Chapter 2
Professio Litterarum

On 13 December 320 the grammarian Victor of Cirta / Constantina was brought before Zenophilus, governor of Numidia, for questioning. The interrogation began as follows:

Zenophilus . . . said, "What is your name?" He answered, "Victor." Zenophilus . . . said, "What is your personal condition [condicio ]?" Victor said, "I am a professor of Roman letters [professor sum Romanarum litterarum ], a Latin grammarian." Zenophilus . . . said, "What is your social status [dignitas ]?" Victor said, "My father was a decurion of the people of Constantina; my grandfather, a soldier. He had served in the comitatus , for our origin derives from Moorish blood."^[1]

Several points in the exchange should be noted. First, when asked his condition, Victor specifies his livelihood, his profession of letters.^[2] Moreover, in the context of the exchange, personal condition implies (or effectively means) dignitas —social status and prestige.^[3] Finally, condition and social status are inextricably associated with legal status: as a member of a liberal profession and the son of a curialis , Victor would have possessed a fairly lofty position (honestas , the state of being a gentleman)^[4]

[1] Gesta apud Zenophilum, CSEL 26.185.7ff. (cf. Chap. 1 n. 83).

[2] Cf. ibid. 193.5f., Zenophilus . . . dixit: cuius condicionis es? Saturninus respondit: fossor ; ibid. 11f., Zenophilus . . . dixit: cuius condicionis es? Victor [another man of the same name, not the grammarian] dixit: artifex sum .

[3] Note that when Saturninus and Victor (n. 2) have stated their condiciones , no further inquiry is made concerning their dignitas . Cf. also ibid. 195.14f., Zenophilus . . . dixit: cuius condicionis es? Castus dixit: nullam dignitatem habeo ; and Garnsey, Social Status 225ff.

[4] Cf. ibid. 185.14, Zenophilus to Victor: memor fidei et honestatis tuae simpliciter designa .

and so certain legal privileges—for example, exemption from torture—that those of lowlier status (humiliores ) did not have.

These points touch on two of the themes of this chapter. First, the concept of a profession in Victor's world evidently involved some attributes different from those of modern professions: for example, the professional man—a physician, say, or an architect—who gives testimony before an American bench cannot expect his professional standing to affect his treatment under the law should he show contempt of court, or to distinguish him juridically from a day laborer or tradesman in similar circumstances. Second, theory and practice do not always coincide: thus Victor, when reluctant to testify, found himself threatened with torture, from which his honestas supposedly protected him.^[5]

We can better understand the grammarians' position by comparing their profession with the modern concept of a profession. The comparison is suggested not only by the etymological link professio litterarum provides^[6] but also by important substantive similarities.

For the contemporary notion of a profession, consider the physician or attorney.^[7] First, and most obvious, the profession of each is based on a conceptually distinct system of knowledge and practice that is recognized as such by society and is reflected in the structural differentiation of society's institutions. For instance, the law in the United States today is a system of thought separate from, say, religion: the attorney does not think of himself (or, of course, herself) as a priest, nor do his fellow citizens; and the institutions of the law have their own well-defined place in the structure of American life. Because of this differentiation, the would-be physician or attorney expects to gain his expertise in a specialized institution—a professional school, where he is trained by members of the profession—and he expects his training to be subject to testing and certification, which will be determined, again, by members of the profession. He assumes that his success at this and later stages will depend above all on objective evaluation of his skills. (How often this meritocratic assumption will prove false is a different matter; we are concerned here with professional ideology.) In his practice he is expected to act autonomously and impersonally; the procedures he follows should be those defined by his expertise and its techniques and should be unaffected by personal relations or outside authority. The physician

[5] Ibid. 186.13ff.: Zenophilus . . . Victori dixit: simpliciter confitere, ne strictius interrogeris .

[6] On the phrase, cf. Dahlmann, Kleine Schriften 255ff.

[7] On the definition of a profession sketched in this and the following paragraph, see Parsons, "Professions" 536; Bledstein, Culture , chap. 3, esp. pp. 86-87 and the literature there cited in n. 12.

should in each case prescribe the treatment dictated by his best professional judgment, irrespective of differences in the social status of his patients or his personal ties to them; the attorney should handle a case according to the methods laid down by his training, without regard for the climate of opinion, his personal feelings toward his client, or external pressures. If either man acts otherwise, he behaves unprofessionally, in the most common sense of the word. The physician or attorney is also expected to put his expertise to socially responsible use and is specifically encouraged to do so by institutions—for example, boards of ethics—that his profession has developed.

Contemporary professionalism has several other important characteristics. Since the profession is commonly a full-time occupation that provides a livelihood, it gives its practitioner a distinct place in the economic system of his society; the profession usually has a specialized or technical language (jargon), a restricted code that allows shorthand communication among its members while excluding laymen; and the profession confers (de facto , if not de jure ) a distinct and usually respected social status. In general, the emphasis falls on the professionals' individual and collective authority, objectivity, self-determination, and self-regulation, with those characteristics contributing ultimately to the well-being of society.

The grammarian's profession resembled the modern notion in several obvious ways. His expertise was conceptually distinct, with a cultural tradition of its own—embodied, for example, in the technical handbook (ars , ), which is his most characteristic document. The grammarian was at home in the structurally differentiated institution of his school, which was distinguished horizontally from other institutions (for example, the family) in the society around it and vertically from other institutions (for example, the school of rhetoric) in the literary culture.^[8] In addition, his expertise and his institutional niche gave the grammarian a sense of autonomy and authority, which found various forms of expression: the Roman grammarian derived the word ars itself from either (excellence) or artus (close, firm, tight); the grammarian treated language objectively and impersonally, as a phenomenon subject to the analytical methods of his tradition, and he imagined himself the arbiter of language.^[9] Finally, from this position of professional competence and authority he could be thought to contribute to the ordered well-being of society in his role as guardian.

[8] For the concept of structural differentiation applied to institutions in the Roman world, see esp. Hopkins, "Structural Differentiation," "Elite Mobility" 108ff., and Conquerors 74ff.

[9] On these and other consequences of the grammarian's professional niche, see Chaps. 4 and 5.

Yet in other, equally important ways the grammarian's ancient profession stands apart from the modern. Most obvious, there did not exist any specialized training comparable to modern professional education; and in its absence the grammarian was permanently linked to a tradition-minded, aristocratic amateurism, with consequences difficult to overstate. Our purpose in this chapter, then, is to survey how the grammarian's position corresponds to or differs from a modern professional's, in order to view that position and its inherent tensions more closely. We will consider, in turn, how the distinctiveness of the grammarian's profession—its conceptual and institutional differentiation—was affected by its place on the boundary between mere letters and liberal letters, how the profession's differentiation and autonomy were influenced by the social milieu of the high literary culture, and how the grammarian's contribution to the common good was regarded by the second great tradition of late antiquity, Christianity.

Some Variable Definitions: Literacy, Letters, and the Grammarian's Profession

We can begin with two propositions. First, grammar's intellectual and social distinction owed much to its role in a segment of society that had a fairly fixed idea of what literacy involved—a knowledge of letters gained in the scholae liberales —and that placed a high premium on acquiring and using this literacy. Second, that segment of society was at all times and on any estimation very small: for the mass of the population, letters of any kind were marginal in daily life. In the following few pages I would like to consider these propositions and their consequences. Specifically, I want to suggest that the marginal place of literacy made the idea of letters more flexible anal that this flexibility had the simultaneous (if contradictory) effects of partially emphasizing and partially blurring the distinctiveness of the grammarian's profession.

It is necessary first to gauge the proportions of literacy and illiteracy in the empire—an inevitably imprecise business in the absence of direct and statistically reliable evidence. The overall impression, certainly, is one of massive illiteracy. R. P. Duncan-Jones has provided the clearest indications in a recent comparative study of age rounding (the practice of giving ages in multiples of five) on tombstones from the western half of the empire in the first three centuries of our era.^[10] The importance of

[10] Duncan-Jones, "Age-Rounding, Illiteracy," superseding the similar study by Mócsy, "Unkenntnis," esp. in the statistical method used. Cf. also Duncan-Jones, "Age-Rounding in Greco-Roman Egypt."

the study lies in the correlation it notes between age rounding and illiteracy in contemporary underdeveloped societies: rounding cumulatively betokens ignorance of exact age, which cumulatively betokens circumstances wherein illiteracy is also common. The index of rounding deducible from ancient inscriptions is very high, and that in turn should imply a high rate of illiteracy. As Duncan-Jones remarked, "it is very striking that in modern cases where rounding exceeds [a level much lower than that implied by the Roman evidence], illiteracy of 70% or more is also found."^[11] The observation appears all the more suggestive when one considers that a survey of inscriptions can only include those able to afford a tombstone, omitting the economically (and so, presumably, culturally) submerged portion of the population,^[12] and cannot take into account the substantial number whose only language was the local vernacular.^[13]

Evidence from other parts of the empire, although even patchier than the inscriptions, also points toward pervasive illiteracy. For example, contracts, deeds, and loans, largely preserved in Egypt but appearing here and there in other areas, commonly reveal that the parties (that is, persons participating in the formal economic life of their society at a fairly high level) were illiterate.^[14] Or, perhaps still more notable, illiteracy appears among men whose standing or function would seem to favor a knowledge of letters, if not presuppose it; these range from illiterate local officials (including a town secretary) in Egypt of the second, third, and fourth centuries^[15] to illiterate abbots, and at least one illiterate

[11] Duncan-Jones, "Age-Rounding, Illiteracy" 347.

[12] Ibid. 345.

[13] On the vernaculars, see Chap. 1 n. 25. There was probably a large overlap between the poorest and the non-Romanized segments of the population, although we need not think it was complete. It is also possible that a person whose everyday language was the local vernacular would have his tombstone inscribed in the language of culture; cf. Brunt, "Romanization" 171.

bishop, in the fifth and sixth centuries.^[16] At the least, there is reason for "a more pessimistic view of the state of literacy in the mass of Roman society than the one usually adopted."^[17] It is hardly going too far to say that the great majority of the empire's inhabitants were illiterate in the classical languages.

Questions naturally arise about this limited literacy: When? Where? Among whom? The first is much the most difficult to answer. Are we, for example, to think of a general decline in literacy, aggravated if not brought on by the "political chaos of the 200's" and simply linear in its direction, with "fewer every year [knowing] how to read and write"?^[18]

[17] Duncan-Jones, "Age-Rounding, Illiteracy" 335, referring to Cipolla, Literacy , and to Marrou, Histoire (sim., e.g., Picard, "D'Autun à Mactar" 15f.; Riché, Education 21f.). See now also Harris, "Literacy," for varied and powerful arguments against optimistic estimates of literacy's diffusion under the principate: unhappily, this valuable paper came to my attention only as the final touches were being put to this book.

[18] So recently MacMullen, Crisis 58ff.; and cf. Turner, Greek Papyri 83.

That is the common opinion, and it is probably correct—in part, and for some areas more than for others.^[19] But it is also surely true that—in a manner and to a degree that the current state of our knowledge prevents us from specifying—the common opinion must be modified to take account of likely regional differentiation, of varying periods of resilience and depression within a given region, and especially of the modest benchmark against which any decline must be measured. For unless the evidence is completely misleading, the general level of literacy at even the best of times must have been very low.^[20]

The case of Oxyrhynchus is instructive here.^[21] Over the course of the third century the city gives evidence of alternating depression and prosperity; in particular, complaints of ruin in the century's second quarter are replaced by signs of economic exuberance in the third quarter, when one finds public works in progress, ambitious games, an expensive corn dole, and municipal concern for education, in the person of a publicly appointed grammarian. Yet toward the end of the third quarter, over two-thirds of the known applicants for the corn dole—themselves members of a privileged segment of the town's citizenry—are illiterate. Allow for the possibility that some of these were illiterate because of an earlier economic depression and decline: the proportion found among a select group of citizens toward the end of a period of prosperity must still point to fundamental illiteracy in the population at large, enduring through good times and bad.

[19] Note, e.g., MacMullen's general statement (Crisis 59, based on Mócsy, "Unkenntnis") that age awareness in the western provinces decreases from the earlier to the later principate and that "in the latter period cities gradually sink toward the level of the rural areas." In fact, the chronological distinctions in Mócsy's work—based in turn on the tabulations of J. Szilágyi (see Mócsy, p. 388 n. 3; on the limited validity of these distinctions and tabulations, see Duncan-Jones, "Age-Rounding, Illiteracy" 350f.)—yield very mixed results: of the 65 towns and cities surveyed, 20 show age awareness remaining at roughly the same level, i.e., fluctuating by less than 5%, between the earlier (s.I-s.II) and later (s.III-s.VII) periods; 22 show a rise in age awareness of 5% or more between the two periods; and 23 show a fall of 5% or more. Of the provinces overall, 6 show age awareness remaining at roughly the same level (Dalmatia stays the same; Africa, which contributes 40% of the data, shows a rise of 3%; Gaul, Italy, Spain, and Moesia show a fall of 4%, 4%, 3%, and 2%, respectively); 7 show rates of age awareness increasing by 5% or more; but none shows a comparable decrease.

[20] Concerning periodic and regional fluctuations in prosperity, as against a generalized and steady decline, see the recent, suggestive survey by Whittaker, "Inflation."

[21] For the following, see Parsons, PCollYoutie 2 pp. 438ff., with Part II no. 90; Rea, POxy . 40, pp. 2ff., on qualifications for the dole at Oxyrhynchus (see also Lewis, "Recipients"); and J. D. Thomas's review of Rea, in CR 26 (1976) 111, drawing attention to illiteracy among the applicants for the dole.

The other questions permit more straightforward answers. As could be expected, the tendency toward age rounding—and so, probably, illiteracy—increases the farther one goes from a major city^[22] and the farther down one goes on the economic ladder. Thus the index of rounding for town councilors in Italy and Africa is only one-third that for the citizens at large in those two areas,^[23] and illiterates in the papyri tend to belong to the lower economic levels of society.^[24]

But it would be wrong to think that higher economic status guaranteed literacy at all times and in every area. The index of rounding for Italian and African curiales in the first three centuries A.D. , though much lower than that for the humbler orders, is not insignificant; possibly we find here a hint that Diocletian's ruling of 293, that illiteracy was no bar to curial status, did not so much mark a sudden shift as clarify and legitimize a situation that had existed for some time, especially in smaller towns, where the curial order was a heterogeneous mixture of occupations and backgrounds.^[25] Similarly, the members of the gymnasial class in Egypt might predictably be literate, but they were not uniformly so: letters were as a rule taught outside the gymnasium, were learned desultorily, and if learned were sometimes forgotten.^[26] Conversely, literacy could reach down to humble levels, to slaves trained as secretaries.^[27]

What general formulation is possible, then? First, we must imagine a state of very sparse literacy at best, subject to fluctuation from time to time and place to place. Though we may suppose that literacy declined in the later empire (with the erosion affecting the margins of the upper classes most), perceptions of a broad decline should probably be tempered by a more sober view of literacy in the early empire.^[28] Second, we should imagine that literacy ranged across the spectrum of classes in a way that

[22] Duncan-Jones, "Age-Rounding, Illiteracy" 341ff., on the evidence of Africa.

[23] Ibid. 338: the sharpness of the cleavage is especially noteworthy, suggesting a rapid drop in the rate of literacy below the curial order.

[25] CJ 10.31.6; on the evidence concerning illiteracy and curial status in Egypt, see Youtie, "AG PAMMATOS " 175 (= Scriptiunculae 2.625) n. 49.

[27] E.g., the notary manumitted in the will of Gregory Nazianzen, PG 37.392.

[28] To put it another way, the general properties of the curve suggested below would probably have remained fairly constant, with chronological differences dependent on changes in the pitch of the pyramid (whether, and to what degree, and with what fluctuations it became more steep) in a given place at different times.

combined the traits of both horizontal and vertical segmentation. For example, the knowledge of litterae (that is, of Latin) in the Western Middle Ages, or the classical (as opposed to the modern) secondary education in nineteenth-century Germany, tended to be engrossed by groups not defined or united simply by common economic standing;^[29] in contrast, basic literacy under the empire was probably first and foremost a function of one's place on the economic pyramid. Yet the evidence suggests that the distinction was not purely vertical that the presence or absence of literacy was not simply marked by a single class line. We should probably think of a curve superimposed on the economic pyramid, starting near the bottom and including greater proportions of each class as it approaches the top:

Another curve with similar properties could be added higher on the pyramid to mark off those who were literate in liberal studies:

The characteristics of these curves are of course purely hypothetical. The picture might nonetheless serve crudely to represent the distribution of literacy and its relation to the different types of schools:^[30] above the second curve are those taught in the scholae liberales ; between the two curves are those educated only in the school of letters. The bulk of the pyramid represents those innocent of formal schooling.

Such a picture has social and political implications that have only begun to be explored, prompting different, equally valid responses when viewed

[29] The clergy in the one case; the liberal professions, the gentry, high civil servants, and officers in the other. Cf. Grundmann, "Litteratus" 14; Ringer, Education 76. In both cases there was significant horizontal segmentation: e.g., the sons of German merchants tended to receive an education different from the sons of high civil servants, although the means of the two groups might place them on an economic par.

[30] See Chap. 1 pp. 24ff.

from different perspectives. Writing with an ideal of administrative efficiency in mind, one historian can rightly question the quality of the information that would reach the central government from a world pervaded by illiteracy.^[31] Another, considering the humbler mechanics of a society that necessarily "made a large place for illiteracy," can rightly emphasize that letters were a peripheral concern, occasionally useful, not necessary in the daily lives of most men, and that far more than is imaginable today the ordinary illiterate was able to live a sound and productive life with no apparent economic or social disability, "to function in a broad variety of occupations, to be recognized as a respectable member of his class, to attain financial success, to hold public office, to associate on equal terms with his literate neighbor."^[32] Our concern with the grammarian's position suggests still another point of view, determined by two evident and related facts: first, literacy was not simple in definition or possession; second, different notions of literacy existed in the different groups represented on either side of the upper curve in my second figure. I want to propose that these two facts in combination not only gave the grammarian's profession some of its distinctiveness (as could be expected) but at the same time helped to blur that distinctiveness at its edges.

Despite the tendency of modern states to standardize education on a scale unknown in antiquity, our notion of literacy is still fluid. The literate person, in the most basic sense of the term, can read and write his society's standard language (in societies that recognize a standard language) with minimal competence. But university teachers in the United States today increasingly complain of their students' illiteracy, by which they mean anything from gross deficiency in basic skills to inability to read and write with far more than minimal sophistication. And anyone seeking a university teaching position will score a point if he can be said to be literate, that is, broadly conversant with the higher literary culture, or, simply, cultured. Having so many possible applications of the term is a symptom of situational literacy: the meaning and connotation of "literacy" depend on such variables as geographic or social context and the user's view of his own literacy.

