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If the academic practice of grammar construed Christianity and paganism as ideal entities manifested in physical texts, how, in turn, did grammatical schooling contribute to the construction of pagan and Christian people in late antiquity? How did late ancient authors’ thoughts about grammatical education aVect the way they or their readers might have imagined the manifestation of religious identity?1 The aVective language surrounding schooling and the learning of grammar reveals a great deal about how the learner is positioned with respect to these larger ideological questions. Three speciWc tropes of emotion surround grammar and contribute to the constitution of a historical subject as well as to a narrative of time passing , both of which are vital to late ancient Christianization.2 Where the more technical works of the grammarians use the broad temporal categories of past and present to constitute subjects, however, these aVective tropes provide moments in which subjects can be understood as experiencing the passage of time—although this is done, as we will see, in a fundamentally discontinuous manner. The three emotional tropes in question are, as the title of this chapter suggests, fear, boredom, and amusement. Fear and boredom as emotions surrounding grammar occur in two slightly diVerent contexts in Roman literature: fear is particularly evoked in accounts of children encountering, and being punished by, the grammarian or magister who instructs them, while boredom is generally reserved for the adult Roman interacting with a grammarian who reasserts (typically in some inappropriate fashion) his role as pedagogue. Both of these portrayals of grammarians are regularly written as occasions of amusement, and the pictures of children being afraid and adults being bored are themselves presented as entertaining. The accuracy of these emotional portraits is not at issue. What is remarkable is the consistency with which these tropes recur. Whether or not all students were afraid of grammarians or 5 Fear, Boredom, and Amusement Emotion and Grammar all adults were bored by them, grammarians were positioned within an aVective Weld in which it made sense to speak of them as bullying or boring. The particular sense that these tropes made, I suggest, rearranged into a unitary developmental narrative the multiple, often conXicting, facets that produced the educated subject. Just as the ethical force of “past” and “present ” could conjure a particular kind of pious subject, the description of aVectively potent moments and their resolution into narratives of emotion formed unitary Wgures, Wgures who could carry with them certain kinds of cultural and religious markings. More expansively, the invocation of amusement implicated the reader, as a literate subject, into the narrative. I will begin by discussing fear and boredom separately, concentrating on speciWc textual instances from Jerome, John Chrysostom, Augustine, and Martianus Capella; the narrative and amusing aspects of the tropes will then be considered together. Fear and the Breakdown of the Subject It is well known that elementary education in antiquity involved a certain degree of physical danger.3 Despite the advice of such Wgures as Seneca and Quintilian against the practice, corporal punishment of schoolchildren was standard procedure in the ancient world when either their behavior or their classroom performance was less than ideal.4 Horace famously called his grammar teacher Orbilius plagosus (which Stanley Bonner translates as “Orbilius the Whacker”),5 and Suetonius testiWes to Orbilius’ violent reputation in De grammaticis et rhetoribus.6 Martial likewise assumes the commonality of the beating grammarian,7 and in the later empire Ausonius ’ grammarian Ammonius is rebuked for his “savage” ways.8 The beatings received at the grammarian’s hands served as a rite of passage for the educated classes, marking the boundaries between educated and uneducated, and between adult and child. As Ausonius tells his grandson , “Both your father and your mother underwent the same things. I hope . . . that you shall walk on the same path that I, and the proconsul your father and prefect your uncle, are on.”9 Beating allows the grouping of educated persons in the empire, and many of those undergoing the grammarian’s punishment are spoken of as anonymized plurals: Suetonius, quoting Domitius Marsus, speaks of Orbilius’ pupils simply as “those whom Orbilius felled with the cane and the lash.”10 To the same extent that actual beatings may have instilled a level of conformity with the grammarian’s Fear, Boredom, and Amusement 111 literary ideologies, descriptions of beatings suggested conformity between literate elites themselves.11 At the same time, beatings could be used to mark lines of diVerence between competing groups. Cicero...

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