Between the fourth and sixth centuries, Gallo-Romans witnessed fundamental political, economic, and cultural upheavals and the eventual disappearance of Roman imperial power in Gaul. This book traces the changing role and value of classical education amid these socio-political upheavals, exploring how Gallo-Romans participated in and perceived classical education in late antique Gaul, and how this shifted throughout the period. Why would Gallo-Romans pursue a literary and rhetorical education and how did these motivations change throughout the period? What did it mean to be educated in fourth-century Bordeaux as opposed to early sixth-century Arles?

Exploring developments in classical education offers a fresh approach to understanding the broader transformations of the later Roman world, since classical education was woven into the very fabric of Roman society – the methods, aims, and desired outcomes of literary education were inextricably linked to the political, social, cultural, and economic structures of the Roman empire. It underpinned the two fundamental aspects of Roman aristocratic life, otium and negotium, and, especially from the fourth century, literary training was a tried and tested way for members of the elite to maintain or improve their family’s social standing and wealth.

As its title Learning and Power indicates, this book explores the relationships between cultural practices and political structures. At its core, it asks what are the uses of education in a society – how is education valued by communities, governments and by individuals, and how does this change in response to political, religious, and cultural upheavals? I argue that while the collapse of Roman political power in Gaul did not mean the immediate demise of classical education, it changed the way education was practiced and perceived by Gallo-Romans. Although many aspects of Roman administration and culture persisted in post-imperial Gaul, classical education could not survive indefinitely without the superstructure of the Roman empire. Neither the barbarian kingdoms nor the Church directly caused the decline of classical schools, but these new structures of power that replaced the centralised western Roman empire did not encourage or support a cultural and political climate in which classical education mattered; while Latin remained the language of the Church, and basic literacy and knowledge of law were valued by the barbarian courts, traditional Roman literary training in grammar and rhetoric was no longer seen as a prerequisite for political power and cultural prestige. Such political changes transformed the perceptions of the value and role of classical education and resulted in the eventual disappearance of the classical schools of grammar and rhetoric from the historical record and from public life in Gaul. When once literary and rhetorical education was seen as a public ‘good’ and path to political power, by the end of our period it was valued more for its personal rewards. This study demonstrates that these fundamental shifts in what education meant to individuals and power brokers resulted in the eventual end of the ubiquitous classical schools of grammar and rhetoric that had once defined Roman aristocratic public and social life.

Sources, Scope, and Approaches

During the roughly 200 years studied in this book – from the fourth century to the first part of the sixth century – the power structures of Gaul underwent dramatic transformations that would have huge implications for the fates of the classical schools of grammar and rhetoric. We begin in a time of relative political stability and active imperial interest and power in Gaul, with emperors residing in Trier for much of the fourth century. We then see the crises of the early fifth century and the increasing withdrawal of direct Roman control in Gaul, and end with the disintegration of Roman influence in the region and the emergence of increasingly independent kingdoms of the Visigoths, Burgundians, and Franks. Against this background of political transformation is the increasing prominence of the Church in politics and society and especially the evolving role of bishops as leaders of their local communities. By studying this broad timeframe, the book is able to trace the effects of larger political, religious, and cultural transformations on the attitudes and practices of classical education in Gaul. The study ends in the early sixth century, during the lifetime of the generation of Gallo-Romans who grew up or were born in the immediate aftermath of the final withdrawal of western imperial power in Gaul in the 470s.

This book approaches classical education from the perspective of both socio-cultural and political history. Rather than taking a literary-historical methodology – that is, collecting allusions to literary texts in the works of Gallo-Roman authors to determine the level of an author’s education and familiarity with canonical texts – this study is primarily an institutional history of classical education. It focuses on education’s public role in society, in particular the relationships between the classical schools of grammar and rhetoric and structures of power, and their importance in shaping and defining Roman aristocratic identity. Fundamentally, the book seeks to understand how and why classical education and attitudes towards it changed between the fourth and sixth centuries in Gaul. Why would Gallo-Roman families invest time and money into literary training for their children? What were the benefits of literary education for both individuals and the Roman state? Could classical education exist in a post-imperial world?

I conceive of classical education as a cultural institution tied to Roman public life, and the central aim of this book is to trace education’s role in political and social life in late antique Gaul. A prosopographical analysis of teachers and students from the fourth to early sixth centuries, which builds upon Robert Kaster’s 1988 study of grammarians, informs the work’s methodology and provides the basis for its central arguments. The book investigates the teachers and students who are explicitly mentioned in the sources, how the visibility of teachers and students in the historical record changes across our period, and what this says about the place of education in public and ‘private’ life in late antique Gaul. I aim to understand the perspectives of Gallo-Roman aristocrats during this period, examining how they perceived and practiced education and how this changed.