Not surprisingly, similar fluidity was apparent in antiquity.^[33] At one extreme were the illiterates who appear in the contracts, deeds, loans,

[31] Cf. the trenchant comments of MacMullen, Crisis 58ff.

[32] Youtie, "YP OG PAF EYS " esp. 219ff., on the relations among literate and illiterate members of the same household and on illiteracy as a centripetal force in the family.

[33] For a useful survey of litteratus and illiteratus in Latin literary usage, see Grundmann, "Litteratus" 15ff. Grundmann's primary concern, however, was the Middle Ages; a more thorough study of the classical and late-antique evidence is needed.

and titles from Egypt and elsewhere, the men and women described as "those who do not know letters" (, litteras nescientes ): "letters" in this case refers to basic skills in reading and writing Greek or Latin, and the phrases are purely descriptive, registering a fact of life that involves no practical disadvantage and implies in itself no social or economic inferiority.^[34] At the other extreme is a liberally educated man like Jerome, who reveals his own assumptions and values in the heat of polemic. Clearly, when Jerome taunts Rufinus with the charge that he and his followers "have not learned their letters," or when he calls Rufinus an "illiterate author" () and recommends that he go back to (note well) the grammarian's school to "learn his letters," he primarily means that Rufinus is deficient not in his ABCs but in more advanced literary skills.^[35] Equally clearly, the deficiency in itself carries a stigma.^[36]

Examples can be collected and located between the two extremes. There is Aurelia Thaisous, who asserts in petitioning for the ius trium liberorum (the laws that "give women adorned with the 'right of three children' the ability to act as their own guardian and conduct all their business without a guardian") that the laws gave this ability "especially to women who know letters," and who describes herself as "literate [] and able to write with the greatest of ease."^[37] Her claim of literacy is substantively fairly modest, the simple ability to write fluently. But by gilding the basic provisions of the law ("especially . . . ") she shows she is, if not boasting of her attainment,^[38] at least aware she possesses a distinction that would buttress her claim to privilege and provide a practical advantage in her dealings without a guardian once the privilege was granted.

[34] Cf. Youtie, "AG PAMMATOS " 168ff. (= Scriptiunculae 2.618ff.), "YP OG PAF EYS "; and cf. n. 36 below.

[36] Note in general that illiteratus appears to have pejorative connotations in Latin only when (if not always when) the higher sense of litteratus is the implied or expressed antithesis; cf. Grundmann, "Litteratus" 16ff. Similarly, Youtie's statement that the illiterate could "associate on equal terms with his literate neighbor" ("YP OG PAF EYS " 201, quoted above) would most commonly be true of the lower forms of literacy.

[37] POxy . 12.1467 (A.D. 263).

[38] Youtie, "AG PAMMATOS " 166f. (= Scriptiunculae 2.616f.), and the second thoughts at "YP OG PAF EYS " 221 n. 62.

Or again, there is the fourteen-year-old boy whose application for membership in the gymnasium includes the statement that he is "learning letters" ().^[39] Here "letters" probably means literature rather than the simple ability to read and write, and the attainment is mentioned since it "serves to enhance the boy's status."^[40] Yet since such an attainment was certainly not required for membership, its absence by itself would scarcely have involved a disability or stigma for other members of the gymnasial class. In these examples the sense of "(il)literacy" and "(not) knowing letters" depends not only upon absolute or substantive criteria but also upon more fluid and less tangible considerations—the context in which the terms are used, the expectations of the circles with which one is familiar, and (clearly in Jerome's case) how far self-esteem and one's claims on the respect of others depend on literary sophistication.^[41]

The curves in my second figure above are drawn in dotted lines because the concepts of letters and literacy were so fluid and so much a product of circumstantial—especially social—definition. The boundary between literacy and illiteracy marked by the lower curve was at once real and vague. The "slow writers" and "persons of few letters," who could painstakingly sign legal documents but were otherwise illiterate,^[42] or the man who could only read block letters,^[43] would all have called themselves literate; they were clearly not "without letters" (, illiterati ), even if they could not claim such fluency as Aurelia Thaisous. Standing on the boundary of literacy, they could regard themselves, and act, as literate for a set purpose or under certain conditions. So the village secretary Petaus could state that Ischyrion, the secretary of another village, was not illiterate, because he could add the appropriate brief subscription to the documents that came before him.^[44] In this case, even

[39] POxy . 22.2345 (A.D. 224), with other, similar documents discussed by Bingen, "Note," and by Sijpesteijn, "Some Remarks."

[41] Thus, for example, the question whether or not the illiterate village secretaries Petaus and Ischyrion attempted to mask their illiteracy in order to avoid its "stigma" (so Turner, Greek Papyri 83; contra , Youtie, "AG PAMMATOS " 172 [= Scriptiunculae 2.622]) could be settled finally only with more explicit testimony from Petaus and Ischyrion themselves. I suspect, however, that Turner has the better part of the argument here; see just below and n. 44.

[43] Petron. Sat . 58.7, lapidarias litteras scio , with Daniel, "Liberal Education" 157ff.

the most marginal literacy has evident social repercussions, acquitting Ischyrion of a charge that he was unfit for his position.

It is plain enough that at the lower boundary literacy is often perceived-variably and individually, that it is defined both by objective or substantive criteria (how well and how much one can read and write) and by context. The important point is, the upper boundary—between mere letters and liberal letters, between schools of letters and liberal schools, between teachers of letters and grammarians—was also both real and porous; its demarcation was similarly influenced by circumstance and substantive considerations. But whereas at its lower ranges the circumstantial definition of literacy can be approached through variations in individual perception, at its upper range it can be more usefully discussed in terms of larger categories: institutions, class, and geography.

As we saw above, Jerome's idea of knowing letters and his play with the idea of Rufinus's illiteracy bear the stamp of his own upper-class liberal education. Just so, the Gallo-Roman aristocrat Sidonius Apollinaris can say of one of his peers that from birth he drank in letters (litteras bibere ), without having to specify liberales . Even if that sense were not clear from the context, Sidonius could be sure that his audience, men of background and expectations similar to his own, would assume as much for themselves.^[45] Such men had a fairly fixed idea of what in substance literacy meant, or at least of the minimum attainments proper to a man who could be called literate: contact with the main classical texts and the correctness and adornment of language to show for it.

This conception of literacy was widely diffused geographically and ancient in its tradition, providing the liberally educated classes with much of their mental furnishings and (however much a Jerome might struggle with it) a sense of their own status and worth.^[46] The importance of letters in this regard reinforced the traditional definition of knowing letters. The grammarian was of course a fixture of this tradition, his profession both distinguished and bound by its antiquity and diffusion. His instruction was standardized, but by shared conventions, not by statute. Because of the tradition of his profession and, hence, because of his clientele's expectations, a grammarian's classroom in Bordeaux would probably have looked much like its counterpart in Rome or Carthage, and a grammarian's classroom in Alexandria would probably have looked much like one in Antioch or Nicomedia.

[45] Sidon. Apoll. Carm . 23.204ff.

[46] See Chap. 1 above; on Jerome, see pp. 81f. below.

The same is not, however, obviously true of the local teachers of letters, "boys' masters," or the like, who were scattered throughout the empire, teaching beneath the level of grammarians, in less prestigious institutions.^[47] Even without any evidence we might predict that such teachers, especially in areas away from the great educational centers, would not be tied to a uniform tradition as broad or strong as the grammarian's and would offer more varied instruction. We might expect to see a more fluid understanding of literacy, depending much more on local needs and the local notion of what constituted letters as well as on the teachers' own attainments and inclinations. But there is no need for conjecture. For example, the teacher of letters Cassianus was evidently responding to one notion of letters and exploiting a particular attainment of his own when he included the useful skill of shorthand in his instruction at Imola, in northern Italy.^[48] But the school of letters in Spain where Orosius had the Aeneid burned into his memory was evidently run according to a different idea of letters, one that overlapped with the grammarians'.^[49]

The presence of Vergil—the poet par excellence of the Latin grammarian—in the ludus litterarius well suggests how permeable was the boundary between the two spheres and how broad, traditional distinctions could be blurred according to circumstances. This is not to say that Orosius's experience was universal, that classical texts were taught in every school of letters: neither the argument nor the evidence implies this, although there is at the same time no need to think Orosius's experience was unique.^[50] Nor was the boundary less real for being porous, any more than the ambiguity of literacy at its lower levels meant there was no real distinction between knowing and not knowing letters. The point, rather, is that the boundary was marked by such intangibles as individual predisposition, locality, or class, as well as by objective criteria. In some cases mere letters and liberal letters, the school of letters and the grammarian's school, might overlap because of a local variation that

[47] On the subject of local variation that follows, see Kaster, "Notes" 342ff.

[49] Oros. Adv. pagan . 1.18.1, the tale of Aeneas's labors ludi litterarii disciplina nostrae quoque memoriae inustum est . Reading Vergil would necessarily also involve, at least incidentally, a fairly sophisticated level of linguistic instruction. For common ground between the ludus litterarius and the grammarian's school in linguistic instruction, see Quintil. Inst . 1.4.27, with the discussion by Kaster, "Notes" 339.

[50] For more evidence, see Kaster, "Notes" 342ff.; and note esp. the boys' master (magister puerorum ) Clamosus and his son of the same name and profession, both at Parentium: Part II nos. 29, 30.

would raise the substance of mere letters to approach liberal letters. In other cases, perhaps more commonly, a similar overlap would result from factors, primarily social, that would bring the substance of the grammarian's school down to approach mere letters.

Upper-class students who aimed at an education in liberal letters would normally have the grammarian as their first teacher.^[51] Some students might have received private tuition in the elements before entering the grammarian's school; some would begin as young as seven. This mixture of ages and backgrounds could be served by a mixed corps of teachers, as we find among the grammarians of Bordeaux, whom we know especially well.^[52] Some of these grammarians—including, at one point, Ausonius, who began as a teacher of the youngest students—gave elementary instruction (called prima elementa or the like); others taught at a more advanced level. The classrooms of the former, in the age and attainments of their students and the level of their instruction, would not have looked very different from the classroom of a teacher of letters. Yet they were all grammatici , by definition teaching liberal letters, however humble the early stages might be:^[53] they were defined by their context, as teachers in an important center of literary studies, educating children who belonged for the most part to the best families of Bordeaux, Aquitaine, and Gaul at large. At the outset of his career, Ausonius was no less a grammarian for giving elementary instruction to children he "nurtured in their suckling years."^[54] Indeed, it might be said that Ausonius was then a grammarian simply because he gave that instruction in the setting he did to the children he did. In such a case, circumstances outweighed substance, intangibles defined boundaries that objectively might seem violated.

Where literacy and letters were not objectively defined but, being fluid in meaning and connotation, were dependent on the contexts in which they were embedded, it is not surprising that the agents of literacy were similarly dependent. For the grammarian this meant that his profession was marked off both by objectively definable skills (knowledge of correct speech, the explication of the poets) and by nontechnical—what we might regard as nonprofessional—considerations. As we see from the grammatici of Bordeaux, the latter were no less important in defining the grammarian's position. The differentiation of his profession coincided with and was determined by the differentiation of his skills; but the differentiation of his profession also coincided with and was determined by the

[51] See Chap. 1 n. 44.

[52] On the grammatici Burdigalenses , see Appendix 4.

[53] Cf. above n. 35, on litterae at Jer. C. Rufin . 1.30.

[54] Auson. Epist . 22.67f., with which compare Kaster, "Notes" 333, on Augustine as grammarian.

social differentiation of the world around him—with consequences that a modern eye, accustomed to seeing a profession in terms of its technical attributes, might overlook or misjudge.^[55] The grammarian was who he was not only because he possessed the traditional skills of his craft but also because he taught in circumstances and served a clientele defined by a traditional structure of prestige and privilege. It is as though a physician's profession today were partly defined by his traditionally serving patients of a certain social status.

Yet, another point of view is possible. Because he stood at the boundary of liberal letters, the grammarian was in an ambiguous position. Although he was easily distinguished from the next figure in the sequence of liberal education, the teacher of rhetoric—there would ordinarily be little opportunity to confuse their classrooms—the same statement cannot be made so flatly concerning the grammarian and the teachers of letters outside the liberal schools. With some grammarians' instruction descending to the level of the latter and the instruction of some of the latter rising to the level of the grammarian, and in view of the fluidity of letters, it is little wonder that the same general style—"agent of letters" (i.e., teacher: , litterator )—is often used of both.^[56]

In a world of limited and varied literacy, the grammarian's professio litterarum was only one among a number of competing educational forms, each offering its own competence and status, even power. Those who stood outside the literary culture of prestige not only were able to live productive lives but might have a freedom of movement extraordinary in itself and repugnant, if not threatening, to those loyal to traditional structures of privilege.

Among the more familiar examples of such freedom are the stenographers (notarii , "notaries") who provide some of the more spectacular instances of social mobility in the fourth century.^[57] Practicing a form of literacy distinct from liberal letters and traditionally reserved for men of humble origins, the notaries were increasingly drawn into the imperial service in the first half of the fourth century, meeting the bureaucracy's need for more and more clerks. They thus merged with the new aristocracy of service; and in particular those who worked dose to the emperor—

[55] For example, Jouai, Magistraat 32ff., correctly recognized the different functions of the grammatici of Bordeaux but had to make the distinction intelligible by singling out one set as "de 'echte' grammatici," against the evidence. The situation is dearly and firmly described by Booth, "Elementary Education" 6ff.

[56] See Appendix 2.

[57] For the following, on the notaries, their status, and their relation to liberal culture, see Marrou, Histoire 448ff., Christiana tempora 55ff.; Wolf, Schulwesen 53ff.; Petit, Libanius 363ff., Étudiants 80; A. H. M. Jones, "Social Background" 28f., LRE 572ff.; Liebeschuetz, Antioch 242f.; Hopkins, "Elite Mobility" 114.

the notaries of the sacred consistory, for example—drew power from the contact, profiting from an access few could match, being entrusted with extraordinary commissions, and enjoying a corresponding mobility as they rose to higher office and wealth. A man like Libanius—who thought of access to power as a commodity reserved for his students or men much like them, emerging from the urban upper classes and passing through the schools into a network of friends—could find the phenomenal rise of such parvenu clerks repellent on several levels. It was, for one thing, a victory of technicité over humanisme and the traditional culture of letters.^[58] To a man whose life was anchored by his daily contact with the ancients, the notary's craft could represent the ultimate plunge of literacy into shapelessness and transience. More galling still was the diminution of his own privilege, which he perceived as following from the notary's circumventing the traditional structure of prestige.^[59] Such disgruntlement had a predictable outcome: the upper classes coopted the notary's position.^[60] After the mid-fourth century, the elite managed to win for itself the access to the emperor that notaries of humble origins had previously enjoyed. The status stenography could provide made learning notarial skills along with liberal letters in an upper-class education not only desirable but even respectable.^[61] By the first half of the fifth century, the title of notary became virtually honorary.^[62]

A figure comparable to the notary, if less well known, is the autodidact.^[63] Like the notary in his heyday, the successful autodidact appeared to prosper independently of traditional structures and was subject to the disgruntled attacks of men who identified with those structures: talking about a man of humble origins who became an advocate by haunting the tribunals and went on to gain wealth and office, Libanius sounded much the same as he did when heaping contempt on arriviste stenographers.^[64]

[58] Cf. Marrou and Petit as cited in the preceding note.

[59] "Perceived" is used here advisedly: since we know that Libanius's complaints are exaggerated (his own students continued to prosper; cf. the remarks of Petit, Libanius 368ff., Étudiants 83), it was evidently the mere thought of such circumvention that stung, as much as its effects.

[60] Cf. Hopkins, "Elite Mobility" 114, comparing the displacement of freed-men by equites in the service of the emperor in the early empire.

[61] See, e.g., Amm. Marc. 29.1.8, on Theodorus in the West; Hauser-Meury, Prosopographie 131, on the education of the sons of Nicobulus in the East. A similar mixture is implied at the beginning of the sixth century by the early career of Ioannes Lydus; see Part II no. 92.

[62] The real work of the notaries was done by a smaller number than bore the title, or by other functionaries in the bureaucracy: see Jones, LRE 574.

[63] I know of no comprehensive study of this interesting type.

[64] Or . 62.46ff. on Heliodorus; directly comparable with Or . 42.23-24, the rogues' gallery of men who rose through stenography.

In the eyes of the expert who had painstakingly acquired his skill within the confines of his cultural tradition, the autodidact was an intruder,^[65] an eccentric talent succeeding through mother wit alone,^[66] disturbingly unencumbered by the forms through which expertise was customarily attained.

To be thus unencumbered meant one's achievement was intensely personal; at the same time it necessarily meant one's position was isolated and exposed. In this lonely distinction the autodidact was unlike the notary. In place of a prestigious tradition, the notary had his institutional niche and the power it could provide; but from his first appearance, the autodidact commonly found validation in another source. The claim of the bard Phemius, "I am self-taught [], and the god has implanted in my wits songs of all kinds,"^[67] is echoed in the epitaph of a literary man "whose life was all-pure, whom the Muse made self-taught"^[68] and even in the epitaph of a woman "excelling in her devotion to her husband, for Athena herself made her self-taught in her accomplishments."^[69] The charismatic claim at once asserts a splendid singularity and draws back from affirming a purely personal achievement, revealing the tendency inherent in for the meaning "self-taught" to fall together with "untaught"—owing nothing to human mediators—and hence with "god-taught." The autodidact, in this sense, embodies the claim of natural knowledge, standing outside or above ordinary human culture, like the man who, "mastered by no constraint of humankind, but educated by the providence of the gods, acquired an incomparable, natural [lit., "self-generated": ] wisdom."^[70] Such a figure

[67] Homer Od . 22.347f.

[68] Bull. ép . 1973, 475 no. 1 (Cremna [Pisidia]), lines 5f.

[69] GVI 791 (s.III / s.IV?, Syracuse), lines 7f.; the subject of the verses was, interestingly, a Christian.

approximates the god who is "natural, untaught";^[71] he has knowledge directly and immediately, like Apollonius of Tyana, who "knew all languages, having learned not a one."^[72]

The socially mobile notary had joined his skill with an undeniable institutional source of power and prestige and had thus circumvented the traditional route to elite status. The charismatic autodidact vaulted over human institutions and traditions in a triumphant display of spiritual mobility. The one troubled the literary culture of prestige until he was tamed by it; the other was most evidently associated with Christianity, which emerged in the fourth century as the second culture of prestige. When we turn to the two great traditions, we will see how the history of the grammarian's profession in the classical literary culture was marked by tensions and cooptation much like the experience of the notary, and how the charismatic self-taught (untaught, god-taught) man stood near the center of the relations between the grammarian and the Christian culture of the fourth and fifth centuries.

