ABSTRACT
Republican Rome identified as an adult a man who had put on the toga virilis, or a woman who had become a wife. But an adult was also someone who had the skills needed to exercise the adult roles. In propertied households, both men and women needed to know how to read and write to check their accounts, and men needed to know how to be soldiers and, if they wished to play an active role in the public life of their community, how to persuade their fellow citizens as public speakers. As the formal distinctions between child and adult citizen became less and less important during the first three centuries AD, so the ability to assimilate these skills increasingly came to be the criterion which distinguished the child from the adult. Quintilian and Menander’s recommendations for the panegyric, as well as surviving collections of letters, show the importance of learning the skills expected of a free man, the artes liberales. The child who was precocious as a learner had a good chance of winning recognition as an individual.
