43. Two Periods in Roman Education.—In Greece, as we have seen, there were two essentially different systems of education in use: at Sparta, a one-sided education, wholly military, with no regard for intellectual culture; at Athens, a complete education, which brought into happy harmony the training of the body and the development of the mind, and by means of which, as Thucydides observed, “men philosophized without becoming effeminate.”

Rome, in the long course of her history, followed these two systems in succession. Under the Republic, down to the conquest of Greece, preference was given to education after the Spartan type; while under the emperors, Athenian education was dominant, with a very marked tendency to give the first place to an education in literature and oratory.

44. The Education of the Early Romans.—The first schools were not opened at Rome till towards the end of the third century B.C. Till then, the Romans had no teachers save their parents and nature. Education was almost exclusively physical and moral, or rather, military and religious. On the one hand, there were the gymnastic exercises on the Campus Martius, and on the other, the recitation of the Salian hymns, a sort of catechism containing the names of the gods and goddesses. Besides this, there was the study of the Twelve Tables, that is, of the Roman Law. Men the most robust, the most courageous, the best disciplined, and the most patriotic that ever lived, were the fruit of this natural education. Rome was the great school of the civic and military virtues. The Romans did not imitate the Athenians in a disinterested pursuit of a perfect physical and intellectual development. Rome worked for practical ends; she was guided only by considerations of utility; she had no regard for ideals; her purpose was simply the education of soldiers and citizens who should be obedient and devoted. She did not know man in the abstract; she knew only the Roman citizen.

These high qualities of the early Romans were marred by a sort of brutal insensibility and a contempt for the graces of intellect and heart; and leaving out of account the circumstances of environment and race, their practical virtues may be ascribed to three or four principal causes. First among these was a firm family discipline. The authority of the father was absolute, and answering to this excessive power, there was blind obedience. Another cause was the position of the mother in the family. At Rome, woman was held in higher esteem than at Athens. She became almost the equal of man. She was the guardian of the family circle and the teacher of her children. The very name matron inspires respect. Coriolanus, who took up arms against his country, could not withstand the tears of his mother Veturia. The noble Cornelia was the teacher of her sons, the Gracchi, whom she was accustomed to call “her fairest jewels.” Besides, the influence of religion was made to supplement the active efforts of the family. The Roman lived surrounded by deities. When a child was weaned, tradition would have it that one goddess taught him to eat, and another to drink. Later on, four goddesses guided his first steps and held his two hands. All these superstitions imposed regularity and exactness on the most ordinary acts of daily life. Men breathed, as it were, a divine atmosphere. Finally, the young Roman learned to read in the laws of the Twelve Tables, that is, in the civil code of his country. He was thus accustomed from infancy to consider the law as something natural, inviolable, and sacred.

45. Rome at School in Greece.—The primitive state of manners did not last. Under Greek influence, Roman simplicity suffered a change, and, as Horace says, Greece, in being conquered, conquered in turn her rude victor. The taste for letters and arts was introduced at Rome towards the close of the third century B.C., and transformed the austere and rude education of the primitive era. The Romans, in their turn, acquired a liking for fine phrases and subtile dialectics. Schools were opened, and the rhetoricians and philosophers took up the business of education. Parents no longer charged themselves with the instruction of their children. Following the fashion at Athens, they entrusted them to slaves, without troubling themselves about the faults or even the vices of these common pedagogues.

“For if any of their servants,” says Plutarch, “be better than the rest, they dispose some of them to follow husbandry, some to navigation, some to merchandise, some to be stewards in their houses, and some, lastly, to put out their money to use for them. But if they find any slave that is a drunkard or a glutton, and unfit for any other business, to him they assign the government of their children; whereas, a good pedagogue ought to be such a one in his disposition as Phoenix, tutor to Achilles, was.”[41]

46. Why Rome had no Great Educators.—In the age of Augustus, when Latin literature was in all its glory, we are astonished not to find, as in the century of Pericles, some great thinker like Plato or Aristotle, who presents general views on education, and makes himself famous by a remarkable work on pedagogy. This is due to the fact that the Romans never formed a taste for disinterested science and speculative inquiry. They reached distinction only in the practical sciences; in the law, for example, in which they excelled. Now pedagogy, while in one sense a practical science, nevertheless reposes upon philosophical principles, upon a knowledge of human nature, and upon a theoretical conception of human destiny,—questions which had no living interest for the Roman mind, and which even Cicero has noticed only in passing, in the course of his translation of Plato, made with his usual magnificence of literary style.

