Grammar
The word comes from Greek gramma-something carved or written, usually a letter, although the letters could be in any alphabet--in Greek, in Hebrew, or in our very own Roman alphabet. Our alphabet derives from Hebrew the four-letter name of God, YHWH, often expanded to Yahweh or Jehovah. As we know from our own experiences and those of our children, letter recognition is the first step toward beginning to read, but by no means the last. We progress from letters to words, words to phrases, phrases to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to stories, and stories to entire books.
In the ancient world, the term grammar covered not just the first steps, but the whole language learning process, from letters of the alphabet to the study of literature. This may be surprising, as if we used the term “bricks” to refer to the building, selling, and buying of real estate, or “numbers” to refer to business and accounting. But precise attention to letters and how they build meaning was and is essential for many professions. Indeed, a group of business leaders recently complained that semi-literate e-mail was degrading productivity because employees could not understand what they were supposed to be doing.
In ancient Rome in the days of the architect Vitruvius (90-20 BC), the professions that required grammar consisted not only of the teachers of grammar, but also law, medicine, architecture, the military, and even large-scale farming. There were, of course, priests, but they tended to be part-time amateur priests, often as part of a large society or collegium, in addition to their primary jobs as lawyers or farmers.
In ancient Rome, all these professions relied not only on training but also on their own reading of handbooks or treatises by experts in the field, of which we have several examples; Vitruvius’ treatises are among the longest and best-preserved, but we also have the military treatise of Vegetius, the medical treatise of Celsus, a treatise of Frontinus about how to build aqueducts, the legal textbook of Gaius, Varro’s fragmentary treatise on Roman religious customs, and the farm management handbook of Columella (whose name means “honey-farmer or beekeeper”). There must have been engineering treatises, for we have evidence for the profession of consulting engineer: Junius Bassus went to Saldae in North Africa to unsnarl a tangled construction job: two teams of workmen digging a tunnel through a mountain from opposite sides had dug past one another, and Bassus was supposed to go and figure out how to join up the tunnel with a minimum of extra labor.
But how were literate professional Romans built? We learn a great deal from Quintilian, who wrote--you guessed it, a treatise--on Roman education around 90 AD. First, Roman boys from about age seven went to school to learn from a grammaticus, who could be either free or slave. The grammaticus taught them how to read and write, and he taught both Latin and Greek. Greek had an unusual status because it was a foreign language, yet a huge body of important literature and treatises already existed in Greek by the time Rome conquered Greece in 168 BC. Also, Greek was the primary language of the eastern half of the empire. Spanish in America is perhaps the closest analogy to Greek at Rome--an older culture, with plenty of native speakers, but true bilingualism difficult to achieve without a lot of hard work. In antiquity the most successful bilinguals seem to have been those who moved permanently in their teens or twenties from a Latin-speaking area to a Greek-speaking area, or vice-versa.
Some of the most important tools of the grammaticus were small vases with letters of the alphabet on them and wooden stencils to guide young hands in practicing writing letters. Later in Italy, the elementary teacher was called the grammatica, all professions ending in -a instead of us, and Martin Grammatica, former kicker for the Tampa Bay Bucs, came from a family whose trade was elementary teaching. But back to the ancient world; the Roman grammaticus was more successful at teaching reading than teaching writing; many Romans had abysmal handwriting, as we know from letters and grafitti that survive, and professional scribes, free or slave, were responsible for the generation of many documents, especially the ones intended for publication. Indeed, the only way to “publish” something in the ancient world was to have scribes copy it.
But the grammaticus did not teach only the mechanics of language, for he used in teaching not the Roman equivalent of “See Spot Run,” but sentences quoted from actual Roman and Greek literature. The Roman schoolboy read and recited words about the doings of adults--war, politics, culture, religion--not about other children; the boy learned about what he would become, not what he was. Later, he would write compositions about the doings of heroes from Roman and Greek history and legend, and, when he took up the kindred liberal art of rhetoric, even would compose appropriate speeches for them to deliver.
Grammar also involved education in character, in how to be good and stay that way, by reading and reciting appropriate words, sentences, and stories. The author Florus, who taught boys in the early Roman empire and wrote a thumbnail sketch of Roman history, says about the teaching profession in a prayer to the Roman king of the gods: “O Kindly Jupiter, how imperial, how royal it is to sit instructing good habits and the pursuits of holy literature, now reciting poems, by which their faces and minds are molded, now stirring their perceptions with diverse opinions and with examples of Roman virtue.” Teaching and learning were both sacred and patriotic acts, which involved both exterior and interior training and self-control.
The grammaticus also taught what we might call discernment or judgment, how to weigh diverse opinions and tell good from bad, in behavior and in literature. The Roman educator Quintilian helps point to the sophisticated, “milky richness” of the Roman historian Livy and the sound-bite-driven, content-free style of the public speaker Seneca. As for moral examples, even literature for adults like the Roman historian Livy’s history of Rome holds itself up as providing examples to imitate and examples to avoid, sometimes even in the same figure; Manlius Capitolinus saves the Capitoline hill, the military and religious center of Early Rome, from its barbarian enemies, but is later thrown off this very hill to his death for trying to become a tyrant with absolute power. The lesson is clear--your duty is to your country, not to yourself. The students of grammar also learned about the sorts of women to marry and avoid marrying--the good, brave heroine Cloelia was captured in war by Rome’s but managed to escape by swimming across a river; in contrast, the evil schemer Tullia ran over her own father with a wagon to increase her husband’s power.