Since the book is about classical education, which was part of elite Roman identity and linked mainly to Roman aristocrats, the main source base is literary texts, namely the writing by and about Gallo-Roman aristocrats. By ‘aristocrat’ I mean both the traditional senatorial elite and provincial members of the curial class. This is because both these segments of the aristocratic class participated in and benefited from classical education. Moreover, while there was traditionally a difference between the senatorial class and the curial elites, after the reforms of Constantine the distinction between equestrian and senatorial status was dissolved and the senatorial orders expanded, reaching as many as 3,000 men by the end of the fourth century, with the highest rungs of the senatorial order – illustris and spectabilis – reserved for those who held high imperial office, and only clarissimus (the third senatorial rank) being inherited by birth.Footnote ¹ While the traditional senatorial families continued to occupy prestigious positions and honours within the empire, many of those who attained the highest senatorial titles also came from the provincial elite.Footnote ² For this reason, in my analysis I do not distinguish between senatorial elite on the one hand and curial or provincial elite on the other, but rather treat the entirety of the Roman aristocratic class as one group.

Education in fourth-century Gaul is best documented by Decimius Magnus Ausonius. Ausonius was a teacher of grammar and rhetoric in Bordeaux for thirty years before becoming tutor to Gratian and subsequently holding high office under the emperors Valentinian I and Gratian. Our picture of classical education in the fifth century is shaped largely by the letters and poetry of Sidonius Apollinaris and his circle of educated Gallo-Roman clerics and laymen. In addition to Ausonius and Sidonius, key witnesses for literary education in Gaul in this period include Eumenius, Paulinus of Pella, Paulinus of Nola, Mamertus Claudianus, Ruricius of Limoges, Avitus of Vienne, Caesarius of Arles, and Iulianus Pomerius, while the works of other Gallo-Roman authors, such as Prosper of Aquitaine, Rutilius Namatianus, Salvian, and Constantius of Lyon are also included in the discussion. My analysis also draws on other types of documentary evidence, such as legal texts (e.g., the Theodosian Code, Diocletian’s ‘Price Edict’), ancient colloquia (e.g., the Colloquium Celtis), chronicles, as well as ecclesiastical sources including monastic rules, acts of Church councils, and hagiographies. The focus of discussion is on Gaul and the attitudes and views of Gallo-Romans from this region, but evidence from other areas of the empire often complements my analysis. For example, the extensive extant oeuvres of Libanius and Augustine provide natural comparisons to our material from Gaul, illustrating the situation of education and teachers in other parts of the later Roman empire. At the same time, I often glimpse into the future, to the situation in Merovingian Gaul on the one hand, and late- and post-imperial Italy on the other, where traditional Roman political and cultural structures persisted first under Odoacer and then Theoderic the Ostrogoth.

Gaul, comprising the Diocese of the Gauls in the north and the Diocese of the Seven Provinces in the south, is the ideal region for a study of the cultural transformations of education in the late antique West.Footnote ³ Gaul long had a strong tradition of schools and a reputation for teaching excellence, which means that there is a benchmark with which to contrast the circumstances of late antiquity.Footnote ⁴ It is also possible to detect a sense of ‘Gallic identity’ in ancient sources, and an understanding that Gaul itself was a unit. This is apparent in how geographical descriptions of Gaul refer to the whole of the region collectively as ‘Gallia’, and how people from Gaul are often referred to generally as Gallus/a or described as having ‘Gallic eloquence.’Footnote ⁵

A further advantage of focusing on Gaul is that we see the effects of the breakdown of the western empire playing out in a much clearer way there than elsewhere in the West. Unlike Britain, where Roman imperial control collapsed in the early fifth century, the western emperors and generals fought to maintain control of Gaul after the initial invasions and usurpations of the 410s, and direct imperial power and interest persisted in some regions of Gaul into the late fifth century. At the same time, Gaul ultimately underwent a much cleaner and more dramatic break from the Roman system of government than did other regions such as Italy. Not only was Italy the centre of court life and the imperial residence from the later fourth century, but it was also the priority of the western Roman emperors amid the upheavals of the fifth century. Even after the deposition of the last western emperor in 476, a number of factors allowed for a longer continuation of some aspects of elite Roman cultural life and outlooks, such as literary culture and classical education. These include the presence in Italy of the Roman senate and traditional senatorial families, the more Romano-centric policies under the Ostrogothic king Theoderic, who had been brought up as a hostage in the eastern court in Constantinople, and Justinian’s re-conquest of parts of Italy in the mid-sixth century.

Although this book discusses the whole of Gaul, it must be noted that there were marked regional variations on the theme of ‘catastrophe’ or ‘continuity’, primarily between the north and south of Gaul. Though parts of Gaul, such as Provence, remained within the imperial scope until the 470s, large swathes of the northern parts of Gaul had fallen out of direct Roman rule much earlier, which the defection of the magister militum Aegidius in 461 exacerbated. While in the fourth century there is much evidence for flourishing educational life around Trier, which was the western imperial residence for much of that period, from the mid-fifth century our source base for education is increasingly focused on the southern parts of Gaul, namely Provence, the Auvergne, and Aquitania, where Sidonius and most of his correspondents resided.

