Schools of Gaul in the last century of the Western Empire

by T. J. Haarhoff

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:

Hic promens teretes pilas, trochosque,

hic talos crepitantibus fritillis.[326]

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 eager love of parents dear, who knew

To temper study ever with delights

Of relaxation, care that understood

To make me good without severity,

And give advancement to my untrained thought.[329]

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.

Unde labor puero, fateor, fuit hic mihi maior

eloquium librorum ignotae apprehendere linguae.[334]

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

Argolico pariter Latioque instante magistro.[336]

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

Alter rhetoricae Quintiliane togae;[353]

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

Quos praetextati celebris facundia ludi

contulit ad veteris praeconia Quintiliani.[354]

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:

Et sic scribere non minus valentem

Marcus Quintilianus ut solebat;[357]

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:

Do you with varied intonation read

A host of verses; let your words succeed

Each other with the accent and the stress

Your master taught you. Slurring will repress

The sense of what you’re reading; and a pause

Adds vigour to an overburdened clause.[376]

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:

εἷς οἰωνὸσ ἄριστος ἀμύνεσθαι περὶ πάτρης

(Dulce et decorum est ...)

and

οὐδὲν ἀκιδνότερον γαῖα τρέφει ἀνθρώποιο.

(Of all things Man most wretched is on earth.)

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:

χρὴ πενίην φεύγοντα καὶ ἐς μεγακήτεα πόντον

ῥίπτειν καὶ πετρῶν, Κύρνε, κατ’ ἠλιβάτων.

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:

Facundus iuvenis Gallorum nuper ab arvis

missus Romani discere iura fori.[488]

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:

Primus Romanas ordiris, Iane, Kalendas,

Februa vicino mense Numa instituit, &c.

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.

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,

Et satis est puero memori legisse libenter,

et cessare licet....

and again:

Disce libens ...

... studium puerile fatiscit,

laeta nisi austeris varientur, festa profestis,[560]

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:

sic neque Peliaden terrebat Chiron Achillem:[561]

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.

Mox pueros molli monitu et formidine leni

pellexi.[571]

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:

Love joins me to you. In this bond alone

Dare I to claim equality with you.

Sweet friendship binds me ever to your heart,

And ever we renew our equal love.[574]

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]

(b) Play.

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.

(c) Organization.

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]

(1) Multos lactantibus annis,

ipse alui gremioque fovens et murmura solvens.

(2) Mox pueros molli monitu et formidine leni

pellexi.

(3) Idem vesticipes, motu iam puberis aevi,

ad mores artesque bonas fandique vigorem

produxi.

But in the Gallic writers of our period the distinction between the first two stages is not at all clear. Ausonius, for example, who never directly mentions the elementary school, says that Macrinus was his first master, but he puts him under the heading ‘grammaticus’;[633] and in the Theodosian Code, while grammatici and rhetores are always distinguished in the laws of the emperors about teachers’ salaries and privileges, the elementary masters are never specially named. Probably the work of the primus magister was considerably diminished in the schools by the fact that many families employed private tutors for the initial stages of education; and whether a school had a separate master for the lower classes depended, no doubt, on its size and circumstances. The whole of ‘primary’ education was loosely considered the province of the grammaticus,[634] who in most cases would have an assistant, called by the less honourable name of litterator[635] or primus magister. The proscholus sive subdoctor, mentioned by Ausonius,[636] seems to have been an assistant grammarian, different from his chief only in social position. For the proscholus described seems to have been as much above the ordinary grammarian in learning as the grammarian was above the litterator. But his learning was in inverse ratio to his pay, for Ausonius describes him as ‘Exili nostrae fucatus honore cathedrae’.[637]

Of Minervius, Ausonius says that he supplied the forum with a thousand of his pupils, and added two thousand to the number of the senate,[638] and Jullian[639] doubles this number (three thousand) to get the total number which Minervius taught (for he was rhetor at Constantinople and Rome as well as at Bordeaux) and, dividing by thirty (the probable number of his teaching years), allots to him two hundred students per annum. But Ausonius’s style and character hardly admit of such mathematical speculation. He was much too vague and careless about things to make a calculation of this kind anything but extremely uncertain. The most we can say is that Bordeaux, the most flourishing Gallic university of the fourth century, must have had an exceptionally large number of students, several hundred, perhaps, drawn from all parts of Gaul, just as the professors sometimes came from Greece or Sicily.

