Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity

468 Pages·2001·19.2 MB·English

by  Yun Lee Too

EDUCATION
IN GREEK AND ROMAN
ANTIQUITY
EDITED BY
YUN LEE TOO
BRILL
LEIDEN • BOSTON • KOLN
2001
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Education in Greek and Roman antiquity / edited by Yun Lee Too.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 9004107819
1. Education, Ancient. 2. Education, Greek—History. 3. Educa-
tion—Rome—History. 4. Classical education—History. I. Too, Yun
Lee.
LA71 E.38 2001
370'.938—dc21
2001043346
CIP
Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme
Education in Greek and Roman antiquity / ed. by Yun Lee Too.
- Leiden ; Boston ; Koln : Brill, 2001
ISBN 90-04-10781-9
ISBN 90 04 107819
© Copyright 2001 by Koninklyke Brill XV, Leiden, The Netherlands
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written
permission from the publisher.
Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal
use is granted by Brill provided that
the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright
Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910
Danvers MA 01923, USA.
Fees are subject to change.
PRINTED IN THE NETHERLANDS
CONTENTS
Authors' Notes ix
Introduction: Writing the History of Ancient Education 1
Yun Lee Too
"Public" and "Private" in Early Greek Institutions of
Education 23
Mark Griffith
Sophists without Rhetoric: The Arts of Speech in
Fifth-Century Athens 85
Andrew Ford
Legal Instructions in Classical Athens Ill
Yun Lee Too
Liberal Education in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics ...11 133
Andrea Wilson Nightingale
The Debate Over Civic Education in Classical Athens 175
Josiah Ober
Basic Education in Epicureanism 209
Elizabeth Asmis
The Grammarian's Choice: The Popularity of Euripides'
Phoenissae in Hellenistic and Roman Education 222241
Raffaella Cribiore
Education in the Roman Republic: Creating Traditions 261
Anthony Corbeill
The Progymnasmata as Practice 2892
Ruth Webb
Vlll CONTENTS
Controlling Reason: Declamation in Rhetorical Education
at Rome 317
Robert A. Kaster
The Problems of the Past in Imperial Greek Education 339
Joy Connolly
Images as Education in the Roman Empire (2nd-3rd
Centuries C.E.) 373
Aline Rousselle
The New Math: How to Add and to Subtract Pagan
Elements in Christian Education 405
Sara Rappe
The Schools of Platonic Philosophy of the Roman Empire:
The Evidence of the Biographies 433
Robert Lamberton
Bibliography 459
Index 473
INTRODUCTION:
WRITING THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT EDUCATION
Yun Lee Too
. . . we require a history that will educate us to discontinuity more
than ever before, for discontinuity, disruption and chaos is our lot.
Hayden White, "The Burden of History"1
I
If there has been a widely regarded and accepted narrative of teach-
ing and learning in Greco-Roman society in the second half of the
twentieth century, it must be Henri Irenee Marrou's Histoire de ['edu
tion dans Vantiquite. Originally published in France in 1948, this wor
saw five further editions in French; it was translated into Italian (in
1950), into English by George Lamb (in 1956), into German (1957),
Greek (1961), Spanish (1965), Polish (1969), and Portuguese (1969).2
Marrou's work has come to occupy a position as the authoritative
history of ancient education. It is one whose mention often and still
commands awe and reverence, and it produces submission to its
grand overarching but also detailed narrative of how and what young
men, and occasionally girls and young women, were taught and
learned from pre-Homeric times to the Byzantine period.
Histoire de ['education dans Vantiquite is a remarkable work, especial
when viewed in light of what came before. L. Grasberger's Erziehun
und Unterricht im klassischen Alterthum (1864-80) studied ancient educati
but it did so without historical sensitivity, failing to distinguish between
various historical periods. The article "Education" by P. Girard and
E. Pottier in Ch. Daremberg and E. Saglio's Dictionnaire des Antiq
1 H. White, "The Burden of History", in The Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cul
Criticism (Baltimore and London, 1978) 50; originally published in History and Th
5 (1966).
2 See Pierre Riche, "In Memoriam Professeur Henri-Irenee Marrou", Pedagogi
Historica 17 (1977) 493.