Classical Education: Terminology and Context

This study does not dwell on the mechanics of training in grammar and rhetoric, nor does it aim to recreate the curriculum or daily life of teachers and students in late antiquity – these and other questions have already been explored in depth and with great success by Raffaella Cribiore, Edward Watts, and Eleanor Dickey in their studies of education in the eastern empire, and recently James Zetzel has examined the study of Latin philology and ancient scholarly works on language in the Roman world.Footnote ⁶ It is nevertheless useful to provide a basic framework of what classical education consisted of, how it worked in practice, and to clarify some key terminology that I will use throughout the book.

The focus of the book is the learning that took place at classical schools of grammar and rhetoric. By classical school or classical education, I mean those institutions that had long shaped Roman elite public and social life and were an integral part of the functioning of the Roman state. The term classical education is particularly apt in a study focusing on late antiquity as it mirrors the common dichotomy in scholarly discourse of classical versus Christian literary culture. Classical education was essentially literary in character and practice because learning grammar and rhetoric revolved around learning the language and style of a specific canon of Latin and Greek authors. Though there were other types of education available, such as elementary education and schools of philosophy, law, medicine, or shorthand, these are not the topic of this study. My discussion is based specifically on the literary education at classical schools of grammar and rhetoric because considering changes in these schools provides an insight into the transformation of late antique society and politics in a way that the other schools cannot. Not only is classical education better documented than other types of education, especially in Gaul in this period, but it also was the standard education expected of elite Roman children, was explicitly tied to political power and cultural prestige, and was one of the main socialising forces of Roman boys. Education went beyond the curriculum taught at school; to be educated was to be a member of a privileged class and have the ability to participate in literary and intellectual culture. Classical education in its broader sense included the lifestyle, values, culture, and priorities of the educated class, which in Greek was termed paideia and can be approximated with the Latin terms doctrina (‘teaching’) and disciplina (‘learning’). This was manifested in many ways: literary production and patronage, participation in intellectual and literary networks, letter writing, and copying and publishing contemporaries’ works.Footnote ⁷

Broadly speaking, education in the Roman world had three main stages – elementary learning, grammar, and rhetoric – though there were differences and exceptions to this tripartite system.Footnote ⁸ Elementary learning comprised the basics of reading, writing (prima elementa), and arithmetic.Footnote ⁹ There is evidence that elementary schools existed in their own right, but such basic education was fluid and often taught informally. Aristocratic families would sometimes hire tutors or have enslaved individuals train their children in basic literacy at home before sending them to grammatical schools. Sometimes elementary ‘schools’ were subsumed within schools of grammar, when grammarians employed lower-level teachers (ludi magistri, proscholi, or subdoctores) to provide basic literacy to students who arrived without any training. Ausonius, for example, celebrates his own assistant teacher Victorius, who is identified as a proscholus sive subdoctor (Aus. Prof. 22), and Augustine’s friend and fellow teacher Verecundus, who owned the estate at Cassiciacum where Augustine stayed and wrote his Cassiciacum Dialogues shortly before his baptism, hired Nebridius as an assistant for his grammatical school (Aug. Conf. 8.6.13; 9.3.5).Footnote ¹⁰

Unlike elementary education, the teaching of grammar and rhetoric was more formalised in the Roman world and took place at classical schools. In this book, the term classical school refers only to the teaching of grammar and rhetoric, not elementary schools. In order to function and thrive, classical schools of grammar and rhetoric required teachers, students, a source of income, a place to learn, a reason to learn, and something to learn.

The notion of ‘school’ or ‘curriculum’ was fluid in the Roman world and should not be equated with our modern western understanding of classrooms and schools. Ancient schools and classrooms did not have a definitive physical shape or structure. Grammarians’ and rhetors’ schools could be located in specialised purpose-built structures, in the public spaces of a city, or in their own homes. In Autun at the close of the third century, the rhetor Eumenius had the school buildings in the city centre rebuilt (Eum. Pan. Lat. IX(5)), but most teachers taught in their own homes or in other informal settings. For example, at different points in his career, the rhetor Libanius taught in his home, in a bathhouse, next to a temple, and in a lecture hall in Antioch’s bouleuterion.Footnote ¹¹ Archaeological evidence from late antique Athens suggests that there were many houses with elaborate rooms specifically dedicated to teaching. Eunapius describes the ‘teaching-room’ of the rhetor Julian of Cappadocia, who taught in Athens at the beginning of the fourth century,Footnote ¹² and archaeologists have discovered what seem to be the remains of the house of the teacher Proclus in Athens.Footnote ¹³ In Alexandria, a large ‘scholastic quarter’ has been discovered, which may have had twenty-five purpose-built lecture halls forming part of a complex that also included a theatre and colonnaded portico. Similar structures have been found in Beirut and Constantinople.Footnote ¹⁴ Regardless of the specific physical space in which education took place, teachers and classical schools were always located in towns or cities.Footnote ¹⁵ Students would sometimes travel to these educational centres to study under famous rhetors, and a notable example of mobility for the purpose of education is Augustine’s well-documented journey from Thagaste to Madaurus, Carthage and later to Rome and Milan.Footnote ¹⁶ Therefore, for classical education to thrive, cities would need to be in a relatively stable political and financial position and be safely accessible, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 2.

