Greco-Roman learning

“ It is hard to gauge the intellect of the average Roman youth of sixteen; all we know is that, while the best of literature, science, art, and philosophy was left to be undertaken by Greeks, the Romans seized upon whatever learning had an appreciable practical bearing, and that, as men capable of administering and directing, they left their intellectual and artistic superiors far behind. ”

“ With the Greeks philosophical specializing was commonly subject to no such reprehension, partly because of the inborn Hellenic ardour for study and esteem of learning, partly because in this domain, even more than in the rhetorical, the Greeks were the accepted teachers throughout the Roman sphere. ”

“ Thus when Rome conquered Greece, Greek education had lost that reality which is drawn from intimate relation to civic life, and the fashionable individualistic schools of philosophy could do nothing to replace the loss. It was, then, an Old Roman education. education which had largely lost its life-springs that was transferred to Rome. In the earlier centuries of the republic, Roman education was given entirely in family and public life. ”

“ The history of Greek civilization and education was so intermingled with the Roman that it can scarcely be distinguished from it. The Greek schools of philosophy and rhetoric were continued in Rome, Roman youths made up a great body of the attendance at the universities of Athens and Alexandria, and the Roman emperors did much for the support and extension of the work in these institutions. Hence from the Greeks have developed some of the most advanced intellectual and æsthetic ideas that civilization has known. ”

“ In science and philosophy none to compare with Aristotle and Plato.
And in the arts, all the finest sculpture and architecture in Rome is known to have been copied from the Greeks. Where are the Roman names to put with those of Phidias and Praxiteles?
Everywhere, throughout the world, if a great literary work or a great artistic work was done, it was done either by a Greek or by some one of another race who had learnt from the Greeks. If Rome had conquered and possessed the world by her arms, Greece had conquered and possessed it by her thought. ”

“ It was soon the established custom for young Romans to go to Athens and to other centers of Greek learning to finish their training, and the knowledge of the Greek language among the educated classes became universal. At the same time many cultured Greeks—poets, artists, orators, and philosophers—flocked to Rome, opened schools, and taught their arts. Indeed, the preëminence of Greek culture became so great that Rome almost lost her ambition to be original, and her writers vied with each other in their efforts to reproduce in Latin what was choicest in Greek literature. ”

“ The aim of Greek education was the formation of the philosophic thinker, the man fitted by nature and training to guide and direct the energies of the man of action. Roman education, on the other hand, directed its efforts mainly to the moulding of the man of action himself. The Romans adopted the form rather than the spirit of Greek education. The aim of Roman education was to make a man who could do things; a practical man, a man full of energy, who was ever ready to sacrifice himself in the interests of the State; a man who knew the laws and who regulated his conduct by them ”

“ For 600 years after the building of the city, those circumstances did not arise in that capital which called forth and promoted philosophy in Greece. The ancient Romans were warriors and agriculturists. Their education was regulated with a view to an active life, and rearing citizens and heroes, not philosophers. The Campus Martius was their school; the tent their Lyceum, and the traditions of their ancestors, and religious rites, their science,—they were taught to act, to believe, and to obey, not to reason or discuss. ”

“ The metre which was brought to such perfection by the Latin poets was formed from the Greek, and the Latin language more and more assimilated to the Hellenic tongue.
As civilization advanced, the rude literature of Rome was compared with the great monuments of Greek genius, their superiority was acknowledged, and the study of them encouraged. The Roman youth not only attended the schools of the Greeks, in Rome, but their education was considered incomplete, unless they repaired to those of Athens, Rhodes, and Mytilene. ”

“ From this time forth not only were Greek philosophers of eminence drawn to live themselves at Rome, and so to meet her statesmen and nobles in habits of intercourse, but the higher classes of the great capital commonly completed their education by visiting and studying at Athens, Rhodes, and other centres of Grecian thought. Thus by the fusion of Greece with the empire, while her political importance dwindled away, her influence upon the mind of her subjugators was immensely increased. But the Roman on his side obtained a sort of victory. ”

“ Modelled on this Greek curriculum was the study of Latin literature—Livius Andronicus, Ennius, with selections from the Roman writers of tragedy and comedy. In due season Virgil and Horace occupied the first rank. Furthermore not far from the beginning of the last century before our era Greek rhetoricians began formal instruction at Rome, and they continued to hold the field against Latin rhetoricians throughout antiquity. We see therefore that all education of every grade from the time of the Second Punic War was either Greek or modelled directly on the Greek. ”

“ After the conquest of Magna Græcia and of Greece, the Romans were brought into closer relations than had hitherto existed with Greek culture. The Roman youth were taught the language of Athens, often to the neglect, it appears, of their native tongue. Young men belonging to families of means, not unusually went to Greece, just as the graduates of our schools go to Europe, to finish their education. Many of the most prominent statesmen of Rome, as for instance Cicero and Julius Cæsar, received the advantages of this higher training in the schools of Greece. ”

“ The Greeks were the one people who could undertake what we call the higher education, and they were now beginning to swarm in Rome. Some Greek teachers were free men, but the greater number were slaves captured in the wars; and thus the first requisite in a school-master, that he should be looked up to and willingly obeyed, was too often absent in this new education. It is men, not methods, that really tell in education. In his heart, as we know from many striking passages in Roman literature, the grown-up Roman despised the Greek, and we may be sure that the Roman boy did too. ”

