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: