ing a horse. Th ere were also the “four exercises of weapons”:
archery, use of the javelin, use of the quarter-staff , and use
of the sword and the sword and buckler. Th en there were the
“t hree r u ra l spor ts”: hu nt i ng, fi shing, and hawking. Last there
were the “seven domestic games”: poetry, heraldry, diplomacy
and musicianship, and four board games. Although the foster
father oversaw this training, particular aspects were taught
by skilled individuals; spiritual training, for example, was of-
ten performed by Druids.
Many of the skills that Celtic boys had to learn were con-
cerned with war, and the Bronze Age in which they fl our-
ished was not only prosperous but also violent. Th e Germanic
tribes tended to prefer boys to use the bow and arrow, while
the Gauls, in the region that is now France, tended to favor the
javelin. To encourage them in warlike pursuits, the Romans
recorded t hat Celtic boys were, from a young age, ser ved meat
on the point of a sword. Many early sporting pursuits, such as
tossing the caber (a pole or tree trunk) for the Picts (in Scot-
land) or juggling swords, were important for developing skills
useful for battle, where agility rather than armor made the
diff erence between life and death. In parts of Europe where
there were no major pressures of population, skills related to
hunting and trapping animals were given priority. Upon be-
ing trained, the boys would be asked to prove themselves in
terms of valor and skill at arms to be acknowledged publicly
as achieving adulthood.
In parts of Europe some men, especially mercenaries,
had specialized occupations. Th e slingers from the Balearic
Islands were used extensively by the Carthaginians, and Ro-
man writers mention them in some awe and trepidation. To
achieve the level of skill they had, boys on these islands were
trained from an early age in the use of the sling. One writer
notes that the boys were trained to hit bread with a stone and
were not allowed to eat until they hit the target; it is also noted
that boys were trained by their fathers, who gave them a sling
as their fi rst toy. Similarly, the Huns trained their sons from a
young age to ride horses.
As the Roman Empire expanded, many well-to-do fami-
lies wanted their sons to be educated in the Roman style. Many
boys in towns and cities were taught by schoolmasters, who
opened a room or more of their houses and tutored a number
of students at the same time. Salaries were low, but there were
encouragements, such as that teachers were exempted from
military service by the emperor Constantine (r. 306–337 c.e.).
Th e wealthy oft en used an educated slave known as a paeda-
gogus, who would act as a tutor. A signifi cant number of these
slaves, especially around the Mediterranean, were Greeks.
Small schools followed an unregulated Roman system of
education with rote learning of grammar as well as poetry
and rhetoric, or the eff ective use of speech and writing. Th e
system also involved learning how to read, oft en both Latin
and Greek, depending on the town or city in which the school
was located. Th e works of Homer were regularly used to teach
history, to explain problems with life and morals, and also
to teach rhetoric. Th e study of rhetoric sometimes involved
repeating imaginary speeches from such historical fi gures as
Alexander the Great, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar. Children
would write on slate, with many committing information to
memory, reinforcing the oral tradition used by the Celts, the
Dacians, and others.
Agricola, the Roman governor of Britain from 77 to
84 c.e., brought with him from Tarsus to Britain a Greek
schoolmaster called Demetrius. Other similar situations oc-
curred. Indeed, Saint Patrick spoke some Latin from a young
age. During the height of the Roman Empire the system of
education, though it did not follow any set curriculum, was
probably fairly uniform throughout the empire. It was not
uncommon for children of the very wealthy to go to Athens
or Rhodes for the best schooling available at that time. Th e
Roman elite families certainly availed themselves of these op-
portunities, and it would seem likely that other rich families
across the empire might have done the same.
Apart from some from wealthy families who would have
had tutors, the Celts seem to have paid little attention to girls’
education, which would have been conducted largely at home.
It is also possible that the male Roman writers did not choose
to record the education of Celtic girls, whose treatment may
not have been much diff erent from that of girls in villages in
Italy. Th e names of very few women survive from this pe-
riod, and even for those about whom much is written, such
as Boudicca, who fought the Romans in Britain in 60–61 c.e.,
little is known about their early life and training. Aft er the
growth of the Christian church from the early fourth century,
churches became places of learning, and boys (and probably a
few girls) started getting their education—religious and aca-
demic—from the local priest and gradually at monasteries.GREECE
BY CHRISTOPHER BLACKWELL
Before the fi ft h century b.c.e. there is little evidence for for-
mal, organized schools in the Greek world. Th e education of
aristocratic children would have been handled by their nurses
when they were very young or by slaves, but schooling was
probably left to informal instruction by peers and older men-
tors. In Homer’s Iliad, we read that Achilles’ father, Peleus,
retained an older man, Phoenix, as a companion and tutor
for the baby Achilles. Phoenix talks of teaching Achilles to
eat with a spoon, and later he instructs him to play games and
use weapons. Young Achilles was also said to have attended
a “school” run by the centaur Chiron—the mythological na-
ture of this schoolmaster may suggest that formal education
was so rare as to seem magical, the privilege only of those
aristocrats descended from gods. In the most ancient Greek
world the aristocracy tended to assume that their superiority
was inborn, a matter of blood and not of education.
For all Greek boys and young men in the centuries be-
fore the Classical Period (which began in the fi ft h century
b.c.e), informal and formal athletic competitions would have
been the center of their development. Th ese games involved382 education: Greece