Education was begun at an early age. Paulinus of Pella began when he was five,[640] and Ausonius took charge of children in their infancy.[641] At fourteen or fifteen the boy usually left the grammarian. Paulinus, who was probably retarded by the difficulty he found with Latin, was still in his grammarian’s school at fifteen.[642] If, as it appears, the law-course lasted five years, law students who went to Rome from Gaul would spend only a year or so in the school of the rhetor. For the emperor forbade students to continue their studies at Rome after the age of twenty, when they were removed by force if they omitted to return. ‘His sane qui sedulo operam professoribus navant, usque ad vicesimum aetatis suae annum Romae liceat commorari. Post id vero tempus qui neglexerit sponte remeare, sollicitudine praefecturae etiam invitus[643] ad patriam revertatur.’[644] Such was the stringent enactment of Valentinian in A.D. 370. We hear of students attached to the ‘Corpora’ who continued their studies at Rome after their twentieth year.[645] But it appears that the general age for leaving the rhetor’s school was, at any rate, before twenty.

Pueros ...

formasti rhetor metam prope puberis aevi,

says Ausonius to Exsuperius,[646] which means that fifteen was a common age for boys to be at the rhetor’s school.

About school-hours we know very little. It does not seem likely that the grammarian had so many hours per week for each of the seven liberal arts. What he aimed at was extensive reading, primarily for philological and literary knowledge, and only secondarily for such historical and scientific facts as came under Capella’s various heads. ‘The grammarian’, says Seneca, ‘attends to language, and, if he wishes to go farther afield, to history, while the utmost limit of his activities is poetry.’[647] ‘If he wishes to go farther afield’ is significant: the system was an elastic one.

Of the total number of teaching hours there is only one indication. Ausonius sends the teacher Ursulus six philippi, the usual New Year’s gift from the emperor which Ursulus had not received, and says that they are ‘As many as the men to whom the fates of the Romans and the Albans were entrusted, and as many as his teaching hours at school and the hours he sits at home’.[648]

Denk, therefore, seems to be wrong when he says of the teachers[649] that they had no limitations of subject or method or time.

When this schoolday of six hours started in Gaul we do not know; but it is probable that it began fairly early in the morning and went on into the early afternoon. This was the case at Antioch in the fourth century;[650] and Augustine says that the teacher is kept busy in the hours before noon.[651]

With regard to examinations we find nothing definite, but there is a passage in the famous law of 370[652] which points to the application of some test. The emperor wants a report from the prefect of Rome, with a view to imperial appointments, of all students who have completed their course and are going back to the provinces. Moreover, such reports (breves) must be lodged at the imperial office every year. ‘Similes autem breves etiam ad scrinia mansuetudinis nostrae annis singulis dirigantur, quo meritis singulorum institutionibusque conpertis, utrum quandoque nobis sint necessarii iudicemus.’

From a few scattered hints it looks as if there was some sort of academic dress. Domitius teaches Terence at Ameria, wrapped in a thick cloak (endromidatus) though the weather is warm[653]—a picture which reminds us of Augustine’s ‘paenulati magistri’.[654] At Antioch the rhetor wore a philosopher’s mantle[655] (tribon), a costume which was not unknown in Gaul, for Sidonius remarks that Claudianus, though a philosopher, wore ordinary dress.[656]

That there were holidays at regular intervals is clear from Ausonius’s letter to his grandson:

Sunt etiam musis sua ludicra: mixta camenis

otia sunt ...

set requie studiique vices rata tempora servant.[657]

