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Gymnastics of the Mind
Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt
By Raffaella Cribiore Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2001 Princeton University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-691-12252-6
Chapter One
MODELS OF SCHOOLING I go to school. I enter and I say, "Good morning, teacher." He gives me a kiss and says hello to me. My slave gives me the tablets, the case; I take out the stylus and sit down at my place: I erase and copy according to the model. Afterwards, I show my writing to the teacher, who makes every kind of correction. He asks me to read and then I give [the text] to another pupil; I learn the colloquia and I recite them. "Give me a dictation," I ask. Another student dictates to me ... When the teacher bids them, the little ones engage in letters and syllables, and one of the older students pronounces them aloud for them. Others recite in order the words to the assistant teacher and write verses. Being in the first group, I take a dictation. Then, after sitting down, I study commentaries, glosses, and the handbook of grammar.
IN THIS VERSION of the Hermeneumata, grammar occupies the rest of the pupil's morning; he is asked to identify parts of speech, conjugate and decline words, and scan verses. The Hermeneumata (also called Colloquia), school handbooks in Greek and Latin that most likely derived fromthird-century Gaul, describe, among other things, a day in the life of a student in antiquity and were studied in schools, as the text quoted above says explicitly. They are preserved in medieval manuscripts in eight different versions: the Eastern Greek teachers who composed them drew from a "deeply rooted school tradition, with which they themselves grew up." These schoolbooks are composed of one or more of four parts: a general glossary, a glossary divided by topic, vignettes of everyday life, and short texts, such as fables of Aesop. School exercises analogous to all the elements but the vignettes have been preserved by the sands of Egypt, but the vignettes are the most seductive part of the Hermeneumata: their vivid picture of the day-to-day routine of a student in antiquity seems largely plausible. They continued to exercise a fundamental influence on students learning Latin up to the first part of this century: the Colloquia composed on the model of the ancient ones by the French schoolmaster Mathurin Cordier in the sixteenth century enjoyed a long-lasting popularity. In evaluating the characteristics of ancient schooling that emerge from the Hermeneumata, the papyri, and the literary sources, it is important to bear in mind that what now seem integral aspects of modern education are relatively recent developments. It was only in the nineteenth century that mass schooling, institutions for teachers' education, and a discipline of psychology emerged, and only at the beginning of the twentieth century that the responsibility for institutionalized education was assumed by the state. The modern institution of schooling-particularly in urban environments-is permeated by an utter verticality: students are ranked within classes, classes are ranked according to levels, and separate schools are ranked as conveying a primary, secondary, and tertiary-or higher-education. Even though schools may differ qualitatively, they are invariably characterized by some idea of permanence and possess an existence somewhat independent from that of those who organize them and administer the teaching. Traditionally, historians of education have maintained that students pursued a full course of literary instruction in antiquity in a somewhat similar system, passing through three successive stages supervised by separate teachers: they learned reading and writing in elementary school, grammar and poetry at the school of the grammarian, and the art of speaking in the school of rhetoric. The Hermeneumata, however, evoke a considerably different paradigm of schooling. In the version quoted above, primary and secondary students are together in one room, while instruction is imparted by a teacher, an assistant teacher, and older students: altogether, by our standards, a chaotic environment in which concentration would have been challenged and the rumble of intellection must have been boisterous. But in order to evaluate the picture realistically, two points must be borne in mind. First, this environment, which appears quaint and unconventional, continued long beyond ancient times. It is remarkably similar to that of the one-room schoolhouse of the nineteenth-century American frontier, where the curriculum from first to eighth grade was covered by a single teacher, some teachers were hardly qualified to teach, and "education ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous." Second, we need to consider how prevalent the model of schooling offered by the Hermeneumata was in antiquity; its vignettes suggest some stability, a specific building where instruction is imparted, and teachers with distinct identities.
