Education in Ancient Greece and Rome
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 มิ.ย. 2024
- Only a minority of Greek and Roman children received an education. Those few found themselves in a strange world of poetry and pedantry.
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If you liked this video, you might also enjoy my book “Naked Statues, Fat Gladiators, and War Elephants: Frequently Asked Questions about the Ancient Greeks and Romans.”
www.amazon.com/Naked-Statues-...
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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
1:17 Education, public and private
2:09 Classrooms and teachers
3:13 Classroom routine
3:59 Elementary education
5:36 Speakly
6:50 The school of the grammarian
9:06 The school of the rhetor
10:33 Declamations
11:45 University towns
12:18 Medical school
12:47 Law school
13:23 Philosophical education
13:49 Late antiquity
The Pokemon of Smyrna was hard to catch, for his dogs were fierce and plentiful.
"My dog ate my wax tablet"
In all honesty, I feel a dog is more likely to eat that then paper
@jwilson544 yah its like a chew toys.
@jwilson544 u say that but my dogs would 100% chew on any notebook and rip it up if left on the floor or couch
"A likely story young man..." 🤨
--ancient Greco-Roman professor
If anyone is wondering what Bart Simpson wrote on the blackboard it was: "Romans, go home!" We know he got the syntax correct because of the scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian. I love your sense of humor, Dr Ryan!
These people called romans they go home?
That's true, and thanks for bringing up "The Life of Bryan". Please forgive me for being a bit of a pedant, but it would be better to say that Bart got the morphology right (not that he got the syntax right). We could also use the rather archaic language of the teaching the classics and say that he got the accidence (inflections: verb conjugations and noun / adjective declensions) right.
-"I am tired of studying phylosophy. Let's study music now!"
-"You will need philosophy much more than music."
-"What for?"
-"For any state office you're going to hold. You have to prepare for responsibility"
-"What I want is to be a great actor, dancer, and singer. Can you talk about responsibility when it comes to art?
-"Not of moral responsibility."
-"You're an old fool, Seneca
-"That's not appropriate at all. You are going to apologize in fifty lines of hendecasyllables that you will present to me tomorrow morning."
-"What if I don't present them to you?"
-"I'll tell your mother."
-"Those Hendecasyllables...can they be sung?"
*Argument between phylosopher Seneca and his pupil Nero during the last years of the Reign of Claudius*
Really? That's hilarious!
@@DanceNightAtDiscoFright It's fromthe Anthony Burguess' novel "The Kingdom of the Wicked"
That reminds me of a scene from Moliêre's "Le Bourgois Gentilhomme" where the teachers are arguing which of their subjects are more important.
I studied under Pokemon of Smyrna.
This channel is the reason both TH-cam and the internet were ever formulated - to spread knowledge and spark curiosity. I'm eternally grateful that people like you continue to make your genre of content. Much love Garrett I wish you every success x
The internet was created to disperse and secure state power.
For those interested in Roman-era education, the Robert Graves' book "I, Claudius" recounts in great detail from Emperor Claudius' point of view what it was like to be educated among the great elites of the Roman Empire. It's quite funny that Claudius went from being bullied for his disabilities to being respected by his classmates thanks to the influence of his brother Germanicus and his cousin Postumus Agrippa, who were very popular during his school years
Ohhh my dad is reading it. He likes it
Claudius according to accounts: historian, a good orator but still stutter when doing casual conversation. Good administrator who knew propaganda
I, Claudius is mostly fictional...
@@Gorgondantess The book is fictional, but it tells with great detail and accuracy how roman society was back then
Of course this comes out right after I finish my research outline for "an analysis of greco-roman pedagogy"
I think this is all contained in the toldinstine’s book naked statues and these videos are randomly transcribing chapters into videos
No, this is new stuff
@@toldinstone oop. My bad. You’re right. Guess I’m a confabulation
@@vikrantsharma8249 Faaab-ulation! *SHING*
It is pretty funny how most of the ancient rulers who had the privilege of being educated by the greatest minds of the time ended up simply ignoring their teachings. For example:
-Alexander the Great consolidated his conquests mainly through the mixture of Greek, Syrian and Indian cultures and races despite the fact that Aristotle taught him as a child that the Syrians and other Eastern peoples were barbarians with whom the Greeks could not mix.
