Education in ancient Rome

In the 3rd century BC, a Greek captive from Tarentum named Livius Andronicus was sold as a slave and employed as a tutor for his master's children.

[7] After obtaining his freedom, he continued to live in Rome and became the first schoolmaster (private tutor) to follow Greek methods of education and would translate Homer's Odyssey into Latin verse in Saturnian meter.

[citation needed] The situation of the Greeks was ideal for the foundation of literary education as they were the possessors of the great works of Homer, Hesiod, and the Lyric poets of Archaic Greece.

[citation needed] While the Romans adopted many aspects of Greek education, two areas, in particular, were viewed as trifles: music and athletics.

[12] From the pater familias or highest-ranking male of the family, one usually learned "just enough reading, writing, and Arithmetic to enable them to understand simple business transactions and to count, weigh, and measure.

Cato the Elder not only made his children hardworking, good citizens and responsible Romans, but "he was his (son's) reading teacher, his law professor, his athletic coach.

He taught his son not only to hurl a javelin, to fight in armor, and to ride a horse, but also to box, to endure both heat and cold, and to swim well".

[13] Perhaps the most important role of the parents in their children's education was to instil in them a respect for tradition and a firm comprehension of pietas, or devotion to duty.

As the Roman Republic transitioned into a more formal education, parents began to hire teachers for this level of advanced academic training.

[16] Using a competitive educational system, Romans developed a form of social control that allowed elites to maintain class stability.

At between nine and twelve years of age, boys from affluent families would leave their litterator behind and take up study with a grammaticus, who honed his students' writing and speaking skills, versed them in the art of poetic analysis, and taught them Greek if they did not yet know it.

[10] By this point, lower-class boys would already be working as apprentices, and girls — rich or poor — would be focused on making themselves attractive brides and, subsequently, capable mothers.

[17] Assessment of a student's performance was done on-the-spot and on-the-fly according to standards set by his particular grammaticus, as no source on Roman education ever mentions work taken away to be graded.

[16] Instead, pupils would complete an exercise, display their results, and be corrected or congratulated as needed by the grammaticus, who reveled in his self-perception as a "guardian of language".

[18] Famous grammatici include Lucius Orbilius Pupillus, who still serves as the quintessential pedagogue that is not afraid to flog or whip his students to drive a point home,[13] and the freedman Marcus Verrius Flaccus, who gained imperial patronage and a widespread tutelage due to his novel practice of pitting students of similar age and ability against each other and rewarding the winner with a prize, usually an old book of some rarity.

[16] Even at the height of his career, Verrius Flaccus, whose prestige allowed him to charge enormous fees and be hired by Augustus to teach his grandsons, never had his own schoolroom.

[13] Other teachers sidestepped rent and lighting costs by convening their classes on pavements, colonnades, or in other public spaces, where traffic noise, street crowds, and bad weather posed problems.

[13] Though both literary and documentary sources interchange the various titles for a teacher and often use the most general of terms as a catch-all, a price edict issued by Diocletian in AD 301 proves that such distinctions did in fact exist and that a litterator, grammaticus or rhetor, at least in theory, had to define himself as such.

Children continued their studies with the grammaticus until the age of fourteen or fifteen, at which point only the wealthiest and most promising students matriculated with a rhetor.

[19] In early Roman times, rhetoric studies were not taught exclusively through a teacher, but were learned through a student's careful observation of his elders.

[15] Later in Roman history, the practice of declamation became focused more on the art of delivery as opposed to training to speak on important issues in the courts.

Tacitus pointed out that during his day (the second half of the 1st century AD), students had begun to lose sight of legal disputes and had started to focus more of their training on the art of storytelling.

An understanding of a philosophical school of thought could have done much to add to Cicero's vaunted knowledge of 'that which is great', but could be pursued by the very wealthiest of Rome's elite.