1. Moral Education
To get an insight into the moral state of a bygone age is difficult for two reasons. The first is that the subject is one on which people are most tempted to be hypocrites in their own case, while they delight in expatiating on the wickedness of others, and the second, that there is an extraordinary tendency for particular cases to fill the horizon and prevent us from taking a general view. In our period we have to reckon with a special form of these difficulties: the preaching habit, which, though it was essential to Christianity, was nevertheless as much open to abuse as pagan rhetoric was, especially when it was a means of combating paganism. ‘The world is wide’, said Stevenson in one of his essays, ‘and so are morals.’ But there is a standard—that of the Sermon on the Mount—which presents an ideal, though it does not give the right to condemn. In trying to follow this ideal the Christians saw pagan morality in a lurid light. How far were they justified?
The traditional trait of impulsiveness in the Gallic character suggested to many writers a proneness to immorality.[1130] Florus represents Livy as saying that the Insubrian Gauls, though brutal in spirit and abnormally large, were like their own Alpine snows: the glow of battle dissolved them into sweat, and even slight exertion thawed them like the sun. From this account Ammianus differs widely when he describes the Gauls of the fourth century as excelling in vigour and endurance irrespective of age.[1131] Yet he speaks of the ‘mollities’ of the Aquitanians.[1132] Perhaps in his description of their hardiness he was thinking chiefly of the northern Gauls, as opposed to their slacker brothers in the south. For it is against the south and against Aquitaine in particular that Salvian launches all the thunder of his denunciation. The Aquitanians need the chastisement of the barbarian invasions to kill off the worst among them and to reform the others.[1133] He rails at length against the prevailing corruption. The theatres ‘are so scandalous that no one can with modesty speak out about them’.[1134] The performances consisted of farces, ‘cotidianae obscenitates’,[1135] ‘restes dégénérés et méconnaissables du théâtre antique’ as Fauriel calls them.[1136] The Christian clergy lose no opportunity of condemning them. In contrast to pagan immorality, Salvian describes the chastity of the Goths. This he exaggerates for the sake of effect, but that there was a considerable element of truth in his description is proved by the Codex Visigothorum.[1137]
If the preacher gives a discouraging picture of the moral state of Gaul, so does the writer of comedy. In the fourth-century Querolus much of the moral corruption pictured is due to imitation of Plautus, and we must remember that it was a comedy. Yet we can detect a strain of satire which is a criticism of existing conditions. Stealing, lying, adultery, perjury are treated as exceedingly common peccadilloes which the household god (Lar) is only too ready to pardon in a pleasing and jolly offender. Between the Plautine conception of the relation of slaves to their masters and that here portrayed we can detect no advance. On both sides morality is simply non-existent.
But if we must discount the evidence both of the preacher and of the comedy-writer, we may find a more impartial guide than either in the Law. The Theodosian Code shows that the aspect of a crime changed with the social status of the criminal. There was no consistent ethical standard. If the wife of a tavern-keeper was taken in adultery, she could be publicly accused; but if her servant girl was so taken, she might be dismissed as too cheap to worry about (pro vilitate).[1138] If a guardian corrupted his ward, he was punished by deportation and total confiscation of his goods.[1139] But a woman who had committed adultery with her slave was put to death, and the slave burned. So terrible did this interference with class-distinction seem that even slaves were allowed to give information.[1140] Again, in bringing a charge of treason which he cannot prove, an ordinary man is subject to torture, but a slave or a freedman is denied an audience and crucified.[1141] If a slave or freedman brought an accusation against his master (except in the case of treason), he was to be beheaded before his charge was examined. ‘Vocem enim funestam intercidi oportet potius quam audiri.’[1142] Again, in the law of extortion, judges who have been convicted lose the marks of imperial favour, are stripped of their office, and ranked with the worst and lowest class in the State.[1143]
In the opinion of the law, and therefore of the mass of the people, being ‘pessimus’ means belonging to the plebs, and the punishment of crime comes to consist in loss of ‘caste’.[1144] That is to say, morality becomes a matter of social position, and the corollary is that anything may be done by those whose status is high, as long as they manage to maintain that status, while those at the bottom, having no status to lose, hardly care what they do. However much we may disregard particular descriptions of moral degeneracy, the Codex Theodosianus supplies a very damning commentary on the ethical standards of the time. Nor did the Christians effect any improvement in this legal respect of persons.
