SCHOOLING AND EDUCATION
AT TIVOLI AND IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

In ancient Tibur, the schools were numerous and attendance was high.

• The school year began in March and the holidays ran from the ides (the 15th day) of march to the ides of october.
• Pupils were divided by classes.
• The grades were three.
  
  
• Elementary teaching
  The ludimagister generally held school in the pergula, small outhouse projecting onto the street. On other occasions the location of the school was quite makeshift, being held under the portici del Foro (Forum porticoes, on what is now the Piazza del Duomo) or in other public places.
  • The Ludimagister, to whom was entrusted a lower grade class, corresponded to our elementary school teacher. To his young pupils, entrusted to his care at the age of seven, he taught the rudiments of reading, writing and arithmetic.
  • To teach his pupils to read, he used ivory counters on which a letter was written.
  • Texts were learned by rote, by reading aloud in unison in a cadenced rhythm.
  • To teach how to write, the master guided the pupil's hand and then got him to imitate the letters that he himself had written on waxed tablets, using a stylus (metal pointed instrument).
  • Arithmetic was taught with the abacus and by counting aloud in unison.
• Higher school teaching The grammaticus taught in more suitable premises than the ludimagister. The walls were adorned with bas-reliefs, papyri and busts of ancient poets.
  • From him the pupils learned grammar, orthography and prosody; minor discussions were raised on various topics.
  • Texts were also read and in this exercise four parts were distinguished:
    • lectio
    , the art of reading well;
    • enarratio, commentary;
    • emendatio, textual criticism;
    • iudicium, the judgement of the work read.
  • The Grammaticus, to whose care romans adolescents were entrusted from the age of thirteen-fourteen, gave lessons on grammar and literature.
  • his teaching approximately corresponded to that given in our secondary or grammar schools.
  • There were grammatici greci and grammatici latini (Greek teachers and Latin teachers): they were also distinguished by the way they dressed, the former in the pallium, the latter in the toga.
• University teaching
  
  • The rethor received youngsters for tuition at the age of sixteen. He taught them eloquence through graduated exercises (sentences, commonplaces, elogia, etc.).
    • His lessons had a university character.
    • The suasoriae and controversiae had a particular nature. They were exercises corresponding respectively to eloquence in public assemblies and in judicial tribunals, which were not only expressed in writing, but publicly declaimed.

In the time of Justinian, grammarians and physicians, orators and jurists enjoyed salaries "so that a well-educated youth may flourish in the state".

• At Tivoli the cultural tradition centred on the Sanctuary of Hercules Vincitor continued. In the streets and piazzas of the town pupils were made to copy the old roman inscriptions as a model of orthography.
• The schools of rhetoric, dialectic and jurisprudence were soon replaced by other disciplines, while medicine continued to flourish and a new literary genre was developed: the passions of the saints; it took the place of pagan literature.
• Sacred poetry, not yet entirely freed from the influences of paganism, was read out in the churches, and new verses were declaimed in the Forum.
• The Young were educated privately by tutors and scholars of the human sciences or learnt the rudiments of knowledge together with harmony in the scholae cantorum.

At Tivoli, the monks must already for some time have developed their own work of cultural diffusion, which enjoyed a strong impulse in the time of Charlemagne, who instituted an important scholastic reform, in which the copying of ancient texts and the reform of handwriting had particular importance.

• If schools must have multiplied, so too must have books. From around 780, the workshops in which manuscripts were copied, the scriptoria, underwent a period of intensive activity.
• Experts in calligraphy were employed and a real revolution in the art of handwriting was also achieved: irregularities in handwriting, encumbered with features that created confusion, were eliminated and replaced by a kind of rounded and perfectly legible letter, called the carolingian miniscule. Its advantages were so evident that it was adopted by printers in the sixteenth century (and is still used in our print faces today).

Eugenius II ordered that learned men suitable for teaching the sciences, the liberal arts and the dogmas (artes liberales and acta dogmata) be present in all dioceses.

• An episcopal school must also have existed in the bishop's palace in Tivoli.
• Those who taught in it probably included the arch-priest Bosone, bishop of Tivoli, and librarian of the holy see, who was one of the most distinguished figures in Tivoli in the early years of the 11th century.

Round about the year 1000, the Benedictines were already running a school in Tivoli.

• Historical records, although late ones, record the activities of the scriptorium of the Benedictine monastery of Santa Maria Maggiore (on the site of the present Villa d'Este) and the teaching given by the monks in San Clemente, close to the ancient amphitheatre.