It is to be noted, moreover, that the Romans seem never to have considered education as a national undertaking, as an affair of the State. The Law of the Twelve Tables is silent upon the education of children. Up to the time of Quintilian there were at Rome no public schools, no professional teachers. In the age of Augustus each teacher had his own method. “Our ancestors,” says Cicero, “did not wish that children should be educated by fixed rules, determined by the laws, publicly promulgated and made uniform for all.”[42] And he does not seem to disapprove of this neglect, even while noting the fact that Polybius saw in this an important defect in Roman institutions.

47. Cicero.—In all Cicero’s works we find scarcely a line relative to education. And yet the great orator exclaims: “What better, what greater service can we of to-day render the Republic than to instruct and train the young?”[43] But he was content with writing fine discourses on philosophy for his country, abounding more in eloquence than in originality.

48. Varro.—A less celebrated writer, Varro, seems to have had some pedagogic instinct. He wrote real educational works on grammar, rhetoric, history, and geometry. Most of these have been lost; but if we may trust his contemporaries, they were instrumental in the education of several generations.

49. Quintilian (35-95 A.D.).—After the age of Augustus, education became more and more an affair of oratory. The chief effort in the way of education was a preparation for a career in the Forum. But from these vulgar rhetoricians, occupied with the exterior artifices of style, these “traffickers in words,” as Saint Augustine called them, we must distinguish a rhetorician of a higher order, who does not separate rhetoric from a general culture of the intelligence. This is Quintilian, the author of the Institutes of Oratory.

Appointed at the age of twenty-six to a chair of eloquence, the first that was established by the Roman state, and called at a later period by the Emperor Domitian to direct the education of his grand-nephews, Quintilian was practically acquainted with both public and private instruction.

50. The Institutes of Oratory.—This work, under the form of a treatise on rhetoric, is in parts a real treatise on education. The author, in fact, begins the training of the future orator from the cradle; he gives counsel to its nurse, and “not blushing to descend to petty details,” he follows step by step the education of his pupil. Let us add, that in the noble ideal which he conceives, eloquence never being considered apart from wisdom, Quintilian was led by his very subject to treat of moral education.

51. His General Plan of Education.—The first book entire is devoted to education in general, and its teachings might be applied indifferently to all children, whether destined or not to the practice of oratory.

“Has a son been born to you? From the first conceive the highest hopes of him.” Thus Quintilian begins. He thinks that we cannot have too high an opinion of human nature, nor propose for it too high a purpose. Minds that rebel against all instruction are unnatural. Most often it is the training which is at fault; it is not nature that is to blame.

52. The Early Education of the Child.—The child’s nurses should be virtuous and prudent. Quintilian does not demand that they shall be learned, as the stoic Chrysippus would have them; but he requires that their language shall be irreproachable. The first impressions of the child are very durable: “New vases preserve the taste of the first liquor that is put into them; and wool, once colored, never regains its primitive whiteness.”

By an illusion analogous to that of the literary men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who would have the little French boy first learn Latin, Quintilian teaches his pupil Greek before making him study his native tongue.

Studies, moreover, should begin betimes: “Turn to account the child’s first years, especially as the elements of learning demand only memory, and the memory of children is very tenacious.”

We seem to be listening to a modern teacher when Quintilian recommends the avoidance of whatever might ruffle the spirits of the child. “Let study be to him a play; ask him questions; commend him when he does well; and sometimes let him enjoy the consciousness of his little gains in wisdom.”

53. Reading and Writing.—The passage relative to reading deserves to be quoted in full. It is wrong, says Quintilian, to teach children the names of the letters, and their respective places in the alphabet, before they know their shapes. He recommends the use of letters in ivory, which children take pleasure in handling, seeing, and naming.

As to writing, Quintilian recommends, for the purpose of strengthening the child’s hand, and of preventing it from making false movements, that he should practise on wooden tablets on which the letters have been traced by cutting.[44] Later on, the copies shall contain, “not senseless maxims, but moral truths.” The Roman teacher did not counsel haste in any case. “We can scarcely believe,” he says, “how progress in reading is retarded by attempting to go too fast.”

