087 - Thinking and Feeling
Hello, and welcome to the History of Rome, episode 87, Thinking and Feeling. Last time we discussed the general economic and political ordering of Roman society in the age of the Antonines. Today I want to add additional layers to that discussion by talking a bit about how these various classes felt about education, religion, and philosophy. Obviously, your outlook depended a great deal on your position in society, but as with most things, it was never quite that simple. Wealth and class usually locked Romans into inescapable social roles, but it did not necessarily predetermine their worldviews, what they held dear, what they believed, and to whom, if anyone, they prayed.
One young senator reacted to his inherited wealth by turning towards stoic self-denial, while his neighbor embraced the joyfully nihilistic leanings of the Epicureans. One middle-class merchant took the loss of his inventory to fire as proof that he needed to double down on his offerings to Jupiter, while his competitor took it to mean that the old gods had forsaken him and that he must find a new religion to explain and justify his sorry lot in life. One dirt-poor pleb looked at the squalor in which he lived and decided to enlist in the army with the hope of rising through the ranks and maybe retiring to a comfortable farm someday, while his brother said bag it and went off to bet on the races. There were general outlooks that defined each class, but by no means did everyone march in lockstep with one another.
Identity formation in ancient Rome often followed the same path it does today. At first, a child was locked into their family structure, with the attitudes and material possessions of their parents dominating their understanding of the world. But at a certain point, that child made contact with the outside world, free from the active mediation, translation, or protection of their parents. For most of us, as for many Roman children, that point of contact was primary school.
Now, of course, the middle and upper classes were the only ones who could afford school for their children, as there was no universal free education as we know it today, so we are going to briefly leave behind the poor to learn what they can of the world on the streets of the city or in the fields of the country and focus on the curriculum of the wealthier children. But do not fret for the poor boys and girls too much. Critics, both modern and ancient alike, cringe when they contemplate the damage wrought by the inadequate, boring, backwards, limited, and cruel years of primary education that were endured by the future leaders of the empire.
Because the one major upshot of Roman early education was that it left its pupils intellectually incurious, distrustful of teachers, and generally glad to be rid of anything that reminded them of school, books, or learning in general. Not exactly the values of a ruling class with staying power. In the days of the Republic things were different. One of the major responsibilities of a father, if not the overriding responsibility, was to handle the education of his children. In practice this meant the boys and not really the girls, but that aside, it was very important for a father to develop and oversee the education of his offspring. Cato the Elder famously spent much of his time focused on the intellectual and physical growth of his sons and demanded that his colleagues do the same.
But as the empire grew and enveloped the East, it became fashionable to turn over the children to educated Greek slaves for schooling. The father might consult with the teachers to develop lessons and monitor progress, but gradually the whole process was outsourced to the tutors and then, finally, to the group learning sessions we are all familiar with today. For those of you out there who are critical of how we handle early education in modern western society, I can assure you that the horrors awaiting the Roman school children were a hundred times worse.
The class curriculum for children aged 7-12, in this case we are talking about both boys and girls who seem to have attended school together, was limited to reading, writing, and arithmetic. Students would use wax tablets to practice writing and an abacus for basic math. This seems well and good until you dig a little deeper. For starters, students were required to learn the names of the letters of the alphabet first without any context for what they might mean to later word construction. They would repeat the names of the letters until they had memorized the proper order. This memorization went on before the teacher even showed them what the letters looked like, further exacerbating the mindless repetition of the process.