Independence and Constraint: Good and Bad Grammarians and The Power of Convention

In Book 14, Chapter 5 of his Attic Nights , Aulus Gellius presents a curious spectacle. Two eminent Roman grammarians are engaged in a heated public argument, all but coming to blows over the correct vocative form of the adjective egregius : first one, then the other presses the claims of his rationalized account (ratio ) or rule (definitio ), then back again; no end in sight. With a shrug and a sniff Gellius withdraws: "But since . . . their competition was going on at quite some length, I did not judge it worth my while to listen longer to those same, well-known arguments, and left them yelling and battling." The incident is intended to amuse and appall, as each grammarian clings to his ratio as though his life depended on it, in a display of emotion and egotism at once unseemly and boring.

The episode, like so many in Gellius, involves a competition for prestige centering on the literary culture. Explicitly, the contestants are the two

grammarians, each with his professional authority invested in his own ratio . But Gellius's dismissal implies the larger competition played out in the Attic Nights as whole: Gellius and his learned friends versus the vulgus semidoctum , "the common run of half-educated men," to which the "half-educated grammarian" (semidoctus grammaticus ) belongs.^[73] In various vignettes the grammarians thrust themselves and their learning forward only to be embarrassed by their betters; they are consistently losers in the competition for a place in the "aristocracy of letters."^[74] This competition, its tensions, and its resolutions are perhaps most responsible for shaping the grammarian's relations as a professional teacher with men of culture at large and for defining the image of the grammarian in the literary tradition from the early empire onward.

In this section, then, we will briefly trace the origins and consequences of this competition. Along the way we will see how the early grammarians were able to claim a place in the world of liberal letters through their technical skills; how the social and cultural elite regarded the rise of the profession; how once the profession and its skills were established the elite coopted them; and how as a result the elite's conventional values limited the profession's independence.

Of course for competition there must be competitors. The grammarians were latecomers to the contest, owing their position to the gradual emergence of the Roman schools of liberal letters as institutions distinct from the family, where the education of the upper classes had long been embedded.^[75] Appearing at Rome from the late second century B.C. , the grammarians over the course of the next century slowly disengaged themselves from the great households to which they were formally tied as slaves and freedmen or on which as men of otherwise humble origin they were wholly dependent. Like the teachers of rhetoric, the grammarians began opening their own schools from about 100 B.C. and gradually became identified as the teachers of children in language

[73] Vulgus semidoctum: NA 1.7.17. Semidoctus grammaticus : 15.9.6.

[74] For the grammatici , apart from the passages cited above and below, see esp. NA 4.1, 5.4, 6.17, 8.10 praef., 13.31, 16.6, 18.6, 19.10, 20.10. For the most important exception, Gellius's teacher Sulpicius Apollinaris, see below, pp. 59-60. The place of letters in the larger competition for prestige and social standing among Gellius's contemporaries is well described by Champlin, Fronto 45ff., esp. 49.

[75] On the development of the grammarian's school at Rome, see recently Bonner, Education 37ff.; and esp. Booth, "Appearance." On competition within the aristocracy as a spur to the emergence of the liberal schools, see the sensible remarks of Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius 30ff. For the idea of structural differentiation applied to education in a systematic account of institutional change, see Hopkins, Conquerors 76ff. The present discussion, less concerned with the reasons for the differentiation, takes as its starting point the fact that it did occur.

and literature.^[76] In general, we can say that structural differentiation had gone as far as it would go by the beginning of the first century A.D. By that time the grammarian's school was formally separate both from the family and from other educational institutions, the rhetorician's school within the field of liberal studies and the school of letters outside.^[77]

These changes did not occur without friction between old and new. In their earliest, most explicit form the tensions of competition had as their focus the new institution that impinged most on public life. In a decree of 92 B.C. the censors attempted to close the schools of Latin rhetoric on the grounds that they contradicted the "habit and custom of the elders" (consuetudo ac mos maiorum ):^[78] the mos , we can infer, was the novitiate of the forum (tirocinium fori ), the traditional form of apprenticeship for public life, through which the prospective man of affairs attached himself as a youth to an established figure, learning how to act and speak as he followed his model and watched him go about his business. By its nature the tirocinium was part of a closed and rigid system that monopolized entry to a civic career. Access depended heavily on the ascribed status of the participants and the connections of family and friendship, and its methods were informal, based upon the personal relationship between the younger and the older man. The schools of rhetoric, offering wider access to an important skill, threatened the monopoly and provoked the (fruitless) attempt at repression.

Probably because the grammarian's connection with public life was always less direct than the rhetorician's, similar tensions involving the grammarian's school were less dramatic in their appearance and longer in coming. In fact, the most overt and sustained reactions did not begin until the first century A.D. , when the grammarian had already settled into his institutional niche and had begun explicitly to stake out language

[76] On the freedmen and slaves as grammarians, see now Christes, Sklaven . For dependence and disengagement, see esp. the cases of Antonius Gnipho and Lenaeus (Suet. Gramm . 7, 15). On schools of rhetoric, see below, n. 78. On the date, and on the gradual identification with the education of younger children, see esp. Booth, "Appearance" 123f. Suetonius's statement (Gramm . 3.3) that at certain times (temporibus quibusdam ) there were more than twenty schools of grammar at Rome is unfortunately vague in its chronology, but it must refer to a period well into the first century B.C.

[77] On the different kinds of schools, see Chap. 1 n. 44; for limitations on the differentiation from the school of letters see "Some Variable Definitions" above.

[78] Suet. Gramm . 25.2, specifying Latin rhetoricians with their own schools (ludi ), thus different from the more general SC de philosophis et de rhetoribus of 161 B.C. (Suet. Gramm . 25.1; Gell. NA 15.11.1); on the opening of the schools of rhetoric in the first decade of s.I B.C. and for the interpretation of the edict of 92 B.C. that follows, see Schmidt, "Anfänge."

as his area of expertise: it is possible here to glimpse the causes and effects, as the profession's differentiation fostered and was reinforced by the development of a specialized skill, with repercussions in the literary culture more broadly. A grammarian's claim to stand against Tiberius and control Latinity by limiting words' "citizenship"^[79] and, in Nero's reign, Seneca's sarcastic reference to the grammarians as the "guardians of Latin speech"^[80] mark out the period when the grammarian became identified in his own mind and in others' eyes as the agent of linguistic control. It is not accidental that the first comprehensive ars appears in Latin during this same period, composed by the professional grammarian Remmius Palaemon and providing the model for future handbooks.^[81] Intellectual history here catches up with institutional and social history: the ars defined and codified the professional's expertise, the systematic analysis and the rules that were his special excellence, and so helped install the grammarian in a cultural system to which he was a newcomer.

In this conservative milieu, the grammarian's rules can still seem novel to Gellius a century later, when he turns an unfriendly gaze on "those who pay homage to the new-fangled conventions [nova instituta ] of the grammatici as though they were the sacred objects of sacred precincts []."^[82] Yet Gellius's impatient disdain here dearly has a meaning different from what he intended. His characterization really shows how far the grammarians had progressed: it recognizes both the validity the common run of educated men attributed to the new-fangled conventions and the prestige those conventions' makers had come to enjoy.

This common grant of validity and prestige had several results. If two grammarians battling over the fine points of morphology are burlesque figures, the comedy nonetheless has a truth at its core: the rival grammarians cling as if for life each to his own rule because their lives—insofar as these were identified with professional and cultural status—did indeed depend on the rules. At the same time, for literary men who would stand apart from the common run, the grammatici became figures with whom they must reckon and from whom they might distinguish them-

[79] See Chap. 1 n. 16; cf. n. 113 below.

[80] Ep . 95.65. See also Ep . 108.30ff., Seneca's contempt for the grammarians, as figures concerned only with linguistic detail; and cf. Ep . 58.1ff., on "wasting one's time with a grammarian."

[81] On the influence of Palaemon's achievement, see Barwick, Remmius 146ff., 236ff. On previous artes at Rome as early as the Sullan age, and so within a generation of the introduction of the grammarian's school, see Barwick, ibid. 109ff., 229ff., with, e.g., Bonner, Education 55.

[82] NA 17.2.15. Note also Gellius's contempt for turba grammaticorum novicia at NA 11.1.5; and cf. NA 16.7.13, isti novicii semidocti .

selves. Writing on the language as a learned amateur in the time of Nero, the elder Pliny could foresee that his work would provoke the grammarians, and he registered a combative glee when his prediction proved correct.^[83] A generation later, the literary guru Yalerius Probus self-consciously set himself apart from the ordinary professional grammarian: Probus had followers (rather than pupils), three or four of whom he would admit to his home of an afternoon (not meet in larger groups, in a classroom, in the morning), where he would recline (not sit in a teacher's cathedra ) and hold conversations (not deliver lectures).^[84] It is the picture of an intimate and elite coterie, gentlemen meeting in an aristocracy of letters. It is of a piece with this picture that Probus despised "those rotten rules and cesspools of grammar."^[85]

Several factors aggravated the tensions that developed over the course of the first century and continued into the next. First, there was the propaedeutic paradox: grammar had become and was to remain the first stage in a liberal education, the fundamentum of eloquence, in the metaphor repeated from Quintilian through Cassiodorus;^[86] as such, it was both niggling and necessary. At the end of the first century Quintilian still had to defend grammar against the view that it was "insubstantial and jejune."^[87] The reasons for this view are understandable. Seemingly removed from the concerns worthy of gentlemen by its immersion in minutiae, grammar required the mastery of those rotten rules; narrow and achingly technical, it summoned up the old distinction between the technician's specialized training and the broad culture of the aristocratic ideal and fell decisively on the side of the former.^[88] But because of the institutional norms and cultural expectations that had developed among the elite, grammar was also unavoidable. The grammarian, as guardian, controlled access to the language and the education one's peers valued.

[83] NH praef. 28.

[84] Suet. Gramm . 24.2, with Grisart, "Valerius" 385. On the connotations of "follower" (sectator ) in particular, see below, with n. 107.

[85] The phrases appear in the anecdote preserved at Gell. NA 13.2.1: finitiones illas praerancidas et fetutinas grammaticas .

[86] Quintil. Inst . 1.4.5; Cassiod. Var . 9.21.3.

[87] Quintil. Inst . 1.4.5ff.

[88] On the distinction, see the recent survey of Christes, Bildung 15ff., 196ff. The narrowness is part of, e.g., Gellius's contempt for the semidocti : for the narrowness of the grammarian vs. the broader culture of the ideal, see esp. NA 20.10. Note that Quintilian's review of the grammarian's tasks, Inst . 1.4-8, dwells on his linguistic instruction; the culturally more inclusive task of enarratio is considered only in the latter part of 1.8. Contrast Florus's attempt to put a fair face on the grammarian's professio litterarum , concentrating wholly on the ethical content of the instruction and, at least as his text is now preserved, ignoring the linguistic-technical: cf. Chap. 1 n. 5.

His institutional place by itself made the grammarian a consequential figure endowed with power and respectability as a cultural authority, and his mastery of the language gave him a conceptual power that even those who might despise his pedantry were unwilling to abandon themselves.^[89]

Yet the grammarians were not obviously or unambiguously gentlemen, worthy of this power: they were by and large stigmatized for taking fees,^[90] and—especially at Rome, in the early first century—they were still comparable in their humble social origins to the grammarians of the preceding century. As competitors, they were at once worthy in their cultural standing and unworthy in their persons. Remmius Palaemon is emblematic of such circumstances, a grotesque in the eyes of the upper classes. Born a slave, he originally learned the lowly craft of weaving (the story went), and got his first taste of letters by accompanying his mistress's son to school; he then taught as a freedman at Rome, where his school brought him yearly earnings equivalent to a knight's census, and an estate. All his wealth went to satisfy his taste for luxury and his lusts; because of his vices, Tiberius and Claudius warned students off his school, but without effect. Vergil, he claimed, had used the name "Palaemon" in his work (Ecl . 3.50ff.) because he had foreseen that Palaemon himself would one day be the greatest scholar of poetry. Varro—a Roman senator and the greatest scholar of Latin before him—he called a pig.^[91]

The sketch is familiar: it is the standard picture of the arrogant and depraved parvenu. With some adjustment, this image of Palaemon could be superimposed on the caricatures of wealthy and powerful freedmen from the first century, especially in the imperial service, or of the suddenly risen notarii from the fourth. In each case the picture appears when competition for honor has been aggravated by the inconsistent status of some of the competitors, men who might enjoy prestige in one

[90] Cf. Dahlmann, Kleine Schriften 256 (and add Suet. Gramm . 3; Dio Chrys. Or . 7.114); Hopkins, Conquerors 124; Booth, "Image" 5; and below, n. 103. In his comment on Suet. Gramm . 24.2, numquam enim ita docuit [sc. Probus ] ut magistri personam sustineret , Grisart was probably correct to conclude ("Valerius" 385 n. 26) that "la phrase veut dire que Probus ne fut jamais un professionel exerçant son art moyennant salaire " (Grisart's emphasis). On change and continuity in attitudes toward payment, see Chap. 3 pp. 122-23.

[91] Suet. Gramm . 23; cf. most recently Christes, Sklaven 98ff.

or more areas (letters and wealth for Palaemon, political office and power for the notarii ) but have none in others (birth in Palaemon's case, letters and birth in the case of the notarii ).^[92]

Which features of our picture of Palaemon might be caricature it is not my purpose to decide here,^[93] nor is it necessary to question individual details. The overall emphasis speaks for itself: it betrays the tendency of a tradition to move in the direction of cliché and to resolve awkward inconsistencies by imposing a single image. An illustration can be found close to hand. One can gather references to teachers of letters in the high literary tradition from Demosthenes to Libanius and emerge with the consistent picture of a thoroughly humble figure with no claims to status in any form, a "gagne-petit universellement méprisé."^[94] Nothing learned from these sources will prepare one to find, for example, a teacher of letters offering a substantial dedication to the goddess Leto in the name of the emperor, on equal footing with a rhetorician.^[95] This does not mean that the tradition is wholly wrong, still less that the literary references are simply a mindless commonplace. On the contrary, the example points to an important need the commonplace meets, offering the reassuring image of a world where the people one despises are really no better than they ought to be. In Palaemon's case, that reassuring image is preserved, at very least, by the proportions in the tradition Suetonius retails and by the shape it takes in the telling. In the long entry on Palaemon, only three terse clauses are devoted to his cultural achievements;^[96] all else is given over to his regrettable mores . His main claim to achieved status is thus submerged; his other potential claim, his

[92] On inconsistencies in status and their consequences for the imperial freedmen, see Weaver, "Social Mobility." On the notarii , see above "Some Variable Definitions" ad fin .

[93] Note that Suetonius's phrasing at the start of the entry (Gramm . 23.1: Q. Remmius Palaemon Vicetinus mulieris verna primo, ut ferunt, textrinum, deinde . . . litteras didicit ; cf. ferunt at ibid. 3 [below, n. 98]) should suggest that the account bears the stamp of gossip, and should therefore recommend greater caution than is usually apparent in its handling.

[94] Marrou, Histoire 484. For references to teachers of letters, see the collections of Marrou, ibid. 223; Booth, "Image" 2, "Some Suspect Schoolmasters"; and cf. Part II no. 241.

[96] Suet. Gramm . 23.1f.: sed capiebat homines cum memoria rerum tum facilitate sermonis: nec non etiam poemata faciebat ex tempore. scripsit vero variis nec vulgaribus metris . Note that even the phrasing here seems not entirely neutral: capiebat = "charmed," "won over," almost "seduced." With the brevity here, contrast the sketch of Valerius Probus, Gramm . 24, a much larger proportion of which is devoted to the man's scholarly activity.

wealth, is tainted by association with his inherent vices.^[97] In sum, he emerges as a man without weight or substance, ultimately laughable.^[98]

We could never gauge Palaemon's contribution to grammar from the tradition that Seutonius passes along to us; the main lines of that tradition aim to put the upstart in his place. He is a bad grammarian, and not in the sense that he is a bad scholar (as we would use the phrase, to mean that he is bad at what he does) but because he is a bad person—morally defective, unworthy of the trust placed in him (recall the warnings of Tiberius and Claudius) and surely unworthy of his spectacular success. Not for the last time, as we shall see, personal and ethical judgments play a significant part in determining how one is to regard the grammarian; insofar as the tale of Palaemon is remarkable, it is so because ethical judgment seems to play the only part. The matter is thereby simplified considerably.

Things would not, however, always be so simple, as the Attic Nights shows. The competition informing so much of that work is, to be sure, predictably resolved by the revelation that one's competitors—including many bad grammarians—are laughable and unworthy. But for Gellius, writing in the second half of the second century, the competition is complex: there are no blatant inconsistencies of status; the villains cannot easily be caricatured and dismissed as arriviste grotesques, and their claims to learning receive dose attention. Thus the portraits of the bad grammarians also become complex as their lapses in learning are drawn in to complement and highlight their lapses in mores .

This complexity has much to do with how the social composition of the profession changed, and that change in turn is a measure of how prestigious the grammarian's role had become. From the late first and early second century onward, the profession began to attract members of the respectable classes. This was a familiar process: the elite habitually claimed positions that were worth holding, "pulling the ladder up after themselves."^[99] The grammatici who appear in Gellius's work as despised rivals for a place in the aristocracy of letters would probably not have had social origins radically different from Gellius's own.^[100] The competition takes place more nearly among peers, which probably made it only

[97] His wealth is mentioned only to provide a measure for his luxuria: Gramm . 23.2, luxuriae ita indulsit ut saepius in die lavaret, nec sufficeret sumptibus, quamquam ex schola quadringena annua caperet, ac non multo minus ex re familiari .

[98] The entry ends (Gramm . 23.3) with a joke handed down (ferunt ) at Palaemon's expense, concerning his libidines .

[99] Cf. Hopkins, "Elite Mobility."

[100] On Gellius's vita , to be set in the middle range of good society, see Holford-Strevens, "Towards a Chronology." It is significant that although the grammatici are spared little in the NA , none is skewered for his social origins. (I assume here, as elsewhere in my comments on Gellius, that the details in his vignettes can claim verisimilitude when they are not strictly historical, and that when historical they are subject to the improvement of Gellius's literary art.) On the grammarians' origins in this period, see now also Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius 38f.

more tense and difficult and no doubt influenced the strategy Gellius chose.

