Chapter 1
The Guardian and His Burden

One of our earliest witnesses to the grammarian's role is an inscription from the Ionian city of Priene honoring a local benefactor, dating to sometime after 84 B.C. Among the man's services is noted his subsidy for a grammarian to instruct the youth of Priene in language and literature (), "through which souls progress toward excellence [] and the condition proper to humanity []."^[1] Itself a commonplace, a token of shared assumptions, the statement reflects the belief that excellence and humanity not only could be derived from the literary education but could even be defined by it. If the soul thus tutored knew the "condition proper to humanity," one not so educated was less than human, like uneducated Fortune ()—irrational, brute, and cruel.^[2] Having made himself human, the educated man belonged to a breed apart.^[3]

This enduring belief in the separateness belonging to and created by the literary culture found expression in several persistent metaphors. Most notably, an idea of sacredness attached to the instruction and to its texts. In the late first century A.D. one grammarian claimed on his epitaph, "I began the holy instruction [] of well-born children";^[4] another not long after praised his profession as the "study of sacred letters":^[5] the sentiments reecho down to the fifth century, and

[1] IPriene 112.73ff.

[2] CIG 2722.4.

[3] Cf. Snell Discovery 247ff.; Marrou, MOYS IKOS 209ff.

[5] Florus Verg. or . 3.8, praecipientem bonos mores et sacrarum studia litterarum , with Dahlmann, Kleine Schriften 256f., emphasizing the connection between the aims of ethical instruction (boni mores )—and so, good order—and the sacredness attributed to the litterae . In addition to the authors cited by Dahlmann, ibid. 257 n. 6 ad fin ., contemporary with Florus and speaking of the sacredness of literary pursuits, see also Quintil. Inst . 1.4.6, interiora velut sacri huius adeuntibus apparebit multa rerum subtilitas , in his encomiastic defense of grammar.

the praise of Vergil's work as a sacred poem.^[6] Such voices spoke with the knowledge that they possessed something set apart and enduring, something fundamental to the scheme of right order: the sacred exercised a powerful centripetal pull on a select group of men, to whom it afforded a special, shared, coherent way of life.

Consequently, the question of how one could gain access to the sacred also arose, to be elaborated in two common but antithetical metaphors. In one, the literary culture was a mystery, of the Muses or the ancients; its acquisition was an initiation, by which "the things not to be spoken" were revealed.^[7] The metaphor well conveys the sense of distinction shared by an elect. But insofar as initiation in a mystery implies a transfiguring revelation, a passive experience, an irreversible change, the recurrent cast of thought does little to convey the reality of the literary education;^[8] its true character is more accurately captured by the second metaphor, at once more common and more consequential. The school of literature is "the gymnasium of wisdom, where is shown the path to the blessed life."^[9] The literary education is the "gymnastic of the soul";^[10] the

[6] Phocas V. Verg . praef. 24: carmen sacrum . Macrob. Sat . 1.24.13: sacrum poema .

[9] Phocas GL 5.411.2ff.

literary culture, a matter of training (), achieved through "the sweat of the Muses."^[11]

The process was gradual, painstaking—and painful. Like the athlete trained in the old gymnasium, the student of literature slowly acquired his knowledge and skills by replacing unrefined habits with good habits until these (ideally) became second nature; lapses into the bad, old habits were repaid with a beating.^[12] Unlike the initiate, the gymnast was not separated decisively from his past but had to struggle constantly against it, using his virtues—memory, diligence, discipline—to fight free of the old ways and so rise above himself. Unremitting and austere, the effort offered correspondingly great rewards. Through "tenacious memory" and "toil," the grammarian Diomedes writes, we achieve "the square-set soundness of speech and its polished brilliance produced by skill." We are then as superior to the uneducated as they are to cattle.^[13] The comparison was the oldest article of faith in the literary culture, extending back to Isocrates, repeated later through the Renaissance and beyond. The eloquent man was nothing less than a distinct and artificial species: he had created himself, and was for that reason enormously proud of his achievement.

At the threshold of that achievement stood the grammarian, controlling the access to eloquence with his texts in one hand and his cane in the other. The grammarian's position here is captured in another recurrent metaphor, that of the custos , or guardian.^[14] The grammarian was, first, the guardian of the language, custos Latini sermonis , in a phrase of Seneca, or "guardian of articulate utterance," in the description of Augustine.^[15] He was to protect the language against corruption, to preserve its coherence, and to act as an agent of control: thus, early in his

[12] Overcoming bad habits the function of the school: see esp. John Chrysost. Ad pop. Ant . hom. 8.5 (PG 49.97); and cf. Chap. 5 pp. 187-89.

