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> In Rome, ... teaching was all done in the home Really?? I am very surprised to hear that, I never thought there could be any other way but having schools in

> In Rome, ... teaching was all done in the home Really?? I am very surprised to hear that, I never thought there could be any other way but having schools in a structured and developed society like theirs. > OTOH the roman soldiers typically could read Not to disbelieve but can you back that up? I thought the bulk of the Roman military was from pretty low down in society and literacy is usually low to negligible there

jan_Inkepa 3y ago
> Really?? I am very surprised to hear that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_(ancient_Rome) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_(ancient_Rome) There were schools...
- gumby 3y ago
  IIRC that was a later development after the 3rd century C.E., well after the eruption of Vesuvius
  - qwytw 3y ago
    As far as we know the Romans used a similar system to the Greeks, there were usually no physical school buildings but parents did/could pool money together to hire a teacher who would teach in various public spaces etc. There are plenty of sources, anecdotes etc. describing this hundreds of years prior the the 3rd century C.E. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurius_Carvilius_Ruga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurius_Carvilius_Ruga is first person that we know of who established an actual school in Rome (and it's unlikely that there weren't any schools before that). He lived in the 3rd century B.C. (not C.E./A.D.)
  - jan_Inkepa 3y ago
    I did a quick look to search to see - I mean if anywhere has retained evidence of schools it should be Pompeii - I did a cursory search through Bloomer's book 'The School of Rome', and here are some bits from it: "The physical requirements for a grammar school were minimal: school, like any small ancient business, could be held on the street, under or above a portico, near an important public building such as a temple, or at a rented shop. A wall painting from Pompeii, now lost, showed school near a portico and decidedly amid the bustle of the city. School could be held “in private,” at the teacher’s home or the house of the patron." "Graffiti indicate schooling took place at several locations in Pompeii and at Rome. The places of instruction are unremarkable shop stalls. Two exceptions to these modest locales merit attention, since they seem to have dedicated space and indicate an education that is decidedly not modest. The emperor’s palace had a slave-training complex known as the paidagogia , and the villas of the wealthy had as part of their design semicircular recesses, or exedrae. The latter, like private libraries, are places of culture, perhaps of poetry reading or rhetorical training." (It links to footnotes which reference an Italian paper apparently saying there are disputes as to how to recognise schools as such). Anyway, yeah, very good point!
gumby 3y ago
> Really?? I am very surprised to hear that, I never thought there could be any other way but having schools in a structured and developed society like theirs. Schools as we think of them today are a pretty recent invention. Even the Academies and Gymnasium of Athens were generally for adults. There was an exception in Sparta, where education was part of the facist indoctrination, similar to the system in the DDR or USSR. Then again, Sparta was super weird even by Greek standards (which was a society whose closest modern analog might be Da'esh (AKA ISIS). The hard part of reading ancient Greek for me was not the grammar but the sheer bizarreness of their structural assumptions, which are rarely visible in translation. > > OTOH the roman soldiers typically could read > Not to disbelieve but can you back that up? I thought the bulk of the Roman military was from pretty low down in society and literacy is usually low to negligible there That's the point: it's a confounding point to my assumption of low levels of literacy among the plebians. You can do your own web search on this topic, but you might want to start with this paper: https://www.academia.edu/37000249/Soldiers_and_Documents_Insights_from_Nubia_The_Significance_of_Written_Documents_in_Roman_Soldiers_Everyday_Lives https://www.academia.edu/37000249/Soldiers_and_Documents_Ins... From its abstract: "The Roman army as an institution and the Roman soldier as an individual could not have functioned without the written word. A few newly published finds from Primis / Qasr Ibrim in Lower Nubia as well as a number of other documents discussed in this paper illustrate the extent to which administrative paperwork and the soldiers’ (semi-)private correspondence contributed to the army’s functioning and governed the soldiers’ everyday lives already in the first decades of the new imperial army. Other evidence shows how the formal and symbolic qualities of imperial and official texts, and administrative documents served Roman soldiers from all types of units in their private documents and monuments as a means to demonstrate military identity"
- qwytw 3y ago
  > There was an exception in Sparta, where education was part of the facist indoctrination, similar to the system in the DDR or USSR That's an interesting description considering those schools were only accessible to the elite rather than the general population. > which was a society whose closest modern analog might be Da'esh (AKA ISIS) Rather a random thing to say? I don't see that many similarities. For one thing (upper class) women in Sparta (or Rome for that matter) had considerably more rights than in Athens for instance (which was probably even worse than modern Saudi Arabia in that regard). > literacy among the plebians. Most of the Roman upper class was plebian.

