argumate:

femmenietzsche:

The social adjustment to studying in schools of grammar and rhetoric could be just as jarring. Though pedagogues continued to monitor most boys, the physical and social environment both within and beyond a school greatly influenced their behavior. When a student enrolled at a school he entered into a new social world. The majority of late antique students probably continued to live at home and attend the classes of a local teacher, but many young men also traveled to teachers based in Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Antioch, Bordeaux, and any number of less famous centers of teaching. Both Libanius and the fourth-century rhetorician Himerius (who was himself a child of the 310s) make it clear that teachers worked hard to court students from abroad through a process that mixed recruitment with admissions. Himerius, for example, delivered two orations, one in person and one in print, to Arcadius, the father of a student whom he particularly wanted to admit.103 Libanius simultaneously courted and vetted new students through a series of letters that advertised his teaching and attempted to measure the quality of the prospective student’s skills.104

This type of personalized recruitment mattered because both teachers and students understood that enrollment in an intellectual circle symbolized the beginning of a new life. Teachers and students alike commonly described the members of their school as a second family. Ausonius, Libanius, and their peers called their teachers “father” or “mother” and their peers “brothers.”105 Teachers saw the boys they taught as their children.106 This was not empty rhetoric; the correspondence of Libanius and Ausonius offers many examples of students depending on their professors for protection and assistance.107 Himerius gave orations that recounted students’ achievements on their birthdays and celebrated their recovery from serious illnesses.108 Students reciprocated by cheering if their professors gave a public performance,109 avoiding the lectures of other professors,110 and even fighting the students of rival schools.111 In the years that they remained at school, students were expected to function as a part of this scholastic family.

Most students arrived fully prepared to participate in this new world. Libanius, for example, grew up hearing “from older men about Athens and the affairs there.”112 Sometimes these accounts highlighted great rhetorical triumphs, but many of the stories involved “tales of the fighting between the schools … and all of the deeds of daring that students perform to raise the prestige of their teachers.”113 Later in his life, Libanius even speaks fondly about the fathers who used to take pride when they saw “on their sons’ bodies the evidence of the battles they fight on their teacher’s behalf, the scars on the head, face, hands, and on every limb.”114 Among the other activities Libanius had heard about and longed to take part in were “the kidnapping of arriving students, being taken to Corinth for trial on kidnapping charges, giving many feasts, blowing all [his] money, and looking for someone to give him a loan.”115

Libanius’s words show that students, teachers, and even magistrates understood that schools operated under a different set of rules than the rest of late Roman society. Students were encouraged to develop new loyalties to their scholastic families and permitted to demonstrate those loyalties through actions (like brawling or kidnapping) that would normally be considered criminal. Indeed, in a justly famous passage, Augustine comments that students “often commit outrages that ought to be punished by law, were it not that custom protects them.”116 One’s student status legitimized normally unacceptable behaviors and, in some cases, even marked them as positive contributions to the fabric of an intellectual community.

Rituals of inclusion particular to intellectual communities helped to reinforce the sense that students lived in a social world with its own particular set of rules. The best-attested such rituals come from the Athenian rhetorical schools of the mid-to late fourth century. When students arrived at an Athenian school, they swore an oath to study under a specific teacher.117 Himerius treated his newly enrolled students to a welcoming oration in which he greeted them individually by noting the regions from which they came.118 The welcoming address concluded with a call for the students to be initiated. They were then divided into senior and junior initiates before they processed past their fellow students on the way to the baths.119 This procession was intended to be a frightening thing and included screamed threats and some physical violence.120 Once the initiates reached the bathhouse, they were “washed, dressed, and received the right to wear the scholarly robe.”121 When this was completed, Gregory Nazianzen says, the students received the newcomer “as an equal.”122

those school days.