Jan R. Stenger - Education in Late Antiquity: Challenges, Dynamism, and Reinterpretation, 300-550 CE

Education can be a divisive issue. When the Gothic court at Ravenna in 526 ce debated the upbringing of King Athalaric, a serious conflict erupted. Athalaric was the grandson and successor of Theoderic the Great but, as a minor, still under the guardianship of his mother Amalasuintha. On one side of the divide was the boys mother, herself of sharp mind and well educated. If everything had gone according to her plans, Athalaric would have received a thorough training by mature experts in Latin grammar and letters, so as to adopt the lifestyle becoming for Roman nobles. On the other, a clique of powerful Goths mounted resistance. Letters, they asserted, are widely separated from manliness, and the teachings of old men for the most part results in a cowardly and submissive mind. Alleging that already Theoderic had evinced dislike for literate education in favour of training in arms, they forced Amalasuintha to abandon the aspirations for her son and replace the three elderly tutors with the company of boys who were to share Athalarics life. From then on, the child kings fate was sealed, as the Greek historian Procopius informs us. These lads, only a little older than Theoderics grandson, soon enticed him into drunkenness and debauchery, until any advice of his mother fell on deaf ears.

This episode from the introduction to Procopius Gothic War, undergirded by stark binariesfemale/male, Roman/barbarian, effeminacy/manliness, and intellect/practical virtueallows us a fascinating glimpse into the debate on education and formation in late antiquity. Embellished by the historians imagination, the dramatic clash at the royal court not only condenses the political and cultural tensions arising from Ostrogothic rule over Italy but also pushes into the limelight questions around which late antique thinking about paideia and personal development was revolving. It contrasts two education systems, the centuries-old tradition of Graeco-Roman schooling in letters and rhetoric, and a barbarian model of socialization in a peer group, with a strong preference for the cultivation of strength and will. As the contents, methods, aims, and outcomes of late Roman education are called into question by barbarians, Procopius cultured readers are encouraged to cast a glance from a different, external angle at their cherished pedagogic principles and traditions, even if, in the end, the superior value of those venerated traditions is reaffirmed by Athalarics steep lapse into degeneration. Education, the account suggests, was a catalyst for negotiating key issues of culture and society, such as gender, ethnicity, the relationship between theory and practice, and the foundations of leadership, particularly in a time of profound transformation. Procopius eavesdropping on the argument in the inner circles of Gothic power draws our attention to the wider implications of training and formation: the personality produced by different processes of upbringing; the morality underpinning pedagogic ideals; the hidden curriculum tacitly at work in any education; and the role of socialization in guiding human beings from childhood to adult age. In this respect, the controversy, stylized though it is, is emblematic of preoccupations of the late Roman elites.