54. Public Education.—Quintilian has made an unsurpassed plea for public education and its advantages, which Rollin has reproduced almost entire.[45] From this we shall quote only the following passage, which proves how far the contemporaries of Quintilian had already departed from the manly habits of the early ages; and the truth which is herein expressed will always be applicable to parents who are inclined to be over-indulgent: “Would that we ourselves did not corrupt the morals of our children! We enervate their very infancy with luxuries. That delicacy of education, which we call fondness, weakens all the powers, both of body and mind.... We form the palate of our children before we form their pronunciation. They grow up in sedan chairs; if they touch the ground, they hang by the hands of attendants supporting them on each side. We are delighted if they utter anything immodest. Expressions which would hot be tolerated even from effeminate youths, we hear from them with a smile and a kiss. Need we be astonished at this behavior? We ourselves have taught them.”[46]

55. Duties of Teachers.—There was at Rome, in the first century of the Christian era, a high conception of the duties of a teacher: “His first care should be to ascertain with all possible thoroughness the mind and the character of the child.” Judicious reflections on the memory, on the faculty of imitation, and on the dangers of precocious mental development, are proofs of the fine psychological discernment of Quintilian. His insight is no less accurate when he sketches the rules for moral discipline. “Fear,” he says, “restrains some and unmans others.... For my part, I prefer a pupil who is sensitive to praise, whom glory animates, and from whom defeat draws tears.”

Quintilian expresses himself decidedly against the use of the rod, “although custom authorizes it,” he says, “and Chrysippus does not disapprove of it.”

56. Grammar and Rhetoric.—Like his contemporaries, Quintilian distinguishes studies into two grades,—Grammar and Rhetoric. “As soon as the child is able to read and write, he must be placed in the hands of the grammarian.” Grammar was divided into two parts,—the art of speaking correctly and the explication of the poets. Exercises in composition, development lessons called ChriÆ, and narratives, accompanied the theoretical study of the rules of grammar.[47] It is to be observed that Quintilian gives a high place to etymological studies, and that he attaches great importance to reading aloud. “That the child may read well, let him have a good understanding of what he reads.... When he reads the poets, let him shun affected modulations. It is with reference to this manner of reading that CÆsar, still a young man, made this excellent observation: ‘If you are singing, you sing poorly; if you are reading, why do you sing?’”

57. The Simultaneous Study of the Sciences.—Quintilian is very far from confining his pupil within the narrow circle of grammatical study. Persuaded that the child is capable of learning several things at the same time, he would have him taught geometry, music, and philosophy simultaneously:—

“Must he learn grammar alone, and then geometry, and in the meanwhile forget what he first learned? As well advise a farmer not to cultivate, at the same time, his fields, his vines, his olive trees, and his orchards, and not to give his thought simultaneously to his meadows, his cattle, his gardens, and his bees.”[48]

Of course Quintilian considers the different studies which he sets before his pupil only as the instruments for an education in oratory. Philosophy, which comprises dialectics or logic, physics or the science of nature, and lastly morals, furnish the orator with ideas, and teach him the art of distributing them into a consecutive line of argument. And so geometry, a near relative of dialectics, disciplines the mind, and teaches it to distinguish the true from the false. Lastly, music is an excellent preparation for eloquence; it cultivates the sense of harmony and a taste for number and measure.

58. The Schools of Philosophy.—By the side of the schools of rhetoric, in which the art of speech was cultivated, imperial Rome saw flourish in great numbers schools of philosophy, whose purpose was the formation of morals. It was through no lack of moral sermonizing that there was a degeneration in the virtues of the Romans. All the schools of Greece, especially the Stoics and the Epicureans, and also the schools of Pythagoras, of Socrates, of Plato, and of Aristotle, had their representatives at Rome; but their obscure names have scarcely survived.

