Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

870 29. education in the roman empire
the patronage of magnates. The church had long maintained libraries, to
which were attached scriptoria to provide for its own internal needs. These
ecclesiastical libraries and scriptoria expanded greatly to meet the increasing
demand for Christian texts. When Constantine wanted fifty Bibles for
the churches of Constantinople, the book trade of the newly founded
capital could not meet this sudden demand, and the emperor had to write
to Caesarea in Palestine, where since the days of Origen there had been an
active Christian scriptorium. 44 In the Greek east the two systems of book
production, secular and Christian, coexisted peacefully. Both Christian and
secular texts were copied in similar hands and with similar layout. In the
west commercial book production continued in Rome and Ravenna,
though probably on a much reduced scale. We hear of a bookseller or
copyist Gaudiosus, active in the late fifth and early sixth century in or near
the church of St Peter in Vinculis in Rome, and of a sixth-century scriptorium
in Ravenna directed by Viliaric – evidently a man of Gothic or other
Germanic origin. 45 The surviving commercial copyists, the ecclesiastical
scriptoria, and the copyists maintained by the great senatorial magnates of
Italy seem in the course of the fifth century to have produced both secular
and Christian books. The consul Turcius Rufius Apronianus Asterius
‘edited’ the Medicean Virgil and the Paschale Carmen of Sedulius towards the
end of the fifth century, 46 and in the sixth century another consul, Agorius
Basilius Mavortius, ‘revised’ both Horace’s Epodes and Prudentius. 47
Hagiographic texts, since they sometimes found liturgical use, were presumably
included in the books produced by the church for internal use. But
one suspects that some of them at least circulated as separate books for the
edification of clerics and laymen alike.
Since education in grammar and rhetoric was essential for the urban
upper classes, it was natural that from Hellenistic times onwards some
teachers should be paid out of municipal funds, just as doctors, athletic
coaches and others were so supported. A city which depended exclusively
on private teachers who lived on their fees might have found itself with no
teacher at all, which would have been a social disaster. In the same way, the
Roman state depended on a supply of educated men to run its administration,
especially as centralization and bureaucratization increased in the later
empire. Considerations of class solidarity would also incline the rulers to
subsidize a service essential to the local aristocracy. But neither state nor
municipality appears ever to have provided subventions for elementary
teachers. There was never a programme of mass literacy in the ancient
world; and many of the upper class in the cities probably had their children
taught elementary literacy by private tutors.
44 Eus. Vita Constantini iv.36–7. 45 Cavallo (1975) 117 and nn. 161, 162. 46 PLRE ii.173–4.
47 PLRE ii.736–7.
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