Over the course of the Republic, general literacy in Rome undergoes some fairly immense shifts, and the picture we have of elementary educational practice changes with it. The growth of formal schooling the emergence of a literary and literate culture in Rome in the middle Republic affected who received an education and how and from whom they learned.

In the earliest period, we have Latin writing but little formal literary culture in Rome. The earliest extant Latin writing goes back possibly as far as the 7th century BCE, to which the Praeneste fibula is usually dated. The 7th century is also the earliest accepted date for the Duenos inscription, although that may be as late as the 5th century, which would put it in the Republican period. We have early inscriptions like these examples, but through the early Republic and up until 240 BCE (accepting Cicero’s dating for lack of any better alternative), when Livius Andronicus is reported to have translated an unknown Greek drama into Latin, there is no capital-L Literature in Latin. While you’ve asked about elementary rather than rhetorical education here, the absence of capital-L Literature until this time has an important side effect on our evidence: there are no contemporary written sources on Roman education for this period. Later, usually Imperial, writers and historians mention earlier periods, but these reports are problematic at best as well as contradictory, and writing about what was, for them, ancient history.

This means that up until the mid-Republic, because this is where our sources picks up, a lot of what we have is pretty tentative and fairly messy, but we can start to establish a few things. Our written accounts report that in the early period there were no pay-a-fee-send-your-kid schools. Instead, later tradition (from Imperial period writers) held that in the early Republic parents were the first educators, responsible for teaching their children to read and write at home, later making use of private tutors. So if you were learning to read in this period, it would have been from your parents, at home. Writing tablets and model alphabets confirm the teaching of letters as early as the 6th century BCE in Italy, potentially along these lines.

For actual schools, both the sources and the scholars trying to put those sources together can agree: at one point there were no schools, and by a later period there definitely were. Most everything else is up for debate. For the appearance of schools, we at least have a sort of terminus ante quem provided by Plautus (behold! A contemporary literary source!), by way of a reference in the Mercator to learning letters at school. So at end of the third century BCE, we’re getting references to schools on the comic stage, as well as, in the Plautine corpus more generally, quite frequent use of epistolary writing and reading. The mid-third century is a likely turning point, as in addition to the advent of Latin Literature the third century was also when Greek-speaking slaves and peregrines started arriving at Rome in large numbers (including Livius Andronicus).

Our written sources mostly accord with this picture, but there are a few oddities. Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, drawing from the same source, both report the existence of primary schools in the Roman Forum in the middle of the 5th century BCE and there’s another mention of schoolchildren in the early 4th century by Livy as well. Livy is the odd one out on this by far, so these are generally regarded as anachronistic. Plutarch insists that the first primary school was opened by a freedman of Spurius Carvilius, who happened to be the first Roman to divorce his wife, and that all this happened in the 6th century, even earlier than Livy’s earliest mention. Bonner argues that Plutarch is mistaking a 6th century Spurius Carvilius with a 3rd century consul Spurius Carvilius, who did make legal precedent as the first person to divorce his wife without his wife committing a matrimonial offense, as mentioned by both Gellius and Dionysus of Halicarnassus, although theirs was not the first Roman divorce by quite a margin. Accepting scholarly consensus that Plutarch managed to make a three hundred year error, this would place the first elementary school according to Plutarch also in the third century BCE.

All this means that by the end of the mid-Republic, there were schools people could pay to send their kids to learn to read and write. This is nice, because we actually have excellent evidence for how children learned in schools, although some of it stretches into the Imperial period. The actual learning process, at the elementary level and beyond, was model-based. At later stages, teachers would be expected to provide reading materials and so must have kept their own collections of books and literary works to use, but even in the early stages the teacher would write out a model for students to copy from. In theory, students built from letters to syllables to words to sentences to passages, and while this progression isn’t entirely wrong it wasn’t necessarily followed entirely faithfully. Beginners’ hands write out their names and copy short sentences from teachers early on, while they haven’t built to those levels yet. Students started by writing out the alphabet forwards and backwards as part of their practice, and throughout antiquity are reported to have sung or chanted the letters in order as they learned (this part, at least, should be familiar to most of us). We also have exercises from later stages where the beginning letters are written out with different vowel and consonant combinations after them (the syllables stage). From extant school exercises, it seems that writing was sometimes taught before reading (also contra theoretical writing on pedagogy). On a number of exercises, students copying in a shaky hand from a clearly executed teacher’s model begin to make mistakes as they go and are unable to correct their own errors, indicating that they were copying without fully understanding what they were copying. This makes some degree of sense, as basic writing skills, like the ability to write one’s name, are important practical skills, especially for any children who never went beyond an elementary education.

For the actual materials you used, most frequently referenced are the wooden and wax tablets that could be tied together into a small exercise book for students to take to school. Students could form letters in the wax with a stilus and ‘erase’ easily. We also see exercises on papyrus and are able to distinguish certain texts as being meant for reading in school, often with breaks between words or word groupings rather than scriptio continua and accents marked. One papyrus from Roman Egypt even features an illustrated account of the labors of Heracles (the colors are mostly gone, but traces of them remain). But while scholarly debate on education in the ancient world has often emphasized expense as a barrier to access (writing materials were not cheap), in Greco-Roman Egypt a number of school exercises are done on broken potsherds, ostraka. As Cribiore points out, in a society where ceramics were easy to find, ostraka were simple to get hold of and eliminated the expense of providing school materials. So while you may have learned your letters on papyrus or on wooden or wax tablets, you may also have made them on potsherds as you practiced.

With the first appearance of schools in the middle Republic and the growth of literary culture more generally, we get a very different picture of elementary education at the two extreme ends of the Roman Republic. But whether students were sitting down with their parents to write them out or doing so with a teacher’s guidance in a classroom with other boys and girls, Roman elementary education relied on models, first of individual letters and building up to syllables and longer form writing, to impart basic literacy.

Bonner, Stanley. Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny. Routledge, 2012. First published 1977.

Corbeill, Anthony. “Education in the Roman Republic: Creating Traditions.” In Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Edited by Yun Lee Too and S.N. Faroqhi. Brill, 2001. 261-288.

Cribiore, Rafaella. Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Johnson, William A. “Learning to Read and Write.” In A Companion to Ancient Education. Edited by W. Martin Bloomer. Wiley, 2015. 137-148.