Once the letters were named, the teacher would reveal what the letters looked like and then command the student to copy the forms on their tablets. Without any initial instruction into how to hold or use their stylus, they were suddenly ordered to copy perfectly forms that they had never before seen. Mistakes in this or any other subject was met with corporal punishment, wraps on the wrist for small mistakes and full beatings for repeated failures. Arithmetic held no hope of relief, as primary math boiled down to repeating over and over again the basic numerals and then repeating over and over and over again the results of their combinations or multiplications. These rote memorization exercises could eventually be recited without the need for the child to even switch his or her brain on. And of course, the mind-numbing repetition was compounded by the fact that Roman children went to school every single day. No weekends, sporadic holidays. Five solid years of dull memorization, recitation, and copying. An endless monotony broken only by the occasional beating. I've heard horror stories about Catholic school, but honestly, it sounds like a lazy day at the park compared to what Roman children endured. Marcus Aurelius considered the fact that his guardians kept him out of primary school altogether as one of the greatest things that ever happened to him in his entire life.
Once the student had had all the joy of knowledge sucked and beaten out of them, they were ready for secondary education, which, for the Romans, meant grammar and rhetoric. Grammar was taught by focusing on a rigid canon of classics, featuring Greek writers like Homer and Menander, and Latin writers like Terence and Aeneas. The rigidity of the canon was apparently so absolute that it was something of a radical revolution when more recent figures like Virgil and Seneca began to appear on the required reading lists. The teaching of grammar did not depart too far from the form of primary school, with emphasis being placed on memorization and oral recitation of whole passages. The focus was never on the content of the works in question, but rather on the words and the order in which they were used. Educated Romans may not have been great poets, but they were pedants of the highest order, which of course made their cocktail parties awesome.
The final stop on the road of Roman education, left only to those who truly had the means to pay for it, was rhetoric. For the Romans, who so highly valued oratory, rhetoric was the top of the intellectual pyramid. But again, the lesson plans were so pedantic and ludicrous that it is difficult to fathom what they really thought they were getting out of it. Beyond endlessly spelling out every single way a potential sentence could be phrased, It's good to see you this morning. This morning it is good to see you. Seeing you this morning is good. The primary focus of the rhetorician was to prepare his students for life in the highly litigious public sphere. This meant working constantly at debate. The teacher would invent some thorny case and then have his students work up prosecutions and defenses. As with the grammarian, the focus was on eloquence, presentation, and theatricality before content was even considered. These were not philosophers debating moral truths. These were sophists, debating who could deliver a better speech.
Once the course in rhetoric was complete, usually in the late teens, the educated Roman was as educated as your average educated Roman was ever going to get. You can't help but notice then all the things missing from their quote-unquote education. Science, advanced math, music, geography, economics, literature beyond a few approved classics, and art were all completely ignored.
This totally stagnant, unappealing, and downright informationless educational system would haunt the Romans as they tried to hold onto their empire in the face of the foreign and domestic turmoil that would soon rock them in the third century. Going forward, the best and brightest of any given generation would often prove to be mediocre and dim, with the most talented often succeeding despite what they had learned in school rather than because of it.
This general failure of education, though, which managed to simultaneously stunt both the right and left sides of the Roman brain, did not stunt the Roman yearning for answers to the great questions, why are we here, what are we doing, what's the point, and is there a point? Finding no answers in the books that they had beaten into them as children, most second century Romans turned to either religion or philosophy for solace, the former absorbing the majority, the latter a small but dedicated minority.
The religion the people turned to, though, to deal with that angle first, was not the religion of their mothers and fathers. By the second century, the titular deities of Rome were losing their hold on the people. Belief in Jupiter, or sacrifices to Apollo, or celebrations in honor of Minerva continued out of sheer inertia, but there was no faith underlying the rituals anymore. The impact of Rome's conquest of the East was felt everywhere, but nowhere was it more dramatically felt than in the religious revolution it unleashed.
For years, Roman officials had tried to maintain the preeminence of the old Olympians, but despite various decrees banning the cult of Isis, and overt persecution of early Christians or Egyptian astrologers, Roman faith continued to leak out of the temple of Jupiter from a thousand tiny holes. For the upper classes, these exciting new religions promised a form of enlightenment denied them by their empty, merely rhetorical educations, while the lower classes listened intently as priests told them that the material world was a transient delusion and that soon enough their souls would be set free. Slaves, women, and common soldiers would flock to Christianity in particular and its radical profession that all were equal in the eyes of God.
