The school
The education was considered a private fact, therefore who desired had to provide for it at one’s expense. Often the teacher didn't have classrooms, so in the morning, met the students and conducted them in an open public place, like the Forum or the Campus and behind the ample portico of such buildings he gave the lesson. The didactic was to exercise the memory, imposing the mnemonic learning of the greatest number of things as possible; usually, the teacher use the whip (vapula).
Instead, the rich families can afford a pedagogus who was usually a Greek slave that had to look after the education of the boy from six, seven years up to sixteen; besides, he had to assist him in all the things to which the parents cannot attend.
The furnishing of the Pompeian school was very simple: some stools for the pupils, the cathedra or sella for the teacher, didactic elements like figurations or relieves and even maps. The schedule of the lessons was formed of seven daily hours divided in five hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, after a small break for the prandium.
The elementary school consisted in a five-years course, during which, besides reading and writing, it was practised dictate, calculation with the abacus or the calculi (pebbles that served for the addition), musical notions, history, geography, narration. At twelve year-old age it started, under the guide of the grammaticus, the average school, where the pupils learned grammar, Latin or Greek. Besides the languages in the ludus grammaticus they studied history, geography, physics, astronomy, arithmetic and geometry.
The elementary school consisted in a five-years course, during which, besides reading and writing, it was practised dictate, calculation with the abacus or the calculi (pebbles that served for the addition), musical notions, history, geography, narration. At twelve year-old age it started, under the guide of the grammaticus, the average school, where the pupils learned grammar, Latin or Greek. Besides the languages in the ludus grammaticus they studied history, geography, physics, astronomy, arithmetic and geometry.
The studies could be continued with the rhetor (teacher of eloquence): the young people got ready to public life widening own culture with the study of classical texts, especially the prose-writers that “helped to learn”, with method, the difficult art of the speech.
Who wanted to continue studying the sciences or philosophy had to go to the big centres of Athens, Alexandria, Rhodes, Ephesus, Pergamum, Apollonia, Naples and Marseille.
About the tools of the study, the books were transported in a special briefcase (capsa) and preserved under form of rolls (volumen, from volvere) in closets said bibliothecæ (bibliopola was the bookseller). The waxed tablets were smeared with wax mixed to pitch and served for scholastic exercises: the wax was engraved with the stilus, a sharpened metallic rod with, on the other extremity, a small round or flat spatula that served for cancelling the letters traced and to give back the uniformity of the surface to the wax.
Who wanted to continue studying the sciences or philosophy had to go to the big centres of Athens, Alexandria, Rhodes, Ephesus, Pergamum, Apollonia, Naples and Marseille.
About the tools of the study, the books were transported in a special briefcase (capsa) and preserved under form of rolls (volumen, from volvere) in closets said bibliothecæ (bibliopola was the bookseller). The waxed tablets were smeared with wax mixed to pitch and served for scholastic exercises: the wax was engraved with the stilus, a sharpened metallic rod with, on the other extremity, a small round or flat spatula that served for cancelling the letters traced and to give back the uniformity of the surface to the wax.
It was also common the use of the papyrus, drawn by the marrow of the papirus (aquatic plant of the Nile Valley). The ink (made by mixing soot, resin, pitch, dregs of wine, sepia, adding rubbery substances) it lasted an indefinite time; the result are the papyruses of Herculaneum, that, remained buried under a layer of ash during the eruption of 79 A.D., have returned to light (in Borbonic age) deprived of consistence and almost charred, but with the clear signs of the writing traced on them.
Today the archaeological investigation is not able to affirm if Pompeii was a centre of culture in the right sense of the word. The discovery on the 1875 of the waxed tables of Cæcilius Jucundus, has remained an extraordinary event putting aside from the so-called Villa of the Papyruses of Herculaneum. It has not been found in Pompeii a public library: there were instead, some harvests of books belonging to privates. The Pompeian inscriptions become then, the principal source of information about the culture in this city: particularly, from the graffiti it is possible to understand the literary orientation and the type of scholastic education that was imparted.