EDUCATION

In the early days of the Roman republic, the education of children was completely in the hands of their parents.Even as great and powerful men such as Cato the Elder or Aemilius Paulus took their time to personally teach their children basic skills like counting.In a society so centered on the family, this was the natural thing to do.If boys were largely taught by their fathers, then girls were taught by their mothers, which was consistent with the different roles they would play in later life. And, according to those separate roles, boys of landowning households would also be introduced at an early age to some form of martial arts.But with the growth of the empire in the third century BC the wealthier households gradually began to send their children to schools which employed educated Greek slaves as teachers.The languages of Greece and Rome were taught in the school of the grammaticus. Poetry was particularly studied, and some attention was given to the fundamentals of history, geography, physics and astronomy. It is in this function that the grammatici in Rome, who were largely Greek, decided much of the fate of Roman literature. The basic schools did introduce children into the traditional Roman faith, adding further to the moral values which children would be given at home. But the older boys would also be introduced into the basics of Greek philosophy. This led to the upper classes finding alternative, more sophisticated world views than merely old superstitions and the Roman state religion. And so Greek philosophy and art established itself at the very heart of Roman identity. And the wealthy were eager to expose their offspring to the sophistication of Greece. Cicero in his youth listened to lectures given by great Greek philosophers like Phaedrus the Epicurean and Philo of Larissa. Horace as a young man studied in Athens, being exposed to the various branches of Greek philosophy.