59. Seneca.—Among these philosophers and these moralists of the first century of the Christian era, Seneca has the distinction of standing in the front rank. It is true that he was not the founder of a school, but by his numerous writings he succeeded in maintaining among his contemporaries at least some vestiges of the ancient virtues. His Letters to Lucilius, letters abounding in real intellectual and moral insight, also contain some pedagogical precepts. Seneca attempts to direct school instruction to practical ends, in following out the thought of this famous precept: “We should learn, not for the sake of the school, but for the purposes of life” (Non scholÆ, sed vitÆ discimus). Moreover, he criticises confused and ill-directed reading that does not enrich the understanding, and concludes by recommending the profound study of a single book (timeo hominem unius libri). In another letter he remarks that the best means for giving clearness to one’s own ideas is to communicate them to others; the best way of being taught is to teach (docendo discimus). Let us quote this other maxim so often repeated: “The end is attained sooner by example than by precept” (longum iter per prÆcepta, breve per exempla).

60. Plutarch (50-138 A.D.).—In the last period of Roman civilization two names deserve to arrest the attention of the educator,—Plutarch and Marcus Aurelius. Although he was born in Boeotia, and wrote in Greek, Plutarch belongs to the Roman world. He lived at Rome at several different times, and there opened a school in the reign of Domitian, where he lectured on philosophy, literature, and history. Numerous works have transmitted to us the substance of that instruction which had such an extraordinary success.

61. The Lives of Illustrious Men.—Translated in the fifteenth century by Amyot, the Parallel Lives of Plutarch were for our fathers a true code of morals founded on history. How many of our great men, or how many of our men of worth, have drawn from this book, at least in part, the material which has nurtured their virtues! L’HÔpital and d’AubignÉ enriched their lives from this source. Henry IV. said of this book: “It has been to me as my conscience, and has whispered in my ear many virtuous suggestions and excellent maxims for my own conduct and for the management of my affairs.”[49]

62. The Essay on the Training of Children.—The celebrated essay entitled Of the Training of Children,[50] is the first treatise, especially devoted to education, that antiquity has bequeathed to us. Its authenticity has been called in question by German critics; but this is of little moment, since these critics are the first to recognize the fact that the author of this essay, whoever he might have been, was intimately acquainted with Plutarch, and has given us a sufficiently exact summary of the ideas which are more fully developed in others of his works.[51]

We shall not give an analysis of this work, which, however, abounds in interesting reflections on the primary period of education. We shall simply note the fundamental thought of the essay, its salient and original characteristic, which is its warm appreciation of the family. In society, as Plutarch conceives it, the State no longer exercises absolute sovereignty. Upon the ruins of the antique commonwealth Plutarch builds the family. It is to the family that he addresses himself in order to assure the education of children.[52] On this point he is not in accord with Quintilian. What he recommends is an education that is domestic and individual. He scarcely admits the need of public schools save for the higher instruction. At a certain age a young man, already trained by the watchful care of a preceptor under the supervision of his parents, shall go abroad to hear the lectures of the moralists and the philosophers, and to read the poets.

63. The Education of Women.—One of the consequences of the exalted function which Plutarch ascribes to the family is that by this single act he raises the material and moral condition of woman. In his essay entitled Conjugal Precepts, which recalls the Economics of Xenophon, he restores to the wife her place in the household. He associates her with the husband in the material support of the family, as well as in the education of the children. The mother is to nurse her offspring. “Providence,” he naively says, “hath also wisely ordered that women should have two breasts, that so, if any of them should happen to bear twins, they might have two several springs of nourishment ready for them.”[53] The mother shall also take part in the instruction of her children, and so she must herself be educated. Plutarch proposes for her the highest studies, such as mathematics and philosophy. But he counts much more upon her natural qualities, than upon the science that she may acquire. “With women,” he says, “tenderness of heart is enhanced by a pleasing countenance, by sweetness of speech, by an affectionate grace, and by a high degree of sensitiveness.”