And Sidonius invites Domitius to come and share the joys of the country after his laborious teaching in the stuffy schoolroom.[658]

When exactly the vacations began and how long they lasted in Gaul we do not know, but it is probable that the order and duration of the Roman holidays were imitated. Ausonius’s verses in the ‘Thirty days hath September’ style on the Feriae Romanae[659] indicate that the Roman holidays existed at least in the memory of the schoolboy. Tertullian implies that they existed also in his experience, though less splendid in the provinces than at Rome (minore cura per provincias pro minoribus viribus administrantur).[660] We hear of ‘Florales Ludi’, which were different from the Roman Floralia, in connexion with the academy of Toulouse. There were ‘Agones rhetorici et poetici quotannis celebrari soliti, quique etiamnum hodie Kalendis Maii (sic) quotannis in domo publica committuntur’.[661] It is doubtful when these games were first introduced. Justinus mentions them in his description of the foundation of Massilia. Tradition at Toulouse said they were instituted by a maiden of literary tastes, Clementia Isaura; another version is that she merely renewed them. She is mentioned in the Agonisticon of one Petrus Faber of Toulouse in the sixteenth century, and Papyrius Massonius wrote an ‘Elogium Clementiae Isaurae’. They set up a statue to her on which the inscription ran: ‘Clementia Isaura ... forum frumentarium, vinarium, piscarium et olitorium ... Capitolinis populoque Tolosano legavit, hac lege ut quotannis ludos Florales in aedem publicam quam ipsa sua impensa extruxit celebrent....’

On such occasions a child would be taken by his parent to see the show, though he would not be allowed a seat (non sedens propter aetatem),[662] and at festivals such as those of St. Just he would enjoy a game of ball or dice.[663]

A calendar of about the middle of the fourth century would, Jullian[664] supposes, taking the evidence of Ausonius’s poem ‘de Feriis’, the calendar of Philocalus, and the Christian writers, show about eighty-nine holidays, of which he considers six doubtful. In the meantime Christian festivals were increasingly claiming recognition. Already in 321 we find Constantine prohibiting the exercise of certain trades on Sunday,[665] and in 389 the Biblical conception of Sunday is definitely recognized[666] (solis die quem dominicum rite dixere maiores) and a general cessation of business is enjoined. In the same year the pagan festivals were cut down; only the summer and autumn festivals (described, even in the law, with the usual literary diffuseness of the time), the New Year holidays, and the foundation-days of Rome and Constantinople were to remain.[667] On the other hand, shows on Sunday were forbidden, ‘so that the sacred rites enjoined by the Christian law should not be disturbed by any gathering of shows’[668] (A.D. 392), and at Easter the business of the forum and of the law courts[669] was suspended. In theory, therefore, there was a decrease in pagan and an increase in Christian holidays. In practice, however, pagan festivals long persisted,[670] and it is significant of the tenacity of paganism that the Lupercalia was celebrated in the fifth century. Very often the church kept the old festivals, merely changing their meaning.[671]

There can be no doubt that the pagan festivals were observed as school holidays: the references in Horace and his contemporaries and the Roman conception of festus, fastus, feriae, as indicating solemnity and reverence,[672] point to this conclusion. Such was evidently the case in the fourth-century Italian schools, for Augustine waits to resign his professorship until the holidays of the ‘Vindemia’.[673]

Of the Christian festivals it is harder to judge, especially after the revival of paganism under Julian at the beginning of our period. But it is probable that while the earlier laws (e.g. those of Constantine) had no widespread effect on the schools, the increasing emphasis laid on Christian festivals, passing through the fourth and fifth centuries into the Germanic period of Gaul, must have meant the recognition of Sundays and such festivals as Easter in the school curriculum.

