What, then, exactly was wrong with the teaching of the second language? Partly it undoubtedly was (as has been indicated) that stupid concentration on the dry bones of grammar which persists up to the present day in the teaching of a strange language. The assumption is that learning a language must necessarily be a synthetic process in which you pass from the details to the whole, instead of being rather analytic, a process in which you pass from an appreciation of the general rhythm and sense and structure to the details of construction, which only have a meaning in so far as they are related to the larger thing. But there was a deeper cause. Augustine gets the root of the matter when he says that it was unnaturalness. The reason why Latin was not to him the drudgery that Greek was lay in the fact that it came to him naturally and easily and pleasantly, ‘inter blandimenta nutricum et ioca arridentium et laetitias alludentium’. He learnt with an interest that was natural and delightful ‘not from lessons but from conversations with those in whose ears I longed to pour out all I felt’. It is interest and not force that produces the best results. ‘Hinc satis elucet’, he says, ‘maiorem habere vim ad discenda ista liberam curiositatem quam meticulosam necessitatem.’
Now naturalness means giving scope to the individuality, and developing that sane curiosity which can be elicited by proper methods from every child. Its practice in education, therefore, must mean a protest against the militaristic disciplinarian, and as such Augustine mainly intended it. But it contains, also, a reproof for the thoughtless and unscientific teacher who regards the child as a receptacle for external and ready-made ideas, a protest against the spiritual militarist who does not start with what there is in the child’s mind, but begins by introducing alien matter and perverting the natural resources.
This was exactly what Roman education had always done. It had taken the Latin-speaking child, and, instead of starting with his knowledge of Latin, it began as a rule by cramming in a foreign language, Greek. When Augustine speaks of the Greek studies ‘quibus puerulus imbuebar’,[1259] he is merely affirming that his school followed the ordinary Roman tendency to put Greek first. Greek influence had early captured the Roman schools, and had been widely spread at various times by Scipio and his circle,[1260] by Hadrian,[1261] and by Julian. That easy acceptance of the Greek example, especially in matters of culture, which Plutarch notices,[1262] called for the strong protest of patriots like Cicero on more than one occasion.[1263] But here, as in the matter of rhetoric, the protest was unavailing. We can trace the hellenizing influence as the Empire goes on. Pliny is quite ready to admit the charge of ‘egestas patrii sermonis’ which Cicero is always denying,[1264] and Seneca writes at length on the subject (Quanta verborum nobis paupertas).[1265] To a certain extent, of course, this was true, but it is the spirit of the writer that is significant. Whereas Cicero tried to coin philosophical terms[1266] to enrich his language, the later writers merely criticize, or advocate the substitution of Greek. Suetonius quotes Cicero’s letter to Titinius: ‘I remember how, in our boyhood, a certain Plotius was the first to teach Latin. He obtained numbers of pupils ... and I grieved that I could not go too. But I was restrained by the opinion of the experts who thought that the intellect could be better nourished by a Greek training.’[1267] How far national pride had declined is indicated by a comparison of Cicero’s Dream of Scipio which Macrobius has preserved for us, and the notes of the commentator. In Cicero’s text the heaven depicted is pre-eminently for patriots; in Macrobius’s commentary entry into public life is a hindrance rather than a help.[1268] And the failure of patriotism meant increased readiness to adopt and ape the foreign thing simply because it was foreign. It meant that education came to be identified with a knowledge of Greek.
Pliny, in spite of his leaning to Hellenism, complained that in the legal profession young men begin with the civil suits of the centumviral court, just as in the schools they begin with Homer,[1269] and his comment is in the nature of a criticism: ‘For here, as there, they start with what is most difficult.’ Suetonius[1270] indicates the Greek tradition in Roman education when he says that grammar at first made no great progress, since the first teachers, who were at once poets and semi-Greeks, explained none but Greek authors to their pupils, merely reading out to them an occasional Latin composition of their own. And Julius Capitolinus in the life of Maximinus Junior[1271] mentions the Greek training and the Greek grammarian in such a way as to indicate that Greek was taught first. This is distinctly maintained by Petronius:
Det primos versibus annos
Maeoniumque bibat felici pectore fontem.
mox et Socratico plenus grege mutet habenas
liber et ingentis quatiat Demosthenis arma.
hinc Romana manus circumfluat, et modo Graio
exonerata sono mutet suffusa saporem.[1272]