“ Without it, we may doubt if the work of the Greeks would have been saved for us when the storms from the north, invasions of barbarian peoples, fell at last upon the sunny lands filled with the spirit of Greek thought and the divine works of Greek artists. To Roman discipline, law, and government, we owe not only much that even now is every day of practical benefit to us, but the preservation of what we still possess of the treasures of Hellenic genius. ”

“ It seems to me that, when the whole world is expanding and thrilling with new life all around us, it is an intolerable mistake not to bring the minds of boys in touch with the modern spirit. The history of Greece and Rome may well form a part of modern education; but we want rather to bring the minds of those who are being educated into contact with the Greek and Roman spirit, as part of the spirit of the world, than to make them acquainted with the philological and syntactical peculiarities of the two languages. ”

“ But I must avow my conviction that our civilization—and I specially remember that we are Englishmen—is not only in origin but in essence, Greco-Roman, modified no doubt by influences unknown to that in its earlier stages, but still Greco-Roman grown to a larger stature and a clearer self-consciousness, self-shaped to its present form, the same vital and vitalizing force, constantly reinvigorated and re-enlightened by reflection upon its own past. ”

“ In these provinces they were copyists of the Greeks: they lacked ideality. They had, also, far less delicacy of perception, flexibility, and native refinement of manners. But they had more sobriety of character and more endurance. They were a disciplined people; and in their capacity for discipline lay the secret of their supremacy in arms and of their ability to give law to the world. If they produced a much less number of great men than the Greeks, there was more widely diffused among Roman citizens a conscious dignity and strength. ”

“ And the philosophy which Greece gave Rome was no better than the mythology. It is not strange that human thought experienced a reaction after a century which contained both Plato and Aristotle, but it is a pity that Rome should have learned her philosophy from a period of doubt and scepticism, an age in which the lesser masters, who had known the greater ones, had gone, leaving nothing but pupils' pupils. ”

“ The good, if there was any good, that Roman dominion brought the world at that period was the spreading of Greek culture across the western half of the world. As Rome mastered the Greek states one by one, their genius won a subtler triumph over the conqueror. Her generals recognized and admired a culture superior to their own. They carried off the statues of Greece for the adornment of their villas, and with equal eagerness they appropriated her manners and her thought, her literature and her gods. ”

“ In a less degree, Roman literature, which is the offspring of Greek culture, has value as an intellectual stimulus and discipline. Here also the youthful mind is brought into the presence of a great and noble people, who, if they have less genius and a duller sense of beauty than the Greeks, excel them in steadiness of purpose, in dignity of character, in reverence for law and religion, and above all in the art of governing. ”

“ In the general organization of the Ancient History field the topics should be so planned that the teacher and class will work from a broad study of the Oriental peoples of the eastern Mediterranean world and of the early history of the Greek peoples and States to a more careful and intensive examination into the Athenian world as typical of the best of classic Greece, of Alexander and Macedonian imperialism, as promoters of Hellenic culture. The early Roman period should be rapidly covered and far less time spent on the republic and its government. ”

“ Previous to the introduction of the Greek philosophy, and the Greek education and social habits, the Roman people were worthy of their noblest representative—Camillus. At that early period of their history they rewarded virtue and punished vice. But during the Empire, after the invasion of Greek manners, they were unworthy of their best representatives—Cato, Germanicus, and Agricola. To those great and good men they preferred Cæsar, Caligula, and Nero: they rewarded vice and punished virtue. ”

“ All in all, then, this epoch of Roman domination is one that need detain the historian of science but a brief moment. With the culmination of Greek effort in the so-called Hellenistic period we have seen ancient science at its climax. The Roman period is but a time of transition, marking, as it were, a plateau on the slope between those earlier heights and the deep, dark valleys of the Middle Ages. Yet we cannot quite disregard the efforts of such workers as those we have just named. ”

“ They had acquired through education the fastidiousness of scholars and men of culture, a quality not easily gained and retained without some sacrifice of native force and popular sympathies. Recognising the immense superiority of the Greek originals in literature to the rude Roman copies, they believed that the best way to create a national Latin literature was to deviate as little as possible, in spirit, form, and substance, from the works of Greek genius. ”

“ In the emphasis they placed on moral worth, education of the body as well as the mind, and moderation in all things, they were much ahead of us. Their schools became a type for the cities of the entire Mediterranean world, being found from the Black Sea south to the Persian Gulf and westward to Spain. When Rome became a world empire the Greek school system was adopted, and in modified form became dominant in Rome and throughout the provinces, while the universities of the Greek cities for long furnished the highest form of education for ambitious Roman youths. ”

“ Alongside of grammar and rhetoric, poetry and philosophy took a place as part of the higher education of the citizen. The habit and capacity of abstract thought reached Rome from the schools of Athens; with the growing power of expression and the increased tension of actual life, the science of politics and the philosophy of life and conduct became the material of a new and splendid literature. Along with the world of ideas diffused by Athens there arrived the immense learning and high technical skill of the Alexandrian scholars and poets. ”

“ From the earliest times, however, till that of Cicero, Greek philosophy was chiefly inculcated by Greeks. There was no Roman who devoted himself entirely to metaphysical contemplation, and who, like Epicurus, Aristotle, and Zeno, lounged perpetually in a garden, paced about in a Lyceum, or stood upright in a portico. The Greek philosophers passed their days, if not in absolute seclusion, at least in learned leisure and retirement. ”