How did the Romans deal with language

Quotations about language from the book "The fall of the Roman Empire" by Pether Heather, ISBN 978-0-330-49136-5

"... A typical school exercise would consist of having to express dome everyday happening in the style of one of the chosen authors ... children were to learn that language ... hold educated Latin in a kind of cultural vice, preventing or at least significantly slowing down the normal process of linguistic change ... effect of allowing instant identification ... the graffiti found at Pompeii suggest that in everyday usage Latin was already evolving into less grammatically structured Romance ...

But talking the talk was only part of the story. Aside from the language of these texts, Symmachus and his friends also claimed that absorbing their contents made them human beings of a calibre quite unmatched by anyone else. Latin grammar, they argued, was a tool for developing a logical, precise mind. If you didn't have a mastery of moods and tenses, you couldn't say precisely what you meant, or accurately express the exact relationship between things. Grammar in other words, was an introduction to formal logic. They also saw their literary texts as a kind of accumulated moral database of human behaviour - both good and bad -  from which with guidance, one could learn what to do and what not to do. ...

... Not only did educated Romans speak a superior language but, in the view of Symmachus and his fellows, they had things to discuss in that language which were inaccessible to the uneducated ...

... Not all late Romans were quite so focused on education and its importance as Symmachus, but all agreed that it not only equipped the individual to identify virtue for himself, but gave him the necessary tools to persuade others of his (correct) opinion. In other words, what it did was to equip its beneficiaries to lead the rest of mankind. ..."