Though the various Eastern cults differed in their particulars, almost all involved some sort of initiation process, and the promise that once initiated, followers would be privy to secret mystical truths. These secret mystical truths usually revolved around using esoteric astrology to predict the future, and then the use of complex rituals to secure good fortune. Best of all, barring a few exceptions, the various Eastern cults never tried to stop their new Roman converts from joining other cults, and in many cases encouraged them to do so. According to the faithful, this was a simple recognition that there was no harm in comparing and combining religious knowledge for the greater good of the adherent, while satirists noted that more likely, Huckster cult leaders felt that there was no harm in each of them getting a bite at the same rich apple.
Conservative Romans bemoaned the rise of these cults and the strange behavior they provoked – women plunging into the Tiber during winter, men crawling on their hands and knees through the streets, and children babbling incoherent warnings about the danger of Saturn being in the house of Osiris – but they were unable to provide any alternative to satisfy the converting masses. Just as with literature, the old Roman religion had been purged of its meaning, leaving behind only a series of empty rituals that no one understood or cared about. Superstition kept them performing the rituals, but they no longer excited the passionate feeling that they once had. The Eastern cults, in contrast, were fresh and exciting, and filled with just the right mixture of secrecy – to get them hooked, exotic cosmology – to keep them interested, and promises of eternal personal salvation, which was apparently what everyone decided they were now searching for.
During this period of transforming religious values, the religion destined to leave all the others in the dust began to really gain its foothold in the Western world. Christianity was, in many respects, similar to other Eastern cults. It had a secret initiation process, strange rituals, and an exotic take on the universe. But in other respects, it was radically different. Reflecting its Jewish roots, Christians were staunch monotheists who demanded their followers forsake all other religions. This requirement of total commitment to a single religion was practically unknown in a pagan world where idols, gods, and rituals were considered interchangeable.
But this was not the only thing that set the Christians apart. In the century between the death of Jesus, supposedly around 30 AD, and the reign of Antoninus, Christian dogma had been filtered through the various, sometimes contradictory lenses of the early church fathers like St. Peter and St. Paul, and so the version of began to flourish in the second century AD was thoroughly Hellenized and focused as much on sexual denial and withdrawal from the material Greco-Roman world as it was in preparing for the second coming of Christ, which everyone agreed was just around the corner.
This was all weird enough to provoke the scorn of average Romans, but Christianity further invited ridicule by willingly embracing the politically and economically downtrodden—slaves, the poor, and—critically for its early success—women. This religion of slaves was viewed with suspicion by the existing power structure, who were further provoked by the Christian unwillingness to offer sacrifices to the deified emperors—a simple request for political obedience that even the combative Jews had bowed to, though it was in their own way, they offered sacrifice to Yahweh in the name of the Caesars. But the Christians refused any compromise, and so incurred the wrath of Roman administrators across the empire.
But despite these persecutions, Christianity continued to gain faithful adherents who were willing and sometimes even proud to die for their religion. The question of how and why early Christianity managed to flourish in the face of almost overwhelming odds is too big of a question to answer just now. I promise, there will be much more to say about Christianity before the end of the history of Rome. So for now, I will simply remind you of the point I made last week. By orders of magnitude, the politically and economically downtrodden made up the bulk of the population in the Roman Empire. When Christianity began speaking a language that empowered these forever marginalized groups, well, the rest is history, you know?
Apart from the religious seekers of the second century who delved into mystery cults to satisfy their desire to know the meaning of life, a small minority of educated elites pursued a slightly different course, believing philosophy rather than religion held the key to understanding the universe. In many ways, ancient philosophy was indistinguishable from ancient religion, with the key distinction being merely that philosophy rested its case on human rationality rather than faith in exotic rituals. But other than that, they both had basic tenets of belief in action, quasi-godlike historical figures to worship, and high priests to instruct the faithful.
