In Titus Andronicus, when Demetrius, one of Queen Tamora's sons, has read from a scroll the two opening lines of Horace, Odes 1.22 (Integer vitae …), his brother Chiron promptly responds:

Shakespeare's ‘small Latine’ (as Ben Jonson condescendingly termed it), like the Latin of all English schoolboys of his day, was nurtured on William Lily's Grammar, first published between 1510 and 1515 and frequently modified and reissued after it became, by royal decree, the King's Grammar in 1540. Integer vitae … is Lily's example of a poem written in Sapphics. Likewise, as A. points out, Lily is the source of the (incomplete) aphorism diliculo surgere, proclaimed (in Twelfth Night) by Toby Belch after his assertion to Andrew Aguecheek that ‘not to be a-bed after midnight is to be up betimes’.

Lily's Grammar, and all that it represents, underlies much of this highly engaging study of Classical education in English schools from ‘the arrival of humanism’ to nearly the end of Thomas Arnold's transforming headmastership at Rugby School. A., equipped with the experience and perceptions of a twenty-first-century teacher of Classics, takes his reader into the classrooms of the three and a half centuries that he covers. By careful analysis of a range of sources – schools’ statutes, textbooks, memoirs and autobiographies by teachers and their pupils – a strikingly vivid picture is created of what it felt like to be at either the supplying or the receiving end of an education that often degenerated (especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) into a round of linguistic exercises that were, for most pupils, of questionable value.

Such ineffectual pedagogy was a far remove from what John Colet, founder of St Paul's School, and William Lily, its first high master, envisaged for the new school that opened in 1509–10. England had, of course, a centuries-old tradition of Latin schooling, its teaching rooted in the works of Donatus and Priscian and its administration under tight ecclesiastical control. Colet, however, his status as cathedral dean notwithstanding, ensured that St Paul's School was a secular foundation that would teach Greek as well as Latin. Furthermore, it was the layman Lily's good fortune to have received his own schooling at Magdalen College School, Oxford, under John Anwykyll the most innovative of English educational establishments at the end of the fifteenth century. St Paul's, for all the ambivalences in the statutes provided for it by Colet in 1518, was henceforth to be the benchmark for schooling based on acquiring command of the two ancient tongues and their literatures from the Classical period.

The humanist who exerted the greatest influence on the development of English Classical education was Erasmus. From their first meeting, in 1499, he was greatly impressed by Colet and supported him in his aspirations. Erasmus had a share in revising sections of Lily's Grammar; wrote for Colet both De ratione studii and De duplici copia verborum et rerum (the latter played an important part, as A. shows, in developing the writing of ‘themes’ as part of the curriculum); advocated the teaching of fluency in Latin speaking by means of colloquies (his own Colloquia are among the greatest works of the sixteenth century); and demonstrated, in De conscribendis epistolis, the attraction of letter writing as a congenial way into Latin composition.

Among the most fascinating discussions in the volume is that of the beginnings of teaching Greek. The statutes and ordinances of many schools founded in the sixteenth century demonstrate a wish to follow older establishments like Winchester, Eton and St Paul's in introducing Greek into the curriculum. Yet, as A. makes clear, between 1530 and 1560 the study of Greek suffered a setback, graphically encapsulated in a comment by Sir Thomas Pope (founder of Trinity College, Oxford) in a letter of 1556: ‘I remember when I was a young scholar at Eton, the Greek tongue was growing apace: the study of which is now lately much decayed’. Such decay is all the more striking for happening during the period which saw, for example, the establishment of the Regius Chairs of Greek at Oxford and Cambridge. A., following S. Goldhill's persuasive argument (Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism [2002], pp. 14–59), sees an Erasmus-related reason at work. Erasmus’ edition of the Greek New Testament, together with his own Latin translation (first edition, 1516), constituted too great a challenge to the authority of Jerome's Vulgate and was seen as an attack on the Catholic Church. ‘To be associated,’ we read, ‘with Greek in the middle of the sixteenth century was a dangerous pursuit.’ Not until 1559, under Queen Elizabeth, was there greater freedom for the study of Greek.

‘Freedom’ is not a word that comes to mind in reading A.’s graphic analysis of the wretchedness of school life for many in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The sheer drudgery of an unimaginative curriculum dominated by language exercises, combined with the brutality which prevailed on the part of many masters (continuing well into the nineteenth century under head teachers like the despotic John Keate at Eton), meant that, for many boys, the study of Latin and Greek represented little more than purposeless misery. So a successful pupil like Sydney Smith, highly adept at Greek and Latin verse composition, ‘even in old age’ (so his daughter, Lady Saba Holland, testifies) ‘used to shudder at the recollection of Winchester, and I have heard him speak with horror of the misery of the years he spent there’. Such recollections are not swept under the carpet, nor does A. resile either from revealing the questioning by many of the gains for most pupils in being subjected to a course of study that had no bearing on their future lives (a questioning trenchantly articulated by John Locke in a passage quoted from Some Thoughts Concerning Education) or from exposing the growing perception of a Classical education as primarily a provider of social status and of elevation (in Dean Gainsford's notorious words) ‘above the vulgar herd’.

Fortunately, the story does not end with such negativity. In the book's penultimate chapter, ‘Classics Renewed’, the reader is first introduced to Samuel Parr, assistant master at Harrow, who in 1771 set up his own school at Stanmore. A brilliant teacher, he is seen as the harbinger of a new emphasis on teaching Greek in its own right, an emphasis whose traction was set to increase with the growth in the public appeal of Hellenism in the nineteenth century. The reinvention, however, of classical teaching, and its reform along lines which we can recognise as providing the matrix for the humane academic discipline that continues (in the face of all educational caprices) to flourish, are primarily thanks to two schools and three of their nineteenth-century headmasters: Samuel Butler and Benjamin Hall Kennedy at Shrewsbury, and Thomas Arnold at Rugby. Although Charles Darwin did not look back to his time at Shrewsbury quite as fondly as A. perhaps implies (in his ‘Recollections’ Darwin says that, for all his admiration for Horace, the ‘strictly classical’ diet under Butler meant that ‘[t]he school as a means of education to me was simply a blank’), the innovations wrought by these three were to transform the teaching of Greek and Latin, and attitudes towards them, for generations to come.

This readable volume is a most welcome addition to the growing number of studies of the history of Classical reception. With specific regard to Classical education, it builds on the work of important predecessors like J. Simon and M.L. Clarke, and takes its place nobly alongside more recent studies such as F. Waquet's Latin, or the Empire of a Sign (2001) and C. Stray's Classics Transformed (1998).