While the curriculum at the classical schools was standard, it was not standardised. Students tended to read the same canon of classical authors and learn practice speeches that drew on a set of standard topics, but there was no overarching body that monitored the curriculum, practices, or quality of teaching at schools. In his Institutio oratoria, Quintilian codified a canon of what he considered useful texts and techniques for the development of a young orator, and it seems that most students throughout the empire continued to study many of the texts from this canon into the late antique period. Greek and Latin texts explicitly mentioned in sources from late antique Gaul – texts including, among others, Homer, Menander, Virgil, Cicero, Terence, and Sallust – suggest an overall continuity of this standard curriculum.Footnote ¹⁷

Students who already had basic elementary training would enter the grammatical school at around the age of six or seven. For example, at the end of the fourth century Paulinus of Pella began his formal grammatical instruction in Gaul at the age of six, after he had been taught basic literacy by private tutors at home (Paul. Pell. Euch. 60–67, 72–74).Footnote ¹⁸ Grammarians taught more advanced reading and writing, and their lessons focused on syntax, parts of speech, pronunciation, grammatical forms, and systematic line-by-line analysis and explication of texts, especially poetry, putting these texts in their historical, literary, and moral contexts.Footnote ¹⁹ It was at these schools that Roman pupils would learn correct classical Latin, which would set them apart from uneducated native Latin speakers who spoke the contemporary Latin of the time. As James Clackson points out, Augustine presents learning the Latin of the grammarians as similar to learning a foreign language,Footnote ²⁰ and mastering this refined, classical Latin allowed educated Romans from across the empire to immediately identify each other as members of the same class.Footnote ²¹ It seems that sometimes grammarians also taught some elements of basic rhetoric,Footnote ²² which would no doubt have been popular, especially among families who might not have been able to afford to send their children to study with a rhetor.Footnote ²³ Latin-speaking students were meant to learn Greek alongside Latin, ideally even before Latin.Footnote ²⁴ Despite the conventional scholarly narrative of a sudden and drastic decline in Greek–Latin bilingualism in the late antique West, there is much evidence for continued opportunities to learn Greek in Gaul throughout the fourth century, and some sources also suggest the persistence of Greek within classical schools in Gaul in the fifth century.Footnote ²⁵

Rhetors would teach students from around the ages of twelve or thirteen, and these students could remain at rhetorical schools for four to six years, though many students left early or changed teachers or subjects.Footnote ²⁶ Libanius, for example, was often disappointed to find that students cut short their studies or abandoned rhetoric altogether in favour of other subjects such as Latin or law.Footnote ²⁷ Rhetoric was a more prestigious subject than grammar, both to learn and to teach. Rhetors were paid more than grammarians and often had public posts or renown separate from their teaching,Footnote ²⁸ and their schools attracted a smaller portion of the population than did those of the grammarian. Rhetors taught the arts of oratory – speaking and writing effectively and persuasively. Students would memorise model texts called progymnasmata, which illustrated principles of rhetoric, and they learned the rules and use of the rhetorical techniques of inventio, dispositio, elocutio, memoria, and actio, putting these into practice by composing and delivering mock speeches called declamations on set topics. The two main categories of declamation were suasoriae, which were mostly political or historical in nature, and controversiae, which focused on legal issues. Students were taught to draw on the examples and advice of classical authors, especially Cicero (and in Greek, Demosthenes).Footnote ²⁹ The students would perform their prepared declamations in public for an audience of their teachers, peers, family, and the larger community. Such public rhetorical performances continued in Gaul into the late fifth century. For example, while the young Burgundio was writing a declamation on Julius Caesar, his friend and correspondent Sidonius set about gathering an audience to listen and critique his performance (Ep. 9.14.7-9).Footnote ³⁰ In this way rhetorical training prepared students for public life as lawyers, diplomats, and politicians.

