🚀 go-pugleaf

> emenes@orion.it.luc.edu (Edwin P. Menes) wrote:
> 

I'm afraid the original post in this thread hasn't reached us yet! So what I'm about 
to say may be completely out of place. Still, if I don't do it now, it's lost
forever, so here goes. Apologies if this misses the point completely.

> I
> suspect many well-educated Romans of Cato's era learned some Greek as
> a matter of course, the way, say, well-educated Americans of a century
> ago learned Latin and possibly some Greek in school. But I can also
> imagine that the Roman, like the later Americans, didn't learn very
> much of it unless and until they undertook to study it seriously on
> their own. Hence it might well be that Cato's claim not to have
> learned Greek until old age is, if not taken too literally, accurate.
> 

This is about as wrong as it can be. Upper-class Roman parents had their children
taught Greek by the simple expedient of having them brought up by Greek-speaking
slaves. Indeed, Quintilian (OK, writing later than Cato) though approving of an early
start on Greek, is concerned that early education shouldn't concentrate too
exclusively on Greek, because then they will grow up speaking Latin with a foreign accent (1, 1, 12-14).

Romans might, of course, decline to use Greek to make a point. So Livy tells us (45, 29, 3) that
in 168 after the battle of Pydna Aemilius Paullus inssited in addresing the Greek delegates
through an interpreter, though he has already made it clear (45, 8, 6) that he was percectly capable
of delivering a speech in Greek.

Most upper-class Romans in fact seem to have been brought up bilingual (which is why Cato was 
thought of as an oddity even in his own day). 

Sorry if this is off the point. All will become clear when the original post struggles through.

Richard Wallace.