In Rome, the two dominant strains of philosophy were Stoicism and Epicureanism. Both were disdained by the average Roman who thought the extreme behavior each branch preached was incompatible with everyday good taste, and only a few dedicated thinkers embraced philosophy over the rising tides of Eastern mysticism. Not that either Stoicism or Epicureanism taught the kind of extreme behavior the stereotyping masses usually thought they did, but hey, when you've escaped childhood with an extreme aversion to further education, ignorance of philosophical precepts does not exactly come as a surprise.
We'll wind up going into a bit more detail on Stoicism as we move into the reign of Marcus Aurelius, that philosophy's most famous Roman advocate. But just to lay some initial groundwork, Stoicism as a school of thought was founded by Zeno of Sidium in the 3rd century BC as an offshoot or continuation of the work begun by the Cynics in the 5th century BC. Taking its name from the stoa, or porch under which Zeno taught, the Stoic philosophy was grounded in a belief that emotion ought to be subordinate to reason, and that this subordination allowed men to live a virtuous life in accord with nature. It is important to point out that the Stoics were not anti-emotional robots, they just believed that negative emotions were highly destructive and could only be reigned in by reason. Order and chaos reigned when men allowed their passions to get the better of them, especially passions that raged uselessly against the unfolding plan of nature.
Stoicism was thus an attempt to marry the determinism of the universe with the free will of the individual. Correct judgment conformed with the laws of nature and produced the calm mind and spirit that was the desired end state for the Stoic adherent. Stoicism was surprisingly egalitarian in its message, though not in the same way Christianity was. Seneca famously reminded his readers, Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stalk, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies. The point being that deep down we are all the same, suffer the same, yearn the same.
But where Christianity promised those slaves eventual salvation, the Stoics simply exhorted men and women of every station to accept the world and their place within it. Just as a Marcus Aurelius must resign himself each morning to meeting the joyless burdens of his office, so too must the slave resign himself to the joyless burdens of his. Ambition ought to be confined to a desire to play your part as best you can each and every day. That Stoicism did not turn out to be the religion of the slave should not come as a shock to anyone.
Despite its reputation for producing dour, joyless men, Stoicism flourished throughout the Greco-Roman world for the positive ideal it gave many to strive for. No one, especially the Romans, could argue with the Stoics' four cardinal virtues which they derived from Plato—wisdom, courage, justice, and temperance. That the average Roman of the second century disdained the committed Stoic was evidence more of their own anti-intellectual prejudices than any real problem with the philosophy itself. It took hard work and constant self-reflection to properly practice Stoicism, and, let's face it, hard work and self-reflection were not necessarily the principles upon which the empire was now founded.
On the other end of the philosophical spectrum were the Epicureans, who, though they pursued the same end-status as Stoics—a calm and tranquil mind—they went about it in a very different way. Founded in the early 200s B.C. by Epicurus, the purpose of this new philosophy was to help students attain a state of mind free from fear, pain, or turmoil. This was a radical notion in the ancient world, a place notorious for its fear, pain, and turmoil. Where Stoicism met the challenges of life head-on and demanded that they be endured, Epicurus exhorted his followers to identify that which caused them pain and then purge it from their everyday lives.
Though the message was often misunderstood to mean that one ought to embrace hedonistic pleasure-seeking, the Epicureans were usually far more modest than their non-Epicurean neighbors. Guzzling wine is a fleeting joy that is balanced by the morning's hangover. Sexual inhibition leads to all manner of jealousies, fights, and misunderstandings. Hedonism, in other words, usually leads to more pain than pleasure. The true Epicurean simply cultivated a close circle of friends and enjoyed their company while dining on simple meals and partaking in non-disruptive pastimes like sitting and chatting. They took no part in politics, tried not to get involved in lawsuits, refrained from commercial activity, and generally tried to mind their own business.