64. The Function of Poetry in Education.—In the essay entitled How a Young Man Ought to Hear Poems, Plutarch has given his opinion as to the extent to which poetry should be made an element in education. More just than Plato, he does not condemn the reading of the poets. He simply demands that this reading should be done with discretion, by choosing those who, in their compositions, mingle moral inspiration with poetic inspiration. “Lycurgus,” he says, “did not act like a man of sound reason in the course which he took to reform his people that were much inclined to drunkenness, by traveling up and down to destroy all the vines in the country; whereas he should have ordered that every vine should have a well of water near it, that (as Plato saith) the drunken deity might be reduced to temperance by a sober one.”[54]

65. The Teaching of Morals.—Plutarch is above all else a moralist. If he adds nothing in the way of theory to the lofty doctrines of the Greek philosophers from whom he catches his inspiration, at least he enters more profoundly into the study of practical methods which insure the efficacy of fine precepts and exalted doctrines. “That contemplation which is dissociated from practice,” he says, “is of no utility.” He would have young men come from lectures on morals, not only better instructed, but more virtuous. Of what consequence are beautiful maxims unless they are embodied in action? The young man, then, shall early accustom himself to self-government, to reflection upon his own conduct, and to taking counsel of his own reason. Moreover, Plutarch gives him a director of conscience, a philosopher, whom he will go to consult in his doubts, and to whom he will entrust the keeping of his soul. But that which is of most consequence in his eyes is personal effort, reflection always on the alert, and that inward effort which causes our soul to assimilate the moral lessons which we have received, and which causes them to enter into the very structure and fibre of our personality.

“As it would be with a man who, going to his neighbor’s to borrow fire, and finding there a great and bright fire, should sit down to warm himself and forget to go home; so is it with the one who comes to another to learn, if he does not think himself obliged to kindle his own fire within, and influence his own mind, but continues sitting by his master as if he were enchanted, delighted by hearing.”[55]

So are those who are not striving to have a personal morality, but who, incapable of self-direction, are always in need of the tutorship of another.

The great preoccupation of Plutarch—and by this trait he has a legitimate place among the great educators of the world—was to awaken, to excite, the interior forces of the conscience, and to stimulate the intelligence to a high state of activity. When he wrote this famous maxim, “The soul is not a vase to be filled, but is rather a hearth which is to be made to glow,”[56] he was not thinking alone of moral education, but also of a false intellectual education which, instead of training the mind, is content with accumulating in the memory a mass of indigested materials.[57]

66. Marcus Aurelius.—The wisest of the Roman emperors, the author of the book entitled To Myself, better known as Meditations, Marcus Aurelius deserves mention in the history of pedagogy. He is perhaps the most perfect representative of Stoic morality, which is itself the highest expression of ancient morality. He is the most finished type of what can be effected in the way of soul-culture by the influence of home-training and the personal effort of the conscience. His teacher of rhetoric was the celebrated Fronto, of whose character we may judge from this one characteristic: “I toiled hard yesterday,” he wrote to his pupil; “I composed a few figures of speech, with which I am pleased.” On the other hand, Marcus Aurelius found examples for imitation in his own family. “My uncle,” he says reverently, “taught me patience.... From my father I inherited modesty.... To my mother I owe my feelings of piety.” Notwithstanding the modesty that led him to attribute to others the whole of his moral worth, it is especially to himself, to a persistent effort of his own will, and to a ceaseless examination of his own conscience, that he is indebted for becoming the most virtuous of men, and the wisest and purest, next to Socrates, of the moralists of antiquity. His Meditations show us in action that self-education which in our time has suggested such beautiful reflections to Channing.

67. Conclusion.—Finally, it must be admitted that Roman literature is poor in material for educational study. Some passages, scattered here and there in the classical authors, nevertheless prove that they were not absolutely strangers to pedagogical questions.

Thus Horace professed independence of mind; he declares that he is not obliged to swear by the “words of any master.”[58] On the other hand, Juvenal defined the ideal purpose of life and of education when he said that the desirable thing above all others is “a sound mind in a sound body.”[59] Finally, Pliny the Younger, in three words, multum, non multa, “much, not many things,” fixes one essential point in educational method, and recommends the thorough study of one single subject in preference to a superficial study which extends over too many subjects.

While by their taste, their accuracy of thought, and the perfection of their style, the Latin writers are worthy of being placed by the side of the Greeks as proficients in education of the literary type, they at the same time deserve to be regarded as reputable guides in moral education. At Rome, as at Athens, that which formed the basis of instruction was the search after virtue. That which preoccupied Cicero as well as Plato, Seneca as well as Aristotle, was not so much the extension of knowledge and the development of instruction as the progress of manners and the moral perfection of man.