I YUN LEE TOO
Grecques et Romaines (1892) provided its reader with a succinct p
trait of the nurture and training of young people in Greek and
Roman society that managed to incorporate some remarkable detail
and which might in many ways be regarded the model for Marrou's
own narrative. But the article was a mere thirty pages long, so that
its coverage was inevitably limited. Other books treated either Greek
or Roman education alone. Where Greek education is concerned,
there was Paul Girard's L'education Athenienne (1891) and Kenn
Freeman's Schools of Hellas (1912), both Athenocentric works, and of
course, Werner Jaeger's Paideia, a work on culture in three volumes
which looked at how the Greeks educated man to his "true form,
the real and genuine nature". Where Roman education is concerned,
the offerings were fewer. Emile Jullien offered a comprehensive sur-
vey of literary education in Rome from the beginning to the death
of Augustus in his 1885 book, Les prqfesseurs de litterature dans I'ancie
Rome, a work that Marrou commends as excellent in his bibliogra-
phy. Aubrey Gwynn focussed his Roman Education Jrom Cicero to Quinti
(1926) on rhetorical education in particular.
Against this background Marrou's work on education in antiquity
is extraordinary above all for its comprehensiveness. Its subject is
ancient education from 1000 BC to AD 500, and it offers a "gen-
eral treatment of the whole subject, integrating all that is really valu-
able in the new acquisitions into a total synthesis" (p. xi). The volume
surveys the development of a social process in order to insist that
antiquity knew "only one coherent and clearly defined educational
system" (p. xiii). What Marrou ended up offering was a totalizing
narrative that insisted upon a single system and curriculum as the
paradigm for education in all of antiquity. This unified and distinct
education is a Greek one, and this is hardly surprising in light of
prior scholarship which emphasizes the Hellenic contribution to West-
ern intellectual culture.3 Yet Hellenic in Marrou's case needs to be
qualified. According to him, antiquity's privileged education is one
that emerged fully formed only after the classical Greek period, with
3 Cf. K. J. Freeman, Schools of Hellas. An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient
Greek Education from 600 to 300 BC (London, 1907); W. Jaeger, Paideia. The Ideals
of Greek Culture, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1939—44). In French classical scholarship, see e.g.
Paul Girard, L'Education Athenienne au Ve et au IV6 siecle avant J-C (Paris, 1889) and
H. Jeanmaire, Couroi et Couretes. Essai sur l'education spartiate et sur les rites d'adolesce
dans I'antiquite hellenique (Lille, 1939).
INTRODUCTION: WRITING THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT EDUCATION 5
which Plato and Isocrates are identified, in the Hellenistic period.4
The narrative of Histoire reflects Marrou's view of the privilege of
Hellenic education in its Hellenistic incarnation. Of the work's more
than four hundred pages (in the English translation) spanning a mil-
lenium and a half, some hundred and fifty are devoted to the paideia
of post-classical Hellenic North Africa, to its various educational insti-
tutions, and multi-faceted curricula—grammatical and literary stud-
ies, mathematic and scientific learning, medicine and so on.5 Marrou
demonstrates that social history "does not flow at one even rate, but
goes at a thousand different paces, swift or slow, which bear almost
no relation to the day-to-day rhythm of a chronical or of traditional
history."6
Histoire is, moreover, in many senses an anatomy of one culture's
teaching and learning. The narrative of archaic and classical Greek
education is a proleptic narrative. It is an account of how the instruc-
tion of young men is about to take on the characteristics of a sub-
sequent pedagogy, while the treatment of Roman and later Christian
education is in many senses a retrospective or nostalgic analysis. It
becomes a story of the continuation of Hellenistic education and for
this reason, worthy of less attention. If Roman education merits only
some sixty pages, it is because Marrou regards this portion of volume
superfluous, for "the general principles, the syllabus and the meth-
ods used in Roman schools were simply copied from their Hellenistic
prototypes . . .".7 Likewise, Christianity is the product of Hellenistic
culture born and nurtured in Palestine, and it is the case that any
Christian culture inherits this legacy; so, "Nothing shows the extent
of the synthesis achieved in four centuries of Christianity and Hellenism
better that the Christian cultures that sprang up in barbarian lands."
(p. 424). Following Jaeger and Guthrie,8 Marrou reinstates the pri-
ority of Greek intellectual achievement, although in such a way that
enables him to appropriate all subsequent pedagogies—up to the
4 P. xiii.
5 W. V. Harris, Ancient Literacy (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989) 244 rightly
sees Marrou as hugely exaggerating the scope of the Hellenistic school system.
6 Cited from Fernand Braudel, "The Situation of History in 1950" [a lecture for
the College de France, 1950] in On History, tr. Sarah Matthews (London, 1980) 12.
7 P. 358. Sewter criticises Marrou for appropriating the Roman model of edu-
cation to the Hellenic paradigm (1951) 191.
8 See W. Jaeger, Paideia. The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York, 1939-45) and
W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy (Cambridge, 1962-81).
