Sermone impromptus Latio, verum Attica lingua
suffecit culti vocibus eloquii,[1239]
and the verses are a commentary on the swiftness of the decline. Ausonius himself, in spite of his confession that he neglected Greek at school,[1240] is quite familiar with the language, and loves to display his knowledge of it—‘magnopere sibi videtur placere graecissando’.[1241] He drags it in pedantically in his epistles and the capers he cuts with it are merely annoying.[1242] But whenever he addresses the general public he finds it necessary to translate even the simplest words and phrases, as in the Ludus septem sapientum when the pantomime player (ludius) speaks.[1243] And he admits that Greek was not very successfully taught, though the Greek grammarians were industrious enough.[1244] There was not much enthusiasm for the language and its literature, as there had been in past times. To Citarius, the Sicilian teacher of Greek, Ausonius says that he would have gained as much glory for learning as Aristarchus or Zenodotus among the Greeks were it not that the scale of values had changed.[1245]
Still lower did Greek sink in monastic education. There was opportunity in the south for learning Greek, but it was exceptional to do so. About the middle of the fifth century Eugendus came as a scholar to the monastery at Condat on the Jura mountains, and the record says of him that he learned the Greek authors as well as the Latin, such was his enthusiasm for study.[1246] But a certain elementary knowledge of Greek was necessary. The ‘Litterae formatae’, letters of commendation given to travelling priests by their bishops, according to the councils of Nicea (325), Laodicea (366), and Milevis (402), were sometimes drawn up in Greek. The decrees of the bishops were marked with certain Greek letters to indicate their authenticity. The work of Dositheus (Ἑρμηνευμάτων libri III), a sort of motley lexicon interspersed with extracts and dialogues, chiefly of a juridical character, was used by those who, like the Northern Gauls, found Greek difficult. We have referred to the low standard of the Books of Instruction written by Eucherius for his son Salonius, who was neither very young (about twenty) nor very stupid (he was made bishop, and could, as we have seen, ask profound theological questions). As far as the study of language is concerned, we need to remember that philology is a comparatively modern science: but such exposition (consisting mostly of mere translation) as that of talentum, obol, drachma, Theos, Christus, Hagios, Angelus, &c., under the heading ‘Quaestiones difficiliores’, must point to a surprising ignorance of Greek even among the intellectuals of the day.
It was not only in Gaul that schoolboys of that age found Greek difficult. Augustine had the same trouble in Africa, and his complaint in the Confessions is well known.[1247] He was by nature romantic, and instinctively hated drudgery. The hateful repetition of the elementary school ‘unum et unum duo, duo et duo quattuor’ bored him beyond words. What he liked was to read about the wanderings of Aeneas and the distress of Dido. But this was not the whole reason for his difficulty with Greek. The prevailing conception of discipline made things unpleasant. He was urged ‘saevis terroribus ac poenis’. Yet this does not explain the matter, for it applied to Latin as well. He himself could hardly understand what was wrong. Why should he have hated Greek so much? ‘Quid autem erat causae cur Graecas litteras oderam quibus puerulus imbuebar, nec nunc quidem exploratum est’;[1248] and again ‘Cur ergo Graecam ... grammaticam oderam?’[1249] The difference between Greek and Latin could not lie in the different material of the books read, because they were Vergil and Homer; and if he liked Aeneas why did he not like Odysseus?
Rocafort,[1250] in his study of the life of Paulinus of Pella, is struck with the extent of Greek in the curriculum of the Bordeaux schools. ‘Here too we must note how great a place was given to Greek literature in that scheme of studies. For from the Greek poets, orators, and philosophers the children learnt poetry, eloquence, and philosophy at one and the same time as from the Latin; or rather, they learnt from the Greek first. To such an extent had the conquered captured the conqueror.... Of the public schools in Gaul, not a single one neglected Greek (publicarum scholarum, quae in illa provincia (Gallia) erant, non fuit una in qua Graecae litterae neglectae fuerint). The schoolboys of that time, he argues, must have been well versed in Greek ‘because in the schooldays of Ausonius there were those who could compare the Greek verses of the schoolmaster Citarius with those of Simonides, and the Greek speeches of Urbicus, also a schoolmaster, with those of Ulysses and Nestor’.[1251]
But the author forgets that the official acceptance of a tradition, the mere inclusion of Greek-texts in the syllabus, the mere following out of the traditional order, does not indicate thoroughness or efficiency. Paulinus talks of studying ‘dogmata Socratus’ at the age of five, but this does not mean that the wealth of Greek philosophy was opened up for the scholar. Indeed, we have evidence that the reverse was the case. And where we learn from both scholars and teachers (as we do) that the results of Greek study were barren and fruitless, it is surely wrong to draw from the prominence of Greek books in the school the inference that Greek studies were in a flourishing state. Moreover, if Paulinus seems to have appreciated his Greek, we must remember that he was born at Pella, and that when he came to Gaul the household servants habitually spoke Greek to him.[1252] He is therefore a special case in the sense that Greek was his mother-tongue. The fact that the literary products of Citarius and Urbicus were compared to those of great men need not mean anything. We have seen with what elaborate and artificial courtesy the ‘litterati’ of Gaul treated one another at this time. They called one another Ciceros and Vergils on the slightest provocation.[1253] As for the argument that Greek was taught first, it may appear that this was to its detriment rather than in its interest. The quite abnormal difficulty which Augustine found in learning the new language (he compares it to gall embittering the sweetness of the poem) is not explained.
Nor can we very well account for Augustine’s distaste for the language by reference to national antipathies. ‘He detested the Greeks by instinct’, says M. Bertrand.[1254] ‘According to Western prejudice, these men of the East were all rascals or amusers. Augustin, as a practical African, always regarded the Greeks as vain, discoursing wits.... The entirely local patriotism of the classical Greek authors further annoyed this Roman citizen, who was used to regard the world as his country: he thought them very narrow-minded to take so much interest in the history of some little town.... It must be remembered that in the second half of the fourth century the Greek attitude ... set itself more and more against Latinism, above all, politically.’ This may be all very well for the educated citizen who could appreciate the considerations of politics and cosmopolitanism, but it hardly applies to the time of life at which we find the complaints against Greek, namely childhood. What we should expect from this thesis is that in later life, with a fuller realization of these things, the men of the West would have shunned Greek. Yet we know that it was precisely then that Ausonius took to Greek, and Augustine, judging from his frequent references to Greek authors, must have done the same.
We need some other explanation, and we begin to find one when we realize that it was not so much the intrinsic difficulty of Greek as the way of teaching the second language that was the real problem. The relation of the one to the other is pronounced unsatisfactory by Paulinus of Pella, who was educated at Bordeaux. He complains that this ‘double learning’ is all very well for the more powerful minds to whom it gives a ‘double glory’, but in the case of the duller boy like himself this scheme is too difficult.[1255]
A proof of this unsatisfactory training we find in the verses he writes. There are many anacolutha, and, as his editor Brandes remarks, ‘metricae artis ita expertem se praestiterit ut nullam paginam foedis maculis non conspergeret’,[1256] though much of this must be attributed to the illness which put a stop to his studies at fifteen,[1257] just when he was beginning to make good progress.[1258]