(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,