The Roman educator Quintilian also mentions competition as a spur to learning--who can recognize the letters first, who can decipher his sentence the fastest, who can recite a poem with feeling but not excessive drama. Competitive learning not only made grammar in all its senses fun for active, fidgety young boys but also prepared them for later competition on the battlefield, in the lawcourt, in political campaigns. This also brings us to two other liberal arts, logic and rhetoric, which I will sketch only briefly here. Grammar, logic or dialectic, and rhetoric made up the trivium, the “three roads” or “crossroads” of learning from about 400 AD through the 19th century. I particularly like the image of the crossroads, because grammar brought students to a point where they could use language to do more sophisticated things.
Logic had to do with reasoning and philosophy, how to figure things out, how to get from point A to point B in your mind, and how to spot faulty reasoning in yourself and in others. Since Roman mathematics were in a primitive state--their number system was a primitive tally system that made long division almost impossible, Romans could not do the symbolic logic of modern philosophers and mathematicians, let alone the sequential thinking of computer languages. Instead, Roman logicians had to use words and sentences--namely, the very tools that grammar had put into students’ hands. Thus, logic was easier to teach and learn than now because the student did not have to learn an entirely new language. That said, the use of words sometimes led to imprecision and non-productive ambiguity, and the Romans were not as good at philosophy as the Greeks, who had 20% more vocabulary words and were thus 20% more precise.
Rhetoric had to do with persuasion, with getting others to see things your way. Even though Romans learned Greek in school, Romans often portrayed rhetoric as a Greek art, both “foreign” and suspicious in its power to make people do things they didn’t want to do. Roman history sometimes features Romans using methods other than words to persuade--in early Rome, a Roman soldier shows his battle scars, all in front of course, as a way to persuade the Roman people to outlaw enslavement for debt. But in the less heroic age of Vitruvius, words were the building blocks of rhetoric. Indeed, the importance of words is shown by complaints about how tyrannical emperors of Rome made words lose their meaning in ways reminiscent of George Orwell’s novel 1984--freedom turns out to mean slavery of Roman politcians and generals, victory turns out to mean disgraceful retreat from Rome’s enemies, and so on.
The other branches of the liberal arts, the quadrivium or “four-roads” or “intersection”, are more specialized. Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music could create proportion in a building or harmony in the soul and in the universe. Nevertheless, grammar was still useful for terms, explanations, and entire treatises, although in these advanced studies, diagrams and symbols (not the same as ours) did more of the heavy lifting. Varro, a ridiculously learned contemporary of Vitruvius c. 25 BC, has a list that includes the seven liberal arts but also architecture and medicine, but other Romans like the lawyer Cicero look down on architecture and medicine as not worthy of a free Roman man.
The seven liberal arts, although they all existed long before Vitruvius’ time, were not put into a formal, robust system until Martianus Capella, c. 420 AD. Capella’s work, On the Marriage of Mercury and Philology, was hugely influential on the school and (later) university courses of study in the Middle Ages. In this highly allegorical work, the male god Mercury (the god of travelers and escort of the soul to the underworld, perhaps the soul itself) marries the female Philology (love of words) to end his celibacy but must also make her immortal so they are equal in rank. Philology has seven female slaves, each of whom stands for the seven liberal arts.
Again, the seven liberal arts were the foundation and preparation for all the professions--the church, medicine, law, even the military--not because soldiers had to be able to recite poetry but because much ancient and medieval poetry inspired courage in the service of a noble cause (or even a not-so-noble cause). For example, in 92 AD, the Roman poet Statius wrote a long poem about the sons of King Oedipus of the Greek city of Thebes (of complex fame). The sons fight each other for the throne of Thebes in a pointless, savage civil war that claims thousands of lives. The hero Tydeus fights bravely on behalf of the younger son and is about to earn immortality among the gods, but, insane with fury, he chews on an enemy warrior’s skull and goes straight to the Roman equivalent of Hell. In the equally savage and gruesome wars among small medieval Italian city states, the story of Tydeus offered examples of both courage and depravity to those who could read it. You’ve seen those bumper stickers, “If you can read this, thank a teacher”--the Roman equivalent was, “If you can recite this poem, thank a grammaticus!”
January 13, 2005 Classics (Latin & Greek)
Queen Anne, Seattle ewaldo@spu.edu
Illustration from the Garden of Delights by Herrad vom Landsberg (Courtesy University of Tbigen), c. 1150 AD: Lady Philosophy (middle, holding banner) with Socrates (middle, with beard) and his pupil Plato (middle, across from Socrates); below are the Four Evangelists writing the Gospels, and in circles around the middle are the Seven Liberal Arts, starting with Grammatica at the top.