pictures of his country seat at Avitacum, refers to wrestling bouts and to the ‘virga gymnasiarchorum’.[614] But he is writing about artistic representations, the content of which were probably literary and without reference to Gaul, and the ‘virga gymnasiarchorum’, if, like the description of the misers who are practised in the palaestra of detraction and rub their limbs with poison instead of oil,[615] it has a realistic and a local ring, may refer with greater pertinence to the public performances such as took place at the Ludi Circenses.
Nor need we depend on the dangerous argument from silence. The whole of Roman traditional sentiment was against such an arrangement. Seneca, and the influential Quintilian, definitely excluded it from their scheme of studies. The most that Quintilian will concede is a master of deportment, who will teach the art of gesticulation (chironomia, lex gestus), which is important for the orator, and who will train in the pupil a decorous grace of body. He will even go so far as to pass the war-dance of the old Romans, with the qualification ‘nec ultra pueriles annos retinebitur nec in his ipsis diu.’ But he clearly means to exclude the gymnastic training as practised by the Greeks.[616]
It may be that the misconception of Denk partly lies in an unconscious confusion of the word ‘gymnasium’. Early writers like Plautus use it in the Greek sense of a school for gymnastic exercises, but where we find it in later authors like Cicero and Juvenal, the meaning is ‘public school or college’; and so it is that Sidonius uses it.[617] However that may be, it seems clear that on the whole Cramer is right, when he says that in the West gymnastics were never looked on as a part of public education.[618]
In so far as they appeared at all in the Roman world, they were due to original Greek influences, which, however, sometimes lasted surprisingly long. We read, for example, that Augustus was a constant spectator of the young men at their exercises, a considerable number of them (according to ancient custom) still being found at Capreae[619]—which was under the Greek influence of Naples. The inscriptions (as we have seen) point to the existence of a gymnasiarchia which superintended officially the physical exercises of the youths and children at Massilia,[620] though how late it persisted we cannot say. It is probable that even in the Greek city of the South the practice was discontinued in the fourth and fifth centuries, for Massilia’s glory was a thing of the past and her specifically Greek character had all but disappeared.
The Maeniana at Autun attracted so much attention that contemporary writers have left us a fairly complete picture of its organization and its structure, which may be taken as typical of the imperial schools in the larger cities of Gaul.
Autun, as we gather from the Panegyrici Latini, was full of big buildings—temples of Janus, Pluto, Jove, Apollo, Hercules, Venus, Proserpine, and Minerva—and possessed an amphitheatre, a ‘naumachia’ or artificial lake for mock naval battles, fountains, and aqueducts. To these, by the generosity of Constantius Chlorus, there had been added at the end of the third century the Maeniana, standing several stories high, in the most important part of the town between the Capitol on the one hand and the temples of Apollo and Herakles Musagetes on the other.[621]
The schoolroom was probably of the traditional type. The furniture was very simple. There were no desks (as we may infer, e.g. from the well-known fresco at Herculanum and the bas-relief at the Louvre)[622] and the pupils wrote on their knees. The benches on which they sat were arranged around the chair of the teacher. On the walls would be pictures of great historical events and geographical maps[623] according to Seneca’s principle ‘homines amplius oculis quam auribus credunt’.[624]
A gravestone relief discovered at Neumagen near Trèves shows a tutor in a comfortable seat holding a roll of papyrus. On either side sit two elder sons also reading from rolls, while a younger son stands on the right with his wax tablets, furnished with a handle, waiting for his writing lesson. The stone dates from the first centuries of the Christian era, and probably represents a private school in the home of a wealthy Gaul who wished to boast of the good education which he had given his children.[625]
We do not hear much about private tuition, but the old Roman custom of having a household slave to teach the rudiments must have persisted in the wealthy families of Gaul. Paulinus of Pella gives the impression that he had such training,[626] and Sidonius writes to Simplicius[627] that it is his duty to admonish his sons who are spoiled and refuse to submit to his assiduous care—which suggests, as Hodgkin remarks, that he was their tutor.
In the schools a ‘chair’ (cathedra) was occupied by the teacher, who was variously called ‘professor’, ‘praeceptor’, or, more rarely, ‘magister’, and a schola meant the number of people grouped under one cathedra, just as, in the official language of the time, it meant a group of officials serving under one head—soldiers, servants of the palace, and so forth.[628]
It is vain to look for any detailed scheme of arrangement in the subjects of the schools. As we have seen, no definite compartments can be distinguished in a subject like ‘Grammar’, nor were the same number of subjects found in every school: Law, Philosophy, and Medicine being taught in accordance with the traditions and the size of the place. We are not even quite clear as to the relation of the various grades of schools to one another when we try to look at Gaul in particular. For a point that is left vague in one’s mind after reading the authorities for Gaul, is whether a distinction was made between the elementary school and the more advanced classes of the grammarian. Julius Capitolinus, in his Life of M. Antoninus, the philosopher,[629] makes it quite clear that a different master was used at Rome during the second century for the two stages. ‘Usus est magistris ad prima elementa Euforione litteratore ... usus est praeterea grammaticis, Graeco, Alexandro Cotiaensi, Latinis, Trosio Apro et Pollione et Eutychio Proculo Siccensi. Oratoribus usus est Graecis Aninio Macro ... Latino Frontone Cornelio....’ Apuleius is just as clear. Drawn from the fountain of the Muses, he says that the first goblet provides the instruction of the elementary master, the second the teaching of the grammarian, while the third provides the rhetor’s eloquence; and that this is as far as most people go.[630] And in our period Augustine says that he was very fond of Latin literature ‘non quas primi magistri sed quas docent qui grammatici vocantur’.[631]
There is, therefore, a clear traditional distinction in the Roman world between the primus magister or litterator, the grammarian and the rhetor, and perhaps we may see this division in the stages of his career which Ausonius describes in the Protrepticon:[632]