One of my current reads is Augustus, by John Williams. This is my second Williams novel (after Stoner).
Augustus is organised like a documentary: different angles and point-of-views through different documents. Most of these are letters and journals of different parties, some reports and notes that slowly unfold history. I like both: the way it is written and the subject matter. It has displacement (which is akin to a sci-fi). A different, noble world opens up, where the thought and language rhythms are high and noble, and people seem to display all the beautiful virtues from respect, restraint of manner, fortitude to grace under pressure. All that tends to speak to the high in a self, the noble, perhaps making it respond in some way. And it is simply nice to encounter nobility of manner, wherever one comes across it.
Where the first half or two-thirds of the book kept me enthralled, somehow, I couldn't see myself through the latter part. (Not sure why. Perhaps the tone changes once the book begins to curve around his daughter Julia rather than Augustus.)
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But no matter the reading, the thought that brings me here is education.
I find the education of princes/nobles/ those who had access to such things, quite interesting and fascinating to look at. When one is brought up in that privilege, what do they learn, or where do they direct their learning energies? Or rather when education was available to only a select few across the world, how did it look like.
For instance, from the book, here is Julius Caesar writing to his niece Atia regarding the education of her son Ocatvius, the young Augustus:
Send the boy to Apollonia....You must understand the importance of the command with which I began this letter. His Greek is atrocious, and his rhetoric is weak; his philosophy is fair, but his knowledge of literature is eccentric, to say the least. Are the tutors of Rome as slothful and careless as the citizens? In Apollonia he will read philosophy and improve his Greek with Athenodorous; he will enlarge his knowledge of literature and perfect his rhetoric with Apollodorus. I have already made the necessary arrangements.Moreover, at his age he needs to be away from Rome; he is a youth of wealth, high station, and great beauty...In an atmosphere that is Spartan and disciplined, he will spend his mornings with the most learned scholars of our day, perfecting the humane art of the mind; and he will spend his afternoons with the officers of my legions, perfecting that other art without which no man is complete.
Following from the journal of Marcus Agrippa, one of Octavius's good friends:
Our mornings were spent in study. We rose before dawn, and heard our first lecture by lamplight; we breakfasted on coarse food when the sun shone above the eastern mountains; we discoursed in Greek on all things (a practice which, I fear, is dying now), and spoke aloud those passages from Homer we had learned the night before, accounted for them, and finally offered brief declamations that we had prepared according to the stipulations of Apollodorus (who was ancient even then, but of even temper and great wisdom).
In the afternoon, we were driven a little beyond the city to the camp where Julius Caesar's legions were training; and there, for a good part of the rest of the day, we shared their exercises.
Here following, from later in the book, about education of Julia, daughter of Augustus. Phaedrus (Julia's current tutor), writing to Augustus:
Your daughter Julia is fast approaching that point in her education at which I can no longer adequately perform as you would wish...she composes easily in Greek; she has mastered those more fundamental elements of rhetoric which I have exposed her to,...and your friend Horace intermittently aids her with that poetry in his own tongue.
Later, from Julia's journal, when following this above note, her education was put in charge of Athenodorus who taught Ocatvius in Apollonia:
Athenodorus, who gave me my first vision of a world outside myself, my family, and even of Rome, was a stern and unrelenting master. ...
We were made to arise before dawn and to assemble at the first hour at Athenodorous's home, where we recited the lines from Homer or Hesiod or Aeschylus that we had been assigned the day before; we attemted compositions of our own in the styles of those poets; and at noon we had a light lunch. In the afternoon, the boys devoted themselves to exercises in rhetoric and decalmation, and to the study of law; such subjects being deemed inappropriate for me, I was allowed to use my time otherwise, int he study of philosophy, and int he elucidation of whatever poems, Latin or Greek, that I chose, and in compostion upon whatever matters struck my fancy...
Not just Julia, but other children in the family group, mostly boys also undergo this education.
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Where this education from the Roman nobility leans more towards learning and in the case of Octavius, physical training, as a counterpoint, consider the following here from India, from the early Mughal times. Here is Babur's plan for education of his much younger cousin Haider (from The Great Mughals - Bamber Gascoigne). Here, there seems to be more all-round skill development as well.
Haidar describes his education as having consisted in the 'arts of calligraphy, reading, making verses, epistolary style, painting and illumination...such crafts as seal-engraving, jeweller's and goldsmith's work, saddlery and armour-making, also in the construction of arrows, spear-heads and knives...in the affaris of the State, in important transactions, in planning campaigns and forays, in archery, in hunting, in the training of falcons and in everything that is useful in the government of a kingdom.'
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To think that those young folks were being trained to be rulers - they were to be good rulers, capable, virtuous, noble and courageous.
Exploratory thought - Perhaps one can see the difference between education supervised by a leader compared to that by a tutor. Babur and Caesar were men of action, as well as seems like with a bent of mind which allowed contemplation. Perhaps that allowed for the physical skills to be brought in the fold of education as well.
Further, it seems that any education perhaps is close to ideal when it addresses both the body and the mind. A strong mind in a strong/graceful body with beautiful virtues is perhaps an ideal human too. In the time of universal education it is good to remind ourselves of how the elite education at times looked like. And although people are not generally being trained to be rulers, perhaps realising the best version possible of any human being should be the noble aim of any education. Perhaps hence, to promote in education anything which can train the body and mind with high levels of discipline, tools and skills, make it capable, independent and in some way, elite.