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EDUCATION
Such were the characteristics of declamation. 1 The danger that these exercises,
designed as subordinate to the practical ends of oratory, might become an
end in themselves was recognized very soon, and the literature of the first
century A.D. abounds in criticisms of the excesses and abuses of the schools.
But the thought of any alternative form of training was never seriously entertained;
Quintilian's belief in the value of declamation when properly controlled
is clearly unshakeable (2.10). For Pliny, Quintilian's star pupil, the cultivation
of eloquence was a life-long pursuit; and he in turn instructed his juniors in the
pleasure and utility of the exercises on which it depended (Epist. 7.9, esp.
sections 12.—14). Only to Tacitus did it occur to question, and then only
implicitly, in his Dialogus, the raison d'etre of this ceaseless activity. For
Pliny and his circle, as for most others, its necessity and virtue were selfevident.
The effects on literature of this mass conditioning, as it must be accounted,
of writers and public alike can be traced already in the work of Ovid, and it is
conspicuous in the poets of the Silver Age. However, one reservation must be
made: women, who formed a not inconsiderable part of the literate public, did
not go through the whole course of education just described. There is some
evidence to show that some girls, probably from less well-to-do families,
attended elementary schools; 2 but most of those who received any education at
all must have received it at home. There is ample testimony to the existence of
cultured women in the poetry of Catullus, Propertius and Ovid, and in Pliny's
letters; 3 and Juvenal's tirade against bluestockings must have had some basis in
fact to be effective satire. Little literature written by women has survived or is
known to have existed; 4 but the purity of the Latin spoken by ladies of good
family is remarked by both Cicero and Pliny.s In attempting to form an idea
of the Roman literary scene, therefore, some allowance should be made for the
existence of a class of readers who had not been through the mill of contemporary
rhetoric.
The most striking feature of ancient education is its extreme conservatism
and effective resistance to change. In essentials the Roman schools of the fifth
century A.D. were still patterned after those of Hellenistic Greece; the main
difference, language apart, was that the emphasis on rhetoric was even more
concentrated. Efforts by Cicero and — such as they -were — Quintilian to impart
1
They are best understood through study of the elder Seneca's Controversies and Suasoriae; cf.
Bonner (1949) 51—70; Winterbottom (1974) vii-xv.
2
Guillemin (1937) 85 n. 4, citing Martial 8.3.15-16, 9.68.1-2; Friedlander (1908-28) 1 130-1,
iv 410—11.
3
Sherwin-White (1966) 347 on Plin. Epist. 5.16.3.
* There seems to be no good reason to doubt the authenticity of the poems ascribed to Suipicia in
the Tibullan corpus, though the patronizing remarks of an older generation of critics about 'feminine
Latinity' will not bear examination: Smith (1913) 80.
5
Brut. 2ii, De or. 3.45, Plin. Epist. 1.16.6; cf. Cameron (1970) 317 n. 1.
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