Theon’s Progymnasmata are also particularly interesting in that his original text (parts of which are preserved only in an Armenian translation from Late Antiquity) included some exercises not found in other collections.19 These include reading aloud (anagnôsis), listening (akroasis), and paraphrase, all of which help us further to understand the use of classical models in the rhetorical schools. Reading ancient texts, copied without word division, was difficult in itself but the exercise of anagnôsis demanded even more. The student had to understand the speech and its strategies and, above all, to think himself in to the situation of the speaker and his persona. This exercise therefore involved an internalization of both the character and the words of the ancient model and provided a first experience of the rhetorical performance, hypokrisis, that was a defining feature of the Second Sophistic portrayed by Philostratus and an essential skill for any member of the elite.20 The identification of listening as a further skill to be developed gives us a further insight into the context of Sophistic performances (Philostratus, moreover, uses the term akroatês, “listener” as a synonym for pupil). Like Plutarch (Mor. 37c–48d), Theon conceived of being a member of an audience as an active process requiring effort and concentration, making the listener into a participant in the performance, whether of a teacher, a fellow student, or a sophist.
Theon’s introduction is also a rich source of observations about teaching methods. Like his Roman counterpart, Quintilian, he shows surprising sensitivity to the needs of his pupils and advises the teachers not to correct every single mistake in their compositions.21 The most important piece of information that he gives though is on the ideal teacher’s role within the classroom: he is less a purveyor of information in the “talk and chalk” mode and more a model to be actively imitated by his pupils. At the level of the Progymnasmata, Theon makes it clear that the teacher should provide his own models of the exercises for his students to copy, and Libanius did just that, leaving a full set of sample exercises. This is vitally important as it shows how mastery of rhetoric, the end goal of this schooling, was a set of practical skills inculcated as much by demonstration as by precept. In this, rhetorical training was similar to other types of technical training and Theon makes precisely this point when he compares the role of practice in rhetoric to the work of the apprentice painter, who needed to combine knowledge of the works of the past with constant practice (62.1–10). As the use of the term gymnasma (literally, “physical exercise”) suggests, the training of the rhetorical schools was closer to a practical training in the way to do things than to the communication of disembodied facts (as echoed in the title of Raffaella Cribiore’s Gymnastics of the Mind). Theon also makes clear the importance of absorbing models at this stage of the boy’s education: the student was to be thought of as a wax tablet ready to receive the impressions made by his teacher and by the classical authors transmitted by the teacher.22 But, at the stage of the Progymnasmata, he was already beginning to make his own compositions from this material, just as Lucian describes his younger self creating new figures out of the wax scraped from his writing tablets (previously impressed with words from classical texts).23
The transition from grammar to rhetoric can therefore be seen as a transition from receiving models to receiving and producing, putting the models that had been absorbed along the way into active use. This change in the student’s relationship to language was accompanied by a parallel shift in attitude toward the authority of the poets the effects of which are perceptible in Second Sophistic texts. The grammarians treated the poets, as we saw, as authorities on a wide range of questions, but the rhetorical exercises just discussed encouraged a rather different approach: a distanced, ironic stance which was far from reverent. The example of Medea demanded that Euripides’s play be conceived of (if only temporarily) as illogical in its action; the enkômion of Thersites presents the deformed and cowardly common soldier of the Iliad as a free-speaking proto-Demosthenes who did not let his physical disability prevent him from joining the expedition to Troy and thus showed greater courage than Achilles or Agamemnon.24 Among Libanius’s refutations there is also a critique of the opening of the Iliad itself (Prog. 5.1). In these exercises we can see the seeds of an important feature of the Second Sophistic: the freedom with which classical models (particularly Homer) are rewritten, questioned, and subverted, often in ways that show the more or less direct imprint of the author’s rhetorical training, as in Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Oration, which applies the techniques of refutation to the story of the Trojan War (Auger et al. 2012, lxi–xlvi; Kim 2010, 116–118 and 128–130). In the hands of Dio and Philostratus (in the Heroicus) the grammarian’s authoritative Homer becomes an unscrupulous manipulator of the truth. The classics were respected but not revered to the point of being untouchable: rather, they were a common property to be actively used.25
AFTER THE PROGYMNASMATA: DECLAMATION
The Progymnasmata therefore provided a basic training in exposition and argumentation, in speaking in public and taking on a persona. These were all skills that could be useful in themselves for students who needed simply to master techniques of oral and written communication, and, for many, formal education would have ended here. A student who left school after this preliminary training (or even part way through it) could have gained some valuable skills.26 For those who went further along the road, the next steps were represented by the full-scale speeches, epideictic and, above all, declamation: the composition and oral presentation of speeches on fictional or historical-fictional themes. Again, the boundaries between stages were not hard and fast. The preliminary exercises led the students in to declamation: narration trained them in the clear exposition of facts, ekphrasis showed them how to involve their audiences imaginatively and emotionally in those facts, êthopoiia (and reading aloud) how to adopt a suitable persona and how to make other characters come alive as necessary. Most importantly, confirmation, refutation, and thesis provided an introduction to argumentation. The exercises of enkômion and psogos were miniature epideictic speeches in their own right. Although we have less evidence for the teaching of epideictic rhetoric in schools at this period, these speeches were part and parcel of the civic and private life of the elite and were practiced in the schools themselves, as Aelius Aristides’s speech for his dead pupil Eteoneus shows (Or. 31).