In this book a teacher is defined as someone who made a living by teaching.Footnote ³¹ Although in some ways the teaching profession was a fluid concept – there were no professional qualifications for teaching, and teachers could move between occupations, both between teaching grammar and rhetoric or between teaching and office-holding – at the same time teaching was an easily understandable and definable job in the Roman world, and it was a legally recognised occupation; different types of teachers and their fees were recorded in Diocletian’s Prices Edict, while privileges and tax exemptions for teachers, alongside doctors, were also regularly confirmed in different constitutions in the Theodosian Code. Teachers of grammar and rhetoric were paid through private fees from students and sometimes also held official chairs funded by their cities or, more exceptionally, by the imperial government.Footnote ³² Though grammarians and rhetors are often identified with the terms grammaticus or rhetor, other technical terminology for teachers is regularly used in our sources to refer to both levels of teaching, including praeceptor, doctor, magister, and professor.Footnote ³³ As discussed earlier, Roman educational practices were fluid, and the teaching profession was no different. Though there were distinctions between rhetors and grammarians, teachers often incorporated other subjects within their own classrooms or within their schools, blurring the lines between grammar and rhetoric, or elementary literacy and grammar, as we see in the prosopography of teachers in Appendix 1.

Students would attend the schools of grammarians and rhetors only if their families could afford to pay tuition fees and their living expenses (if they were studying away from home) and if they felt that literary education was a useful investment of their time and money.Footnote ³⁴ As long as there were opportunities to benefit from training in grammar and rhetoric – for example, positions within the imperial bureaucracy – literary education was attractive both to long-standing aristocratic Roman families and also to those of the lower rungs of the curial class. The specific students discussed in this book are all male, partly because of the nature of our sources, but also because the discussion is primarily interested in the connection between literary education and the ability to wield power and influence within society and politics, opportunities that were not as readily available to women in the ancient world. Many Roman women did have access to power and influence, but this was usually less directly tied to formal literary education they might have pursued, and more a result of family connections and marriage. While Roman women may not have had the same opportunities to participate in public political life, literary education was still valuable for its cultural role as a marker of status and elite identity. Girls could attend classical schools of grammar or learn from private tutors, and virtually all elite women were educated and took care to provide for the education of their own children.Footnote ³⁵ There are numerous extant letters to women included in late antique letter collections, and women were readers and authors in their own right. Examples of elite female erudition in late antiquity include Marcella and her circle of learned women in Rome in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, the group of female correspondents of Jerome, including Paula, Eustochium, Blesilla, and Laeta, and the wealthy aristocrats-turned-ascetics Melania the Elder and Melania the Younger. We also have evidence of the learning of lower-status women, such as the pilgrim and travel writer Egeria.Footnote ³⁶ Other notable examples are Sidonius’ wife Papianilla, to whom his Ep. 5.16 is addressed, the various female correspondents of Ennodius, including his relative Camilla, who asked Ennodius to help educate her son (Ennod. Ep. 9.9), and Proba, who in the fourth century wrote the Cento Vergilianus de laudibus Christi.Footnote ³⁷ In Ostrogothic Italy, the king Theoderic, who was brought up as a hostage in the court at Constantinople and thus imbued from a young age with elite Roman traditions and cultural attitudes, ensured that his daughter Amalasuntha was well educated.Footnote ³⁸ Another opportunity for women to attain at least basic literacy in late antique Gaul was at the Church schools at monasteries, where all nuns and novices were required to be literate.Footnote ³⁹

These Church schools, which took shape at monasteries and around bishops during the later fifth and sixth centuries in Gaul, are the final type of school that is discussed in this book. Some individuals entered the Church with little or no previous education, and so the training offered at such schools focused on elementary literacy and learning the Psalms and other key biblical texts. This training was meant to prepare initiates for their liturgical, pastoral, and spiritual roles as monks, nuns, or as members of the clergy. Initially organised in an unstructured and ad hoc way, this ecclesiastical training was later formalised at Church councils, for example at Toledo (527) and Vaison (529). As argued in more depth in Chapter 5, these schools around monasteries and bishops did not take up the baton from the classical schools, but rather were separate establishments that developed alongside classical schools and ultimately outlived them. While there were certainly some continuities and overlap between pedagogical methods and instruction at Church schools and at classical schools, the overall purpose, content, and ethos of Church schools that trained future monks, nuns, and clergy were distinct from the classical schools that prepared elite young men to take part in Roman public life and aristocratic society.Footnote ⁴⁰

Histories of Education

Education in antiquity was written about most famously by Henri Marrou, whose magisterial account surveyed the whole of the Greco-Roman world, from the Homeric era to the early middles ages (1948, Histoire de l’éducation dans l’Antiquité).Footnote ⁴¹ Marrou’s student, Pierre Riché, continued in his mentor’s footsteps, considering the survival and transformation of culture and education within the barbarian kingdoms of the medieval West (1962, Éducation et culture dans l’Occident barbare: VIe-VIIe siècles),Footnote ⁴² while schools in Gaul in particular were studied by Theodore Haarhoff (Reference Haarhoff1920, Schools of Gaul: a study of pagan and Christian education in the last century of the Western empire). More recent scholars of late antiquity often mention education in their broader narratives of decline or transformation, and usually draw on the conclusions and narratives of these earlier authorities. In this way, these twentieth-century works, especially those of Marrou and Haarhoff, have become canonical in the history of education in the late antique West. This is problematic because while they provide important starting points for investigating the schools of late antique Gaul, their approaches and conclusions are not adequate for understanding the transformations of the Roman world, especially in light of new discoveries and re-interpretations of our sources and models since the blossoming of the field of late antiquity since the 1970s. This book aims to situate the story of classical education in Gaul within this new historiographical context.

