Teachers in Ancient Rome: Types, Methods, Pay | Early European History And Religion

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TEACHERS IN ANCIENT ROME

During the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire Rome state-sponsored elementary education was never formally instituted. It was typical for Roman children of wealthy families to receive their early education from private tutors. However, it was also common for children of modest means to be instructed in a primary school, traditionally known as a ludus litterarius. The instructors at such school were was often known as a litterator or litteratus. There was nothing stopping such a teacher setting up his own school, and requiring parents of students to pay fees for his service. There were never any established locations for a ludus litterarius. [Source Wikipedia]

Scholarly people known as "pedagogues" set themselves up as schoolmasters in private houses and enrolled pupil boarders. The teacher was originally a slave, perhaps he was usually a freedman. The position in itself was not honorable, but it might become so through the character of the teacher. Though the pupils feared the master, they seem to have had little respect for him. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932)]

Quintilian (b.30/35-A.D. c.100) didn't have much good to say about ordinary Roman teachers. He wrote in “The Institutes,” Book 1: 1-26 (c. 90 A.D.): “They should either be men of acknowledged learning, which I should wish to be the first object, or that they should be conscious of their want of learning; for none are more pernicious than those who, having gone some little beyond the first elements, clothe themselves in a mistaken persuasion of their own knowledge; since they disdain to yield to those who are skilled in teaching, and, growing imperious, and sometimes fierce, in a certain right, as it were, of exercising their authority (with which that sort of men are generally puffed up), they teach only their own folly. “Nor is their misconduct less prejudicial to the manners of their pupils; for Leonides, the tutor of Alexander, as is related by Diogenes of Babylon, tinctured him with certain bad habits, which adhered to him, from his childish education, even when he was grown up and become the greatest of kings.” [Source: Quintilian (b.30/35-A.D. c.100), The Ideal Education, “The Institutes,” Book 1: 1-26 (c. 90 A.D.), Oliver J. Thatcher, ed., “The Library of Original Sources” (Milwaukee: University Research Extension Co., 1907), Vol. III: The Roman World, pp. 370-391]

Teacher's Pay in Ancient Rome

The pay teachers received was a mere pittance, varying from three dollars a year from each pupil for the elementary teacher (litterator, magister litterarum) to five or six times that sum for a grammaticus. In addition to the fee, the pupils were expected to bring the master from time to time little presents, a custom persisting probably from the time when these presents were his only reward. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932)]

The fees varied, however, with the qualifications of the master. Some whose reputations were established and whose schools were “fashionable” charged no fees at all, but left the amount to be paid (honorarium) to the generosity of their patrons. There were no teachers’ licenses, and no “Requirements in Education” to be met. Anyone who chose might set up his schoolroom and look for pupils. |+|

Elementary school teachers (magisters) had to depend entirely on the small fees paid him by the parents of his pupils and was often constrained to supplement his income as schoolmaster by other activities. Though the State, in the person of the emperor, became increasingly interested in the support of distinguished teachers and scholars in the higher realms of learning, there is no evidence of any public contribution to elementary education during the classical period. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

Discipline and Punishments in Ancient Roman Schools

According to Listverse: “ Learning in Roman schools was based on fear. Boys were beaten for the slightest offence as a belief existed that a boy would learn correctly and accurately if he feared being caned if he got something wrong. For boys who continued to get things wrong, some schools had a policy of having pupils held down by two slaves while his tutor beat him with a leather whip.” [Source: Listverse, October 16, 2009]

The discipline was thoroughly Roman in its severity, if we may judge by the grim references in Juvenal and Martial to the rod and ferule as used in schools. Horace has given to his teacher, Orbilius, a deathless fame by the adjective plagosus. From Nepos we learn that then, as now, teachers appealed, at times, to the natural emulation between well-bred boys, and we know that prizes, too, were offered. Perhaps we may think the ferule well deserved when we read of the schoolboy’s trick immortalized by Persius. [Source: “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932) |+|]