Besides the public festivals there was the long vacation, lasting from the end of July till the beginning of October.[674] At Antioch, similarly, classes were taken only in the winter and in the spring,[675] the vacation lasting from midsummer till the beginning of winter. When the vacation came, the Antioch rhetors used to go in for public speeches and imperial panegyrics.[676]

Moreover, any special event produced a holiday. At Antioch any festive occasions, funerals,[677] or civil commotions,[678] served to close the schoolrooms. On the occasion of the marriage of Ricimer with the daughter of Anthemius, the schools of Gaul enjoyed a holiday.[679] Apparently the length of the holiday was not controlled by organized rules, and this time it lasted so long that even Sidonius protested.[680] ‘Tandem’, he says, ‘reditum est in publicam serietatem, quae rebus actitandis ianuam campumque patefecit.’

It is interesting to find signs of a common life among the students, the beginnings of a residential university. Aulus Gellius claims the authority of Pythagoras for this mode of life. ‘Here is another point we must not omit: all the students of Pythagoras, as soon as they had been admitted into that “corps” of his, pooled all their possessions, slaves, or money, and so a close and lasting society was formed.’[681] Suetonius tells of one C. Albucius Silus of Novaria (Cisalpine Gaul) who came to Rome and was received into the ‘contubernium’ of Plancus, the orator, i.e. lived under the same roof, became a ‘convictor’ with him.[682] ‘You can enjoy the possession of no good thing’, Seneca says, ‘without some one to share it.’ You will gain more by talking and living with (convictus) people than from set speeches. Cleanthes could never have interpreted the philosophy of Zeno if he had merely attended his lectures. But he lived with him, examined his private life, and watched him to see if he practised what he preached.[683] Similarly, Plato and Aristotle and the rest learned more from the conduct than the words of Socrates, and ‘Metrodorus, Hermarchus, and Polyaenus were made great not by the school of Epicurus, but by living with him (contubernium).’ Gellius gives many examples of this sort of literary fellowship. While master and students dined together, one of the servitors would read some passage from a Greek or Latin author, and if a difficulty arose the master explained. So at the table of Favorinus ‘servus assistens mensae eius legere inceptabat....’ and a discussion was introduced by the philosopher on the word ‘parcus’.[684] Literary criticism was the favourite thing, as when the Bucolics of Vergil and Theocritus were read together at a dinner, and it was noticed that Vergil had left alone passages which contained the peculiar Greek sweetness but could not and should not be translated.[685]

We have no direct data for supposing that this system was followed in Gaul in our period; but the Favorinus mentioned in Gellius came from Arles, and there appear to have been ‘contubernia’ in Massilia.[686] Moreover, the ‘Platonic clubs’ of Sidonius and the general social temper of the Bordeaux professors make it likely that something of the kind was found at the Gallic universities.

As to the payment of teachers, it is clear that before Vespasian it was very unequal. Verrius Flaccus, who was tutor to the children of Augustus, received a salary of 100,000 sesterces (£1,000).[687] Even the infamous Palaemon, to whom parents were forbidden to send their children by Tiberius and Claudius, got as much as 40,000 sesterces. Martial takes a pessimistic view. In his advice to a friend on a career for his son he counsels: Let him avoid grammarians and rhetoricians if he wants to make money:

Artes discere vult pecuniosas?

fac, discat, citharoedus aut choraules.[688]

In Gaul, it appears, teachers were paid by the State before this was the case at Rome; for Strabo remarks in the first century A.D. that he found State-appointed teachers there.[689] But there must have been great lack of organization and equality because State-payment meant, at that time, payment by the municipal town, which could not always provide proper security. Security, indeed, became more and more shaken, and the improvement made by Vespasian when he fixed the teachers’ salaries was a much-needed measure. In the famous decree of 376 Gratian and Valentinian ratified this enactment.[690] Rhetoricians are to receive twenty-four annonae[691] from the treasury, Greek and Latin grammarians, twelve. The chief cities of the provinces are encouraged to elect professors who are to be paid according to the standard fixed by the emperors. Trèves, the imperial favourite, gets something more (uberius aliquid), thirty annonae for a rhetor and twenty for a grammarian.