Declamation (or simply meletai, “exercises,” in Greek) was the school exercise that spread out of the classroom to become the major rhetorical performance art of the imperial period and the defining skill of the Second Sophists, according to Philostratus (VS 481). This exercise was thus at the junction between the schools and adult rhetorical activity in more ways than one. The most striking feature of these performances for the modern reader is the speaker’s adoption of a persona belonging to classical Greek history or to a vaguely classical polis (aptly named “Sophistopolis” by Donald Russell 1983) inhabited by stock characters such as generals, heroic fighters, tyrants, orators, rich men, and poor men. The exercise of reading, with its strong element of role play, prepared for this and involved a similar process of internalizing the past and certain character types (not all of them morally positive models). This apparent obsession with the past has often been diagnosed as a symptom of a certain nostalgia for the classical period and proof of its continuing hold. While this may have been the case for some Greek inhabitants of the empire, other reasons for the restricted range of themes emerge if we look at declamation first and foremost as an educational practice. The most important feature of declamation was not its use of êthopoiia but rather the intensive training it offered in analysis and argumentation. Themes involving tyrannicides and imaginary laws, virgins kidnapped by pirates, or characters from history in less than historical situations may seem to us (as they did to some Roman critics) to be pure fantasy, but they were carefully shaped in order to pose a specific problem (Heath 2007). The student, or professional sophist, presented with a problem (which was “thrown at” [proballô] them) had to identif
y the issue at stake and then to come up with the best strategy for dealing with it. The restricted range of themes ensured that the subjects were distant enough from speaker and audience to allow for an objective treatment while remaining part of a shared culture without which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to evaluate a speech. The restricted range of characters and contexts meant that everyone could be in agreement about a basic set of “facts” about the characters and their actions (as Hermogenes says, a case involving Socrates as a brothel-keeper transgressed the bounds of credibility too far to be debatable).27
Systems for identifying the questions at the heart of declamation subjects had existed since the Hellenistic period. The treatise On Issues by Hermogenes of Tarsus, who makes an appearance in the Lives of the Sophists (VS 577–578) as a brilliant youth who failed to live up to his promise in later life, presents one system for identifying the issue. His contribution to what was already a well-established art was to identify thirteen types of issue and to create a series of questions, like a decision chart, to help students work out which type of problem was presented by any particular situation (Heath 2007, 10–11; Patillon 2009, xliii). If a murder victim has been found, the question concerns the perpetrator (“whodunit?”) and is called conjecture (stochasmos). But other cases raised different issues: that of the pickpocket who operated in a temple and is accused of the more serious offence of sacrilege is a question of definition—he admits the act but argues about its nature. Once the issue was identified, Hermogenes provided blueprints for treating each of these types of case.
Hermogenes’s system can appear to be abstruse and arbitrary at first sight, but it is a powerful tool for analyzing problems and helping speakers to deal with them. What it does not do is give advice about the other aspects of composing a speech: what sort of introduction to use, how to present the narration, when to include appeals to the emotions and so on (Heath 2007, 8). These elements are provided by the treatise On Invention that was wrongly attributed to Hermogenes and by the late antique commentaries to the works of the real Hermogenes. One later rhetorician named Sopater (fourth century CE) gives a glimpse into how declamation might actually have been taught in the classroom. In contrast to Hermogenes, who starts from his categories and then discusses various examples very briefly, Sopater analyzes one declamation theme at a time and talks us through it at greater or lesser length, identifying the issue and outlining the speech that could be made, switching back and forth as he does so between example and precept.28 Reading Sopater, it is easy to imagine a teacher talking through a theme in this way before asking his students to compose and present the speech in full. Another, perhaps more realistic, image of the realities of teaching declamation is given in the anonymous treatise, once attributed to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On Mistakes in Declamation, a catalog of common blunders made by students, from failing to set out the purpose of their speech in the prologue to forgetting the importance of representing the speaker’s character (êthos) through his words, not paying enough attention to the order in which arguments are presented (and thus failing to hide the weaker ones in the middle), or including overlong narrations and irrelevant ekphraseis.29 Even the professionals were not immune from making mistakes: Philostratus (VS 595–596) tells how Ptolemy of Naucratis failed to realize that the case he was addressing was “without issue” (i.e., not suitable for debate). These glimpses into the rhetors’ workshops show what declamation involved, away from the performances of Philostratus’s stars and gives some idea of why Lucian’s speaker in the Teacher of Rhetoric could liken one path to it as a hard uphill slog.