[13] Diomedes GL 1.299.18ff.; cf. Gell. NA 13.17 (liberal education = humanitas = cura et disciplina , setting men apart from beasts), and Chap. 2 n. 301.

[14] Cf. Kaster, "Macrobius" 219f.

[15] Sen. Ep . 95.65. Aug. Solil . 2.19: vocis articulatae custos .

history we find the grammarian claiming the right to limit the grant of citizenship (civitas ) to new usages.^[16] But by virtue of his command of the poetic texts, the grammarian's guardianship extended to another, more general area, as guardian of tradition (historiae custos ).^[17] The grammarian was the conservator of all the discrete pieces of tradition embedded in his texts, from matters of prosody (to which Augustine refers in his characterization), to the persons, events, and beliefs that marked the limits of vice and virtue.

The two realms of the guardianship thus answered to the two divisions of the grammarian's task, the knowledge of speaking correctly and the explication of the poets, and the task imposed a formidable burden upon him. As guardian of language and tradition, the grammarian joined those who preserved the boundaries between order and chaos. The weight of the burden can be gauged by comparing the grammarian with other custodes : the military commander on the frontier (limes ) of the empire,^[18] or the provincial governor in his role as judge, the "guardian of the laws."^[19] Each was a pivotal figure. The soldier preserved the geographic distinction between the insider and the outsider; the governor, placed between the local population and the central government, maintained the hierarchical distinctions that shaped the empire's political structure and its system of laws, wherein legal status depended on social status. The grammarian was similarly pivotal in his own sphere, standing where linguistic, geographic, and social distinctions converged. Although those distinctions are essentially inseparable, it is useful to consider them one by one.

The grammarian's linguistic guardianship, the most important and most complex element of his profession, will be discussed in later chap-

[17] Aug. De mus . 2.1.1.

[18] CIL 3.6660 = ILCV 798 = IGLS 5.2704, on Silvinus, limitis . . . fortissime custos . For his rank, comes et dux Phoenices (?), cf. PLRE I s.v., p. 842.

ters; for the moment it is sufficient to sketch its salient features. In essence, the grammarian presented himself as an arbiter of the claims of three competing forces:^[20] the habit of contemporary usage (consuetudo; usus ), the authority (auctoritas ) of the classical literary models, and nature (natura ), that is, the natural properties of the language, determined by reasoned or systematic analysis (ratio ) and set down as rules (regulae ) in the grammarian's handbook (ars ). In practice, the grammarian spent much of his time protecting the nature of the language (and so his own ars ) against the influences of habit and authority.

The consequences were twofold. First, the grammarian, as a man of regular speech, was fundamentally a man of distinctions. Grammar defines and separates: grammatica dividit .^[21] As a distillation of the grammarian's expertise the phrase could not be bettered, and the definition applies both to the effects of grammar on the language and to its social consequences, distinguishing the educated man from the masses.^[22] Second, by a paradox suited to the self-created species, the language the grammarian taught was simultaneously artificial and natural, a product of human skill that claimed objective validity and permanence. The grammarian created for himself and for his students a stable place to stand, the square-set soundness of articulate utterance, which laid the foundation for a coherent way of life. As a result, the grammarian's rules offered a liberation: the young man educated in his school could be said to have "embraced the restraints of grammatical instruction, and those rule-bound confines of speech, for the sake of freedom."^[23] The paradox, although intended by the comment's author, would have been less remarkable to his contemporaries or his ancestors than it is today. The young man in question had gained freedom through discipline, finding a small spot of coherence in a sea of noise. Close at hand the vulgar language murmured—for example, the Greek and Latin of Scripture, which many of the educated had found repellent^[24] —and not much farther off he could hear the hiss of the vernacular, which existed everywhere in the empire.^[25]

[20] See Chap. 5 pp. 176ff.

[21] Sidon. Apoll. Ep . 5.2.1.

[23] Ennod. Epist . 1.5.10.

[24] See, e.g., Lactant. Inst . 5.1; Arnob. Adv. nat . 1.59; Jer. Comm. Is. proph . prol., Comm. Ion . 3; Cyril. Alex. C. Iulian. 7 (PG 76.853); Isid. Pel. Ep . 4.28, 67, 91.