Quintilian (b.30/35-A.D. c.100) wrote in “The Institutes,” Book 1: 1-26 (c. 90 A.D.): Educating an orator is “an arduous task, even when nothing is deficient for the formation of his character; and that more and more difficult labors yet remain; for there is need of constant study, the most excellent teachers, and a variety of mental exercises. The best of rules, therefore, are to be laid down; and if any one shall refuse to observe them, the fault will lie, not in the method, but in the man. If, however, it should not be the good fortune of children to have such nurses as I should wish, let them at least have one attentive paedagogus, not unskilled in language, who, if anything is spoken incorrectly by the nurse in the presence of his pupil, may at once correct it, and not let it settle in his mind. But let it be understood that what I prescribed at first is the right course, and this only a remedy.” [Source: Quintilian (b.30/35-A.D. c.100), The Ideal Education, “The Institutes,” Book 1: 1-26 (c. 90 A.D.), Oliver J. Thatcher, ed., “The Library of Original Sources” (Milwaukee: University Research Extension Co., 1907), Vol. III: The Roman World, pp. 370-391]

That Roman schoolmasters, no less than their Greek predecessors, relied on the corporal punishment to quicken slow wits is shown in Martial’s Epigrams, X.62 from the end of the A.D. 1st century: “Sir Schoolmaster---show pity upon your simple scholars, at least if you wish to have many a long-haired boy attendant upon your lectures, and the class seated around your critical table love you. Then would no teacher of arithmetic or swift writing have a greater ring of pupils around him. Hot and bright are the days now under the flaming constellation of the lion; and fervid July is ripening the bursting harvest. So let your Scythian scourge with its dreadful thongs, such as flogged Marsyas of Celaenae, and your formidable cane---the schoolmaster's scepter---be laid aside, and sleep until the Ides of October. Surely in summer time, if the boys keep their health, they do enough.” [Source: William Stearns Davis, ed., “Readings in Ancient History: Illustrative Extracts from the Sources,” 2 Vols. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1912-13), Vol. II: Rome and the West, pp. 227-230]

Teaching Methods in Ancient Rome

The master's sole ambition was to teach his pupils to read, write, and count; as he had several years at his disposal in which to accomplish this, he made no attempt to improve his wretched teaching methods or to brighten his dismal routine. Thus, he taught his hearers the names and the order of the letters before showing them their form a method which Quintilian strongly condemns and when the pupils had painfully learned to recognise the written characters by their appearance, they had to make a fresh effort to combine them into words and syllables. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

They progressed as slowly as.they liked, and when they passed on to writing they came up against a similar irrational and backward procedure. Without any preliminary training in holding or using a reed pen, they were suddenly faced with a pattern to copy. Their fingers had to be held by the master or guided by someone else to trace the outline of the letters placed before them, so that innumerable lessons were necessary before they acquired the necessary skill to make the simple copy for themselves.

The study of arithmetic required no more mental effort on their part and brought them no more pleasure than the process of learning to write. They spent hours counting the units, one, two, on the fingers of their right hand, and three, jour on the fingers of their left, after which they set about calculating the tens, hundreds, and thousands by pushing little counters or calculi along the corresponding lines of their abacus.

Teaching Methods at a Roman Grammar School

Between nine and twelve years of age, boys from affluent families studied with a grammaticus, who focused on 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. There were also grammar schools that covered the same material.

Teaching methods employed at ancient Roman grammar schools consisted first in exercises of reading aloud, and in reciting passages learned by heart. With an eye on the ultimate though far-off evolution of the future orator, the grammar class began by a course of elocution which no doubt quickened the taste and widened the understanding of the pupils, but at the same time developed in them a tendency toward theatrical posing and bravura extremely damaging to genuine feeling. Next the teacher introduced them to exegesis proper. As a preliminary they had to reconcile their various manuscript texts, into which the caprices of copyists had introduced divergencies from which our printed editions are fortunately free. Then the emendatio, or what we should nowadays call textual criticism, challenged the attention of the scholars. This might have proved a valuable mental discipline if it had not been perpetually blended with discussions of the qualities and faults of the passages examined, and falsified by the resulting aesthetic prejudices. Finally, the lessons usually close^ with the commentary proper, the so-called enarratio, which aimed at a comprehensive judgment but was so long-drawn-out that its faults were later to spoil even the work of a great commentator like Servius. [Source: “Daily Life in Ancient Rome: the People and the City at the Height the Empire” by Jerome Carcopino, Director of the Ecole Franchise De Rome Member of the Institute of France, Routledge 1936]