4 YUN LEE TOO
Byzantine period and various aspects of contemporary education—
on the basis that they too are essentially "Greek". Numerous and
frequent analogies to e.g. the scouts (pp. 42—3), to Nazism (pp. 46
and 52), to modern universities (p. 262), to British public schools
(p. 48) insist upon our inheritance of the model articulated by the
narrative. Marrou surrenders historical cultural specificities and differ-
ence, and he justifies this as a rejection of prior research in the field
which has by and large neglected larger contexts to dwell upon minu-
tiae (cf. p. xi).
Marrou ends his narrative by insisting on the continuities between
classical learning and subsequent forms of education. Classical edu-
cation continues unbroken in the Greek east, into the Byzantine
period because this culture holds onto Hellenistic paradigms and
texts (452ff.). But it also endures in the West, though somewhat less
intact, in monastic training and culture well into the medieval period
(pp. 439ff.). Antiquity's pedagogies are so ingrained in Western civ-
ilization that they enjoy a series of renaissances, above all in the
Carolingian period (pp. 297, 464). Modern man inherits a venera-
ble legacy, "[Djespite the barbarian interlude there was a certain
continuity of matter, if not of form, that made Western man the
heir to the old Classicism" (p. 465). The continuity between past
and present is articulated over and over again in the analogies that
Marrou draws between antiquity and the twentieth century: so Spartan
education has its analogies in the Boy Scouts or fascist youth organ-
izations (p. 42), while corporal punishment, a mainstay of ancient
pedagogical discipline, remains a constant of educational systems well
into the nineteenth century (pp. 220-2).
II
Some fifty years later we might now think it a curious matter that
Histoire de I'education dans I'antiquite should have served as a singularly
authoritative text on education in Greek and Roman antiquity inas-
much as Hellenistic education is Marrou's "classical/ancient educa-
tion". The matter is even more curious once we begin to contextualize
the scholar and his work within their broader historical and intel-
lectual contexts. From an obituary written by Pierre Richie, we learn
that Henri-Irenee Marrou was born into a modest family in 1904.
As a boy and young man, he distinguished himself academically and
INTRODUCTION: WRITING THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT EDUCATION D
went on to study at the prestigious Ecole Normale. After studying
at the Ecole Normale, he graduated first in the Aggregation d'Histoire
et de Geographie, and then he attended the Ecole Francaise de
Rome, where he began his dissertation on the culture of Low Antiquity.
Work continued at Naple and Cairo, after which he began a suc-
cession of teaching posts at Nancy, Montpellier, and Lyon. In 1945
Marrou was elevated to a Professorship of the History of Christianity
at the Sorbonne. It is in the field that the majority of his major
publications fall: St. Augustin et la fin de la culture antique (Paris, De
Boccard, 1938), L'ambivalence du temps de I'histoire chez Saint Augustin
(Paris: Vrin, 1950) and under the pseudonym, Henri Davenson,
Fondements d'Une Culture Chretienne (Paris, Bloud et Gay, 1934), and
traite de la musique selon I'esprit de Saint Augustin (Paris, Seuil, 1942).9
Marrou was above all a cultural and intellectual historian of early
Christianity. But where most classicists are concerned, he will be
remembered first and foremost as a historian of education—indeed,
he played a key role in founding the journal Pedagogica Historica
went on to publish numerous books, essays, and reviews concerned
with education in classical antiquity and patristic authors.10 It is this
body of work which is of particular interest, and possibly also sur-
prise, for an assessment of the scholar as a historical thinker and
writer. Marrou himself tells a story about the origins of Histoire which
reinforces perceptions of it as an idiosyncratic and extraordinary work
at the point it came into being in his oeuvre. In his later philo-
sophical work on history, De la connaissance historique [On Historical
Knowledge, 1954), Marrou reflects that Histoire was written as a fa
He informs the reader that he was asked to produce this study by
the editor of the Paris publishing house Editions du Seuil in 1943,
who happened to be his personal friend. Marrou is careful to insist
that, despite its instigation by his friend, the project is very much
9 For a complete bibliography of Marrou's works from 1928 to 1975, see Patristique
et humanisme. Melanges. Patristica Sorbonensia 9 (Paris, 1976).
10 Cf. Pedagogica Historica 17 (1977) 491. Marrou's publications included: Mou
Aner (Grenoble: Didier et Richard, 2nd ed., 1937), "Clement d'Alexandrie, Le
pedagogue, Introduction et notes, 1-3, Sources chretiennes, vols. 70, 108, 158 (1960,
1965, 1970); "Les arts liberaux dans 1' Antiquite classique" in Arts liberaux et philos
phie, actes du IVe congres international de philosophic medievale (Montreal, 1967),
pp. 5^27; "Education (History of—), Ancient Hebrews, Ancient Greeks, Ancient
Romans", Encyclopaedia Britannica VI (Chicago, 1974, 15th ed.) 322-9; and Patri
et humanisme. Melanges.