[25] Vernacular languages: see Bardy, Question ; Jones, LRE 991ff.; MacMullen, "Provincial Languages"; Millar, "Local Culture"; Brunt, "Romanization" l70ff. Hiss: cf. Jerome's regular use of stridor and stridulus to characterize the sound of the various Semitic languages (Ep . 130.5, 125.12; Comm. Galat . 3 prol.; V. Hilarion . 22; Comm. Is. proph . 4.11; Comm. Tit . 3), and Maxim. Taurin. Serm . 50 (PL 57.635). For one's speech to change suddenly from the vernacular to a language of culture was the sign of a miracle: Mark the Deacon, Vie de Saint Porphyre 66-67 Gregoire-Kugener; Apophth. Patr ., "De abbate Poemene" 183 (PG 65.365f.). The opposite change was a mark of demonic possession: Jer. V. Hilarion . 22. Predictably, in a controversy with Augustine, the pagan grammarian Maximus of Madaurus picks as one line of attack the barbarous names of local African martyrs: Aug. Ep . 16.2; cf. Augustine's rebuke, Ep . 17.2. See also Lib. Ep . 369.9.

The center of coherence was the town. A rough measure of that fact is provided by the following detail: of the hundred-odd grammarians we can identify and place from the mid-third through the mid-sixth centuries, all taught in spots that emerged as episcopal sees at some time during this period.^[26] To be sure, we should not assume that every see had a grammarian's school; nor were all bishops' towns grand places (the grammarians in fact are mostly found in the larger sees). Such places did, however, tend to be the centers of gravity in the secular as well as the spiritual lives of their regions, and they therefore presume at least a minimal urban organization and urban life. To that extent—and because he was not concerned, like the bishop, to extend his message and his influence into the hinterland—the grammarian in late antiquity still participated in the ancient division between town and country.

Entering the grammarian's school meant that one was safely past an important geographic hurdle, that one had joined the small minority of the population who shared the life of the towns. It also meant that one would be drawn willy-nilly into a town-bound vision of the world, a

vision so fixed that the "natural ignorance" of the rustic might casually be used to explain a verse of Vergil^[27] and so powerful that the Christian preacher would need to emphasize that the grace of God is everywhere, and does not reach only the educated city-dweller like the favors bestowed by men.^[28] People could easily assume that the classically educated man of the town had nothing to learn from the man of the country,^[29] and that assumption was reinforced by the linguistic gulf between the two. The countryman might well not speak the language of culture at all; if he did, he would probably speak a version of it so uncouth as to require apology lest it offend "urban ears."^[30]

The grammarian's school could bridge the divide between town and country—although that is not to say it regularly did so. We know, for example, of the young Hilarion, sent for his entire education to Alexandria from the hamlet (vicus ) of Tabatha, in the hinterland of Gaza;^[31] one would be hard put, however, to cite many such dramatic transitions from hamlet to metropolis. More common was the movement found in the educational careers of Jerome and Augustine: Augustine certainly (and Jerome possibly) received some preliminary. education in his modest home town before being sent to a larger center for further instruction.^[32] For reasons described below, even this sort of movement was subject to notable constraints. It does, however, point to two important characteristics of the literary education, a marked geographic mobility and a close conformity to the patterns of upper-class life.

It is necessary to imagine the educational geography of the empire, not in terms of the great land masses ringing the Mediterranean but as an archipelago of cities where schools of liberal letters were to be found. This distribution encouraged a good deal of island hopping. To an outsider, like the desert father St. Anthony, the spectacle of the would-be

[27] Naturalis inperitia : Ti. Claudius Donatus Interp. Vergil., ad Aen . 7.482 (2.72.5ff. Georgii).

[28] Cyril of Jerusalem Catech . 17 De spir. sanct . 2.35.

[31] Jer. V. Hilarion . 2.

[32] For Augustine, see Part II no. 20. For Jerome, see C. Rufin . 1.30, with n. 46 below.

educated "leaving home and crossing the sea, that they might learn letters," appeared frenetic and fragmented when compared with "us who have no need to leave home for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven, or to cross the sea for the sake of excellence."^[33] The vision has the same strength and weakness as many an outsider's view, seeing only a part of the truth but seeing it clearly. The world of letters was fluid, with effects that were often fragmenting. After leaving home and crossing the sea, many did not return. Some died while studying abroad.^[34] Others died away from home after beginning the careers their education had brought them.^[35] Some never came home, having discovered wisdom of one variety or another;^[36] others found a secular career to relieve them of curial obligations in their native cities.^[37]

Yet amid the movement there was pattern and stability. As far as the literary education is concerned, only the upper levels of the population were geographically mobile. Hence traditional boundaries—for example, between town and country—were preserved far more often than vio-