We have, of course, men like Paulinus of Pella who speak of the ‘sollers castorum cura parentum’[1145] which shielded him from every evil influence, and the Parentalia of Ausonius indicates happy home-conditions. Lavisse notes this,[1146] and makes much of the domestic felicity and the tender love reflected by these writers and by the inscriptions.[1147] But, apart from the fact that Ausonius and Paulinus were at the top of society, it is dangerous to presume too much from epitaphs. Then, as now, convention played a great part, and the stock phrase ‘Coniugi Karissimae’ may be as formal as the constantly recurring ‘memoriae aeternae’. It was the fashion to write epitaphs in which the superlative was prominent.[1148] Besides, in most of these inscriptions there is no clue as to the dates.
We must conclude, then, that there was much for the Christians to educate, in society and in themselves, if they wanted to fulfil the Christian code of morals.
Turning to the question how far an attempt was made in the pagan schools to train the moral nature, we find that it is precisely this side of pagan education that Juvenal and Tacitus criticized. The old Roman tradition of strict moral education at home was impaired under the Empire by the influx of foreign elements, and the decline is familiar from the authors of the first century A.D. Seneca could see in the education of his day no moral element,[1149] and his criticisms apply to the scholars of Gaul as much as to those of Rome. How could there be (he argued), when the masters were so utterly corrupt? ‘The grammarians’, he said, ‘taught merely antiquarian stuff, not ethics. They asked whether Homer was older than Hesiod, and inquired into the ages of Patroclus and Achilles, or the wanderings of Ulysses.’ ‘Quid horum ad virtutem viam struit?’ The geometricians teach how to survey estates, but ‘what does it profit me to know how to divide a plot of land, if I do not know how to share with my brother? You know what a straight line is. What good is it, if you do not know what is straight in life? O man of learning, let us be content with the simpler title: man of virtue.’[1150] The burden of the cry is for perspective, for an ethical basis, without which education was seen to be like an anchorless storm-tossed ship.[1151]
This need continues to be felt through the following centuries. We have seen what stress Julian laid on the moral qualifications of the teacher. His ideal was Hellenic purity. Before him, Eumenius, on whom the imperial injunction was laid: ‘ut ... ad vitae melioris studium adulescentium excolas mentes’,[1152] proclaimed the ideal of practical morality advocated by Cicero. Similarly, the emperor in his zeal for education stressed the moral side as well as the intellectual (so at least his panegyrist maintained), and realized that letters were the basis of virtue.[1153] These virtues, he says, grow up in youth, and in manhood form the strong support of all the various duties of citizenship, whether in peace or war. And so letters are the cradle ‘of all diligence and all praise’.
To a certain extent this demand for moral education was met in the pagan schools. When Paulinus speaks of learning ‘dogmata Socratus’ at the age of five, what he probably means is a selection of well-known sentences chosen for their moral teaching.[1154] The didactic nature of the fables and rhetorical exercises has been noticed, and we cannot doubt that they played a considerable part in the moral theory of the pagan schools. An inscription of Limoges, belonging probably to the second century, contains the figure of a man with a scroll in his right hand, and the following words:
‘Artis Grammatices Doctor Morumqꝫ Mag .. ter Blaesianus Biturix’.[1155]
The inference is that the popular conception of the grammarian’s task included moral training. We find that ‘Grammatica’ was regarded as the nurse of the virtues. A training is obtained through it for practical life. Not only the orator but the soldier was supposed to be thus formed. It is the school of the grammarian that trains the soldier whom the Campus Martius receives. ‘Grammar’ has fired him with imaginary battles, taught him courage by accustoming him to the apparatus of war even among the blandishments of peace, and so will make him obedient to the actual trumpet call.[1156] All this is claimed for the school. Such was the theory, but what sort of training was given in practice? It was of little use that fables with moral tags were put before the child if there was not at the same time the living example. And Seneca’s objection to the character of the ‘grammatici’ seems to have held to some extent in Gaul during our period. The disgusting picture of social vice which Ausonius gives in the latter part of the Epigrams applies in part also to the teachers. Eunus, the pedagogue, figures prominently in the list, and Ausonius himself speaks quite naturally about things that directly contradict the Christian morality which he professed. There was a hollowness in the teaching of the ‘grammaticus’ which logically followed from the attempt to maintain the precept without the example. The objections to the low ethical standard of the gods in Homer, which were urged in the fifth century as in the time of Plato and Cicero, were unheeded by the teachers, says Augustine, even when a man of their own school (ex eodem pulvere) proclaimed that Homer had transferred human qualities to the gods.[1157] A barbarism or a solecism was of more account than a moral offence: to forget the h in homo was more serious than to forget to love a fellow man.[1158]