Philostratus gives us one further piece of information about teaching practices. Describing his own experience of school, he explains that, when his teacher declaimed, both the younger and the older boys were in the audience, the younger ones (neoi) sitting in front separated from the older boys (meirakia) by the slaves who accompanied them (paidagôgoi).30 Since students of various stages and abilities were grouped together in the audience for these displays they must have listened to and watched their teacher declaiming long before they were ready to start doing the same. Such a mixed public is a further sign of the distance of this rhetorical education from our own system (imagine a single lecture addressed simultaneously to advanced undergraduates and school children) and seems more suited to a practical training in a performance art or a trade (like that of the sculptor in Lucian’s Dream). Through this process, the younger pupil’s act of listening was gradually transformed from that of a nonexpert to that of an expert. By the same token, the audiences of the sophists’ public demonstrations must also have contained a mix of levels of competence, with experienced listeners, able to copy and critique the performances they saw, sitting side by side with individuals of more limited competence (current students or adults who had not completed the full course of study). The demonstrative nature of ancient audiences, as illustrated in several anecdotes in Philostratus and others, meant that these public demonstrations could in themselves be an important educational experience for members of the audience who learned by listening to the reactions of others what was prized in a declamation and what was to be avoided (Webb 2006).
Philostratus’s Lives also show how closely the world of the schools was interconnected with the performance circuit. The sophists he portrays were usually teachers themselves: it was understandable, he claims, for Heraclides to suffer an attack of nerves when delivering an extempore speech in front of the emperor Severus as he spent most of his time teaching boys (meirakia; VS 614) In fact, as Kendra Eshleman (2008) has shown, the sophists selected for inclusion in Philostratus’s work can all be connected to a network of teachers and students clustered around the central figure of Herodes Atticus. From the formal sense of “school” as a place of education and practical training we therefore come to the looser sense of a group sharing similar approaches to their discipline. It is at the level of the sophists that we are able to perceive, largely thanks to Philostratus’s comments, the individual styles and qualities that distinguished the different exponents of the education outlined above and that were shared by their regular students.31 Dionysius of Miletus, for example, is said (VS 523–524) to have imitated the “natural style” (kata phusin) and the careful ordering of the thoughts of his own teacher, Isaeus, and to have developed in his own students phenomenal powers of memorization (i.e., of his manner of declaiming). It is also clear from Philostratus’s anecdotes that being a “student of” a sophist involved assimilating not just technical skills but also a far more personal manner of being: Hadrian’s students imitated not just his speaking style but also his gait and his sumptuous dress (VS 587). These were characteristics that even the youngest students could absorb as they watched their teacher’s displays, achieving membership of the group by assimilation. An extreme version of this phenomenon is represented by the second type of teacher caricatured in Lucian’s Teacher of Rhetoric (15) who recommends that his young followers imitate his mannerisms and dress as well as his superficial Atticism since this is all that matters. Students also varied in their degrees of “discipleship”; Ptolemy of Naucratis, for example, is described as a “listener” of Herodes (akroatês) but not a zealous imitator (zêlôtês; VS 595), and others departed—deliberately or, as Philostratus implies, though lack of judgment—from their models, as in the case of one of Hadrian’s students, Apollonius (VS 601).
This system of personal emulation is a logical development of a style of education in which the teacher presented himself not just as a conduit to classical authors but also (and, in the case of the star sophists, above all) as a model in himself. Its effects are reflected in the importance, noted above, of the language of sociability to describe the teacher-pupil relationship in terms of “association” (sunousia), acquaintance (pupils are gnôrimoi), or fatherhood (Hippodromos at VS 617), all of which sit uneasily with the occasional reminders of the fees (misthos) charged by teachers. A particular version of this sociability is attributed to H
erodes, who is said by Philostratus to have favored his best pupils with invitations to a special gathering, called the Clepsydrion, at which he lectured on verses over dinner (VS 585–586). Unlike Athenaeus’s gathering of equals, these particular dinner parties seem to have featured only one speaker, Herodes himself. But he is said to have encouraged his pupils to carry on their studies over wine, which they did in the form of discussions (on the occasion recounted by Philostratus, the subject of conversation was the style of different contemporary sophists). There are hints by both Lucian and Philostratus that this sociability could be erotically charged.32 The Teacher of Rhetoric presents rhetoric herself as a tantalizing object of desire, while Philostratus notes that an Ionian student visiting Athens who never stopped praising his own teacher was said, perhaps only half in jest, to be “in love” with him. The separation of neoi from the meirakia by the phalanx of paidagôgoi at Philostratus’s school was no doubt inspired by concern about the potential for erotic contact (cf. Quint. Inst. 2.2.14).
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 24