The Roman was formed not only by the family, the religion, and the moral code, but, in less degree, by the school, the language, and the literature. Plutarch dates the first Roman school about 250 B.C..; 38 but Livy, perhaps romancing, describes Virginia, the desired of the Decemvir, as “going to a grammar school in the Forum” as early as 450.39 The demand for written laws, and the publication of the Twelve Tables, suggest that by that date a majority of the citizens could read.
The teacher was usually a slave or freedman, employed by several families to instruct their children, or setting up his own private school and taking any pupil that came. He taught reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, history, and obedience; moral education was fundamental and unceasing; disciple and discipline were almost the same word. Memory and character alike were trained by memorizing the Twelve Tables of the law. Heine remarked that “the Romans would not have had much time left for conquering the world if they had first had to learn Latin”;40 but they too had to conjugate irregular Latin verbs, and soon would be put to Greek. The boy familiarized himself, through poetry and prose, with the exploits of his country and its heroes, and received many a patriotic lesson conveyed through edifying episodes that had never occurred. No attention was given to athletics; the Romans thought it better to train and harden the body by useful work in the field or the camp rather than through contests in the palaestra or gymnasium.
The language, like the people, was practical and economical, martially sharp and brief; its sentences and clauses marched in disciplined subordination to a determined goal. A thousand similarities allied it, within the Indo-European family, with Sanskrit and Greek and the Celtic tongues of ancient Gaul, Wales, and Ireland. Latin was poorer than Greek in imagery, flexibility, and ready formation of compounds; Lucretius and Cicero complained of its limited vocabulary, its lack of subtle shadings. Nevertheless, it had a sonorous splendor and masculine strength that made it ideal for oratory, and a compactness and logical sentence form that made it an apt vehicle for Roman law. The Latin alphabet came from Euboean Chalcis via Cumae and Etruria.41 In the oldest Latin inscription known to us, ascribed to the sixth century B.C., all the letters are Greek in form. C was sounded like our K, J like Y, V like U or W, the vowels as in Italian. Caesar’s contemporaries knew him as Yooleoos Keyssar, and Cicero was Keekero.
The Romans wrote in ink with a slit metal reed (calamus, stilus), at first upon leaves (folia), whence our words folio and leaf (two pages); then upon strips of inner bark (liber); often upon white (album) tablets of waxed wood; later upon leather, linen paper, and parchment. As the written forms of Latin resisted change more than the spoken words, the language of literature diverged more and more from the speech of the people, as in modern America or France. The melodious Romance languages—Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Rumanian—evolved from the crude popular Latin brought to the provinces, not by poets and grammarians, but by soldiers, merchants, and adventurers. So the words for horse in the Romance languages—caballo, cavallo, cheval, cal—were taken from the spoken Latin caballus, not from the written equus. In popular Latin ille (he) was one syllable, like French and Italian il; and final -s and -m were, as in those languages, dropped or not pronounced. The best came from a corruption of the worst: corruptio pessimi optima.
What literature did the young Roman read in those first three centuries of the Republic? There were religious hymns and chants, such as the song of the Arval Brethren, and there were popular lays of Rome’s historic or legendary past. There were official—usually priestly—records of elections, magistracies, events, portents, and holidays.II On the basis of these archives Q. Fabius Pictor compiled (202 B.C.) a respectable History of Rome—but in Greek; Latin was not yet thought fit for literary prose and was not used by historians until Cato. There were farragoes of prose called saturae—medleys of merry nonsense and erotic banter—out of which Lucilius would forge a new form for Horace and Juvenal. There were boisterously obscene burlesques or mimes, usually acted by players from Etruria; some of these performers, coming from the town of Istria, were named istriones, and gave the word histrio (actor) to Latin, and its derivatives to modern tongues. There were also, on holidays or market days, crude, half-impromptu farces that gave their stock characters to thousands of Italian comedies, ancient and modern: the rich and stupid father, the extravagant love-entangled youth, the maligned virgin, the clever intriguing servant, the glutton always maneuvering for a meal, the rollicking, tumbling clown. Already the last flaunted the gaily colored patches, the long expansive trousers, the large-sleeved doublet, and the shorn head, still familiar to our youth. An exact likeness of Punchinello, or Punch, has been found on the frescoes of Pompeii.42
