Children in antiquity had an experience very different from that found in most modern schools. Rather than being part of a class of people the same age learning the same things, children in antiquity had a largely individual educational experience even when they attended school – something many did not do, as home schooling (whether by parents or by specially hired tutors) was common, and some (perhaps many) children from poorer families were not formally taught at all.

A school often consisted of a single large room (or even an outdoor space), staffed by a main teacher and one or more assistants, containing pupils of a considerable range of ages and levels of attainment. Most pupils were boys, but some girls also attended school, especially at the primary level; likewise, although teachers were normally men, women teachers are occasionally attested. Each child would be given an assignment to do on his/her own and would sit on a bench or chair (or, in some cases, on the ground) and work through it before going up to the teacher to go over it. There were three main types of assignment: reading, writing, and memorisation.

Learning to read is something that most children now accomplish in a relatively short space of time; after that initial period the modern schoolchild is asked to read as a means of acquiring more information, rather than as an end in itself. But in antiquity reading was a skill that took much longer to master and that had to be actively practised for its own sake during much of a child's time in school. The reason is that ancient books were much harder to read than modern ones. Most had no spaces between the words, no distinction between capital and lower-case letters, no paragraph structure, and no punctuation: just a large block of bare letters. Punctuation and word division were not unknown to the ancients, and indeed they were sometimes used in school texts (punctuation is mentioned explicitly in passage 2.3 below, and the diagonal slashes in figure 15 are word dividers), but since they were not normally used students had to learn how to read without them. Figure 2 provides an example of what reading with ancient conventions is like when the language of the text is completely familiar to the reader.

The second half of the Colloquia describes the day of an adult. For the most part the scenes are arranged in the order in which activities would actually take place on a typical day: court cases, other business, lunch, bathing, dinner, and bedtime. There are variations between the different Colloquia, however, and in one the court scene occurs in an epilogue tacked on to the end.

One of the main reasons why Greek speakers learned Latin was to become lawyers. In theory, Roman law required all legal business to be conducted in Latin, and fluency in Latin was therefore essential for entry to the profession. The reality was more complicated: in Greekspeaking areas much legal work was in fact done primarily or exclusively in Greek, but Latin remained useful. The major works of Roman law were all in Latin until the sixth century, so before then a Latinless lawyer would have been unable to consult them. Moreover, for most of antiquity certain legal documents, including the wills of Roman citizens, had to be written in Latin in order to be valid; of course most citizens in Greek-speaking areas wanted to compose their wills in Greek, but they would hire a lawyer to make the official Latin version, and therefore lawyers were better off if they could write enough Latin to produce these documents.

In the East, therefore, one of the main places the Colloquia were used and adapted was law schools. Entry into law school was not as difficult as it is today: there were no strict limits on the number of students, no standardised exams to pass in order to gain entry, and no major outlays of money at the start (for an outsider's opinion of the intelligence of ancient law students, see Philogelos joke 54 in chapter 11.1). As a result many students began to study law without a serious commitment and later dropped out; others switched fromone law school to another, since there were no particular obstacles to doing so. The income and prestige of these schools depended on the number of students they could attract and retain, sometimes in the face of fierce competition.

As a result of this situation, the teachers who used, adapted, and expanded the Colloquia in the East needed to encourage their students to continue studying. One result of this concern was the introduction of legal materials into the language-learning curriculum.

The passages in this section are not from the Colloquia, but rather from other imperial-period texts that shed additional light on issues raised in the Colloquia and can to advantage be read along with them.

PHILOGELOS

The work known as Philogelos (‘laughter-lover’) is a Greek joke book composed in the fourth century. It sheds light on many of the more absurd aspects of Roman society and the characters involved in that society. For more information and a translation of the entire joke book, see Baldwin (1983).

Joke 34

A learned fool went to visit a sick friend and asked him how he was. But when the friend did not answer, he grew angry and said, ‘I hope to be sick myself, and then I'll not answer you!’

Joke 54

A learned fool, writing a letter from Athens to his father and being conceited at the education he had received there, added, ‘I pray to come home and find you on trial for your life, so that I can show you what an orator I am.’

Joke 61

A learned fool of a primary-school teacher suddenly looked in the corner and shouted, ‘Dionysios is misbehaving in the corner!’ But one of the other children said that Dionysios was not there yet, to which the teacher responded, ‘He will be misbehaving when he comes!’

Joke 70

A learned fool went to see a sick friend, but the man's wife said that he had already departed [i.e. died]. The man replied, ‘So when he returns, tell him that I was here.’

Joke 91

A learned fool invited acquaintances to dinner, and they praised the pig's head he served and advised him to eat from it the next day as well. So he went to the butcher and said, ‘Give me another head fromthe same pig, for the one we had yesterday was very successful.’

Joke 140

A joker seeing a stupid primary-school teacher teaching asked him why he did not teach the cithara. And when the teacher said, ‘Because I do not know how’, he said, ‘So how do you teach letters when you do not know them either?’

Joke 150

When a joker was at the baths two people asked to borrow his strigil, one being a stranger and the other a known thief.

The colloquia

The Colloquia are a set of ancient easy readers for language students. They were originally composed bilingually, in Greek and Latin, and were used both by Latin speakers learning Greek and by Greek speakers learning Latin. Most Colloquia are amalgams of two parts that were originally separate: the first describes the day of a schoolboy from dawn until lunchtime or shortly afterwards, and the second contains scenes that an adult might engage in during the day and evening.

The first of these two portions, known as the schoolbook, is demonstrably related in all the different Colloquia versions: there was once a single schoolbook from which all the extant versions are descended. That original version was composed in the Western part of the Roman world, probably in Rome, to help Latin-speaking children learn Greek. It was in use by the first century AD and may be much older than that. In the first or second century the schoolbook was borrowed by Greek speakers in the Eastern empire, who adapted it as a tool for learning Latin. As it was bilingual to begin with, the changes needed were minimal.

The second part of the Colloquia, known as the phrasebook, comes from the Eastern empire and was composed to help Greek speakers learn Latin. The different versions of the phrasebook are certainly related to some extent, but the relationship is much less close than that of the different schoolbook versions, and it is not clear that all the extant versions go back to one original: different phrasebooks may have been composed separately. The phrasebooks are later in origin than the schoolbook, dating probably to the second century ad. Their original form was probably that of a modern phrasebook, without any connected story line, but in most versions the collections of phrases on each topic were later transformed into coherent scenes.

The Colloquia as we have them are the product of a long period of adaptation and evolution. Successive teachers rewrote various scenes to make them more useful for the particular students by whom they were used, and thus the single original text split into different versions. Those different versions then gradually diverged more and more from one another. Most of the actual wording of the texts we have probably comes from the second and third centuries, but some is earlier and some comes from the fourth century or even later.