Schools of Gaul in the last century of the Western Empire

by T. J. Haarhoff

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.