ROMAN SCHOOLS First Stage.—At Rome schools began with intercourse with Greeks. According to Suetonius, the emperor Hadrian's secre tary, who wrote The School Masters (De grammaticis) about A.D. 140, literary teaching and the science of grammar began with Livius Andronicus, a Greek from Magna Graecia in the south of Italy, who, being brought to Rome as a slave in 272 B.C., became a freedman, translated the Odyssey into Latin, and taught both Greek and Latin. Ennius, the first Latin poet, was also half-Greek, and came to Rome in 209 B.C., where he also taught both languages. According to Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 59) the first grammar school (grammatodidaskaleion) was opened by Spurius Carvilius, a freed man of Carvilius, about 23o B.C. According to Suetonius, Crates, who about 169 B.C. came to Rome as ambassador from Attalus, king of Pergamum, a great centre of learning, and was kept there by a broken leg, occupied himself in giving lectures. His example was soon followed by Romans. Schools of grammar, in which, even as late as Cicero's time, the Laws of the Twelve Tables were the chief text-book and were learnt by heart, were kept by Greeks or freedmen. These seem to have been of the nature of elementary schools. But at Rome, as at Athens, the working classes were for the most part slaves; and elementary schools were like English preparatory schools rather than public ele mentary schools. Schools of rhetoric, which were more like sec ondary schools, were also opened after the model of that of Isocrates at Athens. In 92 B.C. schools of Latin rhetoric were put down as an innovation. Yet among the treatises written by Cato, the praiser of the past at the expense of the present, was one on public speaking, the chief rule in which was "take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves." Neither the gymnasium or palaestra, nor the music school, flourished at Rome. As at Athens, so at Rome the boys were sent to school in charge of a slave, a pedagogus, comes or custos. But it would seem that at Rome the pedagogus, generally a Greek slave, often him self gave elementary instruction. In Varro's much-debated phrase, "Educat nutrix, instituit pedagogus, docet magister," "the nurse brings up, the pedagogue instils the elements, the master teaches."
Magister, which in English became "maister" and then "master," remained the term for the teacher of the public school from that day to this, though attempts were made at the time of the Refor mation to introduce the Greek word didascalus in its place.
The Roman school was very much like the modern school. All the methods of torture which have made the service of the Muses for most boys a veritable slavery were in full vogue. Instruc tion was now in a foreign language, and grammar became promi nent. Early rising, loud speaking and hard flogging were in the ascendant. The staple of instruction in the Roman schools was the works of the poets, Greek and Latin, Homer and Virgil, Hesiod and Aesop, Menander and Terence. Horace says (Ep. i. 19. 4o) "that he was not thought worthy of going the round of the school masters' desks"; but it was a fate not long delayed, and the writings of the poets of the silver age, Lucan and Statius, became school-books in their own lifetimes.
Our knowledge of the Roman curricula is mainly due to Quintilian's Institutio oratorio, c. A.D. 91. Fabius Quintilianus, born on the banks of the Ebro, was not only the son of a man who kept a rhetoric school, but himself kept one, and is said by St. Jerome to have been the first who kept a public school, in the sense that he was the first who received a stipend from the emperor. In endeavouring to create the perfect orator, Quin tilian discusses the whole of education from the cradle upwards.