-Nero was obsessed with being more of an artist and chariot racer than being an Emperor, despite the fact that his tutor Seneca told him all the time to mature and behave like a great ruler. The only attention Neron gave Seneca was asking him to kill himself.
-Commodus was the son of Marcus Aurelius himself, who instilled in him his stoic teachings from a young age, but the only thing that mattered to the boy was becoming Hercules
You mention violent conquerors…who didn’t care about human life, why would they care about their educations?
Can lead a horse to water but u cant make him drink
I bought your audiobook on Audible but was very disappointed to find out that it is narrated by someone else. You an excellent narrator! If in the future you could do the narration itself, that would be amazing
If you add Caesar's Commentary on the Gallic Wars, the texts you mention are pretty much the ones I learned taking four years of Latin in high school. With the Romans as hidebound as they often were about curriculum it tickled my sense of humor we were basically still following it 2000 years later
Likewise... alas, I had but one year of Latin, but we learned it in the Roman way!
Those catholic hs like teaching that shit. They have a rationale but the real reason is any lie if there's a 1 in 100,000 chance of getting some to become a priest.
@@Reziac You should try to read Ecce Romani. So much fun! I read the first two volumes after I had already learned enough Latin to basically sight read the lessons (with occasional help from the chapter's glossary). So, although I didn't really need to study these two books, I wanted to because the stories were so interesting. This is true even in the first first stories which, of necessity, are short and told using very simple grammar and vocabulary. The authors of these books are great at making even low A1 level materials interesting.
The JACT course "Reading Greek" is also very good. So, too, the Cambridge and Oxford books as well as "Reading Latin" by Jones and Sidwell. But I prefer "Ecce Romani" and "Reading Greek".
@@williamwolf2844 Thank you! I'll give that a try!
Man it's crazy to think teachers have always been underpaid
Are you surprised?
@@paulkoza8652 I wish I was surprised
Eh when it's specifically primary school teachers that actually makes a ton of sense. We can and should respect and value teachers, but frankly nearly anyone can offer a child a primary education, it's a collection of knowledge possessed by anyone who themselves had a primary education and therefor not as valuable in the market as the services of a rhetorician, lawyer, or philosopher would be. You could say that's unfair or not right or impress upon it any other value judgment but the market doesn't care all that much and neither do the parents educating their children.
most should be fired tbh
Underpaid? Questionable. Alot of them don't even deserve their job.
Your videos make me feel tingles in my insides
"perished from studying too hard".....wow. I don't even have a joke for that
Guess he was asian
The humour and pictures are on point with this one :D
"Pokemon of Smyrna..." That made me chuckle...Lol
this guy: researching ancient history
Google: “did you mean *Pokémon* ??”
C is for Constantine LOL! 👍
13:00 Laesus? Sordida dives fieri potes. Voca nunc.
Quintus, Quintus et filii
Hi Doc, unless I missed it it might be a good idea to link those other channels in the description. Happy to find them on my own though!
I'll link them now!
Thanks Garrett. I have often wondered about this topic. I enjoy your posts. Keep up the good work.
Thank you for being wonderful❤
I am so thankful for your hard and interesting presentation. It keeps my ghosts away
you are the best. I hope you make a spotify podcast based on stories and experiences. i loved the pompeii series
My new travel channel "Scenic Routes to the Past" will hopefully bring more and more of my travel stories to TH-cam. Stay tuned...
Very interesting, thank you. I found it particularly interesting how oration and philosophical thought were "taught" in such prescriptive ways. How that parallels today and speaks of human nature across the ages.
2 new channels Christmas came early!!!!!!
Wonderful stuff!
This is absolutely perfect for our homeschool unit! Thanks so much!
Very timely, as I am just preparing for lecturing on literacy and education in the Greco-Roman world.