[34] See Lib. Or . 1.151; Symm. Ep . 4.56, 9.54; with some epitaphs, mostly earlier, of students who died away from home: SEG 2.461 = GVI 1519 = Bull. ép . 1958, 336 (cf. Robert, Hellenica 1.154); GVI 1081; Kaibel 228 = GVI 970 = Inschr. Eph . 6 (IGSK 16) 2101 (with the corrigenda at Inschr. Eph . 7.1, p. 28; cf. also Inschr. Eph . 6.2202, 2211); ILAlg . 1363; CIL 8.12152; IG 14.1436 = IGR 1.208 = GVI 1025 = IGVR 3.1165; IG 14.1728 = IGR 1.279 = GVI 745 = IGVR 2.1243; ILCV 740 = IEPD 672.

[36] Compare Marin. V. Procli 8 (Proclus's early education, his father's ambitions for his career, and his own desire for philosophy; sim. Eunap. V. phil . 6.1.1 [Aedesius]) with Zach. Schol. Vie de Sévère 54ff. (the education of Evagrius of Samosata, his father's ambitions for his career, and his own desire for philosophy, i.e., the monastic life).

[37] Cf. Petit, Étudiants 170ff., with the qualifications of Liebeschuetz, Antioch 174ff. (esp. 180f.), and 245f., on CTh 14.9.1 (an. 370).

lated; and the movement of students, like that of the teachers, was determined by the personal relationships between leading men in the cities who commended and received them.^[38] Most important, when the literary education combined with geographic mobility to produce social mobility, it did so above an already existing and clearly definable threshold of privilege. Broadly speaking, social mobility occurred only among the portions of the urban upper classes that still maintained their eminence and its traditions, or in those segments of the imperial service that absorbed members of the urban aristocracy and their values.

The statement that one's cousins had "suffered not even a grammarian"^[39] revealed as much about their social standing as it did about their linguistic and literary attainments. To make such a statement without blush or reproach, as Augustine did, signaled that one was stepping outside the culture of secular prestige. It was a step few of his educated contemporaries were wholeheartedly prepared to take. Anyone who reached the age at which Augustine wrote those words would have had a quarter-century of conditioning, forming assumptions of prestige and privilege that would have become second nature. Such assumptions are found everywhere, from letters of recommendation—a central document of the age, to which we will return repeatedly—to more unexpected or oblique forms: the knowledge that one could appropriately refer to his education as grounds for special consideration in a legal appeal,^[40] or the casual assumption that even pagan literary men could by virtue of their cultural authority and social standing competently judge a religious debate between Mani and a Christian bishop,^[41] or even the distinctions that produced what can be called a socially stratified sense of humor. Walking along the streets of Cyrene, a man could see the graffito, "Question: Who was the father of Priam's children?" and smile, recognizing a schoolboy's parody of the grammarian's catechism, perhaps recalling the jokes of his own school days.^[42] Just so, the recipient of one of Symmachus's letters would have smiled knowingly to see him apply the obliquely obscene Vergilian tag huic aliud mercedis erit to an enemy.^[43]

[38] See esp. Petit, Étudiants 112ff., 122ff., on Libanius's recruiting students from the provinces; on teachers' movement, see Chaps. 3 and 6.

[39] Aug. De beat. vit . 1.6.

[40] Cf. PSI 13.1337.21-23 (s. III, prov. unknown: a petition to the prefect), with a like note struck in similar documents of the fourth century (PKöln inv. 4533 56-57 and 4533 9-10 [an. 348, Panopolis], quoted by Browne, "Harpocration" 192f.) and the fifth (PCairMasp . 3.67295, with Part II no. 78).

[41] See Acta Archelai 12 = Epiphan. Panar. haeres . 66.10ff., with Part II nos. 179, 236. The doubtful historicity of the account does not detract from the point made here.

[42] ASIA 1961-62, 219ff. no. 192, with Kaster, "Schoolboy's Burlesque."

[43] Symm. Ep . 6.22.1 and Verg. Ecl . 6.26, with Kaster, "Echo."

These comforting assumptions were produced by schools not only sparse in geographic distribution but markedly exclusive in social organization. It is necessary here to think not of a single, integrated track of primary and secondary schools, like the system known to (and produced in) the twentieth century, but of different types of schools serving different segments of the population.^[44] The population at large, massively illiterate, was served (however ill) by the "schools of letters" (, ludi litterarii ), institutions of low prestige that provided general, utilitarian literacy. But others, those who had access to the liberal schools of grammar and rhetoric, would receive the rudiments of instruction at home or from teachers assigned to impart the first elements in the grammarian's school; they thus would meet the grammarian as their first teacher. The typical product of the school of liberal letters was therefore insulated from the lower orders, just as the teachers of liberal letters were distinguished by their higher fees and their legal privileges from the common teacher of letters.

