photo courtesy of Chrissy Senecal
What Education Looked Like in Ancient Rome
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Asia Tabb
photo courtesy of Chrissy Senecal
AIRED; September 8, 2025
Listen to the podcast to hear the full conversation.
Education in Ancient Rome was far from the structured classrooms we think of today. Historian Chrissy Senecal joined The Spark to explain how the system evolved over centuries—and how issues of class, gender, and respect for teachers shaped who actually got to learn.
“Ancient Roman history is really one of my favorite subjects, and it goes on for a long time,” Senecal said. “You can start talking about it in the 700s, and you could argue that it goes until 1453 CE. What I’m going to be focusing on is mostly the late republic on.”
In early Rome, there wasn’t a formal education system. Parents—usually fathers—were expected to teach their children at home. “So the kids were being homeschooled,” Senecal explained. She shared the example of Cato the Elder, a Roman statesman who died in 149 BCE. “Even though Cato owned an accomplished slave named Cylon who was a teacher, he didn’t think it proper for his son to be criticized by his slave…Therefore Cato himself was his reading teacher, his law professor, his athletic coach.”
But education was not available to everyone. “Very few people in Rome got a formal education,” Senecal said. “At the very most, 10% of Romans ever could read or write. And if you were a woman, you were much less likely to have an education. If you were not in a city, you were much less likely.”
Enslaved people and freedmen sometimes played surprising roles in Roman education. “Many teachers were either enslaved Greek people or enslaved people that were Greek that then got their freedom,” Senecal explained. Greek influence shaped much of the Roman curriculum, especially after Rome expanded into Greek-speaking areas.
For those who could afford it, education took place in stages, often with private tutors or in makeshift classrooms. “Teachers were paid incredibly poorly,” Senecal noted. “They had to charge based on tuition, and people didn’t want to pay money. So you could be teaching in a room on top of a shop…or even outdoors to take advantage of the light.”
Teachers themselves rarely reaped the rewards of their work. “Unfortunately, there are a lot of commonalities between teachers then and now in the lack of respect and the lack of money they made,” said Senecal. She cited the case of Orbilius, a well-known teacher in Rome. “He earned more fame than money…In one of his books written, when he was an old man, he complains that he is a pauper living in an attic.”
Despite these challenges, education in Rome shaped generations of thinkers, orators, and leaders—laying groundwork that influenced Western learning for centuries.