Crazy how radically things have changed. Here I am, a 4th year English and Philosophy major, with only a passing familiarity of antiquity. Everything I've studied so far seems so...insignificant in the face of these great classics---of Homer, Cicero, Ovid, or even Plato and Aristotle. I suppose, in today's day, I can call myself "educated," yet I know nothing of the very foundation that predicates the Western world.
I lament the decline of the classical education.
Damn fine work as always, love me some toldinstone. I was wondering if you would ever do more conversational interviews or long-form podcasts? You've had some really bright people on and those back-and-forths were nice but the questions seemed pre-written and often it felt like interesting doors the answers opened were left entirely unexplored to continue on to the next question at hand. I see the value in doing that but it'd be great to also have something less formal, just a couple historians shooting the shit as equals and letting the magic of all that knowledge unfold itself organically.
Thank you!
I love all you do, thank you very much, it is priceless, greetings from the mountains of Colombia.
This video is awesome like all of them!
Do a video about greek and roman working culture pleaseee
I like your videos and ancient roman history :)
I love this channel!!
this is awesome. thank you
In the 60's, I was partly educated in the classical system (element, syntaxe, méthode).
It was so useless for the realities of that time. I can't believe I was exposed to the last remnants of the Roman empire. Makes me feel like a fossil !
Studying the Greek and Roman classics in the original remained a major part of upper-class education in Britain until well into the 20th century. Plenty of it in Tom Browns Schooldays, Billy Bunter et al...
And yet, here I am a college student with only a passing familiarity of antiquity. I lament the decline of the classical education.
@@ianian4162 - Do you really want to learn two dead languages (Latin + Greek)? 😟
Better listen to TOLDINSTONE. He kinda educates without the pain.🙂
@@cybair9341 Yet it is that "pain" that encourages growth and confidence. I'm a college student, and, while my "education" was by no means "painless," I never really established a strong foundation to my field.
Right now, I'm taking a class on Shakespeare that doesn't assign actual readings, a theory class that doesn't involve discussion, and an online logic class that is basically a string of multiple choice quizzes.
Does that sound like an "education"? No. It's meaningless bullshit and a waste of time ( again, a damn Shakespeare class where we don't read Shakespeare). I'd rather memorize the Iliad or discuss Pre-socratic metaphysics in Ancient Greek, for at least that's a genuine education in something.
My grandad had to choose between Latin and French. Pretty useless for an accounting assistant like him.
Awesome. Great subject.
Got your book on Halloween, made it through the first 4 chapters, it's a very fun read! If anything I wish there were even more references (for some anedoctes that are aluded to in the text) all in all a great book! Thank you.
I'm glad you're enjoying it! You should find references for almost every anecdote - including those in the footnotes - in the endnotes. (The format makes them more difficult to find than I would have liked.)
@@toldinstone Yes, I've checked them, might have a second read, maybe I missed some. Also, was expecting a word on Julian's Misopogon in the Beard chapter! XD I guess there is plenty of material for a second volume ;)
It’s really cool how I literally just wrote a lesson plan that has an activity that is a Model UN Style crisis Mod about the Bolivarian Revolution but also incorporates paradox style grand strategy elements.
I liked your video. Can you recommend some books about this topic ?
Just subscribed to all your channels.
4:00 has got to be one of the greatest frames I ever saw studying History on TH-cam
We studied some greek mythology/writing in my senior language arts class in high school. Absolutely crazy how even in the 2020s United States we still study classical Greek writing.
Roman numerals in grade school lol
Great video! I would party with Ancient Greek college students
Hi, I completed my bachelor course in dentistry in 2005, and was a highschool graduate in 1995.
Interesting! Perhaps a future topic might be a comparison of the Greek SophIsts versus Aristotle and the Trivium way of education
Yes
Pliny the younger saved his life by choosing to study rather than accompany his uncle on that 1 last investigation.
Hebrew is still taught by the method described in the first part of the video. Learn a consonant and the repeat it with all possible vowel combinations. The build shot words and progress onto two, three and four/five syllables. mish ka no tei kha .
Does anyone know some lf the sources where one can learn more about Roman education?
