The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Uzzi, J. D. 2015. “The Age of Consent: Children and Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome.” In The Archaeology of Childhood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on an Archaeological Enigma, edited by G. Coşkunsu, 251–274. Albany.

  Van Nijf, O. 2001. “Local Heroes: Athletics, Festivals and Elite Self-fashioning in the Roman East.” In Being Greek Under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by S. Goldhill, 306–334. Cambridge.

  Vardi, A. D. 2000. “An Anthology of Early Latin Epigrams? A Ghost Reconsidered.” CQ 50: 147–158.

  Vout, C. 2007. Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome. Cambridge.

  Walters, J. 1998. “Making a Spectacle: Deviant Men, Invective, and Pleasure.” Arethusa 31: 355–367.

  Williams, C. A., ed. 2004. Martial “Epigrams” Book 2. Oxford.

  Williams, C. A. 2010. Roman Homosexuality. 2nd ed. Oxford.

  Williams, C. A. 2012. Reading Roman Friendship. Cambridge.

  Winkler, J. J. 1990. The Constraints of Desire. New York.

  P A R TIII

  PAIDEIA AND PERFORMANCE

  CHAPTER 9

  SCHOOLS AND PAIDEIA

  RUTH WEBB

  GIVEN the importance of education (paideia) to the construction of the Second Sophistic by Philostratus and others and to the self-presentation of the Sophists themselves,1 it is surprising how little mention is made in contemporary texts of schools and their organization. This may be an accident of history: there is no second-century Libanius, whose Letters and Autobiography (Or. 1) tell us so much about the detail of education in the fourth century (Cribiore 2007). But one suspects that the lack of explicit discussion is deliberate. Even Philostratus, who makes clear that his sophists were also teachers, prefers the vocabulary of sociability (sunousia, sumphoitaô, etc.) to the vocabulary of teaching (didaskô, paideuô) and the most direct access to the pure Attic dialect is provided not by books or schoolmasters but through the marvelous figure of Agathion, the wild man of Attica who claims to have been taught (paideuô) by the land itself (VS 553). It is left to Lucian, the perpetual outsider and ironic commentator, to provide some depiction of schools and the educational process in, among other pieces, the Teacher of Rhetoric and The Dream. These are entertaining texts but they are deeply ambiguous: Lucian’s characteristically ironic and allusive presentation makes them challenging to use as sources of facts though rich in ideas.

  The Dream or the Life of Lucian purports to recount a moment from Lucian’s adolescence when he had finished one stage of his education and, after a family meeting, was briefly and disastrously apprenticed to his stonemason uncle. In the dream of the title, personifications of Sculpture and Paideia, rhetorical education, appeared to him, competing for his loyalty in a reworking of the Prodican Choice of Heracles. The narrator’s (Lucian’s?) choice is made clear by the form, the classical allusions, and the Atticizing language of the piece itself, which are all the results of the training offered by Paideia; the piece as a whole would be incongruous, inconceivable even, in the mouth of a Syrian craftsman. In the Teacher of Rhetoric, by contrast, Lucian offers a jaundiced portrait of competing versions of the rhetorical training that the young narrator of The Dream went on to pursue: the hard graft involved in the assiduous study of classical texts, or the soft and easy path of superficial imitation. That these two paths to the prize of rhetoric, figured as a bride, are represented by very different models of masculinity reveals the place of the schools in establishing not just social and ethnic (i.e., Hellenic) identity but gender identity as well, an aspect of the Second Sophistic explored by Maud Gleason (1995).

