Ancient Roman Childhood and Education
From Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul by T. G. Tucker, 1910.
From: 37 C.E. To: 68 C.E.
Location: Rome, Italy
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul by T. G. Tucker, 1910.
Immediately after birth there is a little ceremony. The babe is brought and laid upon the hearth or floor before the household gods for the father to inspect it. As has been said already, if it is a monstrosity, he may order it to be made away with. Otherwise it is still open to him either to acknowledge the infant or to refuse to have anything to do with it. The act of acknowledgment consists in stooping down and lifting up the child from the ground. For this reason the expression used for acknowledging and undertaking to rear a child was ''lifting'' or ''picking up." In our instance the little son and daughter are, of course, not only picked up, but welcomed as the young hopes of the proud house of Silii Bassi.
On the ninth day in case of the boy, or the eighth in that of the girl, the child is named, after certain ceremonies of purification. The whole proceeding bears much resemblance to a christening, except that there is no calling in of the services of a church. The relations and friends gather in the hall, each bringing his present, and even the slaves make their little inexpensive offerings.
The gifts are chiefly little trinkets of gold, silver, and ivory—rings, miniature hands, axes, swords, or crescents—which are to be strung across the baby's breast. The original purpose of all these objects was to act as charms against the blighting of the child by evil powers, or, more definitely, by the ''evil eye,'' that malignant influence which still troubles so many good Italians, both ignorant and learned.
With the same intention the father hangs upon the child's neck a certain object which it will carry till it comes of age. If a few years later you met the boy Publius in the Roman streets, you would find him wearing a round case or locket in gold, some two inches in diameter and resembling the modern cased watch. Inside is shut his protecting amulet. When he is sixteen and puts on the man's toga, his amulet will be laid aside. In the case of the little Silia it will be worn until she marries. Poorer folk, for whom gold is too expensive, will enclose the amulet in a case of leather.
The naming over, the child is registered. The Romans were adepts in the art of utilising a religious or superstitious practice for purposes of state, and the development of the registration of births and deaths is but one instance. In older times it had been a custom, on the occasion of a birth, to pay a visit to the shrine of ''Juno the Birth-Goddess," and to leave a small coin by way of offering. It is easy for a state to convert an already established general custom into a rule; and at our date this shrine of Juno had become practically a registration office, where a small fee was paid and the name of the child entered upon the rolls.
We need not follow with any closeness the infancy of either boy or girl till the seventh year. The ancient world was very much like the modern. Suffice it to glance at them cutting their teeth on the teeth of wolves or horses, rocked in cradles decorated with gold and purple, or running about and calling their parents by the time-honoured mamma, tata—words, if we can call them words, which came from those small Roman mouths precisely as they have come from time immemorial from so many others.
Their slave nurse, who is a Greek and talks Greek to them, tells them the old wives' tales and fables. They play with rattles, balls, and little carts, with pet birds and monkeys, and the girl with dolls of ivory or wax or of painted terra-cotta. They have swings, and ride on sticks and build houses. When bigger, the boy has his tops and hoops, with or without bells, and he plays marbles with nuts. Meanwhile attempts are made, somewhat after the kindergarten pattern, to teach them their alphabet by means of letters shaped in wood or ivory. Whether or not it is modern kindergarten method to tempt children to learn by offers of sugar-plums, that course was often adopted in the world of both Greece and Rome.
On the whole the life of the child, though strictly governed, appears to have been pleasant enough until schooldays began. Though many children were taught at home by a more or less learned slave acting as private tutor, the great majority, at least of the boys, were sent to school. There was at this date no compulsory education; the state dictated nothing and provided nothing in connection with the matter; many children must have received no education at all, and many only the barest elements.
Nevertheless the average parent realised the practical utility of at least reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, and schools of the elementary type sprang up according to the demand. What the higher education was like will be set forth in its place.
The ideal education, as understood in the older days of Rome, was a training which should fit a man for his duty to the gods, the state, and the family. It was above all things a moral and practical training. A man has certain domestic, political, and religious functions to perform: let him learn how best to perform these.
Under this system there was little room for accomplishments or for purely intellectual pursuits. Little by little, however, such liberal elements, artistic and philosophical, struggled into the sphere of Roman education, but neyer to the extent or with the intellectual effect which belonged to them in Greece.
Even by a.d. 64 the education of a Roman boy was very narrow, and, in the direction in which it sought some liberality, it often went sadly astray. The clearest course will be for us to take young Publius Silius through a course typical of the time. We will assume that he does not receive all his lessons at home, but that, through an old-fashioned preference on the part of his father, he goes to a school, along with boys who are mostly but not necessarily of the same social standing with himself.
We have unfortunately almost no information as to any social grading of schools, or as to their size. All we know is that some schools were taught entirely by one man, while others employed an undermaster or several. In some cases the school is entirely a private enterprise, the master charging a monthly fee—amounting in the elementary schools to a penny or twopence a week—together with small money presents on certain festivals. The more select establishments naturally charged more.
Probably most of the schools in Rome and the larger towns were upon this private footing. In other instances a number of parents in a smaller town would club together and subscribe sufficient money to provide the salary of a schoolmaster for their children. In yet others some benefactor, generally a wealthy local magnate, had given or bequeathed an endowment fund, from which a school was either wholly or partially financed.