So strange that the wax tablet and the slate used up to maybe 50 years ago are so similar.
Seems like teachers in the ancient times also suffered with little pay
The narrator of this video is so cool and handsome.
And clever.
How do we estimate literacy rates in ancient populations?
Is there a code for Speakly? Clicking on the link provides no discount.
Should have mentioned Quintilian!
Has there been any evidence of smaller features of education meant for adults or foreigners?
Is there any way to find a complete list of the images used? I recognize many, but I'd like to know where, for example, the image at 14:26 of three figures (Church fathers?) in black and white robes comes from.
Google has a ,image-search' function next to the searchbar. Not perfect, but good enough.
@@DanceNightAtDiscoFright thank you. But not really good enough. I don't watch most TH-cam videos on a browser. I watch them on the TH-cam app, which means there is no Google search for. It's possible to do a screenshot, and then to do a Google lens search, but often that doesn't work. But for reasons of courtesy, as well as for legal reasons of copyright, it's really a much better idea for the creators of these videos to include information on images either in the video itself or in the description period that saves everybody lots of time.
I find it fascinating someone in the 2020’s can so ardently believe that someone who lived thousands of years ago and had no framework of the modern psyche or world could so brazenly claim that those contemporaries of an author “misinterpreted” them.
Thank you very much for this presentation. It made me realise that one of the reasons there are so few tales of the exploits of the life of Jesus the Christ was the lack of education. I don't recall any of the texts in the New Testament being written in Latin; I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong but I recall that the languages used were Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew, and Rome had control over every piece of ground that Jesus ever trod. I find this interesting. Thanks again. P. S. (Septuagint might be added to the list but I could be thinking of something else there.)
This is seriously one of the best youtube channels by far.
Thank you so much for sharing the history of our (Western) civilization.
History is one of the greatest gifts we can ever receive from our ancestors. I truly believe that.
Where is the video on the ancient cultures in the Balkans, toldinstone
Just finally bought your Kindle version ;-)
Deeply appreciated!
The hierarchy of educational availability and lack of respect for teachers sounds distressingly familiar.
Now I know where the concept of _grammar school_ came from.
🔥🔥
Are there any education manuals (esp. bilingual) that have survived to today?
i would use the sponsored app if they had Greek and Latin. That is what I love and why I am here in the first place. (;
Very few language learning apps actually have Greek, let alone Latin. Latin is rare in those. I only know of Duolingo having both Latin and Greek.
Quintus is a pretty great name.
I heard they solved the underpaid teacher problem in the middle ages.
A teacher wasn't actually paid more but since he had probably taken a vow of poverty it didn't really matter.
Interesting !
I work in history and education and came across Hypatia who was said to be a great teacher with students coming from all over. But this gets me confused : in +300, in roman empire, woman were ofter still confined to the Domus. How could a woman ever attend philosophy "school" or groups or teaching if it was the case ? Even more : how could a woman even become a renowned teacher if women in general were confined to a house ?
What I wouldn’t give to be a student of in one of those schools!
but... how were the Engineers educated?
They weren't. Engineering was mostly learned in the legions, or by shadowing other engineers
Probably through apprenticeships.
I have never been so early
Toga parties?
My how far we have fallen.
I found slave letters in the London museum from the Roman time period
What did they say? Were they gaulish, brittonic, thracian, hispanic, egyptian?
@@Game_Hero I didn't get time to read them but it counteracted the idea that literacy was not common among slaves , I actually took a photo of them it would be finding it again
Shadiversity has an interesting video about literacy in the medieval period. To be considered "literate" then, one had to know Latin and Greek and have memorised various classical works. It's likely ordinary people in England and France (the places for where we have the most data, apparently) could read and write their own languages to some degree. At the time there were no real rules for grammar and spelling (like strong regional accents, but in writing), so all they had to learn was the alphabet, and that's not hard.
Of course, classical Latin and Greek did have (many!) rules, but there were also the vulgar forms for common people. I imagine if they learned the alphabet they could make a reasonable stab at shop signs and crude graffiti.
