ABSTRACT
School work in ancient times began at a very early hour. Rather in the way that the old English grammar schools might be instructed by statute to commence ‘at sixe of the clocke’, or at six in summer and seven in winter, [1] Roman schoolmasters, by a generally accepted tradition, awaited their pupils at the crack of dawn. Martial says that even before cock-crow boys were on their way to school, and would stop on the way to break their fast at a baker's shop. [2] On dark winter mornings, the ‘pedagogue’ would guide his young charge's steps by the light of a lamp, and would sometimes carry a child on his shoulder (cf. Fig. 3). On arrival, boys who took a pride in their personal appearance would, after depositing their cloaks, make themselves neat and tidy in an anteroom (proscholium) before entering the schoolroom. [3] Conspicuous in the room sat the master in his high-backed chair (cathedra., which the Greeks called his ‘throne’, placed, as it was, on a dais (pulpitum); [4] beneath his feet was a footstool (cf. Fig. 7). Clad in a Greek mantle [5] or Roman toga, he had his cylindrical book-box, containing his papyrus rolls, beside him, rather as Orbilius was represented in his statue at Beneventum. [6] Equipped with the menacing ferule as his ‘sceptre’, he was monarch of all he surveyed. Well beneath his eye, his pupils pushed to gain their rightful places on their backless benches, [7] for only, perhaps, in select schools, or those held in private houses, did they themselves enjoy the comfort of round-backed chairs [8] (cf. Fig. 9). Sometimes they would form a semicircle round the master, and this is perhaps why the Greeks referred to ‘those around so-and-so’, when they spoke of a teacher's group. Horace says that his father was present ‘around all my teachers’, [9] and Martial speaks of a circulus. [10] Most remarkable was the complete absence of desks, but even this deficiency still existed quite as late as Elizabethan times in England, for we read in an old school-statute: ‘if they wish to write, let them use their knees for a table’. [11] When the lesson began, it could still be barely light, and Juvenal, in a well-known passage, describes how, at the grammar-school, ‘Horace was all discoloured, and the soot clung to the blackened Virgil’. [12] Whether he was referring to the soiling of the texts of the poets, [13] or of busts of them in the schoolroom [14] (common in Greek gymnasia, but at Rome more usually found in libraries [15] ), or even of paintings of them on the walls [16] (such decorations suffered badly from smoke [17] ), it is no longer possible to determine. Suffice it to say that the flickering light of oil-lamps and the whiff of their fumes were familiar to Roman boys in their early lucubrations on dark and dismal days. But in the fresh air of a spring or summer morning, at an hour when the city was as yet barely awake, conditions must have been much more pleasant.
