Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

856 29. education in the roman empire
society, about whom a great deal is known. The elementary schoolmaster
(grammatistēs, litterator, ludi magister) was a more humble individual, whose
activities and whose very existence have left few traces in the record of
history. He, too, seems to have been largely an urban figure. But there were
some elementary schoolmasters in the countryside, especially in the Greek
east. They turn up in some of the large villages of Egypt, and towards the
end of the sixth century we encounter a paidodidaskalos in a remote village
of Galatia, and in another village of the same province – which, however,
lay on a main strategic road – a future saint is sent at the age of eight to a
didaskalos to learn grammata. 3 How widespread socially and geographically
the ability to read was cannot be determined with any pretension to precision.
The father of St Symeon the Younger, a maker and seller of perfumes
in the fifth century, spent his evenings reading religious books. However,
he lived in a small town in northern Syria rather than in a village. 4
The principles which guided late antique education have been explained
and illustrated in the preceding volume of this History (see vol. xiii, pp.
665–80). The traditional three-stage system – elementary literacy, grammar
and rhetoric – was maintained throughout the fifth and sixth century and
later, though the distinctions between the various stages tended to become
more blurred than in earlier periods.
Such information as we possess on the content and methods of elementary
education in late antiquity is derived mainly from school exercises and
similar texts on papyrus, wooden tablets, ostraka (fragments of pottery)
and other materials preserved in the rubbish heaps of Egyptian villages and
towns. There is no reason to suppose that these are not representative of
what took place in schools elsewhere in the Graeco-Roman world, and in
the teaching of Latin as well as of Greek. About a hundred such texts
survive from the fifth to the eighth century. They do not differ significantly
from those of earlier periods, except for the very occasional replacement
of pagan by Christian examples. 5 Learning by rote from dictation and
copying short texts written by the teacher played a central role in teaching,
and there was little attempt to engage the interest of the pupil or to adapt
teaching to the psychological development of the juvenile mind. For most
schoolchildren the school day must have contained large stretches of
numbing boredom.
The traditional methods of learning to read and write developed over
the centuries in the Greek and Latin worlds were taken over with little or
no modification by other linguistic communities as they became literate.
This is illustrated by the corpus of 332 Coptic school texts recently published.
6 Beginning with single letters, the pupils go on to copy the alphabet,
3 Festugière (1970) 5.18, 26.12. 4 PG lxxxvi.2993.
5 Zalateo (1961); Wouters (1979); Harrauer and Sijpesteijn (1985). 6 Hasitzka (1990) passim.
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