The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ResearchArchive at Victoria University of Wellington Self-education and late-learners in The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius By Joe Sheppard A Thesis Submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Classics School of Art History, Classics and Religious Studies Victoria University of Wellington 2008 Self-education and Late-learners in The Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius This thesis was motivated by expressions of self-education during the early Roman Empire, an unusual topic that has never before been studied in detail. The elite cultural perspective nearly always ensured that Latin authors presented the topos of self-education as a case of social embarrassment or status dissonance that needed to be resolved, with these so-called autodidacts characterised as intellectual arrivistes . But the material remains written by self-educated men and women are expressed in more personal terms, complicating any simple definition and hinting at another side. The first half of this thesis builds a theory of self-education by outlining the social structures that contributed to the phenomenon and by investigating the means and the motivation likely for the successful and practical-minded autodidact. This framework is influenced by Pierre Bourdieu, whose work on culture, class, and education integrated similar concerns within a theory of habitus . As with other alternatives to the conventional upbringing of the educated classes, attempts at self-education were inevitable but ultimately futile. An autodidact by definition missed out on the manners, gestures, and morals that came with the formal education and daily inculcation supplied by the traditional Roman household. In most instances it is unlikely that education could ever have contributed to social mobility. The latter half of this thesis treats Gellius’s Attic Nights as a case study of self- education on two levels. A self-consciously recherché miscellany, the Nights at once encourages respectable gentlemen to improve themselves with a short-cut to culture, yet also humiliates any socially marginal figures attempting to educate themselves. This process reproduces the social order by undermining the integrity of any rivals to the elite cultural model while at the same time lionising the author and members of his circle as intellectual ‘vigilantes’. ii Preface Technological advances in communications and information management have seen self-education more easily accomplished and more widespread today than ever before. The moral value that Western societies place on industry, imagination, individuality, aptitude and social mobility means that our autodidacts are more likely to be celebrated than denigrated. But to the elite Romans of the first centuries CE, the advent of the self-educated man heralded threats that cut to the heart of their intellectual culture and social order. Every recent undergraduate in New Zealand is familiar with the phenomenon of opsimathia or ‘late-learning’ in the form of the so-called mature student. Few students seem ready, however, to look past their prejudices and consider some basic consequences of the democratisation of tertiary education, such as what forces had excluded such late-learners from university in the first place or why they might have chosen to embark on or return to their studies. Today university attendance is fast becoming the rule rather than the exception for high school leavers. As such the purpose(s) and value of liberal learning today are as important and sometimes controversial today as they were in the ancient world. As the recipient of a liberal education in Classical Studies from a Western university, I am aware that an inquiry into ancient pedagogy risks horrible images of ivory towers and navel-gazing. However, I have been pleasantly surprised to find that my research around the margins of Roman culture has afforded me the necessary distance to consider just what informed the perspectives and motivations of ancient individuals who existed outside the milieu presented in the dominant discourse of the period. This has uncoupled me from some prevailing modern ideology—such as the mantra that education is always a good thing—and thus helped to give me the freedom to shape questions about the modern Western model of schooling, and especially the university system. The greatest influence on this subversive approach was my forward-thinking supervisor Arthur Pomeroy, who often resembled the stereotypical grammaticus in never tiring nor failing to answer the appallingly diverse torrent of arcane questions I assailed him with. I am also very grateful to Zoë Prebble for her patient support and encouragement, and thank her for helping with final proofs and the more philosophical aspects of my research and writing. iii All translations from Latin are my own, as are any faults and inaccuracies. Any Greek translations are from Loeb editions. The chief texts used are the Oxford editions of Gellius (ed. P.K. Marshall, 1967) and Suetonius’s De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus (ed. Robert A. Kaster, 1995), and the Teubner edition of Petronius’s Satyricon 4 (K. Müller, 1995). All other texts quoted are Oxford editions wherever possible, otherwise Loeb (Quintilian or Seneca, for example). Any abbreviations conform to the style used in the Oxford Classical Dictionary ( OCD ) or else the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary (= LS , Oxford: 1958). iv Contents Part I: The Problem Of Self-Education At Rome ..........................................................2 Introduction................................................................................................................2 A Portrait of the Self-Educated Man .......................................................................17 Roman Education.....................................................................................................24 Alternative Paths to Culture.....................................................................................25 How Roman Education Engendered the Autodidact ...............................................31 Why Get Yourself An Education? ...........................................................................48 Pompey vs. Terence.................................................................................................53 The Futility of Self-Education .................................................................................59 Part II: When Is Self-Education OK? A Case Study of the Attic Nights .....................66 Introduction..............................................................................................................66 The Self-Education of the Respectable Gentleman .................................................68 Initiation into the Mysteries of the Attic Nights ......................................................78 Exposure Scenes: Part I ...........................................................................................85 The First Exposure Scene (NA 1.2).........................................................................86 The Profile of a Professor ........................................................................................88 How Reliable Are The Exposure Scenes? ...............................................................93 The Structure Of the Exposure Scenes ....................................................................98 Exposure Scenes: Part II ........................................................................................106 Late-Learners .........................................................................................................112 Conclusions................................................................................................................120 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................122 Part I: The Problem Of Self-Education At Rome Introduction Why self-education in the Roman Empire? The motivation for this thesis came from a passing comment in the standard work on grammarians in late antiquity, Robert Kaster’s Guardians of Language . In a footnote to a brief digression outlining some less traditional forms of schooling, Kaster identified a gap in the scholarship on ancient education, namely the study of the so-called autodidact. ‘I know of no comprehensive study of this interesting type,’ he wrote two decades ago, and the statement would hold just as true if it were penned today. 1 This thesis of course makes no claim to any such comprehensiveness. My intention is rather to shed some light on the social and cultural forces at play behind a successful figure that has only been faintly sketched—yet with uniform hostility—by the literary sources of the Roman Empire, with a particular focus on the second- century authors Aulus Gellius and C. Suetonius Tranquillus. This thesis is divided into two parts. Part one begins with this introduction, which defines exactly what I mean by self-education at Rome and outlines key concepts and issues, before surveying the modern and ancient literature on the subject and setting limits on the present enquiry. The remainder of the first part attempts to construct a theory of self- education at Rome and the likely point of view of an autodidact. Part two of the thesis tests the examples of self-education in Gellius’s Attic Nights against this framework.

Load more