  Lucian and Philostratus can be supplemented by some less obviously attractive texts: the surviving rhetorical treatises from the imperial period and Late Antiquity which give us an idea of the contents and methods of teaching.2 With a few exceptions, such as the treatises by Hermogenes, these textbooks belong to the periods before and after the Second Sophistic, strictly defined, a fact that underlines the continuities in Greek education from the Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity. What was distinctive about the Second Sophistic was the stringent demand for Attic purity (Swain 1996) and the development of the school exercise of declamation into a performance art in its own right that provided a public forum for the display of Greek identity and for intense negotiations of status between its star exponents. Looking at the details of what was taught in the less glamorous forum of the schools, often by men whom Philostratus would qualify as simple rhetores rather than performing sophists, provides a reminder of other, more technical aspects of the art of declamation that help to explain its longevity as a form of rhetorical training. Another domain of Second Sophistic activity in which the effects of education are visible is the characteristic attitude toward the products of the past, particularly Homeric poetry, as objects of reverence that are nevertheless open to endless questioning and reappropriation, a phenomenon that has its origins, as I suggest below, in the different stances adopted at different stages of the curriculum.

  THE ORGANIZATION OF EDUCATION

  The first concern of the parents in Lucian’s Dream is the cost of education—reflecting the hard fact that schooling was almost always private with the result that anything but the most basic education was beyond the reach of the vast majority of people. Some cities did provide education to the children of citizens (Harris 1989, 244) and some individual teachers accepted pupils at little or no cost. Aelius Aristides claims, for example (Or. 32.16), that his former teacher, Alexander of Cotiaion, even gave money to the neediest, perhaps to offset the loss of the income that the pupil could otherwise have brought in.3 Overall, though, there was no sense that educating the poor was a public duty and, on this point, the author of the treatise On the Education of Children, attributed to Plutarch, appears to represent the consensus when he acknowledges the difficulties faced by the less well-off but advises them to do what they can to educate their offspring despite their circumstances (Mor. 8e–f).

  In an essentially private system, the provision of education was uneven and it is important to note that, in many cases, education was not dispensed in buildings designated as “schools.”4 In the major centers like Antioch, Alexandria, Rome, and the “university town” of Athens, the availability of high-level training in rhetoric and philosophy was ensured by the existence of imperial and municipal chairs (see Schmitz, chapter 11 in this volume), though, even there, students could find it hard to find exactly the training they were looking for (Joyal, McDougall, and Yardley 2009, 226–228).5 Cities often granted exemption from taxation to teachers to encourage their activity, but the fact that in small towns and villages the provision depended entirely on the abilities of the local teacher meant that students had to move away from home to continue their studies. One of the greatest compliments that could be paid to a teacher was to say that his presence brought crowds of students (and with them their retinues and their money) to a city: Philostratus (VS 613k) claims, for example, that Heraclides attracted young men to Smyrna not just from the local region but from all over the Eastern Mediterranean (Asia Minor, Egypt, Old Greece). For the biographer, this influx of students brought considerable economic and social benefits. For potential students and their families, however, the cost of living away from home was a significant extra burden: one of Sculpture’s strongest arguments in Lucian’s Dream is that she would allow him to stay at home and avoid the trouble of traveling.

  THE WORK OF THE SCHOOLS

  Given the degree of improvisation involved in the organization of education, it is surprising to see how unified the curriculum appears to have been. This unity is partly illusory in that the rhetorical textbooks that have survived were the ones selected (and sometimes adapted) by Byzantine teachers who weeded out different versions and the dissenting voices that we hear now only in fragments or in disparaging claims about what “certain authors” (tines) say. However, the underlying unity is real and reflects the final aim of education: mastery of rhetoric in all its d
imensions. The first stage in education was learning to read and write, probably with some basic arithmetic.6 In many cases, these basic skills would have been taught at home to both girls and boys, as well as to the household’s slaves. The wealthiest families hired tutors for the further stages of education too,7 but, for most of those who continued their education, the first stage of formal schooling was the teaching of grammar and poetry at the school of the grammatikos followed by the study of prose writers (oratory and historiography) and the mastery of the art of composing of speeches at the school of the rhetor. As Quintilian (Inst. 1.2.27–31) makes clear, the social microcosm of the school was a necessary part of rhetorical training and the acculturation it represented (Bloomer 2011, 119–120). There was therefore a general progression from reading and absorbing grammatical, poetic, and prose models to the active production of rhetorical compositions of increasing complexity, compared by the rugged representative of the traditional methods in Lucian’s Teacher of Rhetoric 3, to climbing a steep and rocky slope. Some other areas of knowledge that we identify as separate disciplines with their own methods, such as history or geography, were treated as ancillary to the reading of classical texts, while geometry was taught by specialized teachers.8 The philosophers, of course, had their own schools in both senses of the term (identifiable buildings where lectures were given and groups of individuals with the same or similar ideas), on which see Watts (2006).