‘Liberales Artes’, Seneca had said, ‘non perducunt animum ad virtutem, sed expediunt.’[1159] We must be content if the school-training merely creates a disposition of mind favourable to virtue. The Christian schools went further. They insisted on correlating theory and practice, and prescribed definite lines of action. As against the hollowness of the pagan moral teaching (and here again we can detect a reaction), the Christian teachers on the whole not only tried to practise what they taught, but saw to it that their pupils carried out their commands. They were exhorted to do so in the Canons of the Church. They put before men a personal ideal, and, if their methods of striving after it were sometimes crude and exaggerated, their sincerity can hardly be doubted. So obsessed were they with the idea of working out their own salvation that their teaching tended to become oppressively moral. The long disquisitions of Jerome or Tertullian on the minute points of moral behaviour are sometimes positively unhealthy. But we must remember that they represented a reaction from an extreme. And in this reaction the seeds of a higher ethical standard were being sown. Not as the lightning lighteth the heavens, but as the growth of the mustard-tree, the stern teaching of the monks who saw a higher vision and fled the world for its sake penetrated and leavened the mass of society, whether that society called itself Christian or not. Already in the fifth century a better public opinion was being formed. We find Sidonius, half-pagan as he was, commending his villa at Avitacum because of the absence of immoral pictures and scenes—‘non hic per nudam pictorum corporum pulchritudinem turpis prostat historia, quae sicut ornat artem sic devenustat artificem.... Absunt lubrici tortuosique pugilatu et nexibus palaestritae (wrestlers) quoram etiam viventum luctus, si involvantur obscenius casta confestim gymnasiarchorum virga dissolvit.’[1160] So in his letter to his son,[1161] he praises him for loving purity and adopts the tone of the moral educator.
It is not suggested that the pagan efforts to advocate morality were worth less than the Christian, or that there was a steady and abiding advance in morals from this time onwards. Only, there are two facts to bear in mind: the moral state of Gaul was bad, and paganism as a motive to morality had failed. Where then was the incentive to come from? Without claiming for the Church any special virtue, and realizing its many grievous errors, we must answer that the moral inspiration for the future came at this time through Christianity. And the Church and her schools were the channels by which this inspiration reached the people. Thus once more Christian education supplemented the work of the pagan schools.
One of the ways in which Christianity exercised its moral influence consisted in raising the status of women; and this was done, to a large extent, by making education more general among them.
In answering the question whether girls attended the schools at Bordeaux, Jullian[1162] says that this was probably the case. We may omit the ‘probably’. It would have been strange indeed if this had not been the case, seeing that at Rome girls’ schools go back possibly to the time of the unfortunate Virginia[1163] (449 B.C.), while in the Ciceronian period Hortensia belonged to the orators, Lesbia wrote poetry, and girls are mentioned as attending school with the boys by Martial[1164] and Ovid.[1165] Moreover, Ausonius says quite plainly to his grandson, referring to the ordinary school course:
Haec olim genitorque tuus genetrixque secuti ...[1166] and tells us that his aunt was a student of medicine, though he indicates that this was not the usual thing (more virum medicis artibus experiens).[1167] Sometimes the mother taught her daughter literature:
Latios nec volvere libros (says Claudianus of the bride),[1168] desinit aut Graios, ipsa genetrice magistra.
But such home-education was probably rare and confined to the upper classes. We hear of no such instance in Gaul. Yet we know that there was sufficient interest in the classics and in knowledge generally on the part of the Gallic women to elicit a lament from Claudius Marius Victor. For among the signs of corruption of his day he notes their preference for pagan authors. Moreover, they show a knowledge of abstruse questions and a desire to know which is truly monstrous:
Quae ... Deo tantum sunt nota, recondita cunctis,
scire volunt (heu grande nefas!) et scire videntur.