The only responsibility an Epicurean really had towards other people was to do unto them as he would have them do unto him. If the whole point of life was to avoid pain, there was no sense in inflicting it on others. That would just be wrong. The biggest thing Epicurus tried to remind his students was that they need not fear death. The fear of death was the single biggest source of all the chaos, disruptive violence, and anger that permeated society, and if one could conquer that fear, everything else would fall into place. To this end, he came out fully as a sort of proto-atheist, denying completely that the gods played an active role in the lives of mortal men and that there was any sort of afterlife that you needed to worry about. You are alive now and have sensation. When you die, sensation will cease. There is nothing to fear because there will be nothing to feel. What you have today is all you will ever have, so don't waste your time spinning your wheels worrying about something that will A. inevitably come whenever it wants and B. won't hurt anyway.
Beyond the misunderstanding over what the pursuit of Epicurean pleasure meant, it was this atheism that caused the Epicureans the most problem amongst their superstitious and highly religious neighbors. Because when you put the two together, you get a freaky stereotype of a nihilistic atheist who would just as soon ravage your daughter as look at you. Nothing could have been further from the truth and by the standards of the day the average Epicurean, like the average Stoic, was a model citizen. What few demerits you could honestly assess them with comes mostly from an unwillingness to engage in public life, which was a bit like a Roman choosing not to breathe. But it had nothing to do with the fact that you had to keep calling the cops on them every Saturday night.
The philosophy students of 2nd century Rome, be they Stoic or Epicurean, usually came out of the upper classes, men with the means to indulge their peculiar habits. But not all of them were rich and educated. One of my favorite groups of people, and no doubt one of the least popular groups in their own time, were the poor philosophers. Lampooned off and on over the years, these were men who often had no prospects and no hope of any work beyond dull manual labor, who suddenly became enamored with philosophy, grew their beards long, and wandered the streets criticizing the material obsessions of their fellow citizens in between requests for handouts. These street gurus, who assured anyone who would listen that their poverty was not only a chosen state, but also of the highest virtue, combined effortlessly the roles of crazy bum and freeloading artist to produce a character unique to the classical world, the panhandling philosopher. The streets of Rome would have been a less vibrant place without their angry harangues and subsequent requests for cash.
In all of these things we are left, I must say, with the picture of a civilization on the verge of decay. Education had become stagnant and counterproductive, the elites were either withdrawing into weird mystery cults or esoteric philosophy, and everyone else was focused on just trying to stay alive. The vision, dedication, and camaraderie of the Republic was all but gone, leaving in its wake an ignorant, self-absorbed society that had no idea what horrors were lurking beyond the frontiers, just waiting to smash the comfortable world the Romans had begun to take for granted.
Unfortunately, due to time constraints, everything we've covered today has been little more than a thumbnail sketch of a thumbnail sketch. Any one of these topics, Roman education, the eastern mystery cults, or ancient philosophy, could easily become the topic of stand-alone podcasts of their own, and so I would encourage you to take this episode as an outline for further study, rather than say the comprehensive final word on Roman rhetoric, which I can assure you it was not. If any of this stuff sparks your imagination, remember that Amazon or Powell's are both positively overflowing with books on all of these topics, usually at cut-rate prices too, because as much as we know how fascinating Seneca's Letters from a Stoic is going to be, the free market is under the impression that it can only charge five bucks for it.
Next week, we're going to follow the Romans through the course of an average day, from waking up and heading out the door, to the barbershop, the law courts, the afternoon bath and the evening meal. Two weeks from now, we're going to go on a tour of the provinces, and wrap our heads around what the Romans controlled, how they controlled it, and what each region brought to the greater empire, be it natural resources or simply more soldiers for the legions. That will bring us up to the hundredth episode, which I'm really looking forward to since you guys have filled the comment thread with some great questions. I'm going to put a deadline on submissions though, so I can have a little bit of time to sort through it all, so if you haven't posted your question by the time next week's episode comes out, then you're just going to have to wait for episode 200 to come around before I'll be able to address it.