  The Latin term curriculum, like its Greek equivalent dromos (used by Philostratus VS 587), implies a straight line followed by the student from the starting point to the finishing line. This line has often been divided into discrete sections by modern scholars such as Henri-Irénée Marrou (1956, 150–216) by analogy with the modern transition from primary school (reading and writing) to secondary education (the reading of the poets and the study of grammar at the school of the grammarian grammatikos—compare the British “grammar schools”), and then to “higher education” in rhetoric, consisting essentially of a progression from the elementary exercises of the Progymnasmata to the complex and demanding art of declamation. Marrou’s scheme reflects the fact that pupils acquired a cumulative series of skills, each built on the previous stage, and that the number of years spent at school was variable. Students who, for one reason or another, abandoned their studies en route had acquired skills in reading and oral and written expression that they could put to use, even if they would never have been accepted among the true pepaideumenoi. Marrou’s model, however, involves a severe oversimplification of both the organization of education and the presentation of the curriculum. On a purely practical level, it is clear that many schools grouped together students at different stages in their education for some or all teaching, meaning that students could revisit the same activities for different purposes as they moved through the curriculum.9 Similarly, texts could recur at different points for different purposes: the poets served as models for teaching handwriting—as shown by the shards of pottery and writing tablets with lines from Homer, inexpertly copied by a child’s hand10—then as examples of grammatical constructions, then of rhetorical figures, before finally being used as sources for the last stage of rhetorical training: style (cf. Hermogenes, On Types of Style).11

  GRAMMAR AND POETRY

  The main tasks of the grammarian were the teaching of correct (i.e., classical Attic) grammar, a question that took on particular importance in the Second Sophistic, and the exegesis of the poets. Students whose education ended with the grammarian’s class would have mastered the basics of composition in an acceptably classicizing idiom as well as acquiring a veneer of literary culture, mostly through the memorization of short extracts. We can find a taste of the questions posed in the schools in the Homeric scholia which ask, among many other things, why Homer began the Iliad with the wrath of Achilles, a question that the narrator of Lucian’s True Histories (2.20) gets to put to the deceased poet, who does not remember why. This scene was Lucian’s take on a topos of the grammarian: Aelius Aristides (Or. 32.34) envisages Alexander of Cotiaion discussing poetry with Homer and the other poets in Hades after his death. The teaching of poetry also bore a strong moral component which encouraged teachers to focus on a selection of potentially improving quotations, often read in isolation from their contexts and presented as the thought of the poet, not as the expression of a particular character in a particular situation. This aspect of grammar was ridiculed by the skeptic philosopher Sextus Empiricus, who gleefully points out the inadequacies both of the poets (who contradict themselves) and of the grammarians (who are unable to agree on their interpretations).12 The interconnection between morality, poetry and grammar may seem as inappropriate to us as it did to Sextus Empiricus, but self-restraint, the principal concern of these readings, was considered an essential element of paideia (see, for example, Chariton, Chaereas and Callirhoe, 2.4.1, 3.2.6, etc.) even if it was not always among the qualities displayed by Philostratus’s sophists. The moralizing approach also reveals the potential power that texts were thought to hold over their readers, particularly malleable young readers, as we see from Plutarch’s warning about protecting the young from the wrong type of reading as carefully as from the wrong type of people (Mor. 15a).