There can be no doubt that the emperors tried to monopolize education. Julian’s decree[692] that the appointment of all teachers was to be subject to the imperial approval, and the law of Theodosius and Valentinian in the next century forbidding all public schools outside the imperial academy, are illustrations of this tendency. Nevertheless, there must have been a large number of private-school teachers who were not paid by the State. The imperial legislation of the later empire could not have done away entirely with so established and widespread a class of men. They survived, especially in elementary education, and possibly their number exceeded that of the officially State-paid teachers.

The law makes it quite clear that the State-paid school and university teachers[693] were, at one time, dependent on their towns for pay; and the frequent mandates of the emperors to the municipalities not to neglect these salaries show that they were not always prompt in paying. Symmachus, also, complains of the withholding of salaries;[694] and it has been suggested in this connexion that the teachers were unpopular because they were mostly pagans. It is more likely that their unpopularity was due to the fact that their teaching did not touch the mass of the population, who nevertheless had to support them. That the municipal salary stopped when the imperial one came into existence seems unlikely. Denk thinks that the imperial-paid ‘auditoria’ were distinct from the lower municipal-paid schools,[695] but probably the individual cities went on contributing part of the professors’ salaries, even after the law of Gratian.[696] As to the amount received, the impression made by the upper circle of the Bordeaux professors is certainly one of material prosperity. Marcellus of Narbo,[697] Sedatus of Toulouse,[698] and Exsuperius[699] did very well for themselves, and Eumenius considers his salary of £5,000 as nothing extraordinary: ‘multo maiora et prius et postea praemia contulerunt’ (sc. principes).[700] Even of the grammarian Marcellus, Ausonius could say that riches came by teaching:

Mox schola ...

grammatici nomen divitiasque dedit.[701]

On the other hand the less distinguished seem to have had a disproportionately small salary. The frequent application of the epithet ‘sterilis’ or ‘exilis’ to the chair of the grammarian is a feature of Ausonius’s picture of them.

Besides the imperial and the municipal support there were the gifts from the emperor,[702] and the possibility of presents from the family of the pupils—a practice which is still very much in evidence in many country centres. Finally, there were the fees from the pupils, part of which seems to have been paid directly to the teacher.

The class fee (merces, minerval) seems to have been stipulated for by the rhetors individually. Axius asks Merula in Varro’s De Re Rustica,[703] ‘to be his master in the shepherd’s art’, and the reply is, imitating the practice of the rhetors, ‘Yes, as soon as you promise to pay my fee’ (minerval). Juvenal refers to the same practice:

Quantum vis stipulare, et protinus accipe quod do

ut toties illum pater audiat.[704]

Bulaeus says that the amount of the fee was sometimes left to the generosity of the parents.[705] He can hardly be referring to a common practice. The fourth century was far too business-like for this sort of thing. Most of the teachers who were in a position to do so probably demanded a large fee, like Exsuperius.[706] How far this bargaining went on after the law of Gratian we cannot tell: but the fact that it went on after Vespasian had fixed the salaries shows that it was not necessarily stopped in 376. Much more liberal was the East. Lectures at Antioch were open to all, even to pupils of other rhetors:[707] and sometimes invitations to attend were sent round by the servant of the lecturer.[708]

As to the number of the professors appointed little is known. Probably from what Ausonius says there were ten at Bordeaux, six ‘grammatici’ and four ‘rhetores’—the highest number, Jullian thinks, that Bordeaux ever reached. At Constantinople Theodosius appointed in 425 to his special auditorium[709] three rhetors and ten grammarians for Latin, five rhetors and ten grammarians for Greek, one professor of philosophy, and two for law. But this is Eastern exuberance. Trèves, the imperial favourite, had only two or three rhetoricians, one Latin grammarian, and one Greek grammarian—a post which could not always be filled.[710]

Denk, in remarking that the number of teachers was thus definitely fixed, adds that there is no trace of a principal who gave direction to the work of the students.[711] Now it is true that there was no definite organization, but it seems very probable that the emperors, when they interested themselves in a school and appointed teachers, would have some one at the head of the establishment to facilitate communication between the imperial offices and the school. Moreover, it is a natural and traditional thing the world over for a group of men more or less permanently banded together to have a chief. The Druids had their leader,[712] and among the Persian Magi there was an archimagus. Besides, we have at least one ‘trace’ which Denk does not notice. Eumenius, as head of the Maeniana, was called moderator, which looks like an official title. And in the Christian schools it was a common thing to have a head (primicerius), as will be shown later.

