Suetonius Opens Eyes!

For the first few days we read Suetonius, my students complained.  “This is too hard.” “How can we read this stuff?” “This is boring!”

And who could blame them? The first twenty or so paragraphs are difficult grammatically, and hardly a page-turner.  It’s a study in Nero’s capabilities as a governor and administrator, as well as an early examination of his family’s history over the previous two hundred years.  Yawn, who cares?

But then in the hallway after study hall last night, two boys who are not big readers grabbed me by the arm.  I am not a small man — I’m 6′ 2″ and I weigh more than I should.  But they broke through the physical contact barrier to seize hold of me.

“This Nero guy is a freak!” one kid told me. “Read my translation!”  And I did.  It told how Nero had prisoners tied to stakes in the arena, while he came out of an underground den dressed in animal skins to attack and rape both the male and female prisoners; and how he ended his ‘performance’ by having sex in front of the audience with his male companion Doryphorus.

“You think that’s bad!?” said another young man. “Get a load of this!” And he presented his own discoveries of how Nero had a young man gelded and womanized just because he could; and regularly seduced married women, and even one of the Vestal Virgins, a senior priestess of the state religion.

It’s likely that I will be criticized for subjecting ninth graders to such difficult and sexually and violently explicit stuff.

Yet none of these students will ever buy into the idea that a President is ‘evil’ just because he comes up with bad policies, or has consensual sex with an intern.  They’ll know what an evil dictatorship looks like from reading a firsthand account of it.

Today, they’ll see a page from the official school history book — which says of Nero:

Nero

• Bad emperor
• good administrator
• murdered many
• unnecessarily cruel

This is not a genuine or useful summary of the career of one of the most self-centered, profligate, and megalomaniac  insane world leaders who ever lived.  And it does a disservice to our students to shut them out of the real story for the sake of “protecting them” from terrible truths.

But consider.  Both of the boys who pulled me aside on Monday night to talk to me about Nero and Suetonius are considered at risk — both are diagnosed with learning disabilities of various sorts.  Both are considered ‘fragile’ in some way, because they “don’t like reading” or they “don’t like learning“.

Clearly, they like reading.  They like reading real stories, about real people doing horrible things. They like reading as adults and in a world view that they can dig into without feeling like they’re being pandered to.

And schools, and school teachers? Trying to make a difference in your budgets and bottom lines? These texts are free. They came from Project Gutenberg, or the Internet Classics Archive, or from the Perseus Project.  Your high school students will learn to work with primary sources; they’ll learn to weigh evidence, and compare primary and secondary sources.

This is why we study the ancients, you school boards! Not to hear about how how Rome’s republic crashed, or how Rome fell in catabolic stages, like a doyenne tripping down the stairs. But because it is only by knowing the truly bad, and too the best of what the world has ever known, that you raise up citizens equal to the challenges that lie ahead.

Next up, I’m trying to decide between Pliny’s letter describing the eruption of Vesuvius in August AD 79, or the Martyrdom of Priscilla — which would you read next?

First Content, then Context

Today I stepped away from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in class to concentrate on the history of the late Roman Empire, so that they would understand the time in which Marcus Aurelius lived.  In the past, we’d read from a textbook the night before, I’d give a lecture, and they’d be bored; then there’d be some questions in the textbook for homework.

YAWN.  I’m tired just thinking about it now.  How did I survive so many years as a teacher doing just that?

Today I fell back on that old pattern, but with one important difference.  This time, they had been armed with a primary source. They already knew Marcus Aurelius from his own words.  I wasn’t telling them about him; they already knew him, better than any textbook could tell them.  Sure, they probably didn’t have the perfect comprehension that I’d like them to have, but it’s the first week of school.

They were actually interested in the lecture today. They got what it was like to live in Marcus Aurelius’s empire — that these legions on the frontiers were simultaneously a source of protection and a source of worry. That their generals could be the loyal servants of the emperor; or they could be ambitious, venal men, ready to do anything to become emperor themselves.

What was the difference?

The difference was that they were already engaged.  They’d spent four days puzzling out the words of a world leader from two thousand years ago — a world leader who cared about honor and duty and having a sense of right and wrong.  They actually thought he would have been a kind of cool guy to meet and get to know.  And in a sense, they DID get to know him.

And hence, they wanted to know more — so they sat still for a lecture, and absorbed the information they needed about his empire, so that they could understand him better.

But it’s still a bad habit.  I did them a disservice by not making them dig out the information themselves.  I spoon fed them a bunch of data instead of making them go digging.

So tomorrow we’re going to start on Suetonius’s description of the reign of Nero.  Sure, it’s a hundred years and more earlier.  But they now have a sense of what good government looks like; now they’ll have a chance to see really bad government.  And we can start talking about how to read primary sources against each other, instead of relying on a one-voice textbook.

I’ve been thinking about what sort of mental assignment to give them to work on, and I think I just figured it out.  Please feel free to comment on this idea, but here’s the assignment: Pick a line or a part of a line from Marcus Aurelius, and then find a parallel moment where Nero violates this advice. Explain what Marcus Aurelius’s advice to himself is; and explain how Nero violates that principle or rule.  What is the result of this failure?

Suetonius is full of details about life in the empire — the theaters, the baths, the games, the chariot races and more.  They’ll get more of a taste of the daily life in the empire from that than from any lecture I can give them.  And it continues the principles I learned at NECC and in every writing class I ever took: show, don’t tell.  If they read about Nero’s fantastical shows, and the way he suborned the Olympic Games and other contests, they’ll feel the same outrage that Suetonius did in telling it, and they’ll have a sense of how awful it can be to have a self-serving, insecure and monomaniacial blockhead as absolute ruler.

This is the thing, though… As teachers, I think we forget that a TEXTBOOK IS NOT CONTENT. It provides context, but it’s not content in and of itself.  This is particularly true in history, where a textbook is usually a Chronicle — a list of events and persons grouped by geographical region and time period.  Thus a textbook provides an overview of a given place and time. But real content is composed of the stuff of history: not dates and places and obscure people centuries-dead-and-dust, but rather the stories of their deeds, the reasons for their actions, and the things they left behind.  That’s the material historians work with, not chronicles… but stories and reasons for stories… the things that underly the chronicles.

Marvin Minsky said to me this summer while I attended Constructing Modern Knowledge that stories exist in order to provide DNA with important information that would otherwise be lost to catastrophic failure.  DNA passes itself on to another generation through sex and reproduction, and that’s a success. But the failures don’t transmit useful information that way; only stories do… to borrow the Nero example, “don’t put 19-year-old boys in charge of your Empire — especially if the teen in question is insecure, overly sexed with poor moral senses, and too fond of flattery, and profligate with money.  It’s a sure way to start a civil war.”  That’s a useful story for kids, because it reminds them to be strong, secure in themselves, and to be good financial managers, as well as sexually responsible and mature. Those are important lessons at the age of fourteen to fifteen.  Will they get it all at once? Maybe, maybe not.

By contrast, my official textbook mentions that Nero was a good but vicious administrator, a murderer, and a persecutor of Christians.  That’s not content; that’s a summary. It doesn’t explain how Nero got that way, or how he got to be emperor in the first place.  Moreover, Marcus Aurelius persecuted Christians too — why does he get to be a “good emperor”?  Because he was generally a decent man in other ways…  and that’s the kind of thing you can learn only from teaching content, as opposed to starting from context.

So remember… teach content first… then provide the content.

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