  FROM GRAMMAR TO RHETORIC

  The transition from the grammatikos to the elementary stages of rhetorical composition, taught in principal by the rhetor, is a good example of how fluid the boundaries between stages could be, since there was great deal of overlap between the work of the grammarian and the early steps in rhetorical training.13 Students learned to write by copying, among other things, improving quotations (an exercise that in itself helped grammatical models to lodge themselves in the memory) (Morgan 1998, 185–189). These same quotations then became the basis for one of the first Progymnasmata exercises, the chreia (see Hock and O’Neil [1986] 2002), which took as its basis a brief saying, often related to education and its benefits, or action attributed to a known personality. In one example given by Theon (96.20–22), Diogenes the Cynic dismisses an uneducated wealthy young man as “silver-plated filth”; another is attributed to Olympias, the mother of Alexander, who complains that her son is casting doubt on her fidelity by claiming to be the son of Zeus (99.27–30). The pupils had to subject the chosen phrases to grammatical gymnastics (changing singulars to plurals or to duals and back again, recasting the words in indirect speech or rewriting them in abbreviated or expanded form) all the time preserving the original thought. The rhetorical function of the exercise emerges in the second type of activity: the composition of a brief discussion inspired by the model. The relevance to rhetorical training is also apparent in the classification of sayings which include syllogisms and enthymemes as well as demonstrations (a saying backed up by an action as evidence).

  A grammatical component was also incorporated in the two narrative exercises, muthos (an Aesopic fable with animal characters, illustrating a moral)14 and diêgêma (a narration, usually based on a well-known myth or historical event). These too could be expressed in different modes: in simple sentences (“Medea killed her children”) or in indirect speech using the accusative and infinitive construction (“Medea is said to have killed her children”).15 As narratives, muthos and diêgêma had a more direct connection to rhetorical compositions and provided training in the construction of the coherent and clear account of events that was crucial to judicial oratory (as well as to the other rhetorical genres) and, of course, to different types of prose, both literary and administrative. Crucially, it was through these exercises that students encountered the peristaseis or “elements of narration,” the “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why” (and “how”) that enabled them to analyze and organize a sequence of events into a story.16 Other exercises, such as êthopoiia (a speech that might have been given by a particular historical or mythological character in a particular situation), ekphrasis (the vivid evocation of an event, person, place, or moment), and synkrisis, comparison, provided practice in techniques that could b
e used in the presentation of a full-scale speech.17

  Theon’s Progymnasmata reveal another aspect of this spiraling structure. In his conception, many of the exercises were suitable for treatment in progressively more difficult ways. Muthos and diêgêma, for example, were approached first as exercises in composition that ranged from the simple exposition of the story to increasingly complex narratives containing speeches (êthopoiiai) and scene-setting (ekphrasis). Later still, they provided the raw material for exercises in confirmation and refutation which provided students with their first encounter with techniques of argumentation. In some versions of the Progymnasmata, these were defined as independent exercises but Theon saw them as processes, as a further level of activities to be applied to a basic narration in order to argue that the version of events was credible or not. Here, the peristaseis take on a new importance: Theon shows how a basic set of criteria or topoi (possibility, credibility, advantage, etc.) could be applied to each of the elements of a given narrative. In his example he argues that it is improbable that as a mother (person) Medea would murder her own sons, or that she would do it at a moment (time) when she was in a position of weakness or in order to harm Jason (cause). The same techniques were used to prove the reverse, that a particular story was credible, and even to refute and confirm the same story, as in Libanius’s refutation and confirmation of the story of the rape of Cassandra.18

  Other exercises also lent themselves to debate: thesis, an argument for or against a certain course of action (like whether one should marry) prepared for deliberative types of speech. (Although Theon does not make this explicit, one can easily imagine all of these exercises being organized in schools as duels between students or groups of students.) More surprisingly, perhaps, enkômion, the miniature speech of praise that was the students’ initiation into the increasingly important art of epideictic rhetoric, could also be opened up to contradiction. We tend to think of the rhetoric of praise as a univocal rehearsal of a subject’s qualities, serving if anything to suppress debate, but, in the Progymnasmata, it was paired with psogos, blame (vituperatio in Latin). Like confirmation and refutation, the two could be applied to the same subject matter as Libanius shows with his praise and blame of Achilles (Prog. 8.3 and 9.1) that, when taken together, create a dynamic, dialectical presentation of the subject that reflects the complexity of this particular hero and the multifarious traditions about him.