Roman Education in the Late Republic and Early Empire

Abstract

Early Roman education had been based on the mos maiorum rather than on reason, the guiding light of Greek education. It had been education not so much for intellectual achievement as for a clearly envisaged type of character, summed up in the word gravitas. A Roman, learning a way of life rather than a body of formal knowledge, was ‘usu … et domesticis praeceptis multo magis eruditus quam litteris’. This training was conducted largely by the father and was entirely un-supervised by the state, hi contrast with education in Hellenistic cities, whence, by 100 b.c., many new ideas had come. Such training, however, though suitable for a rural community, was bound to change when Rome became a city and when foreign campaigns during the expansion of her empire took fathers away from home for months on end. Moreover the influence which had been exerted from an early date by the near-by cities of Magna Graecia began to increase after the capture of Tarentum in 272 b.c., and the result of Rome's successive conquests of Sicily, Macedonia, Greece, and Asia during the third and second centuries was so great an increase of Greek culture in Roman life that Horace was finally able to say ‘Graecia capta ferum captorem cepit et artis | intulit agresti Latio’.