Marrou presents a narrative of decline and decadence of education and literary culture in the late antique West, ultimately tying the decline to the barbarian invasions.Footnote ⁴³ He argues that these invasions led to general feelings of insecurity, resulting in cities contracting behind walls and fortifications and aristocrats withdrawing to their country villas, causing great harm to the vitality of the schools, which were centred in cities.Footnote ⁴⁴ Emphasising the importance of the imperial government for funding and organising the schools, Marrou concludes that the schools suffered financially when imperial power withdrew from Gaul throughout the fifth century. According to his model, Ausonius’ generation was the last to experience the traditional three-tier system of literary education, and while education persisted in the fifth century, it was conducted on an entirely private basis. He suggests that the teachers whom Sidonius mentions did not have formal ‘public’ schools but were private tutors.Footnote ⁴⁵

Others argue that the breakdown of imperial authority in Gaul had a negative impact on education because there were fewer job opportunities in the imperial administration available for ‘graduates’ of the traditional school system.Footnote ⁴⁶ At the same time, the Germanic invaders were illiterate and not generally interested in Roman rhetorical education.Footnote ⁴⁷ According to this model, if there was any traditional educational activity in the fifth and sixth centuries, it was either drastically reduced or entirely private – that is, in the hands of a very small group of privileged aristocrats who took part in an isolated culture of nostalgia.Footnote ⁴⁸ Ultimately, Marrou and other proponents of the decline narrative argue that any form of organised education was taken over by the Church.Footnote ⁴⁹

Haarhoff’s 1920 Schools of Gaul is the logical starting point for this study, but there are problems with his characterisation of the transformation of the schools, and his approaches and conclusions are outdated, anachronistic, and inadequate in light of more recent studies of the late antique West. Haarhoff attempts to trace an underlying continuity of education from the ancient world to his present day, and his ideas about education and the Roman state are imbued with contemporary ideas of nationalism and communism, influenced by his experiences of writing his book during and in the aftermath of the First World War. For example:

Haarhoff often projects contemporary notions of nationalism, war, educational theory, bilingualism, and child development onto ancient classrooms.Footnote ⁵¹ As will be discussed in more depth in subsequent chapters, Haarhoff also places too much emphasis on the importance of the state in funding and organising education and presents inconsistent and problematic views about the role of the Church in preserving classical education. Though Haarhoff’s study is useful as a starting point and is certainly a window onto the historiographical outlook and attitudes of the ancient historian in the aftermath of the First World War, the story of the schools of late antique Gaul needs to be updated and recast within the context of our new interpretations and understanding of the history and historiography of the late antique world.

While education in late antiquity is often an afterthought or epilogue for most scholars of ancient education, for Riché, who examines education in the early medieval West, the fifth century is something of a prologue. Overall, Riché takes a more balanced view of the schools in the late antique West, though argues for the loss of Greek knowledge and increasing private instruction as opposed to public classrooms. He argues that ultimately, because the program and methods of instruction did not adapt to the changing circumstances,Footnote ⁵² the schools were not able to reverse their ever-quickening decline, and ‘the educated generation represented by Sidonius Apollinaris, who died around 483, disappeared’.Footnote ⁵³

Kaster’s study of the grammarians of late antiquity, especially his 1988 Guardians of Language, is a valuable resource for this book, especially in understanding the social status of grammarians and their liminal place in the cultural hierarchies of the Roman world.Footnote ⁵⁴ His study is both narrow and wide, in that it focuses solely on grammarians but covers the whole of the late antique world, both East and West. Drawing on Kaster’s important prosopographical work and contributions to our understanding of the cultural place of grammarians, my discussion goes further in that it incorporates grammarians, rhetors, students, and Church schools, and at the same time it is more focused, in that it concentrates solely on Gaul. Like Riché, Kaster takes a more moderate viewpoint than Marrou and the proponents of ‘decline’. He identifies grammarians who were active in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries,Footnote ⁵⁵ indicating that formal education did persist in this period, but also highlights conditions that contributed to the eventual decline of the schools. Kaster emphasises that classical schools gained fame and prestige when their students were admired for their skill by local and imperial authorities. In the fifth century, arenas for displaying such skills were becoming limited as imperial authority withdrew from Gaul, and at the same time, ‘secular’ job opportunities were becoming rarer. These factors led to a narrowing of education to the upper classes, and positions of prestige within the Church became more attractive as alternatives to careers in the imperial administration.Footnote ⁵⁶ While Kaster highlights the important connection between the availability of jobs for ‘graduates’ and the fate of the classical schools, he does not take the argument far enough. As this book aims to demonstrate, the problem was not primarily the quantity of jobs available, since there were increasing numbers of positions within the Church and within barbarian courts; the more crucial point is that the political and social culture of the post-imperial power structures of the Church and barbarian kingdoms did not promote the value of the arduous, costly, and time-consuming process of learning grammar and rhetoric. Positions within the Roman administration did not necessarily require advanced literary training, but because those who held power expected Roman elites to be educated, and because such achievements were valued for their cultural prestige, education, in effect, became a prerequisite for public posts within the Roman state. This is explored more fully in Chapters 3 and 5.

