🚀 go-pugleaf

R Wallace <cla02@cc.keele.ac.uk> wrote:

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

The citation above misattributed to Edwin P Menes, is in fact
something I wrote, so if it contains errors, those errors are mine.

>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).

Certainly it's true (at least from what I've read) that many
upper-class Romans throughout a great part of Roman history were
taught by Greek slaves, but I'm not sure how general or how nearly
universal was that practice in the youth of Cato the Elder (late third
century BCE). I've coincidentally just been reading some Terrence and
noted that he was educated in Greek (in fact, he was at the University
in Athens when word came of Caesar's assassination), but that was a
century and a half later. But the fact that Greek works were often
translated into Latin (and not just plays) leads me to suspect that
not all literate Romans of the late republic were bilingual.

In any case, the elder Cato is alleged not to have learned Greek until
old age, but Menes pointed out that there is evidence he actually knew
at least some Greek before that. My response, cited above, is an
attempt to suggest that there is not necessarily an inconsistency
between the two assertions.


D Gary Grady
Durham NC USA
73513.2350@compuserve.com / dgary@mindspring.com