The evidence of attested schools in the Greco-Roman world is admittedly thin: texts and archaeological excavations have revealed only isolated instances of schools that can be identified as such with assurance. But is this due to an actual shortage of schools, or to the fact that schools were physically makeshift affairs that did not leave many traces, and that teaching and learning often went on in various ways and in different environments, without much advertising? Recently it has been argued that an extensive network of schools was indispensable in antiquity for the diffusion of literacy beyond a privileged minority. Clearly mass education and majority literacy did not exist in antiquity. But if one wants to gain a balanced view of the ancient educational scenario, it is essential to be alert to all the possible, and often unfamiliar, ways in which education may have been structured. It is thus preferable to adopt a broad definition of "school" based on the educational activities of teaching and learning rather than on the identity of the person imparting the instruction, the teacher-student relationship, and the premises in which teaching took place. In what follows, I primarily focus on schooling in Egypt in the Greek and Roman period by evaluating not only the few explicit references to existing schools in papyri but also various learning environments suggested by excavations and finds of school exercises. In light of the frequent complaints about the lack of evidence for schools, an inquiry of this kind deserves much attention. Literary sources will also illuminate various school structures in the Greek East, particularly at high educational levels. The extant evidence challenges not only the rigid and uniform organization of ancient schooling that past historians of education have pronounced the norm, but also the recently proposed, more realistic model of a two-track system, which had some validity only in certain geographical environments. The picture that emerges is one of great variety. Its outlines depended on several factors: not only educational stages, but also urban education versus education in the country, economic and social status of the pupil, and purely situational circumstances. One unifying aspect was the fact that schools did not usually have an existence separate from individual teachers, and even at high stages of education a teacher was responsible for finding suitable accommodations: if he decided to move somewhere else, a school ceased to exist. This increased the power that a teacher in antiquity exercised over his pupils. There was no external structure on which a student could rely, no authority higher than that of the teacher, and no external control besides that of parents. Since a school was a teacher, logical corollaries were the impermanence of the institution and the vulnerability of students to lack of stability and to change. One aspect that needs to be noted, moreover, is that the sources do not transmit examples of schools named after women teachers. This is not too surprising, considering that the evidence of schools named after male teachers is rather meager anyway. But it is difficult to know whether this fact has a meaning beyond the chance of the finds, and whether the few women teachers mentioned in the papyri taught groups of students from different environments who were unrelated to each other, or were in charge of the children of a single family.
REFERENCES TO SCHOOLS IN GRECO-ROMAN EGYPT
The few extant direct references to schools in Greco-Roman Egypt occur in letters and documents on papyrus; at no point do school exercises mention the specific localities where they were written. In the papyri, schools are usually called didaskaleia, "teaching places"-occasionally gramma-todidaskaleia when primary instruction was imparted-the same term that designates schools in the literary sources. Most of the time schools were identified by the teacher who provided the instruction. In the second century B.C.E. a school named after the teacher Tothes was located in Memphis, according to a papyrus found among the papers of Ptolemaios, who lived as a recluse in the temple of Sarapis, where he protected twin girls who had found refuge there. The school of Tothes appears in a confused dream that Ptolemaios narrates to a friend in a letter: the twin sisters had called him from there as he was passing by; after he told them not to become discouraged, Tothes himself brought the girls out to him. It is likely that this school, which apparently was housed in some kind of building, was an elementary school. Another school that surely provided instruction in elementary letters was located somewhere in the Fayum in the first century C.E.: named for the teacher Melankomas, it is in fact designated in a letter with the unambiguous term grammatodidaskaleion ("elementary school"). Two more intriguing references to primary schools involve the metropolis of Oxyrhynchos in the fourth and the seventh centuries. A papyrus that contains reports to an official lists repairs to several buildings and mentions the school of the grammatodidaskalos ("elementary teacher") Dionysios, which was situated under the western colonnade with other buildings, such as the temple of Fortune, the temple of Achilles, and the office of a surgeon. The teacher Dionysios, who appears to be responsible for the repairs to the building, which had become run down, must have rented the school space from the city. Another papyrus, dated to C.E. 610, mentions an elementary teacher as a guarantor of a steward's work contract and calls the school where he tendered his instruction "the Southern School." This unusual designation is tantalizing: not only does it indicate that there were at least two elementary schools in Oxyrhynchos at the time, but it also suggests that perhaps this school, which was named not after a certain person but according to its location, was not organized by a specific teacher and sponsored privately but was a public institution.