Mathisen’s prosopographical studies and discussions of late antique Gaul from the 1980s and 90s have provided important foundations for my own discussions and arguments.Footnote ⁵⁷ In much of his more recent work, Mathisen champions a narrative of continuity of classical education into and beyond the seventh century. For example, he identifies over twenty individuals as teachers of grammar or rhetoric in late antique Gaul, concluding that ‘the evidence for secular education in Gaul in the fifth century is not only strong, but in fact more extensive than that for nearly any earlier period’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This conclusion is problematic because, after a careful reading of the original Latin sources and with consideration of the wider historical context, many of those whom Mathisen names as teachers cannot be reasonably identified as teachers of grammar and/or rhetoric.Footnote ⁵⁹ Mathisen also argues that education played the same role in post-imperial Gaul as it had in the Roman empire, and that the barbarian administrations would have required educated people.Footnote ⁶⁰ He makes similar arguments when he claims that Desiderius of Cahors in the seventh century can be considered the ‘last of the Romans’.Footnote ⁶¹ As will be discussed in more detail in the following chapters, one of the contentions of this book is that although the barbarians did require literate people, they did not demand or value literary training in grammar and rhetoric. Furthermore, while post-imperial individuals such as Desiderius may have continued to pursue traditional elite literary endeavours, this does not mean that the socio-political culture in which classical education had thrived under Rome persisted into the seventh century, or that schools continued to operate in the way or carried the same social and political cachet as they had under the Roman empire.

Christian education in late antiquity has been explored extensively by many scholars, most notably Peter Gemeinhardt,Footnote ⁶² Catherine Chin,Footnote ⁶³ and Lilian Larsen and Samuel Rubenson,Footnote ⁶⁴ though most scholars working on monastic and Christian education in late antiquity tend to focus on texts and authors from the eastern parts of the empire. Such studies are explored in more detail in Chapter 5.Footnote ⁶⁵ Most recently, Jan Stenger has studied the intellectual history of education in late antiquity. His 2022 book, Education in Late Antiquity, which was published while I was making the final revisions to this book, explores late antique theories and discourses on education, examining individual writers’ attempts to re-conceptualise learning in response to changing religious and cultural contexts. Stenger’s understanding of education is broadly conceived: he defines it as the lifelong process of moulding and perfecting the self (Bildung), and he is primarily interested in the evolving intellectual discourse on education among late antique intellectuals, rather than on the practical effects of such pedagogical debates on educational practice and Roman society at large.Footnote ⁶⁶ In this book I am seeking to address these very issues that are left unexamined by Stenger: I consider the role of classical education as an institution at the heart of Roman politics and society and trace its changing role in Gaul in relation to the wider transformations of the late Roman world.

Another recent volume on education that took shape during the final editing stages of my book is Gallia Docta? Education and In-/Exclusion in Late Antique Gaul, edited by Tabea Meurer and Veronika Egetenmeyr.Footnote ⁶⁷ The main analytical framing that the editors adopt is that of ‘exclusion and inclusion’, asking how education ‘mark[ed] social status and differences in élite and non-élite contexts’ and how ‘different educational communities, élite and non-élite, established themselves through mechanisms of in- and exclusion’ amid the backdrop of the processes of transformation taking place in Gaul in late antiquity.Footnote ⁶⁸ The collected papers tend to take a broad approach to education, seeing it as a lifelong process of formation of the person as a whole. The editors are specifically not looking at classical education from an institutional perspective, and the editors and contributors often look beyond what was learned at the schools of grammar and investigate different educational communities within Gaul, approaching Gaul itself as a ‘landscape of learning’.

Finally, much research has been done on late antique education in the eastern empire, most famously by Raffaella Cribiore in her books on Libanius and schools in Antioch and Egypt,Footnote ⁶⁹ Edward Watts’ studies of education in Athens and Alexandria,Footnote ⁷⁰ Lieve Van Hoof and Peter Van Nuffelen’s work on literature and society in the fourth century,Footnote ⁷¹ and Eleanor Dickey’s exploration of language-learning texts from antiquity.Footnote ⁷² Such studies, which because of their geographical focus can be based on a wider range of evidence such as material finds and papyri, are useful for my study, providing crucial points of comparison and offering ways to better understand the daily life of students and teachers. But, since the eastern empire did not undergo changes in the same way as the West, especially Gaul, the answers to the questions I am asking cannot be found in such eastern studies alone. Indeed, while education in the late antique East has been investigated thoroughly, this is the first book that focuses on classical education’s central role in the society and politics of the late Roman West, with a spotlight on Gaul. By contextualising classical education as a cultural institution that was part and parcel of Roman political life and aristocratic identity, this book explores the ways that the Roman world of late antiquity could and could not survive beyond the end of the empire in the West.

