latin

• peristyle is a surrounding porch
• relief is a sculptured artwork raised from a plane
• via appia is the queen of the roman roads
• atrium is the entrance hall
• hypocaust is warmed water
• via sacra is the road in the roman forum
• In ancient Rome, the education system looked very different from what we have today.
• The Greeks had a structured, formal education system well before the Romans, but ancient Rome formed no such system until around the 3rd century BC.
• Nouns in Latin are referred to as 'liber', 'liberi', 'puer', 'pueri', 'amica', 'amicae', 'amicus', 'amici', 'casa', 'casae', 'via', 'viae', 'discipulus', 'discipuli', 'magistra', 'magistrate', 'magister', 'magistri'.
• Education in Rome, especially during the time of the Republic and before, centered around the home and an individual's duty to their family.
• This education, led by the paterfamilias, was just as much a moral education as an academic one.
• Children in ancient Rome learned some reading, writing and enough mathematics to enable them to understand simple business transactions and to count, weigh and measure.
• Most learning in early Rome centered around domestic, military, and agricultural skills, all taught by a child's first teachers—their parents.
• Two of the central tenets of this kind of education in early Rome were the ideas of the "good man" ( vir bonus , in the Latin) and the "Ancestral Way" (the mos maiorum).
• These ideals taught Roman children to be good citizens and focused on not only basic life skills, but the traditional social code that made up a successful Roman community.
• It was not until later in the age of the Republic that the idea of a school, or ludus, began to spread in Rome.
• The focus of these schools was for young children to socialize in the community and learn basic academic skills.
• Around the later half of the 3rd century BC, Spurius Carvillius Ruga, a former slave turned freedman and teacher, opened the first fee-based primary school and is also credited as the first to use the letter "G" in place of the letter "C" for the sound /g/.
• His school used Greek methods of education that quickly rose in popularity in the later years of the Republic.
• During the late years of the Roman Republic and throughout the Roman Empire, formal schooling much more like that of the Greeks began to rise in popularity and become an established system in Rome and its provinces.
• Regardless of this growing system, the vast majority of these institutions were still primarily for paying students.
• Most students were boys, though some girls were also being sent to private ludi at this time.
• The famous educator Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, known in his writings as Quinilian, argued that a child's academic success often depended on both parents being educated.
• Quintilian was also a proponent of educating children at as early an age as possible, stating that "memory… not only exists even in small children, but is specially retentive at that age."
• Influence from such educational philosophers led to Rome's tiered system of education, wherein much like our modern examples, students would attend a primary school, followed by secondary and, depending on the child's ingenium or in-born "gift" for learning, and family wealth, onward to university.
• Since schooling was not state-sponsored, and it was never legally required to have children educated, how far a student went in the Roman educational system was largely dictated by financial concerns.
• Most Roman children at this time were educated bilingually—studying Latin and Greek literature with the expectation of fluency in both languages, especially if and when boys reached secondary levels of their education.
• The Romans, on the other hand, only encouraged exercise as a means to an end—sustaining an army of able-bodied soldiers.
• The Greeks had an established wealth of national literature to serve as a basis for education in their country, students in Greece often studied the great works of Hesiod and Homer and were taught an appreciation for lyric poetry and the arts from an early age.
• In the higher tiers of the education system throughout the Roman Republic and Empire, many differences arose between the Greek and Roman methods and topics of instruction.
• Roman children in their primary years were taught in a similar fashion to their Greek peers, with many families taking on Greek slaves as private tutors.
• Cato placed it upon himself to educate his children to be good citizens of Rome, and according to the ancient biographer Plutarch, who at one point said Cato was "his [son's] reading teacher, law professor, his athletic coach.
• While the study of Greek literature continued throughout the Roman education system, the other facets of "mousike" were considered too Greek and not practical enough for Roman students.
• Through their military exploits, the Romans were influenced by their exposure to Eastern Greek culture in many ways, including educational practices.
• A famous Roman educator and author emphasized starting education as early as possible, saying "memory… not only exists even in small children, but is especially retentive at that age."
• The Romans, however, did not have their own poetic tradition to fall back on, and instead devoted the bulk of their instruction to the military arts or, when not actively at war, agricultural pursuits.
• The Greeks' rich lyrical history led to a focus in its educational system on music and the liberal arts.
• History, poetry, drama, dance, and even comedy were considered worthwhile pursuits in a Greek school.
• The first of these to be documented was a former Greek captive from Tarentum, named Livius Andronicus, who moved to Rome after obtaining his freedom and went on to translate Homer's Odyssey into Latin verse in aid of his students' Greek literary education.
• Cato taught his son not only to hurl a javelin, to fight in armor, and to ride a horse, but also to box, to endure both heat and cold, and to swim strongly.