In anecdote after anecdote Gellius shows that whatever their claims or pretensions, most grammarians were nonetheless neither scholars nor gentlemen. Their main claims to cultural standing—their control of the language, and especially their rules—are repeatedly deflated, and their intellectual failure is usually combined with ethical lapse and social catastrophe. The grammarian who misguidedly trusts in his skill and arrogantly claims center stage is reduced to "blushing and sweating" before his betters.^[101] Or, as in the anecdote earlier described,^[102] the grammarians make an absurd and regrettable spectacle of themselves, not just engaging in an undignified public wrangle (that would be bad enough) but wrangling over something Gellius can dismiss as old hat. Or, in a direct confrontation with Gellius, an unbecomingly boastful fellow (homo inepte gloriosus ) must finally cover his embarrassed ignorance with a self-important (but self-destructive) defense, "That's no small question you ask; I don't teach that sort of thing for free": his desperate retreat into professional status is simply the finishing touch in a picture of cultural and ethical inferiority.^[103] Or, meeting another contentious grammarian, Gellius amuses himself by coolly making up his own rule (finitio ficta ) on the spur of the moment to suit his argument and sends the grammarian off with a flea in his ear: the rule is false, Gellius says, but you cannot prove it is.^[104] The implications are of course disastrous: so far as the grammarian's precious rules are concerned, anyone can play the game, with no authentic claim to validity; and without the claim, there remain only those rotten rules and cesspools of grammar that Probus had denounced, and the grammarian's silly and arrogant pedantry, which Greek epigrammatists had satirized at Rome still earlier in the first century.^[105]

Yet such vignettes tell only part of the story. They report easy victories over faceless grammarians, but they do not convey the importance that Gellius attributed to grammar itself. That was a serious business for

[101] NA 19.10.

[102] NA 14.5.

[103] NA 13.3.3; cf. 18.14.1 (the contempt for a iactator quispiam et venditator Sallustianae lectionis , who is contrasted with Sulpicius Apollinaris) and n. 90 above.

[104] NA 15.9.6ff.

[105] Cf. esp. Anth. Gr . 11.321 (Philippus), with 11.347; 11.138, 140 (Lucilius); cf. also 11.279 (Lucilius).

Gellius, as he demonstrates not only in his insistent attacks on the grammarians—if they were unimportant, he would not attack them—but also in the high proportion of chapters that are devoted to grammatical questions and show Gellius's readiness to use the grammarians' techniques and categories when it serves his purpose. How could he not, when he had been immersed in them through his schooling? The substance of grammar was just too important, in fact, to be left to the common run of grammarians, the bad grammarians. Accordingly, heroes must be summoned up to show how it should be done and to put the villains to rout; and the hero himself can be a grammarian, provided he is the right sort—a good grammarian, like Gellius's teacher, Sulpicius Apollinaris.

Sulpicius is of course shown to be more broadly and more deeply learned than the grammarian of the vulgus . More noteworthy, the difference is presented as much in terms of personal attachment and mores as in doctrina . Gellius first associates with Sulpicius not as a puer of the age normal for a grammarian's student but only after assuming the toga virilis , when he has gone on his own in search of "more expert teachers":^[106] the relations and status of student and teacher are immediately characterized as extraordinary thereby. Gellius is not a common pupil but a "follower";^[107] Sulpicius is "our friend Apollinaris," a familiaris ,^[108] contrasted at one point with a vulgar "peddler of Sallust."^[109] The bond is different from and more intimate than the exchange of cash for learning, the normal, tainted relationship between student and teacher. Further, the experiences of Gellius and Sulpicius are not set in the classroom but belong to the palace, the booksellers' quarter, or the bibliotheca Tiberiana^[110] and are thus part of the public or semipublic intellectual life of the city. Their experiences in fact suggest nothing so much as a metamorphosis of the old tirocinium fori . Nor is the relationship confined to Gellius's adolescence, since Sulpicius is there to give advice to the more mature Gellius,^[111] as he does to men still more eminent.^[112]

[106] NA 18.4.1, which of course implies that even at this still-tender age Gellius was able to distinguish the good coin from the base.

[107] Sectari: NA 7.6.12, 13.18.3, 20.6.1; for sectator elsewhere in the NA , see, e.g., 3.1.5, sectatores of Favorinus. Cf. above, with n. 84, on Valerius Probus. For the connotations of personal loyalty inherent in sectator , appropriate to members of succeeding generations within a family, see esp. Chap. 1 n. 74 (on CIL 6.1416, 1418); and cf. Anon. Pan. Lat . 7.23.2 Galletier, multi sectatores mei equated in the preceding sentence with the rhetorician's natural children.

[108] NA 11.15.8, 13.20.1.

[109] Cf. n. 103 above.

[110] NA 19.13,18.4,13.20.

[111] NA 12.13, when Gellius was a iudex .

[112] NA 13.18, advising Erucius Clarus; cf. 19.13.

Personally, where other grammarians are assertive and combative, Sulpicius is content not to press his authority:^[113] mild in rebuke and quietly confident when he knows he is right, he handles pretenders to learning with "the kind of wily irony that Socrates used against the sophists."^[114] "A man with a surpassing knowledge of literature," "a man adorned with choice knowledge," "the most learned man I recall,"^[115] Sulpicius could be taken for one among the learned amateurs, did not Gellius tell us that he was a grammaticus and magister .^[116] That, of course, is precisely the point: Sulpicius is the grammarian as gentleman. Consistent with this, his writings were belletristic epistulae ,^[117] not an ars or other technical tract.

In his portrait of Sulpicius and in his concern with things grammatical, Gellius shows us a stylized, idealized gentrification of the discipline: gentlemen and the grammarian as gentleman together immersed in grammar. If grammar had become established as part of Rome's literary world, much of Gellius can be read as an attempt to show how it should behave accordingly, with manners and learning alike refined and exquisite. The attempt is not unique to Gellius but recurs in the period with which we are centrally concerned.

Two and a half centuries after the Attic Nights , another good grammarian is sketched in the pages of one of Gellius's literary descendants—Servius in Macrobius's Saturnalia .^[118] As in the case of Sulpicius, Servius's excellence is expressed in terms of both doctrina and mores and is revealed in informal, personal relationships: he is "at once admirable in his learning and attractive in his modesty" (iuxta doctrina mirabilis et amabilis verecundia ),^[119] and both his learning and his verecundia are displayed in the symposium held by "nobles and other learned men" in their discussions of Vergil. The most striking feature here is that the virtue attributed to (or imposed on) the grammarian sets the tone of the entire work, which is itself the most profoundly grammatical product of the amateur literary tradition in late antiquity.

One of the cardinal virtues, verecundia can be translated as "modesty"; more accurately (if more cumbersomely), it names the sense of propriety deriving from a regard for the opinion of other men and an awareness

[113] Note esp. NA 19.13.3: Sulpicius graciously allows Fronto the authority to give citizenship to words—an evident alteration of the metaphor's original application (cf. Chap. 1 n. 16) that conforms to the ethos of Sulpicius.

[114] Mildness: NA 13.20.5. Irony: 18.4.1.

[115] NA 4.17.11, 16.5.5, 13.18.2.

[116] NA 7.6.12, 18.4.1.

[117] NA 15.5.3; cf. 13.18.2f.

[118] For the points raised in the following paragraphs, see further Kaster, "Macrobius."

[119] Sat 1.2.15.

of one's own position (especially one's hierarchical position) relative to others in a given context. It is the quality found, for example, in the deference an inferior owes to a superior (women to men, a young man to an older man, a humble man to an aristocrat), in the sense of shame that restrains a superior from humbling himself before an inferior, or in the awareness of parity that, ideally, checks competition between equals.^[120]Verecundia is the virtue of knowing one's place, the virtue par excellence of the status quo , an abundantly social virtue, regulating the behavior of men in groups.

In the ideal world envisioned by Macrobius, verecundia is so spontaneous as to seem innate. Thus Servius, who possesses a naturalis verecundia ,^[121] is found now deferring as a young man and a grammarian to his elders and betters, now offering a contribution as an expert, according to the propriety of the situation. So too the other guests as a group spontaneously take their places in a hierarchical rank (ordo )^[122] and know individually when to yield to others' expertise, when to assert their own, how to combine becomingly the two kinds of behavior. And Vergil himself is presumed to have exhibited precisely the grammarian's qualities in his own sphere, delicately coordinating deference and self-assertion in his treatment of the literary tradition.^[123]

This deep sense of propriety gives the Saturnalia its core and makes erudition a moral quality. The innate regard for others' opinions, the capacity for gauging how one ought to behave in general, and how in particular one should respect the cultural heritage others value provide the impulse to learning. That impulse is brought to fruition by another virtue, diligentia , the scrupulousness that in social relations characterizes the dutiful behavior of friends and in intellectual life maintains and deepens one's contact with one's culture and makes one truly learned.^[124] The model of excellence is the scrupulous reader (diligens lector ), exerting himself out of respect for the text, doing his duty by reciprocating the

[120] See Kaster, "Macrobius" 224ff.; with, e.g., Ambros. De off. min . 1.17.65ff., on verecundia among the officia adulescentis ; and esp. Jer. Ep . 66.6, where verecundia denotes the sense of shame produced by consciousness of rank, and the consequent difficulty for a member of the upper classes to descend to the life of the vulgus . Cf. Reg. orient . 17 (PL 103.479D): among the rules governing a praepositus of a monastery, the injunction ne perdat animam suam propter verecundiam . Cf. also Ambros. Apol. David altera 11.56: non mediocre autem quod Nathan denuntiavit ei [sc. David ], hoc est inferior propheta. gravis enim verecundia pudorque delictum ab inferiore reprehendi .

[121] Sat . 7.11.1.

[122] Sat . 2.2.1ff., 7.4.1ff., with Kaster, "Macrobius" 227ff.

[123] Sat . 1.16.44, poeta doctrina ac verecundia nobilis , with Kaster, "Macrobius" 231ff.

poet's diligentia ; conversely, the ignorant man (most notably, in the Saturnalia , the cross-grained aristocrat Evangelus) is such because he lacks diligentia , and he fails to be scrupulous because he lacks verecundia .

Learning thus follows mores : the learned man must first be virtuous; the ignorant man is necessarily depraved. As a result, the grammarians who are criticized in the Saturnalia , as in the Attic Nights , are vulnerable for more than their failures in learning. The "vulgar troop of grammatici " from whom Servius is distinguished, grammarians concerned only with their linguistic expertise, who neglect the studia potiora —religion, philosophy, antiquities, and other Realien —that Vergil incorporated in his work, are fundamentally moral failures.^[125] But a curious twist is involved here as well, one of the features that distinguish the Saturnalia from the Attic Nights , and Macrobius's Servius from Gellius's Sulpicius. The bad grammarians are among the villains of the piece, but Servius, the good grammarian, is himself apportioned only linguistic matters in the communal discussion of Vergil; the studia potiora belong to the noble guests. The grammarian's ethos and expertise stand at the center of the work, but the grammarian himself is at the margins: so thoroughly has grammar been engrossed by the learned amateurs of Macrobius's ideal that the group must even be reminded to include Servius in distributing their roles.^[126]

Later on we shall consider the behavior of real grammarians and trace the lines they followed in life between the idealized images just described: the good grammarian of Gellius, moving freely among men of power and standing, and the good grammarian of Macrobius, following in the noblemen's wake, "his eyes upon the ground and looking as though he were trying to hide."^[127] But in moving from the time of Gellius to that of Macrobius, one notices a fact that requires preliminary discussion here, since it concerns the development of the grammarian's profession. The grammarians have no lack of competitors and critics in the literary world of the early empire; in the later period the critics' silence is startling by contrast.

The sniping at grammarians in the Saturnalia is far less elaborate than in the Attic Nights (perhaps partially as a function of genre, and certainly because of Macrobius's greater concern to present a front of unity, compared with the open combativeness of Gellius).^[128] Beyond the passing hits in the Saturnalia and a similar swipe in Tiberius Claudius Donatus's Interpretationes Vergilianae (1.1.5ff. Georgii), criticisms or lampoons fall into three categories: a few scattered and largely sectarian or ad hominem

[125] See Sat . 5.19-22, 1.24.12f., with Kaster, "Macrobius" 235f., 252ff.

[126] Sat 1.24.14-20.

[127] Sat . 1.2.15.

[128] Cf. Kaster, "Macrobius" 247f., 259f.

sneers from one or another of the learned professions,^[129] a few limp revivals in Latin of the earlier epigrammatic tradition,^[130] and the remarkable poems of Palladas in Greek.^[131] A grammarian in his own right, Palladas yet turns his general contempt for the world upon himself and his profession, and falls upon the sword of his own satirical epigrams. And that is all—save for a few voices among a new group of potential competitors, the Christian Fathers.^[132]

Since from no point of view can the grammarians be said to have become unimportant to the literary culture and therefore too insignificant to be attacked, an explanation for this late-antique calm must be sought elsewhere. It is possible, for example, to point to cultural inertia: the grammarians' conventions were no longer new-fangled but had long since become familiar fixtures in the life of the liberally educated elite and could be valued as such, or at least be taken for granted. It is also possible that some tensions were dissipated by changes in the grammarians' social status as members of the respectable classes took over the profession. The trend visible at the end of the first century is certainly dominant by the fourth; although a few grammarians still emerge from humble levels of society,^[133] the other grammarians whose origins and circumstances are observable cluster around the curial order and belong to the landed classes. They are not categorically their students' social and economic inferiors.

Yet these observations are not sufficient to explain the absence of comment and criticism. Cultural inertia evidently involves a petitio principii , since it does not address the questions, Why did those conventions settle into such easy familiarity? Why, in fact, did so little change in the substance and especially in the conceptual bases of grammar over the centuries? The familiar conventions of course continued to serve the advantage of the grammarians, who therefore had little incentive to

[130] Cf. Epigr. Bob . 46, 47, 61, 64.

[131] See Part II no. 113.

[132] See "Polished Speech, the Common Good, and Christianity" below.

[133] See Chap. 1 n. 59 for the grammarians of libertine birth at Bordeaux. Note that the inconcinnity is still felt by Ausonius, although not as grounds for contempt: thus Prof . 21.25-28, on Crispus and Urbicus, ambo loqui faciles, ambo omnia carmina docti, / callentes mython plasmata et historiam, / liberti ambo genus, sed quos meruisse deceret / nancisci ut cluerent patribus ingenuis . On the grammarians' social status generally, see Chap. 3.

change.^[134] Part of the answer no doubt lies there. But that can still tell no more than half the story, since it overlooks the grammarians' acquiescent audience—the members of the educated classes. Nor can change in the grammarians' status offer a solution, since, as Gellius shows, competition need be no less intense when it takes place among men who are more nearly peers.

It is possible, however, to suggest a broader hypothesis that might provide, if not a solution, at least a framework for fruitful discussion. The grammarians' conventions stayed as they were, and the grammarians ceased to be disturbing competitors, because the profession's social circumstances limited its differentiation and autonomy. Despite their emergence as separate institutions, the schools—and perhaps especially the grammarian's school—remained partially domesticated: the profession's horizontal differentiation Was limited because the grammarians remained tied directly to the family, to the representatives of the gentlemanly amateur tradition, and to the values of both.

Although it is commonly said, for example, that second- or fourth-century pedantry represents a decadent acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, one could well suggest a different view of the matter: knowledge was pursued not for its own sake but as a predominantly social phenomenon, as an appanage of personal relations and a token of accepted virtues. Knowledge could not usually be pursued, analyzed, pondered for its own sake. Or to put it another way, the habit of speaking (anachronistically) of ancient universities ought to be avoided, not simply because it obscures substantive curricular differences but especially because it obscures the institutional differences and their consequences. Antiquity lacked the institutional buffer that is raised between the lay and professional worlds by the modern university, which serves as the seedbed of the learned professions; and as a result antiquity had no place where a profession could attempt to set its own course and determine its own values.^[135]

In the grammarian's world autonomy and dependence, achieved and ascribed status, professional skill and the virtuous regard for the opinions of (nonprofessional) others rubbed shoulders. The distinction—so basic to the modern notion of a profession—between impersonal evaluation

[134] See Chaps. 4 and 5, esp. Chap. 5 pp. 196-97.

[135] This does not of course imply that restraints on the institutional and personal autonomy of the professions cannot be found in the recent past or today, or that the modern professions are context-free; rather, the embedding takes different forms in different contexts. For studies of the problem in specific settings, see Clark, Prophets ; Keylor, Academy ; and esp. Ringer, Decline , and Weisz, Emergence . Much light is also thrown on the question by Bledstein, Culture . For a recent general discussion, see Ben-David, "Organization."

of skill and personal favor or antipathy had no central place in the dominant ideology; instead, the distinction was blurred by an ideal that subordinated skill to ethical qualities. Old patterns of behavior persisted long after the profession's formal establishment: the face-to-face relations that characterized the dealings of grammarians with their patrons in the great households of late republican Rome never fundamentally changed, regardless of the different ways those relations came to be articulated, linking the teacher now to one, now to another benefactor—a parent, a town council, a provincial governor, or an emperor.

These relations had their ideological foundation in the union of doctrina and mores , the combination already found in the heroes and villains of the literary tradition. The centrifugal force of learning, tending toward personal distinction and autonomy, was balanced by the centripetal force of mores , urging conformity to established values and behavior. The meeting of the two forces and the resolution of their tensions are differently expressed in different contexts, accordingly as the grammarian is glimpsed in his professional writings or in a social setting.^[136] There is, overall, a strong normative urge to resolve the tensions by subordinating doctrina to mores .

First, good learning and good mores are assumed to be inseparable: Gellius's half-learned grammarians are not quite gentlemen; his gentleman grammarian is among the most learned men he ever knew. The union of qualities is part of the line of continuity in the classical tradition from the early to the late empire and between literary and social convention. Macrobius's praise of his idealized grammarian, "at once admirable in his doctrina and attractive in his verecundia, " recapitulates the qualities patrons desired in their dependents and imagines a man capable of finding the middle course between the extremes of professional life described in a fourth-century letter of recommendation: "You know, of course, . . . how rare is the affinity of eloquence and good character [bonum pectus ]: either verecundia diminishes an unassuming talent [modestum ingenium ] or the eloquent man gets above himself in his success."^[137]

[136] See Chaps. 4 and 5, and Chap. 6, respectively.

[137] Symm. Ep . 1.43, recommending an advocatus to Ausonius; for verecundia in an earlier letter of recommendation, see, e.g., Fronto Ad Velum imp . 2.7.7 (p. 128.11f. van den Hout): nihil isto homine officiosius est, nihil modestius, nihil verecundius . For other examples of the mores et doctrina type in the commendaticiae of Symmachus, see esp. Ep . 1.15, 79; 2.2, 16, 29, 39; 3.22; 7.58, 91; 9.2, 54. Specimens from other sources are collected by Pedersen, Late Roman Public Professionalism 30f. nn. 84, 85. Compare also Auson. Prof . 10.37-41, on the grammarian Ammonius, doctrina exiguus, / moribus implacidis: / proinde ut meritum, / famam habuit tenuem ; and esp. the editing tale of Marcellus in Prof . 18: his talent (indoles egregia ) brought him success, including a good marriage, but his bad character (pravum ingenium ) led—inevitably—to his ruin (lines 9-10; cf. Part II no. 94).