Chapter Outline

Chapter 1, Classical Education in the Late Roman World opens with a discussion of the foundational importance of classical education in Roman society and politics. It highlights its function as a public institution in Roman culture, serving as the basis for both office-holding and elite Roman identity and self-fashioning. The chapter also provides a prosopographical sketch of the teachers and students that are visible in the historical record from the fourth to early sixth centuries in Gaul, demonstrating that identifiable teachers and students begin to fade from the sources from the later-fifth and early-sixth centuries. I discuss the marked shift in the visibility of these individuals, the changing nature of our sources for education throughout the period, the limitations of our sources, and what we can learn from those limitations. I argue that, while schools and teachers of grammar and rhetoric largely disappear from the historical record by the early sixth century, this by no means indicates that classical learning ceased to exist entirely. Rather, it shows that classical education was no longer a public institution as it had been under the Roman empire, and that it did not occupy that specific place within politics, society, and culture that allowed it to be visible and take a prominent place in the technical and literary texts of the period. A full prosopography of teachers and students in late antique Gaul is included in Appendix 1.

Chapter 2, The Cultural Ecosystem of Late Antique Gaul, situates classical education in late antique Gaul in its historical and historiographical contexts, positioning the book within current scholarly debates and building on recent scholarship on late antique Gaul. I explore how the Roman socio-political structures that had long fostered education were affected by the political, military, religious, and cultural transformations of the late antique West. Arranged thematically, this chapter considers key developments in the relationships between Gallo-Roman aristocrats and the western Roman empire and barbarian groups, the vitality and continuity of Gallo-Roman cities, and the increasing dominance of the Church and bishops in daily life.

Drawing on both legal and literary sources, Chapter 3, The Relationship between Education and Power, focuses on the practical aspects of education, namely the organisation and funding of the classical schools. It traces the status of classical education as a public institution in the late imperial period, during the transformations of the fifth century, and within the early barbarian successor kingdoms. The chapter begins by establishing the extent of direct involvement of the imperial government in education, arguing that cities and individuals had always played a far more important role in patronising and funding classical schools. It then considers opportunities for ‘graduates’ of classical schools in late and post-imperial Gaul, the crucial difference between literacy and literary education, and emphasises the important connection between the vitality of classical education as an institution and structures of power that promote and demand literary training.

Chapter 4, Education in Society and Culture, focuses on the ideological aspects of classical education, considering how the shifting political and cultural landscapes of Gaul changed the way Gallo-Roman aristocrats practiced and perceived education, and how this is reflected in our sources from the fourth to sixth centuries. While in the fourth century, classical education is valued mainly for its tangible rewards and is closely linked to imperial structures of power, throughout the fifth century Gallo-Romans increasingly highlight the personal and ideological uses of education in shaping and affirming their status and identity. Teachers of grammar and rhetoric are more closely linked to aristocratic literary circles, which goes hand in hand with an increased blurring of the distinctions between grammatical and rhetorical teaching and a narrowing of education and literary networks. These changing attitudes and practices of education reflect the underlying political and social transformations of fifth-century Gaul and Gallo-Roman aristocratic anxieties and responses to them.

The final chapter discusses the relationship between Christians and classical education, and the emergence of Church schools in monasteries and episcopal households. Chapter 5, Classical Education and the Church, argues that while the Church never set out to consciously replace or compete with the classical schools, nor to destroy classical literary culture, like the other power brokers in late-Roman and post-imperial Gaul, the Church neither taught classical grammar and rhetoric nor did it expect such high educational attainments for membership or promotion within its hierarchies. At the same time, the presence of new learning and career opportunities within the clergy, coupled with the increasing rise of asceticism and monasticism, indirectly contributed to the marginalisation of traditional classical educational institutions and the disappearance of schools of grammar and rhetoric from public life by the early sixth century.

Taken together, these chapters offer a fresh interpretation of the history of classical education in late antiquity and show in what ways the ‘fall’ of Rome meant the end of the schools of grammar and rhetoric in Gaul. I argue that without the superstructure of the Roman empire, the socio-political culture that valued literary education disappeared, and the schools soon followed suit; it was not primarily material changes caused by the political, cultural, and religious upheavals of the fifth century that led to the decline of the schools, but rather marked changes in the attitudes and mindset towards education and learning of the emerging power brokers of post-imperial Gaul – the barbarian kingdoms and the Church.