Schools of advanced education were also called didaskaleia. A papyrus found in Oxyrhynchos that is part of the Acta Maximi alludes to their existence in this city. In this speech, an important personage-perhaps the prefect Gaius Vibius Maximus-is denounced on account of his relationship with a certain seventeen-year-old boy who was constantly in his company and followed him in his travels so that he no longer attended "the schools (didaskaleia) and the exercises proper for the young." Thus in the papyrus, didaskaleia are considered as localities set aside for education, where a young man ought to spend his day. Schools that imparted some kind of professional education, about which not much is known, were also designated as such. The only reference comes from a Ptolemaic papyrus, which preserves on the back official instructions and letters copied for practice and alludes to students of a school again named after a teacher, Leptines. That these were adult students is disclosed not only by the fact that they are addressed as andres, "men," instead of paides, "boys," but also by the verb used to exhort them to work hard, which is the more dignified ponein, "work," instead of the usual philoponein, "pay attention." It is likely that these "pupils" were officials who received some kind of literary instruction.
While surveying references to teaching and learning situations, mention should be made of the term schole, which occurs both in the Hermeneumata and in the papyri, but with a different connotation in each. In the Hermeneumata, this word is always applied to a place where instruction is given: the pupil is described as entering specific premises, which in one case are located on the second floor of a building: "I went straight along the arcade that leads to the school (schole) ... when I reached the stairways, I climbed the steps." The word schole, which in Greek originally meant "leisure," was then applied to that for which leisure was employed, especially learned discussions and lectures, and was also used for a group to whom lectures were given. In the papyri this term indicates both the activity of learning and a group of students who congregated to receive instruction. In the second century C.E. in Hermopolis, Heraidous, the daughter of the local governor, needed "material suitable for schole such as a reading book." For Heraidous, going to school meant learning at home with a private tutor-an arrangement that must have been popular among children of the elite, both male and female. Groups of advanced male students, called scholai, followed the classes of teachers of rhetoric in Alexandria. In the second century the private teacher Didymos was heading a schole that the student Neilos had decided to attend for lack of a more prestigious one. Later, in the fifth century, the grammarian Flavius Horapollon is described in a papyrus as having a schole in the capital, where he taught grammar and philosophy. The relative infrequency of the references to schools in papyri is at first surprising when they are compared with the numerous references to teachers. This seeming paradox is partly offset by the fact that the papyri gloss teachers with a professional title only in order to distinguish them from other community members with the same name; they do not describe the professional activities of these individuals. There is no doubt, however, that this paucity of references is also a reflection of the fact that schools were not always present institutionally in specific buildings designed for educational purposes. Particularly at the lower levels, ancient schools may often have lacked formal settings.
SCHOOL ACCOMMODATIONS
In exploring school accommodations in antiquity, it is necessary to be alert to a vast spectrum of situations: besides occupying a private or public building, a school could have been located within the perimeter of an ancient temple, in the cell of a monastery, in a private house, or even in the open air, at a street corner or under a tree. Teachers took advantage of the various opportunities offered by the place where they lived to set up a "school" whose characteristics varied according to their personal circumstances. Particularly at high educational levels, as a teacher moved up the ladder of recognition, the location and arrangement of his school often changed for the better. I shall identify various school accommodations on the basis of archaeological remains and finds of exercises. I intend only to suggest a range of possible situations rather than to give a complete and detailed account.
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