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Women were much more influential than their formal position would suggest. In the upper classes they were expected to be cultivated and could study with tutors at home; and it was possible for girls to attend primary school. Crucially, they were able to retain their own property on marriage and so did not fall completely under their husbands’ sway. In fact, men were often absent on public duties in the army or in the provinces, and wives were expected to take on the management of the family estate and financial affairs. Some of them acted as political brokers behind the scenes. Cato, who was as blunt as he was censorious, reportedly remarked, “We rule the world and our wives rule us.”

We do not know exactly where the Cicero boys spent their preschool years; presumably for most of the time they stayed in the villa outside Arpinum. But the family had a house in Rome in the respectable but not very fashionable quarter of Carinae on the Esquiline Hill, not far from the center. Marcus and Quintus may well have been taken on visits to the big city, perhaps for extended stays.

The better type of Roman house, such as the Ciceros’, had a small courtyard at the back. It was usually a garden with a colonnade running around it. This part of the building was reserved for the family and contained bedrooms, a kitchen (usually tiny), a larder and a bathhouse with a steam room. There were no nurseries or special spaces for children and, when they were not out playing in the fields of Arpinum or being shown the sights of Rome, little Marcus and Quintus must have spent a good deal of their time in the garden under the watchful eyes of slaves.

Cicero’s father had high ambitions for his two sons and made sure they were given a good schooling. Like other upper-class children, they may have been taught by a tutor at home, but what evidence we have suggests that they were sent to school. Roman education in the late Republic typically fell into three distinct phases. From seven to twelve years boys and girls could attend a ludus litterarius, where they learned reading, writing and elementary arithmetic.

Cicero’s schoolmates seem to have admired him for his academic ability. He was always in the middle of the group when out walking and was the focus of attention. Some fathers visited the school to witness the infant prodigy at work, although others were irritated by his dominance over their children. Brains are seldom liked and this popularity may have been the product of hindsight. However, it is possible that Cicero had already developed the strong sense of humor he showed as an adult. He could well have won friends through laughter rather than cleverness.

A household slave, the paedagogus, would accompany his young master (or mistress) to school and carry his satchel. Classes were often held on an open porch or shop, which was protected from the noise of traffic and the inquisitive stares of passersby by only a sheet of tent cloth stretched between pillars at the front. The pupils sat on benches and wrote on wax tablets placed on their knees, with the teacher presiding on a dais. They learned the names of letters before their shapes, singing them in order backwards and forwards; they then graduated to combinations of two or three letters and finally to syllables and words. Knowledge was acquired through imitation and repetition, as when learning fencing or some other sport. Hence the Latin word for school, ludus, also means “game.”

Classes began at dawn, without breakfast, and went on into the afternoon. There were no physical sports, although the day ended with a steam bath. Summer holidays lasted from the end of July to the middle of October, but otherwise the school year was interrupted only by public holidays.

At twelve, a boy graduated to a secondary school. The curriculum was narrowly confined to the study of grammar and literature. Both Latin and Greek were taught. In Latin the archaic epic and dramatic poets (now lost to us except for fragments) were on the curriculum and in Greek the emphasis was mainly on Homer and the Athenian tragedians, especially Euripides. Another key document for study was the Twelve Tables, Rome’s primary code of laws established in about 450 BC. This “germ of jurisprudence” has not survived, but was the basis of civil law: one of its provisions suggests its down-to-earth, practical flavor. This was that each piece of land should include an untilled five-foot strip for the turning of the plow, but that no squatter could settle on it on the grounds that it was uncultivated.

At the best schools lessons were given in rhetoric, or the art of public speaking. The Romans and the Greeks before them believed that it was possible to establish a system of oratory that could be taught. They spoke of training public speakers under five traditional headings: inventio, seeking out ideas or lines of argument; collocatio, structure and organization; elocutio, diction and style; actio, physical delivery; and memoria, memory (speeches could last for hours and as they were spoken not read they had to be learned by heart). There were different opinions as to the best form of elocutio. Some advocated an elaborate, ornate style and others plainness and simplicity. There was a middle way, grand but not exaggerated, which the adult Cicero came to favor.

The good public speaker recognized that he had to be a performer, like an actor. Later in his life Cicero wrote books on oratory and in them he underscored the point:

A leading speaker will vary and modulate his voice, raising and lowering it and deploying the full scale of tones. He will avoid extravagant gestures and stand impressively erect. He will not pace about and when he does so not for any distance. He should not dart forward except in moderation with strict control. There should be no effeminate bending of the neck or twiddling of his fingers or beating out the rhythm of his cadences on his knuckles. He should control himself by the way he holds and moves his entire body. He should extend his arm at moments of high dispute and lower it during calmer passages.… Once he has made sure he does not have a stupid expression on his face and or a grimace, he should control his eyes with great care, for as the face is the image of the soul the eyes are its translators. Depending on the subject at hand they can express grief or hilarity.

Students were taught how to turn fables and other kinds of stories into simple narrative; to develop arguments from quotations from famous poets; and to compose speeches inspired by actual or fictional situations and events. They would declaim them to the class. Although by Cicero’s day the teaching of rhetoric had been reduced to a complicated and arid system of rules, it lay at the heart of the curriculum. At one level rhetoric was a vocational subject, for it was the key to a political career, to which all men of good birth should aspire. They would be able to do so only if they acquired the necessary skills to persuade people of the rightness of their point of view. In Rome reputations were made not only at public meetings and in the Senate but also in the law courts. Ambitious young men in their early twenties often appeared as prosecutors in criminal trials in order to make a name for themselves, not just as lawyers but as potential future politicians.

Both rhetoric and the study of literature were also intended to give students an ethical grounding, a moral education which inculcated the virtues of fortitude, justice and prudence.

Public speaking in this complex sense is extinct and it is difficult now to conceive of its power, immediacy and charm. Just as Samuel Pepys in seventeenth-century England would spend a Sunday going from sermon to sermon for the sheer pleasure of it, so crowds of Romans would pack the Forum, where trials were held in the open air, to listen to and applaud the great advocates of the day as they presented their cases. The “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar gives a hint of how the real thing must have been.