Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

880 29. education in the roman empire
which teaching programmes in other fields may have been organized. No
other programme of instruction, however, is likely to have been the subject
of imperial legislation. But law had always been a close concern of the
Roman state.
Architects and engineers were normally trained by a kind of apprenticeship
system. Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices establishes a monthly
fee payable by or for the pupils of an architectus magister. Constantine in an
Edict of 334 orders a provincial governor to urge (impellere) youths aged
eighteen qui liberales litteras degustaverint to study architecture, and grants to
them and their parents immunity from personal taxes as well as a salarium
competens (C.Th. xiii.4.1). These young men will have completed their
studies with the grammaticus before going on to study architecture. The profession
was not merely literate but cultured. Anthemius of Tralles, the
architect of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, was not only a man of
remarkable imagination and technical skill, but was also an applied mathematician
and engineer of distinction and author of a surviving treatise On
Unusual Devices (Peri paradoxōn mēchanēmatōn) as well as a lost treatise on
Burning-Mirrors. He was a member of an unusually talented family, and may
well have studied mathematics in Alexandria. 70
Surveyors probably learnt their craft by a similar system of apprenticeship.
Their role in the assessment of taxes gave them unusual importance
in the eyes of the state in late antiquity, which probably explains why
Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices allows them to charge twice as much
as architects for teaching pupils. They enjoyed the relatively high social
status accorded to practitioners of a profession based on a body of theory
enshrined in written texts.
At a much lower social level, and hence much less frequently mentioned
in our sources, came the practitioners of fine and applied arts – painters,
sculptors, potters, jewellers, mosaicists, etc. They too were taught by an
apprenticeship system. But concerning these professions there was no
body of theory and no authoritative texts. Diocletian’s Edict accords to a
portrait-painter 150 denarii a day, to a mural painter 75 denarii, to a mosaicist
60 denarii, and to a mason or carpenter 50 denarii. These were not contemptible
wages, but they were far below those of the grammarian, the rhetorician,
the doctor or the engineer. An enactment of Valentinian I of 374
granting certain tax exemptions to painters shows that they were regarded
as humiliores, whereas members of the ‘literary’ professions were honestiores
(C.Th. xiii.4.4).
Somewhere between these two categories came astrologers, apothecaries
and the like, as well as shorthand writers. The latter readily found
employment in the imperial service and in that of the church, and some
70 Huxley (1959).
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