Jullian[713] notices as a praiseworthy feature of the fourth-century educational system that the master passed on with his pupils as they advanced from stage to stage. Our author reads into his idealized fourth century a method which has long been practised by the Jesuits. But perhaps the wish is father to the thought. For it is clear that this could not, in the majority of cases, apply to the elementary master, whose intellectual limitations would effectually prevent him from taking the higher classes. Ausonius tells us as much.[714] Such teachers were ‘humili loco ac merito’. He mentions Romulus and Corinthius[715] as the Greek grammarians who taught him ‘primis in annis’, and they do not appear again in the list of his masters. When quite young he was put under his uncle Arborius (qui me lactantem, puerum iuvenemque virumque | artibus ornasti),[716] who may have been a kind of general tutor to him at that time. When he was about ten years old he went to Toulouse (c. A.D. 320) and was taught for eight years in the school of Arborius, who in 328 was appointed tutor to one of the sons of Constantine at Constantinople,[717] where he died. Ausonius then returned to Bordeaux where he seems to have continued his studies in the rhetorical school, studying under Minervius,[718] and Luciolus,[719] who was once his fellow student, and probably under Alcimus[720] and Delphidius,[721] while Staphylius took the place of Arborius[722] as general tutor:

Tu mihi quod genitor, quod avunculus, unus utrumque

alter ut Ausonius, alter ut Arborius.

All these later masters, like Minervius, are spoken of distinctly as ‘rhetor’ or ‘orator’, just as his early masters are distinguished as ‘grammatici’.[723]

Ausonius’s experience as pupil, therefore, seems to contradict the statement that the master followed his students from class to class. But it may be argued that the scheme was upset in Ausonius’s case by his temporary removal to Toulouse, and his experience as master may be urged. This is a plausible contention. For he tells us in the Protrepticon of three stages in his career corresponding presumably to those of the litterator, the grammarian, and the rhetor. Yet Jullian’s supposition is not therefore true. Not every primary master was an Ausonius who could rise to the top of his profession and become an imperial tutor. Obviously there were a large number who found, as they left, the teaching profession a poor and dreary task. The grammarians whom Ausonius mentions,[724] except, perhaps, Nepotianus,[725] did not rise to the higher position, and some, in their old age, even lost the little glory they had achieved, as Anastasius did.[726] Moreover, Ausonius does not say that his promotion kept pace with the advance of his students. The terms he uses are quite vague (mox, idem). And even supposing the master could in this way remain with his pupils, what happened when they had reached the highest stage? Jullian maintains that he started at the bottom again with a new class: ‘Le même homme était tour à tour professeur de grammaire et rhéteur: il lui arrivait ainsi de suivre ses élèves, de les accompagner de classe en classe.’[727]

Now this is reducing the matter to an absurdity. The fixity of the distinction between grammarian and rhetor is so striking in all Latin literature, and particularly in Ausonius, that the system, however desirable, would have been impossible. It is quite clear that there was a definite status attached to the positions,[728] and the Theodosian Code prescribes different salaries. Is it conceivable (to mention no other objections) that a man would be constantly changing his social standing and his salary in order to accompany his class from stage to stage?

The most we can say is that the connexion between the lower and higher forms of education was sufficiently close (as in France to-day) to allow a man of merit to rise from the lowest to the highest. This is proved by Ausonius’s case, and Denk is not stating the whole truth when he says that the teachers were independent of one another.[729] There was a certain amount of independence, no doubt, between grammarian and grammarian, or rhetor and rhetor, but between the grammatical school and that of the rhetorician there was a considerable degree of interdependence.