Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

868 29. education in the roman empire
In the west the situation was a little less clear. Augustine envisaged a
Christian education which could replace the traditional classical education,
but never worked out his idea in detail. Both in east and west the grammarian
and the rhetorician were left to teach Christian and pagan children alike,
using traditional methods and materials.
Monasteries faced peculiar problems of their own. They often admitted
novices who were juveniles or adult illiterates. They may have had no need
of the culture of the secular world which they had abandoned. But they
had to be taught to read the Bible and the essential liturgical texts.
Pachomius in Egypt had laid down rules for dealing with illiterate monks,
who were almost exclusively Coptic speakers. They were to be given twenty
Psalms to learn by heart and tested thrice daily by an older monk. Later they
were to be taught letters, syllables, verbs and nouns, i.e. the subjects taught
by the elementary schoolmaster. 42 ‘Even the unwilling must be taught to
read.’ The Regula Magistri and the Rule of St Benedict both insist on monks
becoming literate. St Basil desired illiterate oblates, who would be mostly
children, to learn to read biblical names and then, surprisingly, to go on to
short stories based on Greek mythology. This is one of the few indications
in antiquity of the adaptation of educational methods to the interests and
abilities of children. However, monastic education in general eschewed all
use of profane literature. Occasionally and sparingly, children who were
not committed to the religious life were admitted to monastery schools. But
in 451 the Council of Chalcedon banned the admission of secular children
– paides kosmikoi – to any monastery, a ban which has never been formally
relaxed.
In those regions of the Roman empire where the population largely
spoke neither Greek nor Latin, the situation differed both from that in the
Greek east and that of the Latin west. In these communities, members of
the local élites had for centuries sought a Greek or Latin education, and by
doing so had distanced themselves from their fellow citizens, who spoke
their own tongues, were more often than not illiterate, and neither understood
nor esteemed classical culture. It was largely thanks to the missionary
and pastoral work of the church, especially since the fourth century,
that the vernacular tongues of these peoples became literary languages and
the people themselves potentially literate. The Syriac, Coptic, Armenian,
Georgian and Gothic languages first emerged as vehicles of culture when
the Bible, the liturgy and some patristic texts were translated into them,
sometimes in an alphabet specially devised for the purpose. Speakers of
these languages, who could now become literate without having to learn a
foreign language, learnt to read, write and express themselves by the study
of Christian texts rather than of profane literature. What they took over
42 Pachomius, Praecepta 139–40.
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