Two points should be stressed concerning this arrangement. First, it is not in itself peculiar to late antiquity, the product of a sudden aristocratization of the literary culture, but stands revealed in sources ranging from the first through the sixth centuries. If any change is visible, it is not in how the schools were structured but in how the structure was maintained and in the clientele it served: the authority and the burden were perhaps increasingly shared by the imperial government,^[45] and sons of some imperial functionaries perhaps took places that sons of the depressed segment of the curial order had vacated. Second, there was some movement from one type of school to the other, especially when a student was fortunate enough to move from an outlying town that had no grammarian to a larger center that did. But passage from a school of letters to a liberal school was irregular, a trickle, not a steady stream. Of the three men noted above—Hilarion, Jerome, and Augustine—only the last clearly began in a school of letters.^[46] While there were surely other

[44] For the following; which differs somewhat from the usual account of the institutional configuration of the schools, see Kaster, "Notes"; Booth, "Schooling" and "Elementary Education"; cf. also Jones, LRE 997f. For further nuance, see Chap. 2 "Some Variable Definitions."

[45] See Chap. 6 pp. 216ff.

[46] Augustine: cf. Kaster, "Notes" 326, 341. For Hilarion, Jerome (V. Hilarion . 2) mentions no preliminary schooling before he was sent to the grammarian's school at Alexandria; he was probably among those who had the grammarian as their first teacher (see Kaster, "Notes" 329ff.). Jerome: Booth ("Date," esp. 351ff.) has argued plausibly that Jerome began his education under a grammarian (the Orbilius saeviens of C. Rufin . 1.30) at Rome. Note that even if his arguments are rejected in favor of the standard view, that Jerome received some education at Stridon before going to Rome, the nature of that education is not immediately clear; cf. Kaster, "Notes" 342ff.

such instances,^[47] specific examples do not thrust themselves forward: one must not generalize from the familiar but perhaps exceptionally brilliant (and fortunate) case of Augustine.

The higher fees the teachers of grammar and rhetoric charged, the additional largesse they traditionally received on special occasions, and the allowances young men would need if they traveled to major centers of study all required surplus wealth.^[48] As Lactantius remarked, instead of giving thanks for being born human, male, Greek, Athenian, and a contemporary of Socrates, Plato should have given thanks that he was born talented, teachable, "and with the resources to be liberally educated."^[49] The social origins of the sophist Libanius's students show that few categories in the population had resources on the necessary scale: government functionaries, teachers of liberal letters, members of other liberal professions (for the most part, advocates), some gentlemen of no visible occupation, and curiales .^[50] To these can be added some Christian bishops and presbyters,^[51] and of course the old senatorial aristocracy in the West.^[52]

While some from among these categories—teachers, imperial bureaucrats, advocates—could count on salaries, fees, or douceurs (paid in the stable currencies of gold and silver, no small advantage),^[53] the common denominator was still land: thus, Jerome presumes that a man unable to pay a teacher's fee in a pinch would give a landowner's excuses—crops damaged by hail or drought, profits eaten up by taxes.^[54] The excuses, especially the latter, are ominous. By no means could all landowners—or curiales —manage easily: although his father was a town councilor of middling means with an estate,^[55] Augustine's education was a close thing, begun in the lower-status school of letters and continued only through the extraordinary efforts of his father and the timely beneficence of a family connection.^[56]

[47] See esp. Symeon of Mesopotamia Hom . 15.42, quoted and discussed by Kaster, "Notes" 326.

[48] On fees and largesse, see Chap. 3; on allowances, see Liebeschuetz, Antioch 84 with nn. 8, 9; and on living conditions generally, see Petit, Étudiants 144ff.

[50] Petit, Étudiants 172,194f.

[51] Jer. Comm. Ephes . 3.6 (PL 26.574A).

[52] On social origins and access to schools in the West, see also Nellen, Viri 98ff.

[53] Liebeschuetz, Antioch 86.

[54] Comm. Galat . 3.6 (PL 26.459B). Jerome's education Was probably made possible by his family's landholdings, for which see Ep . 66.14.

[55] Conf . 2.3.5; Ep . 126.7.

[56] See Part II no. 20.

