CULTURE 215Roman intellectual scene. Romans in the Flavian period witnessed the
spectacle of a Spaniard, Quintilian, the leading rhetor and fi rst incumbent of
the state chair of Latin rhetoric, championing traditional Roman literary
and educational standards against the innovations of Silver Age baroque,
represented by among others his fellow Spaniards Seneca and Lucan, who
are described by Martial, another Spaniard, as the glories of Cordova
together with their father the elder Seneca ( Epig. 1.16). In the second
century, Africa displaced Spain as the main exporter of intellectual luminaries
to Rome: Suetonius the biographer, Fronto the orator, Sulpicius Apollinaris
the grammarian are the best- known representatives. What is remarkable is
not that all these men, and many others, responded to the magnetic pull of
Rome, but that, Martial apart, their writings carry so little mark of their
provincial origins. For this reason, doubt lingers over the African origins of
Suetonius, the addressee of an honorifi c inscription from Hippo Regius in
eastern Algeria, and over the hypothetical south Gallic origins of Tacitus, for
whom no such convenient evidence exists.^14
Born two generations after Suetonius and one after Fronto, Apuleius was
different, a provincial who composed worthwhile Latin literature elsewhere
than in Rome. As such, he was the fi rst of a series of Africans extending
through Tertullian, Nemesianus and Lactantius to Augustine, who found
Carthage an acceptable centre of intellectual excellence. Apuleius symbolizes
the creativity and self- confi dence of African society in the late Antonine and
Severan periods. The more representative product of Africa in this period
was, however, not Apuleius but Fronto. Apuleius saw himself as a (Platonic)
philosopher. He is more accurately described as a sophist. It does not matter
which term is used: they overlap. It is more signifi cant that these interests
were something of a rarity in north Africa, and that they led him to Athens.
The natural destination of Fronto the advocate was Rome, and Africa, as
Juvenal commented, was ‘the wetnurse of advocates’.^15
The prosaic norm is often as revealing as the brilliant exception. For
every Fronto, Martial or Favorinus, the sophist from Arles, there were
thousands of uninspired litterateurs, the ‘Ciceros’ and ‘Virgils’ of their
communities, or ambitious mediocrities whose talents made no impact in
Rome, or small- town products exploiting within their provinces the
opportunities for social and political advancement that education afforded.
At an even lower level, the educational attainment of the average product
of a municipal school, whether in Apuleius’ home town of Madauros or in
Isona in Spain ( CIL II 4465), was not high. While every city had its grammatici
equipped to give a basic literary education, teachers of rhetoric were far from
ubiquitous, and only the upper echelon of the elite could afford to pursue the
standard rhetorical education – let alone a legal training – in the larger
towns. The defi ciencies of the schools of Pliny’s Como meant that the more
talented – and well- to-do – youth were drawn away to the regional centre
Milan ( Ep. 4.13). Again, although Greek was taught as well as Latin, literary
and inscriptional evidence suggests that erudition and fl uency in both