praemia musarum cupias facundus, et olim
hac gradiare via, qua nos praecessimus et cui
proconsul genitor, praefectus avunculus instant.
This particular incentive to education was lacking in all but the senatorial class, from which, Jullian confesses,[753] the greatest number of pupils was drawn. Freedmen were definitely excluded by law. The emperors of 426 forbade all of their station to stand for the higher offices, or to be admitted as soldiers of the Imperial Guard.[754]
The laws which prevented the curial from leaving his class[755] were many and stringent. Once a curial, always a curial, and not even flight from his town could save him. The prize of five ‘aurei’ offered by the government would be sure to find him a captor.
Denk’s argument that the curial must have had a school training to manage municipal affairs does not go very far. The reading, writing, and arithmetic taught by the ‘litterator’ he would certainly need, but there is no reason for supposing that he went any further. The respectable curial on his freehold farm probably had little incentive to education, and found no inspiration in his forced work of somewhat anxious tax-gathering. He would probably have considered the poetical flourishes of the rhetor beside the point for his son. It would be much more important for him to learn the practical wisdom which his father had formulated as to the best methods of making people pay their taxes or of managing the problems of agriculture.
Now it is true that a law of Constantius[756] enacts that no one shall attain to the first rank in the ‘ordo decurialis’ unless he has passed through a course of studies. But firstly, the law applies technically only to the city of Rome, and its ‘decuriae’; secondly, the amount of education required was not excessive: all the emperor wanted was that a man of the first rank should be able to speak grammatically (ita esse litteris expolitum, ut citra offensam vitii ex eodem verba procedant); and finally, the regulation that this elementary knowledge was specially laid down as a qualification for the first rank (librarii) suggests that the other two (fiscales et censuales) were frequently held without such proficiency.
If the law tended to stifle the curial’s interest in education, much more was this so with those who belonged to a lower grade. The incentive needed there was greater and the incentive given, less. The work of the artisans belonging to the rigidly separated ‘collegia’ was harder, though it varied with the trade. The bakers’ guild was not far removed from slavery. Here, too, frequent flight from the class points to oppression. The tendency to learn only the practical tricks necessary to make the trade a paying one must have been even more accentuated. For where there is no prospect except the drudgery of the trade in which he grew up, it must be an exceptional man who will take an interest in education or awaken it in his son. Even the school of the ‘litterator’ must have been a mystery to many of these ‘corporati’. Moreover, intermarriage between the classes was regarded with horror, and forbidden on the severest penalties. Senators or men who ranked as ‘perfectissimi’, or ‘duumviri’, or ‘quinquennales’, or ‘flamines’, or ‘sacerdotes’, suffered ‘infamia’ if they married a freedwoman or the daughter of a freedwoman, an actress or the daughter of an actress, a shopkeeper (tabernarius) or the daughter of a shopkeeper, or any one of low standing.[757]
Whatever we may think of the wisdom of such a measure, one thing is clear: the difficulty of imagining that all ranks were levelled, as Jullian says, in the school, and that the son of a senator sat on the same benches as the sons of freedmen.
Further, the tendency of the emperors to restrict people to the same place must also have had an effect on education.[758] For the imperial policy aimed at uniformity and immobility, and in attaining them it lost life and progress. The discouragement of travel must have meant a restriction of knowledge and a strangling of that wonder which is stimulated by new scenes, and is, as Plato said, the beginning of philosophy.