In this study, Martin Bloomer offers a new synthetic account of Roman education, in the tradition of Marrou, Bonner and Clarke. In eight chapters he investigates the origins of Roman schools, discusses stories of the education of famous Romans, reconstructs the activities of Plotius Gallus and his school of rhetoric, presents some theories about the upbringing of children in the works of ps.-Plutarch and Quintilian, and assesses the significance of the study of grammar and elementary rhetorical exercises for Roman schoolboys. Syntheses of a subject are often welcome, especially when there has been a good deal of recent activity in the field. A study of education that focuses on Rome, rather than, like recent monographs, on the wider Greek and/or Roman worlds, also has its attractions. Even better, B. takes the long view, showing us the evolution of educational practices from the middle Republic through to the later Principate. The picture he draws, however — whether due to the limitations of the sources or his style of analysis — turns out to be less strikingly novel that one might have hoped.
Conceptually, the book relies on earlier work. The theory that what gave Roman education unity was not institutions but a common curriculum; what ps.-Plutarch and Quintilian tell us about the psycho-social development of the child; what moralizing sayings and stories tell the schoolchild about the nature of the world; how what a Roman child read equipped him for a certain place in society; what one learns from grammar and elementary rhetorical exercises; all these ideas are almost uncannily familiar to this reviewer. There is nothing wrong with using conceptual frameworks developed by others, but it encourages the reader to look for originality either in the range of evidence presented or the conclusions drawn.
B. misses some opportunities to improve on the limitations of earlier work and to take into account advances which have been made since the publication of previous monographs. He mentions that Roman education included mathematics, but does not pursue it. He does not discuss a recent argument that the curriculum included the study of geography. He does not try to do more justice than did previous writers to the education of slaves or women. He makes most use of a group of well-known texts by Cicero, Plutarch, ps.-Plutarch, Suetonius, Quintilian, and ps.-Quintilian. This creates some difficulties for his project. His focus on Roman education is his justification for omitting, for instance, papyrological sources — but his Rome seems to encompass Plutarch and the authors of the Greek progymnasmata, not to mention early comedy and the distichs of Cato, which are heavily influenced by Greek gnomologies. If Roman education is distinct from Hellenistic education in this period, as B. wants to argue, then one wonders why he relies so heavily on Greek sources. If it is not, then I am not sure where his subject is. It might have been more productive to begin with the places where Roman education appears or claims to be distinctive and reflect on their rhetorical and/or socio-cultural currency.
B. takes an optimistic view of the sources, following Bonner in assuming, for instance, that we can on the whole accept the narrative implicit in Plutarch's Lives of a pre-Greek Roman aristocratic education. His investigation of the school of Plotius Gallus is more adventurous, and forms the basis for an entertaining reconstruction of the difficulties encountered by early schools of rhetoric at Rome.
Much of B.'s previous work has drawn our attention to topics which had been undeservedly neglected and shed a great deal of light on Roman society. Roman education is still, in some respects, such a topic; that B. has tackled it is to be welcomed, but it is a pity that he does not develop our understanding further than he does.