The conventions suggest that at least ideologically the grammarian's profession was not a carrière ouverte aux talents in any simple sense. Doctrina and mores might overcome the absence of high birth, but mere talent was not enough—unless "talent" be taken to include the seemingly innate qualities, on the order of naturalis verecundia , that predispose one to respectful and scrupulous behavior. Hence the first assumption slides easily into a second: doctrina and mores are not simply inseparable qualities or opposing forces in equipoise; the former is subordinate to the latter. When the emperor Julian laid it down that teachers "ought to be surpassing in their mores First of all, and then in the skills of speech," the novelty probably lay less in the sentiment than in the sectarian use to which it was presently put, in driving the Christian teachers from the schools.^[138] The sentiment surely overlaps with the Saturnalia 's pervasive belief that virtue is the prerequisite for true learning.^[139]

The emphasis on ethical qualities (especially those conducive to stability and hierarchy) as attributes equal or superior in importance to skills, which we take to be the primary qualifications for a profession, resulted from the direct contact between the professional and amateur spheres.^[140] It should be added at once, however, that this contact did not produce a broad conflict along lines clearly drawn; we might think more usefully of an interpenetration of the two spheres. In this respect it is symptomatic that, in Macrobius certainly, but already in Gellius, a chief attribute of the professional that we might assume would separate him from the dilettante is taken over by the amateur literary tradition and regarded as a moral trait, one of the attributes of the good man—his scrupulous attention to the details of his cultural tradition (what impatient modern readers of Macrobius and Gellius commonly call their "pedantry"). Conversely, Servius, the grammarian whom Macrobius idealized, can remark in the introduction to one of his technical treatises, "I met with Horace when I was at my leisure in Campania":^[141] a work that would seem to be a piece of professional writing is presented as a parergon of the scholarly leisure (otium ) affected in the West by the amateur litterateurs of the aristocracy.

Nowhere is this interpenetration more apparent than in the value set on the personal bond between teacher and pupil. This urge to intimate attachment, exemplified, as we have seen, by the follower (sectator ), is

[138] CTh 13.3.5 (17 June 362), elaborated in the subsequent directive specifically affecting the Christians, Ep . 61c Bidez.

[139] Cf. also at Chap. 1 n. 13.

[140] Passages that seem to base judgment of qualifications primarily or purely on skills are rare: see esp. Auson. Prof . 7.9-11, on the grammarian Leontius signo Lascivus; and cf. Prof . 9, on Leontius's brother, Iucundus.

[141] GL 4.468.6: Horatium, cum in Campania otiarer, excepi .

expressed with special force in the blending of the images of teacher and father, and follows from the father's responsibility for his son's education. Gellius and Macrobius dedicated their works to their sons and in so doing took their places in a long and broad tradition, putting their accumulated wealth of learning and wisdom at their sons' disposal as part of their patrimony.^[142] The literary convention, like most conventions, is a compound of actual practice and normative pressure: it reflects both the fact that a father supervised his son's education and the belief that such was the father's proper role.

The supervision might be direct: far from being a quaint and isolated figure, the elder Cato in taking personal charge of his son's lessons^[143] is part of a tradition that runs from one of the earliest references we have to , in the third century B.C. ,^[144] to the households of late antiquity.^[145] But the father's responsibility is no less emphasized when the supervision is mediated by the professional teacher. Libanius's extensive correspondence with his students' fathers^[146] and his shock that one of his enemies would canvass prospective students' mothers^[147] belong to the same world where a marriage contract stipulates a father's responsibility for his sons' liberal education,^[148] or where a student writes asking his father to visit "so that you might learn whether or not the teacher is paying attention to me"^[149] or asking his father to write "so

[142] For the dedication of works of literary scholarship to sons in late antiquity, see, e.g., Mart. Cap. De nupt . 1.2. and 9.997, 1000; Fl. Mallius Theodorus De metris, GL 6.585f.; Nonius Marcellus (cf. Part II no. 237); Ti. Claudius Donatus (date uncertain; cf. Part II no. 209); Vibius Sequester De fluminibus , dedicated to his son Virgilianus, who was probably a grammarian (cf. Part II nos. 163, 254); Ioannes Stobaeus (Phot. Bibl . cod. 167, 2.149 Henry); and probably Fl. Sosipater Charisius (cf. n. 153 below). For the tradition active in other areas, cf. Basil's dedication of his essay on Greek literature to his nephews; Claudius Marius Victor's dedication of his Comm. in Gen . to his son (Gennad. De vir. ill . 60); and Eucherius of Lyon's dedication of the Liber formularum spiritalis intelligentiae to his son.

[143] Plut. Cat. mai . 20.

[145] See, e.g., Symm. Ep . 4.20.2, 6.61; Eustrat. presb. V. Eutych . 8 (PG 86:2.2284); Callin. V. Hypat . 1. Cf. Paulin. Pell. Euchar . 60ff., the pietatis opus studiumque insigne parentum associated with his education at home; Greg. Naz. Or . 43.12; Aug. Ep . 2 12-13, esp. 13.2-3; Sidon. Apoll. Ep . 4.12.1.

[146] Cf. Petit, Étudiants 18ff., 104f., and esp. 151ff.

[147] Or . 39.4.

[149] SB 3.6262 (s.III).

that I might pay reverence to your hand, because you have educated me nobly."^[150]

Injecting himself into this deeply traditional and highly charged relationship, the teacher in turn was captured by it. In one of the most common images of the teacher in late antiquity, he assumes the role of surrogate father: he "nurtures" his students, his "children"; he is their "father in letters."^[151] The literary image—again, not merely a convention—also appears in another form. Though amateur litterateurs dedicated their works to learned friends or sons, no professional grammarian we know in late antiquity dedicated a work to his own son; dedications were to learned friends or patrons, or to pupils.^[152] A double impulse can be seen here. The professional's distinguishing mark was his stepping aside from his own role as father,^[153] but this withdrawal took the form of a transference, with the dedications to pupils reproducing the traditional pattern of family relationships. The relationship was not one-sided: it was reciprocated, for example, in a former pupil's funeral oration for his teacher or in the inscriptions recording dedications students made to teachers.^[154]

[152] For grammarians' dedications, see Part II nos. 19, 31, 47, 52, 60, 72, 73, 110, 126, 132, 136, 156; cf. nos. 188, 265. For dedications to pupils, see nos. 57, 130, 136; cf. no. 221.

[153] Thus the examples are sufficiently numerous, and the distinction sufficiently clear, that Charisius's dedication of his work to his son can add further and perhaps decisive weight to the evidence that he was an amateur and a palatine official rather than a professional grammarian: see Part II no. 200.

[154] Funeral oration: Ael. Arist. Or . 32, for Alexander of Cotyaeum; cf. Lib. Or . 1.105, for Zenobius. Dedications (a selection): CIL 8.5228 (an. 211/12, Thibilis), with 5229; IG 14.2454 (Massilia); CIL 6.9444, 9449, 9827; ILCV 721 = CIL 6.10008; IG 2 3897, with Raubitschek, "Phaidros" 99f.; IG 2 3793 (s.I); Raubitschek, "Greek Inscriptions" 248f. no. 10; IG 2 3813 (s.III med.); IDelos 1801; Robert, Collection no. 46 (Madytos, Thracian Chersonese), with ibid. pp. 56ff. for other examples; Inschr. Eph . 7:2 (IGSK 17:2) 4340; AE 1941, 141 (Prusa); MAMA 7.358 (Carbasli^[*] Yaila, eastern Phrygia). See also the comparable expressions of piety in Dracontius Rom . 1 and 3, for his teacher Felicianus (cf. Part II no. 59); the poem of Georgius for his teacher Coluthus (cf. Part II nos. 33, 63); and Priscian on his teacher Theoctistus (esp. GL 2.238.5f.). Note that the sentiment is not confined to teachers of liberal studies: see Sahin^[*] , "Neue Inschriften" 34 no. 103 (with C. P. Jones, "Two Epigrams"), a sepulchral inscription set up by an apprentice weaver to his teacher with the appropriate expressions of regard and gratitude.

Such details trace the normative model of relations between teacher and student. They are the concrete tokens of the desire for close attachment and of the belief that, in a favored phrase of Libanius, teachers act on their students' souls.^[155] To be sure, it was not the only image of the teacher,^[156] and the ideal of personal attachment was often violated in practice. But the ideal was far from inert; it prepared the way for action, to the teacher's benefit: thus Libanius asks a provincial governor to show favor () to the brother-in-law of the grammarian Calliopius, so that Calliopius and his father, who were then teaching Libanius's son, would in turn be more favorably disposed () toward their charge.^[157]

This cooptation should not be thought of as either dramatic or conspiratorial. The ruling elite did not rise up as a body to crush a nascent professional middle class built on the independence of achieved status and personal skill; it was a case of assimilation, a gradual process leaving room for upward mobility. Nor should we expect the teachers to regard the consequences as pernicious. To refer to the example just cited from Libanius: in comparable circumstances the modern academic presumably would claim to be equally shocked by the suggestion that official favor shown to one of his connections could influence professional dealings with a pupil and by the suggestion that his personal relations could justify manipulating the public administration for the sake of personal privilege. He would be inclined to find the transaction thoroughly corrupt, from the assault on his professional integrity to the undermining of one of the cornerstones of the common good, government without fear or favor. But the ancient academic would find equally shocking the suggestion that any discontinuity existed between professional relations and personal relations, between personal relations and customary privilege, between customary privilege and social good.

The arrangement Libanius sketches was not simply ordinary; it was proper. The outrage lay in its violation.^[158] One can diagnose corruption in this sort of transaction only from outside the social system in which the transaction was embedded, and with a different image of community and social good in mind. Historical remove can provide such a vantage point, allowing us to describe as "self-satisfied idiocy" the identification

[155] Cf. Ep . 337.1, 398.2, 969.1.

[156] For an opposing image, the Christian teacher as father vs. the grammarian with his cane, cf. Aug. Tract . 1, p. 449.31ff. Morin.

[157] Lib. Ep . 678 to Iulianus, praeses Euphrat . See further Chap. 6, pp. 209ff.

of the learned with the good and to regret all the consequences that flow from it.^[159] Another such perspective might be found in a contemporary culture with different roots or a different angle of vision—the culture of the Christians, to whom we now turn.

Polished Speech, the Common Good, and Christianity

Visions show men what they want to see; reports of visions tell men what they want to hear. In the first half of the fifth century, the grammarian Alypius of Isaurian Seleucia is said to have been stricken with a wasting illness that brought him and his family to despair.^[160] Taking refuge in the shrine of St. Thecla, Alypius slept, and in his sleep was visited by the saint, herself "a lover of , a lover of the Muses, ever showing grace to those who speak her praises in learned speech." When Thecla asked what troubled him, Alypius replied with Achilles' answer to his mother, Thetis (Il . 1.365): "You know. Why am I to tell you, who know all these things?" The saint then "smiled, delighted with both the man and the verse, struck with wonder that he made so suitable a reply," and began his cure.

At the end of the fifth century, in the metropolis of Aries, the young Caesarius (bp. 502-42) is said to have come from the monastery of Lérins and to have been taken into the household of a local magnate, Firminus.^[161] Firminus wanted to provide him with a classical education "that his monastic simplicity might be polished by the discipline of secular learning," and so entrusted him to the African Iulianus Pomerius, who was then teaching as a grammarian in the city. One night, Caesarius chanced to fall asleep over one of the books his teacher had given him to read and in a vision saw "the shoulder on which he was lying, and the arm that had rested on the book, being gnawed by a coiling serpent." Frightened from his sleep, Caesarius reproved himself bitterly, "because he wished to join the brilliance of salvation's rule with the foolish wisdom of the world. He therefore despised these things straightway, knowing that the adornment of polished speech is not wanting for those in whom spiritual understanding looms large."

[159] MacMullen, Crisis 50f. n. 7, reacting to Aur. Vict. De Caes . 9.12; cf. Chap. 1 n. 66.

[160] For the following, see [Basil. Sel.] Vie et miracles de Sainte Thècle 2.38 Dagron; cf. Part II no. 6.

[161] For the following, see V. Caes . 1.8-9 (2.279f. Morin), with Part II no. 124.

The visions of the literate saint or the ravenous serpent, of the traditional culture as a bond of intimacy and health or as a suffocating coil, define the poles the grammarian ranged in the Christian imagination. At the same time, the visions represent different solutions to an old problem in which the grammarian was much involved.^[162] Where the literary culture was not simply an elaboration of esthetic principles but a distinguishing possession of a small and extraordinarily influential segment of society, how was one to understand the relation between the polished speech of the few and the grace of God available to all? What did polished speech have to do with spiritual understanding? How did the rules and forms of grammar and rhetoric meet the real needs of men, their good relations with one another in this world and their preparations for life in the next? Such questions challenged at its base the notion that the grammarian's profession and the literary culture served the well-being of the individual and the common good of society.

The questions had their roots both within and without the Christian community. The canonical reminder that Peter and John were "illiterates and laymen" (Acts 4.13) and Paul's claim to be "ignorant in speech, but not in understanding" (2 Cor. 11.6) converged on the powerful model of the illiterate or ill-educated apostle as charismatic teacher, whose truth owed nothing to the conventions and institutions of men. But the classically educated men of the non-Christian world rejected that truth, spurning the uncouth language in which it was transmitted.^[163]

In apologetics the Christian could meet that contempt readily enough with the claim that such men saw only surfaces. Not for the first or last time, a group on the defensive would align itself with substance, leaving its opponents mere words: the literary culture was a culture of the tongue, not of the heart; it invested everything in trappings meant to increase prestige among men in a world rotten with false values, and cared nothing for grace, the inner truth that bound a man to God and gave a stable center to his life and his relations with others.^[164]

[162] The following pages, with their narrow focus, do not pretend to offer a full survey of the relation between Christianity and the classical culture. In addition to the works cited in the notes to this section, see esp. Laistner, Christianity ; Baynes, Byzantine Studies 1ff., 24ff.; Gaudemet, Église 582ff.; Jaeger, Early Christianity ; Dodds, Pagan ; Chadwick, Early Christian Thought ; Gigon, Antike Kultur ; Lemerle, Premier humanisme 43ff.; Quacquarelli, Scuola ; Ševcenko, "Shadow Outline"; Kennedy, Greek Rhetoric 180ff.; Wilson, Scholars 1ff.; Hagendahl, Von Tertullian zu Cassiodor esp. 83ff.

[163] See Chap. 1 n. 24.

[164] E.g., Lactant. Inst . 3.13, 5.1; Arnob. Adv. nat . 1.59; Zeno Veron. Tract . 3.1 (PL 11.280); Paulin. Nol. Carm . 10.20ff.; "Ambrosiaster" In 2 Cor . 11.6 (CSEL 81:2.283.4ff.); Quodvultdeus De acted. ad grat . 1.1.4ff., Lib. promiss . 1.37.54; Vigilius Tapsens. C. Eutych . 1.15 (PL 62.104B); Iulianus Pomerius De vit. contemp . 1.24; John Chrysost. Adv. oppugn. vit. monast . 3.8 fin . (PG 47.363), Expos. in Ps. 4 2 (PG 55.42); Isid. Pel. Ep . 4.88, 91 (cf. 1.180); Cyril Alex. Hom. Pasch . 4.3 (PG 77.460; cf. Dial. quod unus sit Christus [PG 75.1253f.], with Comm. in Ioan. Evang . 5.8.30 [PG 73.849f.]); and cf. Mohrmann, Études 3.157ff.

When directed outward, across boundaries that could simultaneously distinguish non-Christian from Christian and liberally educated from layman, those straightforward claims might provide comfort and reassurance, a sense of old battles fought and won once more: rejecting the classical formalism recreated the apostle's charismatic leap over the written law to the natural law instilled in the heart by the grace of the Holy Spirit; the tongue of the literary culture, with its puffed-up and hollow pretensions, was like the lips of the Jews, who adhered to the shell of the Law.^[165] But when, from the late third century onward, those boundaries became ever less distinct, and when more Christian voices came to speak with that tongue, answers to old questions became less clear-cut, less easily generalized. It becomes possible to trace different answers in the two halves of the empire. Beyond their specific circumstances and details, the visions of Alypius and Caesarius bespeak divergent trends in the East and the West concerning the standing and function of the literary culture and its polished speech. In the East, that culture came to be regarded less as a divisive force and was inserted in the hierarchy of values in such a way that old loyalties could blend with new. In the West, the literary culture remained an important symbol of fundamental divisions, defining loyalties more sharply and making certain that old oppositions continued to be felt.

Of course no distinctions are simple and uniform; similarities between the two halves of the empire coexist with the differences.^[166] Educated men were assimilated into Christianity in the West as in the East, notably among the Christian academics teaching in the schools of grammar and rhetoric by the mid-fourth century. Julian's vindictive logic, which dictated that a Christian (whether sincere or insincere in his belief) had no place in the traditional schools, was applied and unwelcome in both parts of the empire:^[167] claiming an absolute and exclusive congruence between classical literature and pagan belief that even most non-Christians would have thought outré , it had short-lived effects.^[168] Conversely, one can note

[165] Cf., e.g., Ambros. Explan. in Ps. 36 69 (CSEL 64.128.15ff.), with Rom. 2.17-29.

[166] For this emphasis, see Marrou, Histoire 456ff.; and for continuing tensions in the East, see recently Alan Cameron, "Empress" 282ff., citing evidence of the fifth-century debate on the value of classicizing paraphrases of Scripture.

[167] On Julian's school law, see esp. Hardy, "Emperor"; Brown, World 91ff.

[168] Note esp. that Libanius, though a committed pagan himself, does not appear to have been much concerned with the religious loyalties of his students: Petit, Étudiants 120f. (cf. 133 n. 210); Liebeschuetz, Antioch 226f. Cf. also n. 201 below. Julian's merging of literature and religion—almost treating paganism as a religion of The Book—is so extreme and so unusual for a pagan that we should probably regard it as a legacy of his Christian upbringing.

the rejectionist views expressed within the Christian community. In the East, the Didascalia Apostolorum repudiated the "books of the gentiles" and proposed the study of Scripture as a satisfactory alternative.^[169] In the West, the Statuta Ecclesiae Antiqua forbade ordained bishops to read the classics.^[170]

Yet even within these similarities it is possible to discern important differences. Consider, for instance, the men from the mid-third to the end of the fourth century who we know taught in the schools of grammar or rhetoric and (usually later) held some position in the Church hierarchy, who might therefore most conspicuously represent the mingling of the traditionally educated classes and local Christian leaders: in the West, Cyprian at Carthage, Victor, the grammarian and lector at Cirta/Constantina,^[171] Marculus, a rhetorician who became a bishop and Donatist martyr,^[172] and Augustine; in the East, Malchion, rhetorician and later presbyter at Antioch,^[173] the two Apollinarii at Laodicea (the elder a grammarian and presbyter, the son a rhetorician and later a bishop),^[174] and other rhetorician-bishops—Gregory of Nyssa, Amphilochius of Iconium,^[175] Optimus of Phrygian Agdamia and Pisidian Antioch, and Ablabius, the Novatian bishop of Nicaea.^[176] The Easterners are not only more numerous, they show a wider geographic spread; significantly, the Westerners are all from Africa, where Christianity had made its greatest gains in the West in the third century. The clustering is symptomatic of the uneven rate of Christianity's spread in the western provinces, which as a whole lagged behind the East.