The grammaticus was either a teacher at a ancient Roman grammar school or tutor who covered the same material with a student or students from a wealthy family. After an analysis of the work he had chosen, he began the explanatio, phrase by phrase or verse by verse, dwelling with meticulous pedantry on the meaning of each word and defining the figures of speech to which they lent themselves and the diversity of the "tropes" into which they entered: metaphor, metonymy, catachresis, litotes, syllepsis. The matter of the passage was considered wholly secondary to the function of the words which conveyed it, and the perception of reality to the form of the statements which vaguely allowed the meaning to peep out between the lines. Only by the digressions which occurred in his teaching did the grammaticus introduce the discipline of what the Romans called the liberal arts, the sum of which, far from embracing every branch of knowledge which has since become science, never included any but the twigs of knowledge.

The Roman grammaticus had dipped into everything without studying any subject thoroughly, and his pupils in their turn did nothing more than flutter over the surface of the knowledge enshrined in Greek literature; mythology where this was necessary in order to understand poetic legend; music where the meters depended on the odes or the choruses; geography enough to follow Ulysses in the tribulations of his return home; history without which many passages of the Aeneid would have been unintelligible; astronomy when a star rose or set to the cadence of a verse; mathematics in so far as they bore on music and astronomy. Blinded by an excess of practical common sense, and with an eye always fixed on immediate profit, the Romans saw no long-term usefulness in disinterested research; they did not understand its value; they did not feel its attraction; they made a collection of the results research had achieved, and lifted science ready-made into their books, without feeling any need to increase it or even to verify it.

Plutarch’s Advice to Parents on Getting a Good Teacher

Plutarch wrote in “The Training of Children” (c. A.D. 110): “7. Next, when a child is arrived at such an age as to be put under the care of pedagogues, great care is to be used that we be not deceived in them, and so commit our children to slaves or barbarians or cheating fellows. For it is a course never enough to be laughed at which many men nowadays take in this affair; for if any of their servants 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. [Source: Oliver J. Thatcher, ed., “The Library of Original Sources” (Milwaukee: University Research Extension Co., 1907), Vol. III: The Roman World, pp. 370-391]

“And now I come to speak of that which is a greater matter, and of more concern than any that I have said. We are to look after such masters for our children as are blameless in their lives, not justly reprovable for their manners, and of the best experience in teaching. For the very spring and root of honesty and virtue lies in the felicity of lighting on good education. And as husbandmen are wont to set forks to prop up feeble plants, so do honest schoolmasters prop up youth by careful instructions and admonitions, that they may duly bring forth the buds of good manners. But there are certain fathers nowadays who deserve that men should spit on them in contempt, who, before making any proof of those to whom they design to commit the teaching of their children, either through unacquaintance, or, as it sometimes falls out, through unskillfulness, intrust them to men of no good reputation, or, it may be, such as are branded with infamy.

“Although they are not altogether so ridiculous, if they offend herein through unskillfulness; but it is a thing most extremely absurd, when, as oftentimes it happens, though they know they are told beforehand, by those who understand better than themselves, both of the inability and rascality of certain schoolmasters, they nevertheless commit the charge of their children to them, sometimes overcome by their fair and flattering speeches, and sometimes prevailed on to gratify friends who entreat them. This is an error of like nature with that of the sick man, who, to please his friends, forbears to send for the physician that might save his life by his skill, and employs a mountebank that quickly dispatches him out of the world; or of his who refuses a skillful shipmaster, and then, at his friend's entreaty, commits the care of his vessel to one that is therein much his inferior. In the name of Jupiter and all the gods, tell me how can that man deserve the name of a father, who is more concerned to gratify others in their requests, than to have his children well educated? Or, is it not rather fitly applicable to this case, which Socrates, that ancient philosopher, was wont to say — that, if he could get up to the highest place in the city, he would lift up his voice and make this proclamation thence: What mean you, fellow-citizens, that you thus turn every stone to scrape wealth together, and take so little care of your children, to whom, one day, you must relinquish it all?" — to which I would add this, that such parents do like him that is solicitous about his shoe, but neglects the foot that is to wear it.

