Rome's First Professores

Rome's First Professores

At some point in the first century CE, Roman grammatici and rhetores adopted the title of professor, and simultaneously the cognate verb profiteor began to be used in the absolute sense, meaning “to be a professor.” Individual instances of this shifting word usage have always been recognized by scholars of imperial Latin (e.g. Kaster 1995, Sherwin White 1998, Reinhardt/Winterbottom 2006, Whitton 2013), but the shift itself has yet to be examined in terms of how it paralleled changes in the broader perception of Roman education. In this paper, I examine this connection by interrogating this evolving history of the title professor, with attention to the changing uses of its cognates (especially profiteor and professio). I argue that even as professor came to be accepted as a legitimate title for teachers at Rome, certain pejorative associations often persisted.

Prior to the first century, Latin educational vernacular was almost entirely derived from verbs with etymologically physical senses (docere, educere, institutere, instruere, praecipere, tradere), and yet professor (from profiteor, i.e. pro + fateor, “to say publicly”) uniquely associates teaching not with any physical act, but with the act of talking. How was this an attractive title to the Roman intelligentsia, whose members had often preferred to present themselves as unlearned (e.g. Cicero’s Crassus and Antonius, Tacitus’ Aper)? The relative rarity of the noun professor in first- and second-century literature, along with its “lingering verbal force” (Reinhardt/Winterbottom 2006), compels us to examine more closely its cognate verb profiteor. I will show that for Cicero and Seneca, especially, profiteor as meaning “to claim” often has the pejorative connotation of making false claims, sometimes associated directly with teachers in a manner analogous to the classic Socratic critique of sophists, who claim knowledge which they do not have. Subsequent imperial authors such as Quintilian and Pliny the Younger continue to use profiteor (as “claiming”) in this pejorative sense, although the title professor had become more common. Later on, this sensitivity to these pejorative connotations would be revived in the Christians polemic of Tertullian and Augustine, even as the professio litterarum has acquired a more solid technical definition (Kaster 1988).

I conclude that it is highly unlikely for professor to have originated as a title of respect. Over time, it develops beyond the connotations of “making false claims” previously associated with profiteor, but the persistence of those connotations even in Christian Latin frustrates any attempt at a tidy narrative of this progression. Nevertheless, there is a story to be told, here, about the first professores, in the broader scholarly conversation about changing perceptions of teachers in antiquity (Booth 1976, Bloomer 2011, Maurice 2013, Uden 2020): Latin authors continued to grapple with how to portray those very teachers whose craft the Romans had traditionally disdained, but who were now, by virtue of their very job title, openly “professing” it.