Or again, consider the prescriptions of the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Statuta Ecclesiae Antiqua . The former sets down guidelines meant (in vain) for all "servants and sons of God"; but the latter imposes its restrictions only on the bishop, in effect emphasizing the distinction

[169] Didascalia Apostolorum 1.6.1ff. Connolly (s.III).

[170] Stat. Eccl. Ant . can. 5 (Conc. Gall., CC SL 148) = Collect. Hispan . (Conc. Carthag. IV, an. 398) can. 16 (Conc. Afr., CC SL 149), the Statuta compiled ca. 475 by Gennadius of Marseilles.

[171] See Part II no. 161.

[172] PL 8.760ff. (= Prosop. chrét . I s.v., pp. 696f.).

[173] Euseb. Caes. HE 7.29; Jer. De vir. ill . 71.

[174] See Part II no. 14.

[175] Basil Ep . 150.2, 4.

[176] For Optimus and Ablabius, see PLRE I s.vv, pp. 650 and 2, respectively; for other Novatian bishops with backgrounds as teachers, see Part B nos. 116, 238. Note also, just slightly later, Anatolius (Vie et miracles de Sainte Thècle 2.9 Dagron); Silvanus (PLRE II s.v. 2, p. 1011).

between the community at large and a single figure specially charged with a burden of holiness. The difference is still more eloquent and reveals a consequential trait of Christianity in the West: a tendency to treat more self-consciously or explicitly the divisions in the community and in the world.

By the early fourth century most Christians of the East were prepared to look out on the world as a place with which they had much in common; the Church in the West, by contrast, was more inward-turning, still regarding itself as a small gathering of the elect, an alien body in an environment of dangerous contradictions and divisions. These divergent positions had underpinnings both intellectual and social. The decisive messages of Tertullian and Origen still reached receptive audiences, but the two men spoke with very different voices. To an educated Christian of the East, the stringent puritanism of Tertullian would have seemed strangely backward. It was at best an unsophisticated notion that classical culture in all its forms was a poison, or that education in the traditional schools, though perhaps necessary for want of an alternative, was nevertheless a regrettable and evil necessity; at worst, the idea revealed a disquieting lack of confidence in Christian intelligence and judgment. The harsh antitheses implicit in Tertullian's question "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" could easily be resolved along the lines Origen laid down: Athens was part of Jerusalem's perfection—in itself imperfect or immature, no doubt, with a mixture of truth and falsehood that required discrimination, but an inseparable, in fact desirable, part nonetheless. Origen had banished the choice of either/or by telling the educated Christian that he occupied the enviable position of the connoisseur: with untroubled superiority he could surely and subtly separate the true from the false, the important from the inconsequential.

This sense of easy and sophisticated superiority was further cushioned by the social experience of Christians in the East. Christianity there had not only spread more quickly than in the West, but it stood in a different relation to the organization of urban life. The Christian community closely followed the continuum of social gradations in the towns.^[177] The educated bishop who emerged from the local upper classes could justifiably claim a position among his city's social and cultural elite; as the

[177] Note esp. IGLTyr 1, a Christian necropolis of the late third and the fourth century: the arrangement of the necropolis reflects the social distinctions between free and slave, honesti and humiles ; see the remarks of Rey-Coquais, pp. 162f. An unusually large number of inscriptions reveal the metiers of the deceased, with a range of craftsmen and tradesmen, and one member of a learned profession (a physician, no. 217). There are also epitaphs of the familiar type for liberally educated youths, praising their relations with the Muses (nos. 149A, B, 150); see Chap. 1 n. 64; and cf. Feissel, "Notes (III)" 550ff., with the addendum at "Notes (IV)" 474.

leader of an important group that cut across class lines within the town, he could take his place as a force to be reckoned with, alongside—and in the manner of—the factional leaders of the old town councils.^[178]

But in the West the social structure was surmounted by the class of great landowners, especially among the old senatorial aristocracy, a group of men who had no exact counterpart in the East and with whom few Western bishops could associate as social or cultural equals.^[179] Seeming to stand aloof in their pursuit of otium while devoting themselves to their own interests and those of their dependents, such men were raised up by their wealth, education, and birth, and loomed over the towns. Late in coming into the Church, they provided a continuing reminder of the worldly authority and prestige of the classical culture that lay outside. They were not easily domesticated when they came in;^[180] their power required gingerly treatment on the part of the bishop to coax and bend them to his purposes.^[181] The status and self-assurance they derived from their wealth and education made them potential competitors of men who had risen through the ranks of the Church. Their desirability as bishops threatened to upset the developing order of ecclesiastical office.^[182] The tensions did not quickly dissipate: the right that the learned (and perhaps senatorial) layman Priscillian claimed late in the fourth century, to discuss noncanonical texts as a lay teacher, and the lethal reaction of the more anxious members of the Church hierarchy, sharpened the conflict between two differently constituted elites and splintered Christian opinion.

The components of worldly and spiritual standing were at variance longer in the West, insuring that the distinctive pattern of each would remain conspicuous. At the same time, other lines of division were superimposed. The early development of vernacular Christianity in the East meant that religious boundaries were no longer fundamentally congruent with linguistic boundaries; in the West, where nothing comparable developed, Latin provided the single path of access to the vital texts. Hence,

[178] He was also increasingly likely to have his origins in the curial order; see recently Eck, "Einfluss."

[179] Cf. Eck, "Einfluss," emphasizing the exceptional status of the aristocratic bishops in Gaul and Italy of the late fourth and the fifth century; and Chadwick, Priscillian 11, on the modest social origins and intellectual attainments of the Spanish bishops.

[180] Cf. Aug. De cat. rud . 8.12, still conscious of the eruditi catechizandi as a special set offering special difficulties.

[181] Cf. Brown, Augustine 192f.

[182] See Canones Osii 13, with Hess, Canons 103ff. The canon insists that, if a wealthy man, an advocate (scholasticus forensis ), or a civil official be desired as bishop, he must first pass through the ranks of lector, deacon, and presbyter. Cf. n. 319 below.

what kind of Latin one should use remained a sticking point and a center of attention: in many minds, the polished speech of the few continued to be incompatible with the spiritual understanding of the many. In the East, where the question of language was more diffuse, solutions were more numerous. Loyalties could be so expressed as to deflect attention away from polished speech and its conflict with spiritual understanding. A readiness to hear the Truth spoken, for instance, in a Graeco-Syriac patois^[183] made it possible to turn aside from one's own highly cultivated speech—to treat it as something detachable, neutral, and so taken for granted—in a way unknown in the West. In part, the Eastern vernaculars added one more cushion against self-consciousness, a way of avoiding the problems framed in the language of either/or.

A further, decisive factor was the persistence of political unity in the East, which both sheltered urban Christianity and kept it in check, drawing it into the structure of civilian life and competing institutions with a web of familial, social, and political relations. But the sudden fragmentation of the western empire in the early fifth century tore apart that structure just when it was being finally and firmly joined with the Catholic Church. As a result the Church was isolated yet endowed with its own hauteur, left to provide the leaders of society with new careers and the institutions on which to base them. Life in the West did not suffer collapse so much as compression. Communities were thrown back on their own resources, which were frequently identical with the resources—the men, money, and culture—that the local episcopacy could mobilize. The problem of leadership, put thus acutely, would be solved differently according to the individual bishops' backgrounds and angles of vision—including the vision of the literary culture.

We can trace the points of divergence noted above in more detail, beginning with how Christians of the East resolved the problem of the traditional education. Most characteristic are the strategies that emphasize differences in value in order to discard unwanted antitheses: opposition is replaced by safe, hierarchical relationships. So, for example, one could draw on typology to adjust the relationship between charismatic teaching and the learning of men. David, the singer inspired by God, and Moses, "educated in all the wisdom of the Egyptians," can embody two acceptable types of holiness, the former "brought up in a hamlet, raised in the hands of peasants, a shepherd from childhood," the latter nurtured "in a city, in the embrace of royalty, a guardian of letters from boyhood." The two types might represent the two poles of class and culture; but the tension between them is eased by the recognition that the holiness

[183] See below, p. 79.

of David is ultimately superior, though the external learning of Moses remains nonetheless valued.^[184]

Gregory Nazianzen can be seen making a similar adjustment in order to smooth the way for his literary attainments. He dissociates himself from the normative model of St. Peter (with more than a touch of sarcasm for those who would hide behind it), declaring himself unable to match it: "I myself would have embraced the that some see fit to call faith if I were a fisherman . . . and if I had the power of signs as my own form of speech." At the same time Gregory makes a place for his own eloquence, claiming that through the divine he has "ennobled" and "sweetened" the "tongue educated in external ." The problem of the tongue is thus defused by finding one's proper place in the hierarchy of holiness and accommodating—or elevating—one's education to it.^[185]

But perhaps the most important variation on this general strategy is found in Basil's influential tract, written for his nephews, on the use of Greek literature.^[186] The work is neither an encomium of the classics (as some used to think) nor a recommendation that their form be approved but their content be rejected, with a warning, in the manner of Tertullian, against the danger of things evil in themselves (as others have recently claimed). Instead it is an exhortation and a guide to right choices. Beginning with the principle of utility ()^[187] and referring that term to what is good and useful, not in the life of men only, but for the "other life,"^[188] Basil makes the classical texts subject to the moral sensibilities and spiritual aims of Christians. Without polemic, without the suggestion that one is reluctantly coming to grips with a necessary evil,^[189] the status and function of the classics are simply and firmly redefined: they provide the preliminary exercises in a truly liberal education (),^[190] the new gymnastic of the soul, which will finally raise men up and liberate them from the transient world of crude sensation by steeping the soul in the wisdom of Christian . Of course the poets, historians, and orators cannot be sufficient for such

[184] For the comparison of David and Moses, see esp. Asterius soph. Hom . 23.15-16 (p. 180.25ff. Richard). On Moses (cf. Acts 7.22), see below, p. 78.

[186] Now available in the critical edition of Wilson, Saint Basil .

[187] Basil 1.24ff.

[188] Basil 2.1ff.

[189] Cf. Wilson, Saint Basil 10.

[190] Cf. Basil 9.86ff.

a job by themselves. Warnings must be issued not to believe what is said of the gods,^[191] or to make certain that the actions of bad men are taken as negative examples; but at the same time the actions of good men are there to be imitated, and the texts have a substantive, ethical value that can help in the progress toward the true and Final good of the soul.^[192]

The external culture () is the first stage in this gymnastic of the soul:^[193] thus Moses, Basil says, "having exercised his intelligence [] in the learning of the Egyptians, proceeded to the contemplation of reality."^[194] In a different metaphor, Basil compares the external culture to the leaves of a tree that protect the fruit (the Christian Truth growing in the soul) and give it a pleasing appearance.^[195] In still another metaphor, the classical texts lend themselves to a sketch or outline () of virtue, which "our " will teach more completely.^[196] All Basil's metaphors converge on the same point: an obvious difference in value (say, between the fruit and the leaves) can exist without implying a necessary opposition.^[197] The external culture and "our " are distinct and unequal: each has a function and value in its own sphere, and once the functions are recognized, the hierarchy of values sorted out, the external culture is no longer a threatening force.

Basil does the external culture the favor of allowing it to remain both clearly secular and clearly useful in Christian terms.^[198] Its noxious elements remain safely outside (or below); its healthy elements ease one's passage inside (or upward). One can thus enjoy the best of both worlds. From the position Basil sketched, it requires only a short step to redefine the lover of as the man who knows both classical and Christian authors.^[199] At that point, one is no distance at all from the saint as in a grammarian's dream, a kindly mother to a new Achilles.

[191] Basil 4.19ff.

[192] Basil 2.34ff.; cf. 4.5ff., 7.2ff., and the ethical exegesis of Hom. Od . 6.135ff. at 5.25ff. Compare Gregory Nazianzen's funeral oration on Basil, Or . 43.11, where the essentials of Basil's position are restated and their implicit premise is drawn out: the classical culture, like all the components of the created world, is a mixture of the useful and the harmful, which are to be distinguished by an understanding surrendered to Christ.

[193] For the gymnastic, see Basil passim and esp. 8.44f. Cf. at Chap. 1 nn. 9-11.

[194] Basil 3.13ff. With the thought and metaphor, cf., e.g., V. Marcell. Archimand. Akoimeton §2 Dagron, Anal. Boll . 86 (1968) 288.

[195] Basil 3.6ff.

[196] Basil 10.1ff.

[197] Just as there is a difference but no necessary opposition between the created and the Creator; cf. n. 192 above.

[198] Contrast below, pp. 87-88, on Augustine.

In all these cases, men have found their way around stark choices. The literary culture does not get in the way of what really matters; one can glide from one sphere to the other, since the attainments and behavior traditionally valued by literate, upper-class society are compatible with Christian duties and loyalties. In the fourth century, Gregory Nazianzen could mediate a dispute between two sophists or recommend a pupil to Libanius,^[200] and Gregory of Nyssa could hope that the pagan Libanius would review the style of his tract against Eunomius.^[201] Neither those dealings nor the careful Atticism that the Cappadocian Fathers cultivated was felt to be inconsistent with their regard for the monastic ideal or with their remarkable efforts in proselytizing (and hellenizing) their rude province.

In the next century Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, sent pupils to the pagan sophist Isocasius^[202] or acted as a middleman, receiving letters of recommendation for an Egyptian rhetorician from two presbyters and in his turn recommending the rhetorician to the comes Ulpianus.^[203] Theodoret's involvement in such transactions does not detract a whit from his deep admiration for the illiterate saints of the Syrian hinterland. The concerns of the tongue and their associated social forms and relations remain comfortably apart from or are dwarfed by the concerns of the heart. As a result, when the cultured townsman encounters the saint in the pages of Theodoret, the meeting is imagined as taking place with remarkable ease and tranquility: the holy man Aphraates appears at Antioch, speaking a mixture of Syriac and Greek, "crying out with the great Paul, 'I am ignorant in speech, but not in understanding'"; and at once all people come running to meet him, the high, educated, and rich together with the humble, ignorant, and poor, "the latter receiving in silence what he offered, the former questioning, learning, proposing topics for discussion."^[204]

Or again, in the second quarter of the sixth century, the bishop Marcian of Gaza was among the patrons of the sophist Choricius. The beneficiary of a full literary education,^[205] Marcian was interested in the local school of rhetoric and enjoyed (or endured) at least two of

[200] Greg. Naz. Ep . 192 and 236, respectively.

[201] Greg. Nyss. Ep . 15, with the remarks of Wilson, Saint Basil 11.

[202] Theodoret. Ep . XVII, XXVIII; cf. XLIV. For Isocasius, see Part II no. 85.

[203] Theodoret. Ep . 19, 20, 22.

[204] Theodoret. Hist. phil . 8.2 Canivet. The scene has no true counterpart in the West, nor could it, in view of the linguistic situation there; cf. above, pp. 75f. It is noteworthy that in the closest Western approximation (Sulp. Sev. Dial . 1.27.2-4) an apology for the rustic speaker's offense to urban ears must be confected, and the polarities thus emphasized, so that a show can be made of brushing the offense aside.

[205] Choric. Laud. Marc . 2.7 (p. 29.17ff. Foerster-Richtsteig).

Choricius's encomia, in which he heard recounted his own student days, when he "culled from poetry whatever was useful, while smiling at the myths."^[206] Town-bound as it is by the rhetorical tradition in which Choricius was working—his Gaza is completely and impeccably Greek-speaking: no more than Libanius does his epigonus reveal that the country people were largely Semitic speakers, whose language would fill Gaza's streets during the festivals Choricius lovingly describes—the sophist's point of view shows us how the local Christian gentry had merged with the civic life around them. In the Gaza of Choricius the literary culture is still an important mark of status, joined with mores ("a reverend way of life") and wealth (in the form of charitable benefactions) to form the triad "that makes men exalted."^[207] Marcian's family, too, besides Marcian himself, was involved in public life: one of his brothers was an advocate; another held a provincial governorship or some other imperial office.^[208] And as a local benefactor Marcian takes his place alongside the governor Stephanus and the duces Aratius and Summus as a subject of Choricius's praise.^[209]

Basil allowed Greek to remain both external and useful in the new gymnastic of the soul; Gregory Nazianzen claimed to ennoble the literary language; Theodoret imagined a world where the question of language is spontaneously set aside; Choricius kept his eyes fixed on the upper-class life of the town. Each in his own way overcame the problem of the traditional literary culture. The same process of accommodation of course occurred among Christians in the West: Ausonius (sometimes—quite unfairly—said to have been a nominal Christian) could not agree with Paulinus of Nola that "hearts dedicated to Christ are not open to

[206] Choric. Laud. Marc . 1.6 (p. 4.1ff.).

[209] Laud. Arat. et Steph . (pp. 48ff.), Laud. Summ . (pp. 69ff.). Cf. also Laud. Marc . 1.7 (p. 4.11ff.), with Laud. Marc . 2.16 (p. 32.5ff.); Laud. Marc . 1.30-31 (p. 10.11ff.).

Apollo";^[210] the two Clamosi, father and son, schoolmasters at Parentium, contributed to the construction of the Christian basilica in their town at the end of the fourth and again in the mid-fifth century;^[211] the grammarian Calbulus donated a baptistery to his church and adorned it with his own pious verses at the end of the fifth or the beginning of the sixth century.^[212] (We will meet others below.) But influential voices continued to express doubts that fundamental conflicts could be so easily resolved. Would worldly eloquence, for example, simply become antiseptic as the junior partner of faith? Or would it inevitably foster qualities—pride in personal ingenuity and achievement, competitiveness, pretensions to status fixed by ephemeral standards—that were a disease on the soul and divisive in the community? To Jerome and Augustine, the second possibility seemed more likely. To each of them the social good of the grammarian's profession continued to appear questionable, if not illusory; and for each, controlling the effects of his own education was a struggle set between scarcely reconcilable poles.