jan_Inkepa 3y ago

> Really?? I am very surprised to hear that https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_(ancient_Rome) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_(ancient_Rome) There were schools...

gumby 3y ago
IIRC that was a later development after the 3rd century C.E., well after the eruption of Vesuvius
- qwytw 3y ago
  As far as we know the Romans used a similar system to the Greeks, there were usually no physical school buildings but parents did/could pool money together to hire a teacher who would teach in various public spaces etc. There are plenty of sources, anecdotes etc. describing this hundreds of years prior the the 3rd century C.E. Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurius_Carvilius_Ruga https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurius_Carvilius_Ruga is first person that we know of who established an actual school in Rome (and it's unlikely that there weren't any schools before that). He lived in the 3rd century B.C. (not C.E./A.D.)
- jan_Inkepa 3y ago
  I did a quick look to search to see - I mean if anywhere has retained evidence of schools it should be Pompeii - I did a cursory search through Bloomer's book 'The School of Rome', and here are some bits from it: "The physical requirements for a grammar school were minimal: school, like any small ancient business, could be held on the street, under or above a portico, near an important public building such as a temple, or at a rented shop. A wall painting from Pompeii, now lost, showed school near a portico and decidedly amid the bustle of the city. School could be held “in private,” at the teacher’s home or the house of the patron." "Graffiti indicate schooling took place at several locations in Pompeii and at Rome. The places of instruction are unremarkable shop stalls. Two exceptions to these modest locales merit attention, since they seem to have dedicated space and indicate an education that is decidedly not modest. The emperor’s palace had a slave-training complex known as the paidagogia , and the villas of the wealthy had as part of their design semicircular recesses, or exedrae. The latter, like private libraries, are places of culture, perhaps of poetry reading or rhetorical training." (It links to footnotes which reference an Italian paper apparently saying there are disputes as to how to recognise schools as such). Anyway, yeah, very good point!

gumby 3y ago

> Really?? I am very surprised to hear that, I never thought there could be any other way but having schools in a structured and developed society like theirs. Schools as we think of them today are a pretty recent invention. Even the Academies and Gymnasium of Athens were generally for adults. There was an exception in Sparta, where education was part of the facist indoctrination, similar to the system in the DDR or USSR. Then again, Sparta was super weird even by Greek standards (which was a society whose closest modern analog might be Da'esh (AKA ISIS). The hard part of reading ancient Greek for me was not the grammar but the sheer bizarreness of their structural assumptions, which are rarely visible in translation. > > OTOH the roman soldiers typically could read > Not to disbelieve but can you back that up? I thought the bulk of the Roman military was from pretty low down in society and literacy is usually low to negligible there That's the point: it's a confounding point to my assumption of low levels of literacy among the plebians. You can do your own web search on this topic, but you might want to start with this paper: https://www.academia.edu/37000249/Soldiers_and_Documents_Insights_from_Nubia_The_Significance_of_Written_Documents_in_Roman_Soldiers_Everyday_Lives https://www.academia.edu/37000249/Soldiers_and_Documents_Ins... From its abstract: "The Roman army as an institution and the Roman soldier as an individual could not have functioned without the written word. A few newly published finds from Primis / Qasr Ibrim in Lower Nubia as well as a number of other documents discussed in this paper illustrate the extent to which administrative paperwork and the soldiers’ (semi-)private correspondence contributed to the army’s functioning and governed the soldiers’ everyday lives already in the first decades of the new imperial army. Other evidence shows how the formal and symbolic qualities of imperial and official texts, and administrative documents served Roman soldiers from all types of units in their private documents and monuments as a means to demonstrate military identity"

qwytw 3y ago
> There was an exception in Sparta, where education was part of the facist indoctrination, similar to the system in the DDR or USSR That's an interesting description considering those schools were only accessible to the elite rather than the general population. > which was a society whose closest modern analog might be Da'esh (AKA ISIS) Rather a random thing to say? I don't see that many similarities. For one thing (upper class) women in Sparta (or Rome for that matter) had considerably more rights than in Athens for instance (which was probably even worse than modern Saudi Arabia in that regard). > literacy among the plebians. Most of the Roman upper class was plebian.