The outlook for the lower orders was still less promising. Few students from lower levels of society than those already mentioned are known to have entered the grammarian's school: Aetius, patronized by the anonymous grammarian of Anazarbus;^[57] or Eustathius, the son of a clothes factor, educated (according to the hagiographic tradition) by a grammarian at Nicomedia;^[58] or the three freedmen's sons who taught as grammarians at Bordeaux.^[59] In addition, there was probably a significant dropout rate. Of fifty-seven students whose length of study in Libanius's school is known, thirty-five followed the course of rhetoric for only one or two years, twelve for only three or four years, and the other ten for five or six years.^[60] Evidence suggests that the pyramid of enrollments should be projected farther downward,^[61] that there was also attrition between the schools of grammar and rhetoric and within the grammarian's school—hence the earlier statement that the grammarian's school would be the only thing approaching a common experience for the elite. Yet in some respects it was enough: in language and manners, the man who had never attended the grammarian's school was more marked than the man who had attended the grammarian's school but had not gone on to rhetoric; the latter, moreover, was not necessarily shut off from a career open to a man of liberal education.^[62] If nothing else, he

[57] Philostorg. HE 3.15, with "Prologue" above.

[58] See Part II no. 234 for comment also on the historicity of the account.

[59] See Part II nos. 40, 146, 165. Note that these are the only grammarians of this social standing known in the period: see Chap. 3. Among other liberally educated men of humble origins who achieved some eminence, one might mention, e.g., Festus of Tridentum (= PLRE I s.v. Festus 3, pp. 334f.), described as ultimi sanguinis et ignoti at Amm. Marc. 29.2.22; Pamprepius the grammarian and political adventurer, said to have begun life as a poor man (Part II no. 114); and perhaps Fl. Mallius Theodorus, whose antecedents are passed over in Claudian's panegyric (cf. PLRE I s.v. Theodorus 27, p. 902). But "low birth" and "poverty" are notably relative terms; there is no reason to suppose that Festus, for instance, was in his origins the social inferior of, say, Jerome: see Matthews, Western Aristocracies 47; cf. Part II no. 46 ad fin . It is unlikely that any of these men was comparable in his origins to the figures mentioned in this and the preceding two notes.

[60] Petit, Étudiants 62ff., with pp. 95-96, 155f., 170ff. Note the most common reasons for withdrawal after one or two years: family circumstances, e.g., replacement of a deceased father in the local curia (cf. Kopacek, "Curial Displacements" 327ff., for the career of Firminus); or the pursuit of careers in advocacy and the law. For three years as the "indispensable minimum" for a thorough grounding in rhetoric, at least in the opinion of Libanius, see Petit, Étudiants 65.

[61] See esp. Vie d'Alexandre l'Acéméte 5 (PO 6.660f.): Alexander proceeds to serve as praefectianus directly from education in grammar. Cf. also the career imagined by Symeon of Mesopotamia (above n. 47) and, e.g., the case of Eustathius (above n. 58).

[62] Cf. Vie d'Alexandre (preceding note) and Symeon of Mesopotamia (above n. 47).

could claim the "letters" (that is, liberal letters) or the "gifts of the Muses" sufficient for purely personal distinction.

The exclusiveness of the literary culture had two evident consequences. First, "letters" or the like recurred as one of the three or four most important marks of status—what Paulinus of Nola meant when he referred to honos, litterae, domus as the "tokens of prestige in the world," or what Jerome had in mind when he spoke of the "noble man, fluent of speech, wealthy," a vivid figure flanked by an "accompaniment of the powerful," set off against the backdrop of the "mob."^[63] At one extreme, literary attainments would provide eminence at the tomb, if nowhere else, a fact that accounts for the frequent mention of such attainments on the epitaphs of children or youths, pathetic reminders of dignity achieved and promise cut short.^[64] At the other extreme, literary culture followed one through life, to be noted regularly, for example, among the virtues of men who had gone on to hold the highest offices of state.^[65] The phrase "among the virtues" is used advisedly here: the literary culture in itself guaranteed virtue; its acquisition signaled that one possessed discipline, an appetite for toil, and the other ethical qualities that marked a man fit to share the burden of government.^[66]Doctrina presumed mores ; to be a scholar presumed that one was the right sort, a gentleman. That fact must engross the attention, however irrelevant to competent rule the literary education might seem to modern eyes.^[67]

[63] Paulin. Nol. Carm . 24.481f.; Jer. Ep . 66.6; cf. id. Comm. Ion . 3 (PL 25.1143B).