“And yet many fathers there are, who so love their money and hate their children, that, lest it should cost them more than they are willing to spare to hire a good schoolmaster for them, they rather choose such persons to instruct their children as they are worth; thereby beating down the market, that they may purchase ignorance cheap. It was, therefore, a witty and handsome jeer which Aristippus bestowed on a sottish father, who asked him what he would take to teach his child. He answered, A thousand drachmas. When the other cried out: Oh, Hercules, what a price you ask! for I can buy a slave at that rate. Do so, then, said the philosopher, and you shall have two slaves instead of one — your son for one, and him you buy for another. Lastly, how absurd it is, when you accustom your children to take their food with their right hands, and chide them if they receive it with their left, yet you take no care at all that the principles that are infused into them be right and regular.

“And now I will tell you what ordinarily is like to befall such prodigious parents, when they have their sons ill-nursed and worse-taught. For when such sons are arrived at man's estate, and, through contempt of a sound and orderly way of living, precipitate themselves into all manner of disorderly and servile pleasures, then will those parents dearly repent of their own neglect of their children's education, when it is too late to amend; and vex themselves, even to distraction, at their vicious courses. For then do some of those children acquaint themselves with flatterers and parasites, a sort of infamous and execrable persons, the very pests that corrupt and ruin young men; others waste their substance; others, again, come to shipwreck on gaming and reveling. And some venture on still more audacious crimes, committing adultery and joining in the orgies of Bacchus, being ready to purchase one bout of debauched pleasure at the price of their lives. If now they had but conversed with some philosopher, they would never have enslaved themselves to such courses as these; though possibly they might have learned at least to put in practice the precepts of Diogenes, delivered by him indeed in rude language, but yet containing, as to the scope of it, a great truth, when he advised a young man to go to the public stews, that he might then inform himself, by experience, how things of great value and things of no value at all were there of equal worth.

Plutarch on Motivating Children and Getting Them to Remember

young girl reading

Plutarch wrote in “The Training of Children” (c. A.D. 110): “12. I say now, that children are to be won to follow liberal studies by exhortations and rational motives, and on no account to be forced thereto by whipping or any other contumelious punishments. I will not argue that such usage seems to be more agreeable to slaves than to ingenuous children; and even slaves, when thus handled, are dulled and discouraged from the performance of their tasks, partly by reason of the smart of their stripes, and partly because of the disgrace thereby inflicted. [Source: Oliver J. Thatcher, ed., “The Library of Original Sources” (Milwaukee: University Research Extension Co., 1907), Vol. III: The Roman World, pp. 370-391]

“But praise and reproof are more effectual upon free-born children than any such disgraceful handling; the former to incite them to what is good, and the latter to restrain them from that which is evil. But we must use reprehensions and commendations alternately, and of various kinds according to the occasion; so that when they grow petulant, they may be shamed by reprehension, and again, when they better deserve it, they may be encouraged by commendations. Wherein we ought to imitate nurses, who, when they have made their infants cry, stop their mouths with the nipple to quiet them again. It is also useful not to give them such large commendations as to puff them up with pride; for this is the ready way to fill them with a vain conceit of themselves, and to enfeeble their minds.

“But we must most of all exercise and keep in constant employment the memory of children; for that is, as it were, the storehouse of all learning. Wherefore the mythologists have made Mnemosyne, or Memory, the mother of the Muses, plainly intimating thereby that nothing does so beget or nourish learning as memory. Wherefore we must employ it to both those purposes, whether the children be naturally apt or backward to remember. For so shall we both strengthen it in those to whom Nature in this respect has been bountiful, and supply that to others wherein she has been deficient. And as the former sort of boys will thereby come to excel others, so will the latter sort excel themselves. For that of Hesiod was well said: ‘Oft little add to little, and the account/ Will swell: heapt atoms thus produce a mount.’

“Neither, therefore, let the parents be ignorant of this, that the exercising of memory in the schools does not only give the greatest assistance towards the attainment of learning, but also to all the actions of life. For the remembrance of things past affords us examples in our consults about things to come.”

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons and "The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston

Text Sources: Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Rome sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Late Antiquity sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; “Outlines of Roman History” by William C. Morey, Ph.D., D.C.L. New York, American Book Company (1901) ; “The Private Life of the Romans” by Harold Whetstone Johnston, Revised by Mary Johnston, Scott, Foresman and Company (1903, 1932); BBC Ancient Rome bbc.co.uk/history/ ; Project Gutenberg gutenberg.org ; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Live Science, Discover magazine, Archaeology magazine, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, The New Yorker, Wikipedia, Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopedia.com and various other books, websites and publications.

Last updated November 2024