But it is all the fault of the men, he says (sunt nostri crimina sexus). Without the example of the husband, the wife would never have strayed into such ways of wickedness:
Sic exempla virum uxores accepta sequuntur.[1169]
Eulalia, the wife of Probus, was fond of reading the involved writings of Sidonius,[1170] who does not think it too much to expect from a wife that she will be interested in literature. For he reminds a friend that marriage need not interfere with his studious habits: have not Marcia, Terentia, Calpurnia, Pudentilla, Rusticiana, and many others ‘held the light for those who read’?[1171] We may conclude, therefore, that while a large number of girls received a home-education, chiefly in spinning and household crafts,[1172] many of them attended the schools and became interested in literature.[1173]
If there was an increasing liberalism about women’s education in pagan circles (to take the references from Ausonius and Sidonius under this head), the principle of a woman’s right to education assumed much wider and more active proportions among the Christians.
The spread of monasticism naturally affected a large number of women. Marcella was the first of the noble ladies at Rome to take the veil, and set an example which was so extensively followed that by 412 Jerome could boast ‘crebra virginum monasteria’.[1174] Avitus in 517 called together a Church Council at Epao (a small village south of Vienne), which regulated in one of its canons the admission to the ‘monasteria puellarum’,[1175] and he refers elsewhere to the cloister founded by Leonianus where Remilia was brought up (sub regulari disciplina nutrita).[1176] The nuns learnt weaving and spinning,[1177] but the various ‘Regulae’, though somewhat later than our period, make it probable that a portion of their time, at least, was spent in reading and writing.
From these scattered data the point that emerges is that there was a change of attitude towards the education and intellectual capacity of the ordinary woman.
Jerome showed quite clearly that he had no contempt for the feminine mind as such. He considers Paula and Eustochium competent judges of his Latin translation of the Bible, and treats their suggestions as coming from intellectual equals.[1178] The number of books dedicated to them is remarkable, though not when we remember that they inspired the translation.[1179] They, and many other women like Blaesilla, Felicitas, and Fabiola were adepts in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, and frequently consulted Jerome on points of interpretation, as did women from all parts of the Empire, including Gaul. For if the rhetorical tradition was one and universal in the West, Christian teaching in the fifth century was almost more so. ‘If Augustine from his retreat at Hippo dictated a new treatise against the heresies of his time, all the churches of Italy, of the Gauls and of Spain listened with attention. Thus, at first sight, we can only discover one sole Latin Literature which, so to speak, began the education of all the races of the West.’[1180]
Sedulius, who had taken the side of liberalism in the matter of pagan literature, when discussing the dedication of his Carmen Paschale makes Macedonius mention many learned presbyters. ‘Nor need you be ashamed’, he continues, ‘to follow the example of Jerome the interpreter of the divine law, the student of the library of heaven (caelestis bibliothecae cultoris), in submitting to women, high born and of known high character, women in whose minds the passion for sacred reading has built the sober home of wisdom, the documents of your inmost reasoning. Who would not wish, would not be ambitious, to please the superb judgement of a Syncletice...?’ And he goes on to describe Perpetua, whose wisdom (gemina resplendens lampade) lends lustre to that of her sister.[1181]
Ennodius also testifies to the intellectual activity of women at the close of the fifth century. In counselling his correspondents to leave grammar and rhetoric, he recommends certain teachers. Among these he mentions with enthusiasm ‘domna Barbara, Romani flos genii’. She seasons her speech with a simplicity that is at once natural and artistic, and her eloquence is enhanced by her clarity of thought. There is also Stephania ‘splendidissimum catholicae lumen ecclesiae’.[1182] One of the points that emerge in the De Ordine of Augustine is that ‘Monica is not to be kept from discussing philosophy because of her sex’.[1183]
On the whole, we must say that though there had been an Aspasia in the time of Pericles, and though Hypatia taught at Alexandria at the beginning of the fifth century, there had never been such a general interest in education on the part of women as in the Christian circles of the Western Empire at this time. The references to educated women in pagan authors is slight when compared with those in the Church Fathers. Of all Symmachus’s letters not one is addressed to a woman, and neither Ausonius nor Sidonius (except for one letter to his wife) had a female correspondent; whereas not only Jerome, but Augustine, Cyprian, Tertullian, Ambrose, all followed Christ’s example when he taught the woman of Samaria. Yet when all is said, we feel that the extent of female education is still small, and that Ovid’s words still apply:
Sunt tamen et doctae, rarissima turba, puellae.
But we also feel that there is an interest which contains a promise for the future:
Altera non doctae turba, sed esse volunt.[1184]