Literature came formally to Rome about 272 B.C. in the person of a Greek slave. In that year Tarentum fell; many of its Greek citizens were slaughtered, but Livius Andronicus had the luck to be merely enslaved. Brought to Rome, he taught Latin and Greek to his master’s children and some others, and translated the Odyssey for them into Latin “Saturnian” verse—lines of loose and irregular rhythm, scanned by accent rather than quantity. Freed for his services, he was commissioned by the aediles to produce a tragedy and a comedy for the ludi, or games, of 240 B.C. He composed them on Greek models, directed them, acted the main parts, and sang them to the accompaniment of a flute till his voice gave out; then he had another sing the lines while he acted them—a method followed in many later plays at Rome, and influential in generating the pantomime. The government was so well pleased by this introduction of the literary drama that in honor of Andronicus it gave poets the right to incorporate, and allowed them to hold their meetings in the Temple of Minerva on the Aventine. Henceforth it became the fashion to present such ludi scenici, or scenic plays, at the public festivals.43
Five years after this historic première a plebeian ex-soldier from Campania, Cnaeus Naevius, shocked the conservatives by producing a comedy in which he satirized with Aristophanic freedom the political abuses that were flourishing in the capital. The old families complained, and Naevius was jailed. He apologized and was freed, wrote another satire as sharp a the first, and was banished from Rome. In exile and old age he composed, with undiscourageable patriotism, an epic poem on the First Punic War, in which he had fought; it began with the founding of Rome by Trojan refugees, and provided Virgil with a theme and several scenes. His condemnation was a double misfortune: the vitality and originality of Roman comedy suffered from a censorship that made libel a capital crime, and Roman politics lost the purge of a public critique. Naevius wrote also a poetic drama based on Roman history; this experiment too ended with him, and thereafter Roman tragedy circled vainly in the cropped pastures of Greek myth. Only a few fragments survive to reveal Naevius’ quality. One describes a coquettish girl:
As if playing ball in a ring she skips from one to another, and is all things to all men with her words and winks, her caresses and embraces; now a squeeze of the hand or a pressure of the foot; her ring to look at, her lips to blow an inviting kiss; here a song, there the language of signs.44
It is pleasant to see that women were then as charming as now, that not all Romans were Catos, and that under the shadow of the Porch even virtue might take a holiday.
Beyond the essentials of arithmetic, and enough geometry to plot a farm or plan a temple, science played as yet no part in the education or culture of the Roman citizen. The boy counted on his fingers (digita), and the figures he used were imitations of an extended digit (I), a hand (V), or two hands joined at their apexes (X); and he was content to form the other numerals by repeating these symbols (II, III), and prefixing (IV, IX) or suffixing (VI, XII) digits to V or X to lessen or increase them. Out of this manual arithmetic came the decimal system, constructed on parts and multiples of ten—i.e., the ten fingers. The Romans used geometry well in building and engineering, but added not one theorem to that rounded achievement of the Greek mind. We hear nothing of Roman astronomy in this period except in its presperous sister or mother—astrology.
Medicine, till the third century, was largely a matter of family herbs, magic, and prayer; the gods alone could heal; and to make cure certain a special god was invoked for each disease 45—as one now invokes a specialist. Against the mosquitoes of the Roman campagna appeal was made to the goddesses Febris and Mephitis, as, until our century, the Romans petitioned La Madonna della Febbre, Our Lady of the Fever.46 Healing shrines and sacred waters were as common as today. The temple of Aesculapius was a busy center of religious healing, where diet and hydrotherapy, peaceful surroundings and a quiet routine, prayer and the soothing ritual of worship, the aid of practical physicians and the cheerfulness of skilled attendants, conspired to restore confidence and to effect apparently miraculous cures.47 Nevertheless, there were slave doctors and quacks in Rome five centuries before Christ; and some of these practiced dentistry, for the Twelve Tables forbade the burial of gold with the dead except where gold had been used to wire teeth.48 In 219 we hear of the first freeman physician in Rome—Archagathus the Peloponnesian. His surgical operations so delighted the patricians that the Senate voted him an official residence and the freedom of the city; later his “mania for cutting and burning” won him the name of Carnifex, butcher.49 From that time onward Greek physicians flocked to Rome, and made the practice of medicine there a Greek monopoly.