Gaius was only four years old when his father died. In addition to the sadness of his loss, his premature death will have caused a family crisis. Domestic life was rigorously patriarchal. A widow, especially one of independent means, was often expected to marry again at the earliest opportunity, although if she remained true to the memory of her dead husband she would deserve praise for being a univira, a one-man woman.
This may not always have been easy for a woman of a certain age with a growing family; but Atia was still young, and her connections made her highly eligible. A year or two after Octavius’ death, she landed another apparently rising politician, Lucius Marcius Philippus, an aristocrat who proudly claimed descent from the royal line of Macedon. He had just returned from Syria, where he had been provincial governor, and he stood successfully for one of the two consulships of 56 B.C.
He backed his brother-in-law Julius Caesar as Caesar climbed the political ladder—but only cautiously so. Unlike his dashing ancestors, the Macedonian king Philip and Philip’s son Alexander the Great, who conquered the Persian empire in the fourth century B.C., Philippus was temperamentally risk-averse—a neutral who preferred diplomacy to commitment.
After his father’s death, little Gaius seems to have been brought up by his maternal grandmother, Julius Caesar’s sister, in whose house Atia may well have passed her brief widowhood. That he stayed with her after his mother’s remarriage is a little odd; it could be explained by mutual affection or by Philippus’ lack of interest in a small stepson. It may have been in this house that he first met his famous great-uncle, Julius Caesar.
Romans of high social status took very seriously the education of children, and especially of boys. During his early years, a boy was looked after by the women of a household, but once he reached the age of seven he usually passed into the control of his father, whose duty was to instill in his offspring the qualities of a good man, a vir bonus. High among these were pietas, loyalty and a due respect for authority and traditional values; gravitas, a serious (sometimes oversolemn) approach to the challenges of life; and fortitudo, manliness and courage. A son was expected to learn by observation; he helped his father on the land and, wearing his smart little toga praetexta, an all-enveloping cloaklike garment with a red stripe indicating the wearer’s childhood status, trotted around after him as he went about on public business or conducted religious ceremonies. In this way the boy would learn how the political system worked and how grownups were expected to behave.
It is not clear who, if anyone, played this paternal role for the orphaned Gaius. For a time a friend of Octavius, one Gaius Toranius, was the boy’s guardian, but he left little mark (we know that the adult Gaius did not value him highly). However, Atia won a reputation as a strict and caring mother, even if she was not always directly involved in her son’s day-to-day supervision. One positive masculine influence is recorded: a slave called Sphaerus was Gaius’ “attendant” during his childhood. He seems to have been much loved; he was given his freedom and, when he died many years later, his charge, now adult and famous, gave him a public funeral.
Boys from affluent families were sometimes taught at home, but many went to private elementary schools, ludi litterarii, which inculcated reading, writing, and arithmetic. Girls might also attend, but their schooling ended with puberty, although they were trained in the domestic arts by their mothers and some received private tuition in their teens. It is probable that Gaius attended classes in Velitrae or Rome, accompanied by Sphaerus.
Teaching methods were painstaking, but hardly inspired, a matter of imitation and repetition. The school day opened with a breakfastless dawn and ran on into the afternoon. No attention was paid to games or gymnastics (fathers looked after boys’ physical exercise), but the long hours of instruction ended with a bath. Pupils had to learn the names of the letters of the alphabet before being shown what they looked like; they chanted the letters all in order forward and backward. They then graduated to groups of two or three letters, and finally to syllables and words.
In about 51 B.C., when Gaius was twelve, his grandmother Julia died. It must have been a sign of their closeness that the boy was given the signal honor of delivering a eulogy at her funeral. The invitation is also evidence that he was growing into a self-possessed and clever teenager, who was likely to acquit himself well. He addressed a large crowd and was warmly applauded.
Gaius at last moved into his stepfather’s household, where both Atia and Philippus took his secondary education into hand. He attended a school run by a grammaticus, a teacher of literature and language, the staples of the curriculum. Both Greek and Latin were taught, but literary studies centered on the Hellenic inheritance: the epic poems of Homer, the Athenian dramatists, and the great orators. (There was a Latin literature, but it was rough-hewn and heavily dependent on Greek paradigms.) As Cicero drily put it: “We must apply to our fellow-countrymen for virtue, but for our culture to the Greeks.”
The teacher specialized in textual analysis, examining syntax and the rules of poetic scansion and explaining obscure or idiomatic phrases. The student learned to read texts aloud with conviction and persuasiveness, to master the art of parsing (that is, breaking a sentence down into its constituent grammatical parts), and to scan verse. This form of schooling had a long life: it survived into the Dark Ages and was reinvigorated in the Renaissance. As one modern commentator has observed, “There was not a great difference in the teaching of Latin and Greek between early nineteenth-century Eton and the schools of imperial Rome.”
The grammaticus also introduced the student to rhetoric, the art of public speaking. Most upper-class Roman men were destined for a career in politics, so the ability to persuade people to adopt a course of action or entertain an opinion was an essential skill. But oratory was held to be more than a talent; it conduced to the leading of a good life. The statesman and moralist Cato the Censor defined an orator as “a good man skilled in speech.”
Apparently Gaius showed great promise: if this is not a later invention, boys ambitious for a political career used to go around with him when he went out riding or visited the houses of relatives and friends. Like the adult senators, who used to walk through the city accompanied by crowds of dependents, Gaius was attracting young adherents whose support would be returned, they hoped, by help whether now or in the future. This will have had less to do with his charm or intelligence than with the fact that he was related to Rome’s most powerful politician, Julius Caesar.
Gaius made two special school friends, very different from each other in personality. The first was Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, a year younger than Gaius. The origins of his family are unknown, but Suetonius says that he was of “humble origin”; the name “Vipsanius” is highly unusual and Agrippa himself preferred not to use it. He may have come from Venetia or Istria in northern Italy. Like the Octavii, the family was probably of affluent provincial stock.
According to Aulus Gellius, a collector of curious anecdotes and other unconsidered trifles, the word “Agrippa” denoted an infant “at whose birth the feet appeared first, instead of the head.” Breech births were difficult to manage and could endanger the mother’s life. It is said that Marcus was born in this perilous manner, and was so named in memory of the event.