At a rather later date Pliny writes a letter, of which the following is a passage, interesting in this connection. ''When I was lately in my native part of the country (that is to say, at Como), a boy—the son of a fellow townsman—came to pay his respects. I said, 'Are you at school?' 'Yes,' he replied. 'Where?' 'At Milan.' 'And why not here?' At this his father said, 'Because we have no teachers here.' 'And why have you none? It is of the greatest importance to, any of you who are fathers—and it happened that several fathers were listening—that your children should be taught here rather than anywhere else... How small a thing it is to put money together and engage teachers, and to apply to their salary the amount which you now spend on lodgings, travelling expenses, and the articles that have always to be purchased when one is away from home.'"
Whereupon he proceeds himself to offer to contribute one-third of whatever sum the parents collect. He does not believe in giving the whole, because experience has taught him that endowments of this kind are commonly misused. The parents must themselves retain an interest in preventing corruption; and this will be the case so long as they are themselves paying their share. In this instance we are, however, to think rather of a high school or school of rhetoric than of the primary school. Como would not lack a primary school, nor would parents send very young children to lodge in Milan. There is no trace of real boarding-schools.
To whatever school Publius goes he will be accompanied by a sedate slave, generally elderly and also generally a Greek, whom you may call his "guardian,'' or his “governor," or his "mentor," according to your fancy. The function of this worthy is to look after the morals and behaviour of the boy when in the streets, and also to supervise his manners when at home. Publius will not be free of this incubus until the day when he puts on the adult's toga; and he must be prepared to accept, at least in his younger days, not only scolding, but also corporal punishment from him.
In poorer families the mother corrected her children with a slipper. The ''guardian'' of Publius is nevertheless a slave, and will carry the young master's books and school requisites for him, while the sons of poorer parents are marching along, freer and happier, with their tablets and writing-case slung over their left arm. When, in the New Testament, we are told that the "Law hath been our school-master unto Christ," the word employed does not at all mean schoolmaster. It means this slave who keeps the pupil under salutary discipline until he reaches the schoolmaster, and who superintends his conduct until he is of age.
School age regularly begins at seven for the elementary stage, which commonly includes writing, reading, and arithmetic. The first lessons in writing are done upon wax tablets, which correspond to our slate. For school purposes they are flat pieces of wood, with a rim, their surface being covered with a thin layer of wax. The pupil takes a "style," or metal stiletto, pointed at one end and flat at the other; with the point he scratches, or "ploughs" as the Romans called it, the writing in the wax; with the other end he flattens the wax and so makes the necessary erasures when he desires to correct a word or to ''clean his slate."
His first efforts will probably consist either of tracing letters through a stencil, or of forming them from a copy while the master guides his hand. He will next write a series of words—the good old copy-book method with the good old copybook maxims. It is only when he has gained some proficiency that he will be allowed to write upon paper or parchment with ink and with a split reed for pen. In such a case the backs of useless documents come in handy, and particularly serviceable are the rolls containing the poems of the numerous authors whom no one wants to read, but whose books thus find one of their ultimate uses, another being to wrap up spices or salt fish.
His arithmetic will be merely such as will enable him to make up accounts. The Roman numerals did not lend themselves easily to the method now adopted of calculating on paper, and the Roman pupil therefore reckoned partly with his fingers, partly by means of counters laid or strung upon a board. At this he became remarkably proficient, and at mental arithmetic there is reason to believe that he could beat the modem boy hollow. Along with the reckoning he would also necessarily learn his tables of weights and measures. ''Two-and- a-half feet one step; two steps one pace; a thousand paces one mile." So he said or sang, and a mile—mille, "a thousand" paces—remains our own word to this day, even though it has come to signify an eccentric 1760 yards.
That Roman boys bore no love to school or school-master is little wonder. Perhaps Publius may be fortunate; but if his schoolmaster is of the ordinary type he will be an irascible loud-voiced person, who bawls and scolds and thrashes. It will be a common thing to find, as Seneca puts it, a man ''in a violent passion teaching you that to be in a passion is wrong."
Horsing a boy (After Sächs). Image from text, by T. G. Tucker.
The doctrine went that ''he who is not flayed is not educated." The methods of the military centurion may have had something to do with creating this behaviour, but there is perhaps another excuse to be found for the Roman pedagogue. His school, if of the inferior kind, is like any other shop, a place open to the street, whether on the ground floor or in the balcony-like entresol. There is no cloistered privacy about his instruction. To such a place at a very early hour come the boys "creeping unwillingly."
When the days are short the school opens before daybreak, and the smoky lamps and lanterns create an evil smell and atmosphere in the raw and chilly morning. That is no time to be amiable towards inattention or stupidity. There were many other circumstances to try the temper, and the Roman temper, except among the highest classes, was, as it still is, quick and loud. No real boy who had been at a Roman school but knew what it was to have his ears pinched and to take his punishment on his hands with the cane or the tawse. Many had been "horsed," in the way depicted in the illustration.
Tucker, T. G. Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul. The Macmillan Company, 1910.
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