They were "tutors" not teachers although possibly later in Rome's History something more formalized did arise in having Romans travel to Ancient Greece itself to learn. There is no evidence of an ancient "University System" though of course more of a Roman "way" requiring one to know both Latin and Greek in order to govern which of course gave certain Greeks (though not Greece of course) a truly awesome amount of influence over Romans. This of course would never make Romans into Greeks but yes in some ways the Romans were more fanatical ancient Greeks than the Greeks themselves in a quest to become how a Greek might see there be become a kind of "ultimate Roman."
"And misinterpreted accordingly" nice
It's sad that even in ancient Greek and Rome students had to memorize almost everything and a teacher sometimes had to work two of three jobs to make ends meet.
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Another axium about teaching....."Those who can DO....Those who can't TEACH"
What about engineering?
We need to bring back debating fictional characters' decisions.
Meanwhile, the useful people were learning their trades by working for master craftsmen.
Say what you want about how English is complex because it evolves and intersects with so many other languages, trying to learn Latin will make you want to stick to English. Engli, Englorum, Englis, Englos, Englis x20 in order to phrase things in unnecessary and extinct ways that no modern romantic language would imagine. And thank god for arabic numerals.
I bet the toga parties were great oras they called them, “parties.” 😉
It makes sense, in a twisted way, that the most necessary jobs are the lowest paid. We require so many teachers, that governments are incentivized to keep ongoing costs, in the form of salaries, down. Taxpayers would rebel if they had to see their taxes go up year after year, eating away at their savings. Taxpayers and landowners, who have a larger stake in outcomes, are also those who tend to vote.
I also know understand that proper reform and investment in public schools, tend to produce a decent return on investment on every dollar. If terrible teachers, whom we have all had the pleasure to encounter, lost their jobs, due to incompetence or malicious intent, maybe taxpayers would be willing to pay a higher tax burden. Other wise, its just throwing money into a roaring fire and pretending that because we all feel a little warmer, that everything is getting better.
It must frustrate good and honest teachers who see their worthless collegues get the same pay regardless of performance. But if those bad apples, were removed from the bushel, maybe the rot would not spread, and education and teachers pay would rise, allowing good teachers to be better ones.
You’re telling me Hooked on Phonics was invented by the Romans.
You forgot the universities that arose in Western Europe in the High Middle Ages.
You can never truly understand a book unless ur reading it in the native language. It would be very interesting if people who are fluent in old languages to annotate historic books and describe the meaning behind every line.
Something I notice in every history doc/video I watch that broaches the subject, and I watch a lot of them, is that religion in the ancient world had no atheists. I mean pagan atheists, societies well before Christianity and societies running congruent to the Semitic religions genesis. According to the videos I see entire civilizations are zealots, some extreme like Aztecs and human sacrifice. In Ancient Rome the business of the city didn't start until religious ceremonies were undertaken every single day. So who were the pagan atheists then? Were there even atheists in the ancient world that could be 'open' atheists and still exist in society? Were there dissenters of the State religions back then ( not Christians, Jews, etc.- just non believers) or was life so incredibly difficult for the average human that just about any religious dissent inside of yourself was squashed by the need of survival by means of what community provides? I could understand that as 'exile' was a means of punishment then and without some kind of patron you were probably going to die.
Just add the link to your secondary channels in the description so people can subscribe easier :)
Good idea!
This is a really great video, but the cadence of the speaker is really repetitive and becomes funny at about 5mins and infuriating at 7mins. My class of 12 year olds were all laughing and humming along with it, going up at every third word.
If I may ask sir and I don’t intend to be that guy. But do you think that this education system was a great hindrance to the development of science and technology in the ancient world. For I in all earnestness cannot see a huge value in much of these subjects. I do not say the classics are nothing but that they are not that much.
heh, paid in experience
This is completely unrelated but:
Once a classicist was asked if he agreed to hybrid teaching.
Replied the classicist: oh well... Yo mamma so fat...
Replied the superintendent: Your ubris does not amuse me.
Sayed the teacher: Well, you've asked for it.
It wasn't college as we know it.