43. Two Periods in Roman Education.—In Greece, as we have seen, there were two essentially different systems of education in use: at Sparta, a one-sided education, wholly military, with no regard for intellectual culture; at Athens, a complete education, which brought into happy harmony the training of the body and the development of the mind, and by means of which, as Thucydides observed, “men philosophized without becoming effeminate.”
Rome, in the long course of her history, followed these two systems in succession. Under the Republic, down to the conquest of Greece, preference was given to education after the Spartan type; while under the emperors, Athenian education was dominant, with a very marked tendency to give the first place to an education in literature and oratory.
44. The Education of the Early Romans.—The first schools were not opened at Rome till towards the end of the third century B.C. Till then, the Romans had no teachers save their parents and nature. Education was almost exclusively physical and moral, or rather, military and religious. On the one hand, there were the gymnastic exercises on the Campus Martius, and on the other, the recitation of the Salian hymns, a sort of catechism containing the names of the gods and goddesses. Besides this, there was the study of the Twelve Tables, that is, of the Roman Law. Men the most robust, the most courageous, the best disciplined, and the most patriotic that ever lived, were the fruit of this natural education. Rome was the great school of the civic and military virtues. The Romans did not imitate the Athenians in a disinterested pursuit of a perfect physical and intellectual development. Rome worked for practical ends; she was guided only by considerations of utility; she had no regard for ideals; her purpose was simply the education of soldiers and citizens who should be obedient and devoted. She did not know man in the abstract; she knew only the Roman citizen.
These high qualities of the early Romans were marred by a sort of brutal insensibility and a contempt for the graces of intellect and heart; and leaving out of account the circumstances of environment and race, their practical virtues may be ascribed to three or four principal causes. First among these was a firm family discipline. The authority of the father was absolute, and answering to this excessive power, there was blind obedience. Another cause was the position of the mother in the family. At Rome, woman was held in higher esteem than at Athens. She became almost the equal of man. She was the guardian of the family circle and the teacher of her children. The very name matron inspires respect. Coriolanus, who took up arms against his country, could not withstand the tears of his mother Veturia. The noble Cornelia was the teacher of her sons, the Gracchi, whom she was accustomed to call “her fairest jewels.” Besides, the influence of religion was made to supplement the active efforts of the family. The Roman lived surrounded by deities. When a child was weaned, tradition would have it that one goddess taught him to eat, and another to drink. Later on, four goddesses guided his first steps and held his two hands. All these superstitions imposed regularity and exactness on the most ordinary acts of daily life. Men breathed, as it were, a divine atmosphere. Finally, the young Roman learned to read in the laws of the Twelve Tables, that is, in the civil code of his country. He was thus accustomed from infancy to consider the law as something natural, inviolable, and sacred.
45. Rome at School in Greece.—The primitive state of manners did not last. Under Greek influence, Roman simplicity suffered a change, and, as Horace says, Greece, in being conquered, conquered in turn her rude victor. The taste for letters and arts was introduced at Rome towards the close of the third century B.C., and transformed the austere and rude education of the primitive era. The Romans, in their turn, acquired a liking for fine phrases and subtile dialectics. Schools were opened, and the rhetoricians and philosophers took up the business of education. Parents no longer charged themselves with the instruction of their children. Following the fashion at Athens, they entrusted them to slaves, without troubling themselves about the faults or even the vices of these common pedagogues.
“For if any of their servants,” says Plutarch, “be better than the rest, they dispose some of them to follow husbandry, some to navigation, some to merchandise, some to be stewards in their houses, and some, lastly, to put out their money to use for them. But if they find any slave that is a drunkard or a glutton, and unfit for any other business, to him they assign the government of their children; whereas, a good pedagogue ought to be such a one in his disposition as Phœnix, tutor to Achilles, was.”[41]
46. Why Rome had no Great Educators.—In the age of Augustus, when Latin literature was in all its glory, we are astonished not to find, as in the century of Pericles, some great thinker like Plato or Aristotle, who presents general views on education, and makes himself famous by a remarkable work on pedagogy. This is due to the fact that the Romans never formed a taste for disinterested science and speculative inquiry. They reached distinction only in the practical sciences; in the law, for example, in which they excelled. Now pedagogy, while in one sense a practical science, nevertheless reposes upon philosophical principles, upon a knowledge of human nature, and upon a theoretical conception of human destiny,—questions which had no living interest for the Roman mind, and which even Cicero has noticed only in passing, in the course of his translation of Plato, made with his usual magnificence of literary style.
It is to be noted, moreover, that the Romans seem never to have considered education as a national undertaking, as an affair of the State. The Law of the Twelve Tables is silent upon the education of children. Up to the time of Quintilian there were at Rome no public schools, no professional teachers. In the age of Augustus each teacher had his own method. “Our ancestors,” says Cicero, “did not wish that children should be educated by fixed rules, determined by the laws, publicly promulgated and made uniform for all.”[42] And he does not seem to disapprove of this neglect, even while noting the fact that Polybius saw in this an important defect in Roman institutions.