[65] E.g., eloquentia (litterarum lumen , etc.) included with iustitia, integritas, auctoritas, nobilitas (vel sim .) in honorific inscriptions dedicated to L. Aurelius Avianius Symmachus signo Phosphorius (CIL 6.1698), lulius Agrius Tarrutenius Marcianus (CIL 6.1735), Petronius Probus (CIL 6.1751), L. Turcius Secundus signo Asterius (CIL 6.1772). Cf. CIL 5.7917 = IANice-Cimiez p. 94, epitaph of C. Subrius Secundinus, flamen et patronus provinciae, pietatis eloquentiae morum magister .

[66] For the learned = the good, and the uneducated = the crude and slothful (inertes ), cf. Aur. Vict. De Caes . 9.12. For the place of such virtues as discipline and diligence in the ideology of letters, see above on the gymnastic of the soul and below, Chap. 2 "Independence and Constraint."

[67] Cf. Marrou, Histoire 444f.

Letters validated claims to status, both moral and social—although the two were hardly separate to the liberally educated man.

The fusion helps to explain the second consequence of the literary culture's exclusiveness, the importance of liberal studies in upward social mobility. If in theory the man of letters could be presumed to be the right sort, in practice the presumption provided entry into the network of personal relationships and patronage that could lead to wealth, offices, and good marriages. The general observation of Augustine and John Chrysostom, that liberal letters furthered temporal ambitions,^[68] is amply borne out by specific cases: Augustine himself, Ausonius and other teachers at Bordeaux,^[69] Libanius's students,^[70] rhetoricians and advocates who became governors,^[71] wandering panegyrists,^[72] and even a few fairly obscure grammarians.^[73]

When we face this picture, it is important to remember several points. First, the man thus prized for his education fundamentally embodied continuity. This is true in the obvious sense that literary attainments formed part of the foundation for success in the imperial service already in the high empire.^[74] It is, however, also true in another sense, which touches more directly on the coexistence of continuity and change. The literary men—for example, the sophists of the Greek East—who were drawn into the imperial upper class from the local elites of their towns in the second and early third centuries shared the responsibility for

[68] Aug. De discipl. Christ . 12; John Chrysost. Adv. oppugn. vit. monast . 3.5.

[69] Hopkins, "Social Mobility"; and below, Chap. 3.

[70] Petit, Étudiants 166, 185.

[71] See Chap. 3 nn. 133, 178.

[72] E.g., Aur. Harpocration of Panopolis (above n. 35); the sinecure as tribunus et notarius gained by Claudian, CIL 6.1710 = ILS 2949 = IGVR 1.63, with Alan Cameron, Claudian 390ff.

[73] On the social mobility of the grammarians, see Chap. 3. On the general phenomenon of "gebildetes Beamtentum" in the West in s.IV, see the material collected by Nellen, Viri .

[74] See MacMullen, "Roman Bureaucratese" 368 n. 16; Bowersock, Greek Sophists 43ff. (with the qualifications of Bowie, "Importance"); Millar, Emperor 83ff., 101ff. (cf. also 491ff.); Champlin, Fronto, passim . For continuity within a single family, see the case of M. Postumius Festus, an African orator, acquaintance of Fronto (cf. Ad am . 2.11.1 van den Hout), participant in a vignette of Gellius (NA 19.13.1ff.), senator, and suffect consul in 160 (Alföldy, Konsulat 174), whose memory as an orator is kept alive through two of his pronepotes : T. Flavius Postumius Varus, himself a suffect consul and PVR in 271, an orator . . . beatus diis, amicis, literis (CIL 6.1417 = ILS 2940) and sectator of Festus (CIL 6.1416 = ILS 2929); and T. Flavius Postumius Titianus, consul II in 301 and PVR in 305-6, and an orator, pronepos, et sectator M. Postumi Festi orat (oris ) (CIL 6.1418 = ILS 2941). For Titianus and Varus, see PLRE I s.vv. Titianus 9 (pp. 919f.), Varus 2 (pp. 946f.); for the nuance of sectator , see further Chap. 2 "Independence and Constraint" at nn. 84, 107.

cracking the shell of provincial life and showing new horizons to their peers.^[75] If the pressures of the third century enlarged that crack beyond repair, they also guaranteed that the new horizons would remain permanently in view, providing a new measure of ambition and a new setting for old forms of homage. The man of the second and early third century who could anticipate (and take it as his due) that his townsmen would praise and remember him for his education and other ^[76] has as his epigonus the governor of the third through sixth centuries, honored by the city for his wisdom, his literary attainments, and his other virtues.^[77] The change marks part of the shift in the empire's center of gravity; insofar as the schools participated in that change, they did so by providing reassurance that nothing basic had shifted, that the right, honorable men were still conspicuously present and accounted for.