"You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian; 'where your treasure is, there too is your heart.'" So the Heavenly Judge spoke to Jerome in the dream that terrified him on his way to Bethlehem in 374, as he recounted it to edify Eustochium a decade later.^[213] The "old serpent" had mocked him. Beguiled by the style of Plautus, Jerome could not turn back to Scripture without disgust at its uncouth speech; and yet, "I reckoned it the fault not of my eyes but of the sun that I could not see the light in my blindness." Fastidiously confident of his own judgment, the Ciceronian was the captive of his past, its vainglory, and its false values; he could be freed only by the salutary humiliation of the flogging he received in the dream at the Judge's order.

The crosscurrents of eloquence and faith, pride and abasement, that disturbed Jerome's sleep on that occasion continued to drag at him as he attempted to come to terms with his own highly prized literacy:^[214] "It is no small thing for a noble man, a man fluent of speech, a wealthy man, to avoid the accompaniment of the powerful in the streets, to mingle with the crowds, to cleave to the poor, to associate with peasants."^[215] This praise of Pammachius's descent to the life of the vulgus was written by a man with sensibilities in tune with his subject's, aware of the tug of worldly prestige, the difficulty of pulling free (aware, too, of the rare

[210] Paulin. Nol. Carm . 10.22f. On Ausonius, see Étienne, Bordeaux 278ff.

[211] See Part II nos. 29, 30.

[212] See Part II no. 23.

[213] Jer. Ep . 22.30; see Kelly, Jerome 41ff.

[214] See esp. Hagendahl, Latin Fathers 318ff.

[215] Jer. Ep . 66.6.

satisfaction of being seen conspicuously to try). "I know that among Christians flaws of speech are not usually criticized, but . . ."^[216] Enemies are skewered for their lack of education,^[217] and educated men who come to Scripture from liberal letters are mocked for their pretensions: "If they chance to have soothed the ear of the people with an elegant speech, they reckon whatever they have said is the law of God."^[218]

The balance was so hard to find. Split by experience and conscience, Jerome worked his conflicts out in his writings. We see him in the contemporary commentaries on Ephesians and Galatians trying to control the problem of Paul's literacy. Some were able simply to imagine Paul among the illiterate^[219] or to take his agitated question "See with what big letters I've written to you?" (Gal. 6.11) as evidence that he was marginally literate, a slow writer.^[220] Ridiculous, says Jerome. Yes, Paul was a "Hebrew born of Hebrews," learned in his vernacular, unable to shape his deep thoughts in an alien tongue;^[221] yet Paul of course knew, for example, the literary trope of allegory, just as we learn about it in school, because he too had had some contact with secular letters.^[222] Then again, he does commit solecisms^[223] —of course, because his literary education was not perfect.^[224] And anyway, "He did not care about the words, as long as he preserved the sense."^[225] In these arguments we can sense Jerome's attempt to thread his way between two unacceptable alternatives, a Paul with too little worldly learning, or one with too much. In that respect, the arguments are symptomatic of Jerome's continuing debate on the value of his own worldly learning and of his attempt, never quite successful, to find a safe and stable (and distinctive) place between the "two imperfections" of "holy rusticity" and "sinful eloquence."^[226]

[216] Jer. C. Rufin . 2.20.

[217] Cf. n. 35 above; Hagendahl, Latin Fathers 311 n. 4.

[218] Jer. Ep . 53.6f.; cf. C. Rufin . 3.34 and esp. Comm. Ephes . prol.

[219] See, emphatically, John Chrysost. In 1 Cor . hom. 3.4 (PG 61.27).

[221] Comm. Gal . 3.6 (PL 26.455A-B); cf. Comm. Ephes . 3.5 (PL 26.553A).

[222] Comm. Gal . 2.4 (PL 26.416A-C).

[223] Comm. Ephes . 2 prol. (PL 26.509B-D); cf. Tract. de Ps. 81 8.221ff. (CC SL 78.89 = Anecd. Mared . 3:2.80).

[224] Comm. Gal . 2.4 (PL 26.416A-C).

[225] Comm. Gal . 3.6 (PL 26.455A-B).

[226] Jer. Ep . 52.9: nec rusticus et tantum simplex frater ideo se sanctum purer, si nihil noverit, nec peritus el eloquens in lingua aestimet sanctitatem. multoque radius est e duobus imperfectis rusticitatem sanctam habere quam eloquentiam peccatricem . Cf. Ep . 27.1, 53.3f., 57.12; Comm. Ezech . 2.7 (PL 25.61).

The problem with which Jerome wrestled in his own conscience was solved more directly by others, in the broader setting of the Christian community. The solution at once preserved the polarities of eloquence and faith, the learned and the simple, and attempted to mediate between them, de haut en bas . "Why does Paul lower himself [se humiliat ]," Jerome's contemporary "Ambrosiaster" asks, "when he says he is ignorant in speech?"^[227] Because he wanted to serve as an example against those who sought approval for their eloquence instead of their faith:^[228] he could speak in the manner of the learned of the world, but he did not choose to. Paul's statement, and by extension the blunt and restless spontaneity of his style, thus become part of a self-conscious and self-imposed humiliatio growing out of his message.

The idea had been anticipated in the apologetics of Arnobius, whose defense of the uncouthness of the Christians' Latin includes the claim that certain Fathers, although they could speak more ornately and more richly, "not only put off the cultivation of speech but even intentionally pursued a common lowness of speech [trivialis humilitas ]" lest the weight and rigor of their message be corrupted by sophistic display.^[229] Transposed from apologetics to the apostolic duty of the bishop, the idea motivates Peter Chrysologus (bp. of Ravenna; d. 450) when he calls for a "natural language," "popular" and made up of "common speech," to provide a common ground for the learned and the simple;^[230] or Augustine, when his preaching plays off the formidable strepitus of Cicero against the inviting sound of Scripture^[231] or the "grammarian's laws" against the "people's understanding."^[232] Put into effect, the idea takes the form of the humble style, sermo humilis , the style of the Christian message^[233] —humble in its descent from the shimmering, timeless standards of classical correctness and adornment down to a language intent on making the Truth plain and immediate to a heterogeneous congregation. It is the vivid, simple style of Augustine's preaching,^[234] fluent talk in plain language. Turning away from the classical canons that matched levels of style to importance of subject (for "everything we say is of great importance"),^[235] the speaker feels free to range spontaneously

[227] In 2 Cor . 11.6 (CSEL 81:2.283.4ff.).

[228] Ibid.: hoc ergo dicens non se loqui nescire voluit intellegi, sed propter eos qui non per fidem sed per eloquentiam commendari volebant .

[229] Adv. nat . 1.59.

[230] Serm . 43 (PL 52.320A).

[231] En. in Ps. 103 serm. 3.4.

[232] En. in Ps. 36 serm. 3.6, En. in Ps. 123 8, En. in Ps. 138 20, Serm . 37.14.

[233] Cf. Auerbach, Literary Language 27ff.

[234] See van der Meer, Saint Augustin 2.212ff.

[235] Aug. De doct. Christ . 4.18.35.

over the various styles according to the didactic needs and emotional pitch of the moment.^[236] Augustine wanted such a style to reach a largely uneducated audience^[237] and to extend the "franchise of the Latin language" in a mixed population of Punic and Latin speakers by simultaneously pressing Latin's claim as the only point of entry for full participation and making the entryway as wide as possible.^[238]

The style was also a subtle form of episcopal discipline. Implicitly discounting the distinctions and prestige of the traditional literary culture, it was a chastening reminder for the learned that what was important, true, and correct—in language as in substance—could not be deemed by external standards. Those standards belonged rather to the arsenal of worldly competition; they divided the community. Augustine had felt their divisiveness in himself: always conscious of the pride and competitive urge of the learned,^[239] he knew soon after his ordination that his enduring love of praise required the "medicine" of retirement and study.^[240] His style, with its "simplicity achieved at the other side of vast sophistication,"^[241] was another, continuing form of self-restraint, a way of working free of the time in his own career when those standards had meant so much. Spoken from the authoritative cathedra of the bishop, his language was a unifying force, moving downward to instruct the simple, reaching upward to set the docti an example.

This need for compelling, authoritative, yet accessible speech, capable of opening up texts singularly important in their truth but often obscurely deep or seemingly ambiguous in its presentation, motivates the De doctrina Christiana , Augustine's formal answer to the claims of the traditional literary culture.^[242] Begun in 396 and completed in 427—thus nearly framing his episcopacy—the work sketches for clergy and educated layman the possibility of an alternative literary culture based on Scripture. As a necessary part of its argument, the work divorces communication from the authority of classical grammar and rhetoric.

Augustine shows that the traditional standards of correct speech refer to a man-made order and so strips them of their veneer of permanence. As classical rhetoric's seemingly absolute judgments concerning dignity of subject matter have no meaning in Christian experience,^[243] so the

[236] Aug. De doct. Christ . 4.19.38ff.

[237] Cf. MacMullen, "Note."

[238] Cf. Brown, Religion 287ff.

[239] De bono vid. 15.19. Cf. Ep . 95.4, 266.2; De Gen. ad litt . 10.39; In Ioan. evang. tract . 57.2, 6; and cf. n. 251 below.

[240] See Brown, Augustine 205f.

[241] Brown, Augustine 268.

[242] See esp. Marrou, Saint Augustin 331ff., 505ff.; Brown, Augustine 263ff.

[243] See nn. 235, 236 above.

definitions and rules of classical grammar, concerning phonology, morphology, barbarisms, and solecisms,^[244] have no absolute validity but are only habitual observances: "What then is soundness of speech [integritas locutionis , the traditional province of the grammarian and his rules]^[245] save the preservation of an alien habit [aliena consuetudo ] supported by the authority of ancient speakers?"^[246]

The grammarian would answer that soundness of speech was definitely no simple matter of habit and authority but was founded on the nature of the language.^[247] One said inter homines , not inter hominibus , because the former expression preserved, and the latter corrupted, the natural force of the preposition and the natural relationship between the components of the phrase—not simply because, as Augustine claimed, it was the manner of "those who, before us, spoke with some authority."^[248] But Arnobius had already rejected claims to a permanent validity for rules founded in nature; he began from the position that "no speech is sound by nature" (nullus sermo natura est integer ) and went on to describe the distinctions of grammar as merely human, hence mutable, conventions.^[249] His point is essentially the same as that of Augustine, who elsewhere devalues the artifices of the grammarians as nothing more than the coventional adherence to the authority of the past:^[250] the mortmain has nothing to do with us.

At one and the same time Augustine shrugs off the burden of an alien tradition, remote in the past and appealing to criteria of no permanent value, and places the grammarian in a morally untenable position. The strength of his rules—and so his own strength—lies in his weakness and others', their ambitious regard for the good opinion of other men. Where barbarisms, solecisms, or the conventions of classical phonology are concerned, "men are all the more offended by their violation the weaker they are, and all the more weak in proportion to their wish to seem more learned."^[251] That weakness could be overcome by submission to the yoke of God,^[252] joined with the realization that the only correct speech was speech effective in context, communicating the Truth dearly, whether or not it was correct by extrinsic, formal standards.^[253] The ars

[244] De doct. Christ . 2.13.19-20, 38.56; 4.10.24.

[245] Cf. De doct. Christ . 4.3.5: ipsa arte grammatica, qua discitur locutionis integritas .

[246] De doct. Christ . 2.13.19.

[247] See Chap. 5 p. 176.

[248] De doct. Christ . 2.13.19.

[249] Adv. nat . 1.59.

[250] Cf. De mus . 2.1.1, C. Cresc . 3.79.86.

[251] De doct. Christ . 2.13.20. For pride and self-consciousness connected with the rules of correct speech, cf. 2.14.21, 41.62; 4.7.14; with Conf . 1.18.28-29.

[252] De doct. Christ . 2.13.20.

[253] De doct. Christ . 4.10.24.

grammatica could therefore be dispensed with, so long as children could grow up among men who spoke correctly.^[254]

"'Here we will not be troubled by fear of the grammarians or be afraid lest our careless use of words be punished by those who have put their goods at our disposal.' When the others had laughed . . ."^[255] In the rarified atmosphere of Cassiciacum, the enclave of retirement and study the grammarian Verecundus provided outside Milan, it still seemed possible to integrate the liberal arts smoothly with Christian studies.^[256] Augustine could then urbanely joke about fear of the grammarian's authority. But when the idea recurs in a sermon of Augustine the bishop,^[257] joking in sheltered surroundings has been replaced by instruction in a community at once the only means of salvation and split by contradictions. Augustine had "come home"^[258] and found a place where the grammarians' claims were in equal measure intrusive and irrelevant. The irritating fellows simply would not go away: witness the pagan grammarian who so disapproved of Christianity that he contemned the barbarous names of local African martyrs,^[259] or the Donatist layman Cresconius, who paraded his professional expertise as part of his polemics with Augustine.^[260] Yet such concerns seemed pointless when the typical newcomer to the Church was an uneducated townsman,^[261] when Christians accustomed to the language of Scripture thought the locutions of Latin auctores strange,^[262] when Augustine's colleagues at Hippo would most often have been like Possidius, "nurtured not by those letters that the slaves of diverse passions call 'liberal' but by the bread of the Lord,"^[263] and when not a few of Augustine's fellow bishops were ill-educated by classical standards.^[264] (Indeed, it should be remembered that the one illiterate bishop whom we know was Augustine's contemporary and countryman.)^[265]

[254] De doct. Christ . 4.3.5. How long men would continue to speak correctly—even by the relativist measure of clarity and effectiveness in context—once the formal criteria were devalued is a question with which Augustine did not concern himself; cf. Brown, Augustine 268; Dionisotti, "On Bede" 125-26.

[255] Aug. De beat. vit . 4.31.

[256] Cf. Fuchs, "Frühe christliche Kirche."

[257] Serm . 37.14: dum omnes instruantur, grammatici non timeantur .

[258] See Brown, Augustine 266f.

[259] Maximus of Madaurus ap . Aug. Ep . 16.2, with Augustine's rebuke, Ep . 17.2.

[260] Cf. Weissengruber, "Augustins Wertung" 104ff.

[261] De cat. rud . 16.24.

[262] De doct. Christ . 2.14.21.

[263] Ep . 101.1.

[264] E.g., Ep . 34.6, on the bishops Proculianus and Samsucius.

[265] See n. 16 above.

To stand in awe of the grammarian and his definitions in such circumstances was to surrender to the weakness of pride and self-satisfied idiocy.^[266] The liberal attitude toward language expressed in the De doctrina Christiana was a way of overcoming that weakness. But at the same time, it was liberalism in the service of a scarcely tolerant and stringently exclusive counterculture. To be sure, Augustine takes it for granted that men should be literate^[267] and allows that oratory may be learned—quickly, by those who have the time—in the traditional ways.^[268] Like Basil he grants, momentarily, that the liberal disciplines have some ethical value in themselves.^[269] Yet while he gives with one hand, he takes away massively with the other.^[270] One can learn the traditional rules of oratory—but really there is little point, since a student capable of learning such rules to begin with will gain nothing that he could not acquire for himself by listening to eloquent men or by reading ecclesiastical writings.^[271] Similarly, correct speech can be learned without the ars grammatica and so without the grammarian.^[272] And as for the grammarian's skill as exegete, in resolving, say, a perplexity of interpretation by punctuating correctly,^[273] that can be learned as well, if not better, from the example of Augustine himself, or from other commentators on Scripture.^[274] In short, though Augustine assumes an audience educated like himself, most of what he says debunks that education, or shows how the familiar institutions of the traditional culture, and much of its substance, can be circumvented.

Above all, the substance of the traditional culture is to be retained as useful only insofar as it can contribute directly to understanding and communicating the faith.^[275] Thus it happens that when Augustine sounds most like Basil, in offering advice to "industrious and talented youths" on their studies outside the Church,^[276] he is least like Basil in fact. Far from even hinting that the utility of the classics could be defined in terms of such immediate and limited relevance, Basil assumes that the

[266] To borrow Ramsay MacMullen's phrase; see above, n. 159.

[267] De doct. Christ . 2.18.28, 25.40; cf. prol. 4.

[268] De doct. Christ . 4.3.4.

[269] De doct. Christ . 2.40.60.

[270] Cf. De doct. Christ . 2.42.63, on the general theme that all that can usefully be learned elsewhere—and more—is found in Scripture.

[271] De doct. Christ . 4.3.4-5.

[272] See above, n. 254.

[273] See De doct. Christ . 2.2.2ff., for application of the method.

[274] Cf. Marrou, Saint Augustin 415ff.

[275] Cf. De doct. Christ . 2.18.28, utile ad intellegendas sanctas scripturas and ad spiritualia capienda ; 2.28.42, ad libros sanctos intellegendos ; 2.40.60, usui veritatis aptiores and ad usum iustum praedicandi evangelii .

[276] De doct. Christ . 2.39.58-42.63.

literary culture would remain a sanitized but unmistakably secular propaedeutic: as the first step toward the final good of the soul, Moses' preliminary gymnastics among the Egyptians have a value in themselves and are left, so to speak, in situ .^[277] But when Augustine speaks of the use of the foreign culture, in the metaphor of despoiling the Egyptians, the emphasis is wholly on passing out of Egypt.^[278] The bits and pieces of the literary culture that one can surreptitiously appropriate (clanculo vindicate ) are valued only to the extent that they do not remain secular; the metaphor of propaedeutic, with its implications of continuity and progress, yields before the metaphor of possessive alienation. For the spiritual émigrés envisioned in the De doctrina Christiana , rigorous and direct subordination is the only alternative to rejection of the literary culture or surrender to it. If the De doctrina Christiana is the "fundamental charter for Christian culture,"^[279] then as such it recognizes no middle way, no compromise, in any real sense of those terms; it is thoroughly like its author, neither desiring to break free of the traditional culture^[280] nor able to reach a comfortable rapprochement with it.

Augustine's views were not decisively influential until the deep confusion of the sixth century, when Cassiodorus could find in the De doctrina Christiana part of his formula for stripping the humanities of their vanity and including them as a branch (and nothing more) of divinity.^[281] To the aristocracy—Christian and non-Christian alike—along whose edges Augustine had moved at Rome and Milan, the path he followed as bishop would have seemed both wayward and dangerous. The traditions of the literary culture were identifying marks of the natural superiority of their class; both the traditions and the assumptions of superiority largely transcended differences of religion. During the long process by which the senatorial aristocracy in the West came to Christianity,^[282] classicism and paganism rarely coalesced to divide the aristocracy—least of all in the late fourth century. Although often attractively mounted,^[283] attempts to find in Symmachus a Julian without

[277] See above at n. 194 and p. 78.

[278] Thus De doct. Christ . 2.40.60-61, exire de Aegypto (vel sim .) repeated four times in two paragraphs.

