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Essay on Education in Old Rome
The main explicit objective of education at Roman schools for the elite was to cram pupils with Greek learning. Some theorists recommended even that Roman children in the highest social set should get a head start by having a Greek-speaking nurse; but others complained that this experience permanently ruined the child's Latin accent. Once children had learnt how to read and write in both languages, they began to study grammar and literature. Formal grammar was a Greek invention of the third century BC. It constituted a tremendous technical and intellectual breakthrough.
Some modern scholars criticise Roman Elite education as derivative, imitative, intensely conservative and ritualistic. School, they allege, was not relevant to the real world. Roman schoolboys and university students, for example, practised rhetoric on completely unrealistic cases, chosen from textbooks or literature. For example, |The law ordains that in a case of rape, the woman may demand either the death of her assailant or marriage without a dowry. A man raped two women in one night. One woman demands his death; the other marriage'. Discuss. Their intellectual style is reminiscent of some question set in modern university examinations.
Ancient critics ridiculed the heavy diet of bombast which these rhetorical debates entailed. Of course, ancient rhetoricians and lawyers could muster a whole series of arguments in defence of declamation. Young men could sharpen their wits, improve their debating skills and gain in self-confidence before a crowd, just as easily, with more pleasure and less tedium, on fictional cases. Besides, these fictional cases raised real points of Roman law. In law school and long afterwards, distinguished Roman lawyers argued serious points of law, from cases which probably had not occurred. The critics countered by claiming that declamations were aimed primarily at winning applause and at giving pleasure; hence the search for superficial brilliance or turgid bluster............