Redistribution of land after the disturbances in third-century Gaul,^[78] the rift that began to open between superior and inferior town councilors in the second century^[79] and produced a crisis by the early fourth century, the expansion of the imperial bureaucracy under Diocletian (A.D. 254-305) and the increased opportunity for wealth it brought to some of its members—all were elements of the third century's "loosening of society."^[80] The schools thereafter had to consolidate the effects of that loosening by continuing their old job of sorting out and identifying the elite.^[81] They would not only provide the basis of a career but also add the traditional adornment to a gentleman's life.^[82] They would confirm status already held more frequently than they would serve as the springboard to higher status. And they would contribute to mobility,

[75] See Bowersock, Greek: Sophists 28f.

[76] E.g., IG 5.466, 563, 1168, 1369; Olympia 5.470; SEG 11.321 (Argos); Inschr. Eph . 3 (IGSK 13) 710; Miltner and Miltner, "Epigraphische Nachlese" 10ff. no. 2 (Ancyra); SEG 6.57 (Ancyra); AE 1971, 305 (Dassare [Dalmatia]).

[78] See Wightman, "Peasants" 111.

[79] See Garnsey, "Aspects."

[80] MacMullen, Enemies 246.

[81] Cf. Marrou, Christiana tempora 49ff.

[82] I would add this to balance the general and, I believe, one-sided emphasis on the purely careerist motives associated with late-antique education: our sources by their nature more often reveal the public man than the one who "knows that the calm of retirement is appropriate to those raised in philosophy and literature" (PKöln inv. 4533 9-10 at Browne, "Harpocration" 193: the words of Aur. Ammon, brother of the wandering panegyrist Aur. Harpocration; cf. n. 35 above) and who has "escaped our knowledge, simply by having escaped distinction" (Brown, Religion 186, on the members of the senatorial order at Rome).

where they did so, by validating the aspirant's claim to standing and prestige and ushering him into predictable channels of influence, in effect acting as a brake on sudden, unstructured mobility. The sorting might take two or three generations:^[83] so much the better reason for believing that virtue was safe in the order—the disciplina —Diocletian and his successors restored. Affronts to that order by jumped-up litterateurs—cases of spectacular mobility built on letters, cutting disturbingly across class lines—would not often come from the schools of liberal studies.

With its emphasis on order, discipline, and regularity, the sketch above might be read as an elaboration of Salvian.^[84] Writing after the fragmentation of the imperial government in much of the West, Salvian used Carthage as an example of the impurity of Africa under Roman rule, because that city "contained virtually all those things by which the order of the commonwealth [disciplina rei publicae ] is maintained or guided in the world as a whole." He listed the institutions responsible: the military forces, the governor's office and the other tools of administration, and the "schools of liberal arts"—grammar and rhetoric—which with the "philosophers' workshops" made up "all the gymnasia of language or mores. " Salvian's hostile vision brings us back to our starting point: the grammarian as guardian, ranged alongside the military commander and provincial governor, maintaining the language and tradition of the special man produced by the gymnastic of the soul and thus preserving the disciplina and social coherence of at least one segment of the commonwealth. So deeply rooted and enduring is this conception of the grammarian's role that it persists even when—or perhaps especially when—the comparable roles of commander and governor have been submerged or radically transformed. Although at first glance surprising, it seems on reflection predictable that a grammarian in Milan should have been called guardian of the empire (imperii custos ) at the start of the sixth century under the Ostrogothic kingdom.^[85]

[84] Gub. Dei 7.16.67-68.

[85] Ennod. Carm . 2.90.1; cf. Dict . 9.5, libertatis index, boni testimonium sanguinis ; all applied to Deuterius, for whom see Part II no. 44.

Yet our sketch, spare and selective as it is, is also artificially distinct. Drawn largely from the point of view of the literary culture, the picture tends to credit the classical elite's view of itself as living the only coherent and worthy life. That was, of course, a delusion. Moreover, the sketch cumulatively attributes to the grammarian a more important place than many of his contemporaries within and without the literary culture would have been willing to grant him. As a guardian the grammarian was also a threshold figure, exposed and ambiguous; his position of strength was vulnerable, capable of being chipped away on several sides. The next chapter accordingly is intended to blur some of the distinctions and give further nuance to the picture above by drawing in some of the forces that impinged upon the grammarian and his profession.