[279] Marrou, Saint Augustin 413.

[280] On the course and extent of Augustine's classical reading during his episcopacy, see most recently O'Donnell, "Augustine's Classical Readings."

[281] On De doct. Christ . and Inst ., see O'Donnell, Cassiodorus 205f., 212f. Cf. Riché, Education 130f., on Eugippius's use of De doct. Christ .

[282] See esp. Chastagnol, "Sénateur"; Brown, Religion 161ff.; Matthews, Western Aristocracies 101ff. For the period up to and through the reign of Constantine, see Eck, "Eindringen"; Novak, "Constantine."

[283] Most influentially within the last generation by Bloch, "Pagan Revival." See also, e.g., Klingner, Römische Geisteswelt 528ff.; Paschoud, Roma 100ff.; Klein, Symmachus 67ff.; Markus, "Paganism."

portfolio, the center of a defensive pagan revival that sought to preserve the literary culture as a distinctive possession of a resisting elite, do not survive analysis.^[284] It is more accurate and more productive to think of the literary culture as a neutral zone of communication and shared prestige, across which the best families could move, near the turn of the fifth century, toward a "respectable, aristocratic Christianity."^[285] Having made the passage, the Christianized aristocracy brought the literary culture with it as naturally as it brought the traditional values and perquisites of family and class. When the fifth-century grammarian Phocas (himself a Christian, or at least writing for a largely Christian public at Rome) spoke of the schools of liberal letters as "the gymnasium of wisdom, where is shown the way to the blessed life,"^[286] he would have raised hardly a ripple of disagreement in his audience.

For the Christian aristocracy the blessed life of the schools persisted through the disruptions of the fifth century,^[287] which saw a Visigothic court in southern Gaul from 418 and senatorial domination in Italy transmuted by the establishment of an Ostrogothic court in Ravenna at the century's end.^[288] In Italy, the change produced a fateful division: the senate and the papacy, intertwined in their connections at Rome, averted their eyes from the Germans and looked to their past or to the East; in the north more flexible figures set about domesticating their new rulers.^[289] At the court in Ravenna the Italian Cassiodorus, through the edicts now gathered in the Variae , "tried to give Roman dignitas to the orders of his barbarian masters," even suggesting that their concern for the schools at Rome showed them to be not barbarians in fact, since "barbarian kings have no use" for grammar, the "mistress of words."^[290] He tried,

[284] For a decisive but, one suspects, unfortunately not final demythologization of the pagan revival and of the role of the circle of Symmachus, see now Alan Cameron, "Paganism." The pagan reaction in politics (commonly linked with the revival in letters and followed to its dramatic resolution at the battle of the Frigidus, in 394) has benefited from a similar but independent inspection, which has qualified the specifically pagan character of the events and has emphasized the essential isolation of Nicomachus Flavianus; see J. Ziegler, Zur religiösen Haltung 85ff.; O'Donnell, "Career" 136ff.; Szidat, "Usurpation"; and cf. Matthews, Western Aristocracies 241ff.

[285] Brown, Religion 177.

[286] GL 5.411.6f., gymnasium sapientiae, quo ad beatam vitam semita demonstratur , with Part II no. 121 ad fin . Contrast Aug. De doct. Christ . 2.39.58: videtur mihi studiosis et ingeniosis adulescentibus . . . salubriter praecipi ut nullas doctrinas quae praeter ecclesiam Christi exercentur tamquam ad beatam vitam capessendam secure sequi audeant .

[287] See Appendix 5; Riché, Education 24ff.

[288] Domination: Matthews, Western Aristocracies 352ff. Transmutation: Wes, Ende .

[289] Momigliano, Secondo contributo 191ff.

[290] Var . 9.21.4 (MGH AA 12.286.15ff.).

too, to give them the equally important dignitas of a past, in his Getica .^[291] As deacon of the church at Milan, the Gallic nobleman Ennodius could praise the martial Theodoric and the status rei publicae , and shepherd his own young relatives and wards into the school of Deuterius, teacher and custos imperii .^[292]

In southern Gaul, much of fifth-century aristocratic life consisted of a "reversion to type,"^[293] a return to the local expression of power characteristic of the Gallic aristocracy in the first and second centuries of the empire. Delicately maintaining their relations with the Visigothic court, less delicately taking over what remained of the imperial structure administered from Aries, and making occasional forays into the government in Italy, the senatorial families turned their attention to their libraries, their munificence to their local communities, and their backs on their German guests, establishing their place as the center of Gallo-Roman society. In this milieu, to be learned was to know that one was still Roman: the man who postponed the eclipse of Latin letters in troubled times was a heroic figure, deserving honor as "a second Demosthenes, a second Cicero."^[294] But to be truly learned was to be a Christian scholar as well, and the library worth envying had Augustine next to Varro, Prudentius next to Horace.^[295] More critical still, to be Roman and Christian was to be Catholic; that was a distinction the Goths' persistent Arianism did not allow forgetting, whether the persistence was regarded as a regrettable habit in a useful Goth or the noxious motivation of a hostile one.^[296] To possess all these characteristics, and to combine one's cultural and religious identity with a social standing that could command local loyalties and orchestrate local resources, was to become a characteristic figure of the period, the senatorial bishop.^[297]

Such a man was Sidonius Apollinaris. Sidonius, who passed smoothly from secular to episcopal concerns, is the most conspicuous example of that blending of traditional and Christian culture already noted in the

[291] Momigliano, Secondo contributo 206; O'Donnell, Cassiodorus 43ff., 55ff.

[292] Cf. Chap. 1 n. 85 and, on Deuterius, Part II no. 44.

[293] Matthews, Western Aristocracies 348ff.

[294] Sidon. Apoll. Ep . 8.2, with Part II no. 80. In a calmer period, Sidonius invites the grammarian Domitius to enjoy his estate at Avitacum, evoking the good old Roman custom of contubernium (Ep . 2.2.3; cf. Part II no. 50).

[295] Sidon. Apoll. Ep . 2.9.4. See also Ep . 4.3 and 5.2, on the qualities of the De statu animae of Claudianus Mamertus; Ep . 9.7, on the declamationes of Remigius of Reims; cf. Ennod. Epist . 2.6.2, 4ff., on the accomplishments of Iulianius Pomerius (Part II no. 124) in utraque bibliotheca .

[296] Cf. Matthews, Western Aristocracies 344f., with Sidon. Apoll. Ep . 7.6.6, on Euric; and, a bit differently, Wormald in a review of Matthews, JRS 66 (1976) 222f.

[297] On the type, see esp. Stroheker, Senatorische Adel 72ff.

East. The library Sidonius admired for its stock of secular and Christian classics recalls the definition of the as the man who knows both classical and Christian authors;^[298] the cordial correspondence of Sidonius and other bishops with the teachers of liberal letters recalls the Eastern bishops' involvement in their own literate society. "The jewel of friends and letters," Sidonius calls the young Hesperius, whose education warmly reminded Sidonius of his own; Hesperius one day would teach the son of another highly placed bishop, Ruricius of Limoges.^[299] The spiritual leader of a community did not sever the ties of friends and letters that had become the accoutrements and support of his status. Sidonius and other litterati among the bishops of the late fifth and early sixth century might say that to continue their secular literary endeavors was inconsistent with their episcopal professio , and attempt to adjust their behavior to match their statements.^[300] There is, however, little reason to think that such moves represented a fundamental detachment from their own education or a devaluation of its worth.

Far from it. When bishop of Clermont, Sidonius could repeat the ancient assertion that "the educated are as far superior to the uncultured as human beings are to beasts."^[301] The belief did not, of course, prevent him from caring for the uncultured by dispensing alms to the poor or defending his town against Gothic attack. It does, however, suggest the perspective he brought to the job, and what he and his fellow townsmen believed his task was: to step in as a great protector, with the authority and sense of duty of his social station.^[302] His education and his rhetorical style, exquisite and arabesque, were part of that station. In fulfilling the demands of episcopal office he used that style as naturally as he did his material wealth; and deficiencies of style (at least in an address composed for an audience of other bishops) demanded apology as much as would a failure of charity.^[303]

Yet the mixture of classical and Christian that marks the writings and attitudes of Sidonius occurs at a level of lonely eminence unknown to the Cappadocian Fathers, or to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, or to Marcian of

[298] See above, n. 199 and at n. 295.

[299] See Part II no. 229. Cf. Sidon. Apoll. Ep . 8.9, to Lampridius; 8.11, to Lupus.

[300] On the variable success of such renunciations by Sidonius, Avitus, and Ennodius, and their probable connection with ecclesiastical pressure (cf. Stat. Eccl. Ant . can. 5, n. 170 above), see Riché Education 96ff. For a balanced survey of Sidonius's attitudes and practice, see Gualandri, Furtiva lectio 6ff.

[301] Ep . 4.17.2; cf. Chap. 1 n. 13.

[302] Cf. Stevens, Sidonius 137f.

[303] Regret for the supposed absence of sufficient stylistic elaboration: Ep . 7.9.1f.; cf. n. 35 above. His preaching parallel with the dispensation of his personal wealth in charity: Ep . 4.2.3, from Claudianus Mamertus.

Gaza; for the same conditions that encouraged the emergence of the senatorial bishops isolated their classical culture and that of their peers among the laity. To flourish, the classical schools had always depended on their students' skills and prestige being acknowledged by an audience of significant others, whether locally or in the imperial administration. But the schools were now hemmed in by circumstance. The arena for display had become narrower: Sidonius speaks of the diminishing scope of letters, now pursued to distinction by few men in a "world already growing old."^[304] The elegiac remark acquires force by appearing in the praises of an advocate, the sort of man for whose talents the thriving imperial bureaucracy a century earlier had provided a venue and opportunity for advancement. Such a man, Sidonius implies, is now one of a dying breed. Since advocacy and governorship had survived the German settlements, a fifth-century Gallic family might produce an advocate and a provincial governor as well as bishops in a single generation;^[305] but opportunities for such secular careers were ever more rare and became the preserve of a small circle. Constriction of opportunities had a double effect: it made the classical culture a preserve of the high aristocracy to an extent scarcely paralleled since the last days of the republic; and it made a position of local, ecclesiastical leadership an attractive or necessary alternative to an imperial, secular career.^[306]

Hence there had to develop a different institutional base for such a position. It has been well remarked that "the nearest successors to Ausonius' 'Professors of Bordeaux' are the monks from the monasteries of the south":^[307] one glimpses here how institutions have consequences unintended at their inception. Founded as centers of withdrawal and meditation, where entrants could be taught literacy sufficient for the study of Scripture and where the world at large could point to a reassuring store of holy intercessors before the Heavenly Judge,^[308] the monasteries at Lérins, Marseille, and elsewhere came progressively during the fifth century to serve as sources of bishops. Some of these men, like Eucherius of Lyon, had received a classical education before finding refuge in the monastery and had resumed their interest in the literary culture after leaving the monastery behind.^[309] But more consequential was the

[304] Ep . 8.6.3.

[305] Cf. n. 208 above, on the family of Marcian of Gaza.

[306] The constriction is well described by Matthews, Western Aristocracies 347f. For the bishoprics of the Gallic aristocracy as alternative careers, see recently Heinzelmann, "Aristocratie"; Mathisen, "Hilarius."

[307] Matthews, Western Aristocracies 348.

[308] Cf. Sidon. Apoll. Ep . 7.9.9.

[309] Cf. Riché Education 102. Note the fusion of religious and cultural authority that provides the conceit for Agroecius's dedication of his Orthographia to Eucherius, GL 7.113.1ff.: libellum Capri de orthographia misisti mihi. haec quoque res proposito tuo et moribus tuis congrua est, ut, qui nos in huius vitae actibus corrigere vis, etiam in scribendi studiis emendares. nihil ergo quod in nobis est alienum a castigatione tua credis: omnia nostra, el quae dictu parva sunt, sollicita indage rimaris. . . . hoc est vere summum Dei sacerdotem esse, commissos sibi homines, ut ipsi dicitis, et secundum spiritum imbuere et secundum litteram perdocere . Cf. Part II no. 181. Contrast the case of Gregory of Nyssa sending his tract against Eunomius to Libanius for vetting, above, n. 201.

trend that can be found already in the first half of the fifth century, in the shift from a father who became a bishop after holding the praetorian prefecture to his son, brought up in a monastery before becoming a bishop in his turn.^[310] The fact that the father's literary sophistication could distinguish him from his son is symptomatic of the shift and of the emergence among the episcopal aristocracy of a new group, owing none of its prestige and authority to the traditional culture.^[311]

The voice of that new elite is heard clearly in the Vita of Caesarius of Aries, which recounts his vision of—and triumph over—the serpent of worldly wisdom and polished speech.^[312] The vision bears an evident likeness to the anxious dream of Jerome, but more significant are the differences, which emphasize the spiritual muscle of the monastic visionary: no Judge, no need for a flogging to turn the dreamer to humility, and no tears of repentance; Caesarius awoke, reproved himself, and "despised these things straightway"—and that, to all appearances, was that. Far from marking the beginning of a long inner turmoil, as it did for Jerome, the dream conveys an image of instant superiority. The temptation of foolish wisdom and its vainglory is only a moment in an otherwise direct carrière that takes Caesarius from Lérins to holy orders at Aries, and from the abbacy of the suburban monastery at Aries to the episcopal throne.^[313] The secular culture and its prestige intrude only as a foil for the greater strength, and greater authority, of the monastic culture Caesarius first acquired at Lérins and later recreated for the clerics in the domus ecclesiae at Arles.^[314]

[310] The Petronii: the father, bishop of Verona; the son, bishop of Bologna. See Gennad. De vir. ill . 42, with Mathisen, "Petronius" 108ff.

[311] Gennad. De vir. ill . 42: Petronius . . . , vir sanctae vitae et monachorum studiis ab adulescentia exercitatus, scripsisse putatur vitas patrum Aegypti monachorum. . . . legi sub eius nomine de ordinatione episcopi . . . tractatum, quem lingua elegantior ostendit non ipsius esse sed, ut quidam dicunt, patris eius Petronii, eloquentis et eruditi in saecularibus litteris viri: et credendum, nam el praefectum praetorio fuisse se in ipso tractatu designat . The distinction, although rejected in the past, has been vindicated by Mathisen, "Petronius."

[312] See above, n. 161.

[313] V. Cats . 1.8-14.

[314] This became the prototype of the episcopal schools, the training ground for a professional clergy: Riché, Education 124ff. On the "episcopal aggression" that might have motivated some such establishments, see briefly Wormald's review of Matthews, JRS 66 (1976) 225.

Whether the account of the vision originated with Caesarius or with his biographers, it seems accurately to suggest the extent of Caesarius's hostility to the classical culture^[315] and his limited familiarity with it:^[316] certainly Caesarius's style owes more to Scripture than to classical rhetoric^[317] and is the idiom of a man "nurtured not by the letters that the slaves of diverse passions call 'liberal' but by the bread of the Lord."^[318] But what is equally important, the account eloquently conveys both the tensions and the quiet arrogance of men asserting against the secular prestige of the liberally educated the authority and independence of their own institutions as the framework for a career. If the movement from secular career and classical school to ecclesiastical career and the Church as educator can be thought of as a translatio imperii , it was, like all such transfers, a movement accompanied by friction.^[319]

The simplicity of speech Caesarius insists upon when he offers his sermo pedestris as an example while sharply directing the bishops under his primacy to keep their worldly rhetoric out of their churches,^[320] or when he draws attention to his own rusticity in his sermons,^[321] is of course suited to the bishop's role as mediator, disciplining the learned while drawing into the congregation people on the margins of Latinity.^[322] The role itself was not new—Augustine had molded himself to it at Hippo^[323] —nor were the circumstances: it is doubtful that Arles at the beginning of the sixth century was a radically less learned place than Hippo at the beginning of the fifth.^[324] The difference lies in Caesarius's blunt and unmodulated certainty, a luxury and a defense his background provided. In place of the tense dialectic through which Augustine took his traditional education for granted even as he distanced himself from it, there is the unalloyed excellence of Caesarius's monastic simplicity, a badge to be worn proudly, an emblem of divine grace^[325] and in itself a guarantee

[315] See esp. Serm . 99.3.

[316] Cf. Riché Education 114f.

[317] See Bonini, "Stile."

[318] To apply Augustine's description (above, n. 263) of Possidius, who like Caesarius passed from the monastery (at Hippo) to the episcopacy (at Calama).

[319] For similar tensions appearing elsewhere in slightly different terms, see esp. Sidon. Apoll. Ep . 7.9.14, on the objections that Sidonius anticipates should he nominate a bishop from among the laity who have enjoyed a secular career. Sidonius's solution was to propose a man who could point both to bishops and to magistrates in his family's history (ibid. 17) and whose wife could count both bishops and professors among her ancestors (ibid. 24).

[320] Serm . 1.20; cf. 1.12-13.

[321] Cf. Serm . 86.1, 114.2.

[322] Cf. Auerbach, Literary Language 91; Riché Education 93f.

[323] See above, p. 84.

[324] See above, p. 86.

[325] Cf. V. Caes . 1.9.

of virtue.^[326] His simplicity is ultimately as aggressive and self-satisfied as the sophistication and polished speech of the classical culture it opposes.

In Sidonius and Caesarius one hears two distinct voices of the episcopal aristocracy, each speaking from a different position of strength, each equally removed from the struggles of Jerome and Augustine. Sidonius assumes the episcopacy as an extension of his secular primacy, of which his classical culture was a part—he was not one to suffer from visions. In counterpoise there is the image of Caesarius easily exorcising the demon of classicism, the straw man for his own monastic culture. Where Augustine had needed to think and feel his way to a resolution of his own experience, Sidonius never fully knew the need, and Caesarius never had such experience. In their differences, the two men symbolize the still-conflicting claims of worldly and spiritual sources of authority, and the divided legacy with which continental Europe entered the Middle Ages—a division in which the classical culture continued to figure and across which the men of the following generations would make their way only along such narrow paths as those pointed out by Augustine's doctrina Christiana .

In the eyes of friends and critics alike, the grammarian's profession stood for the tenacious maintenance of one kind of order. It fostered and defined, and was fostered and delimited by, a hierarchy of individual status and social relations built on the good opinion of other men. In this way the profession contributed to an idea of permanence that sought to control the instabilities of idiosyncratic achievement and historical change. In the following chapters we will look more closely at the lives and teachings of the grammarians themselves within that hierarchy. As a start, we can examine the places they occupied—the range of their social and economic circumstances, the fact and limits of their social and geographic mobility, their roles as private or public persons—between the humble experience of the common run of men and vertiginous ambition for earthly power or heavenly grace.

[326] See esp. the defense of rusticity—in effect, an assertion of moral superiority—at V. Caes . praef. 2.