Raffaele Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman

Egypt, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Starting with the fourth century BCE gymnasia were not only places of athletic
activity but also centers of intellectual pursuits It is particularly from the third
century B.C.E. on[ward] that inscriptions testify that gymnasia were centers of
intellectual and educational activity in attica and in several parts of the Greek world.
Numerous inscriptions in Hellenistic gymnasia preserve lists of victors in agones
contests not only in gymnastics but also in poetry or other academic subjectsand
occasionally the inscriptions themselves testify that teachers tested students by
examination in the gymnasia. 34-35
In the Ptolemaic period gymnasia existed in Egypt not only in large centers but also
in the most Hellenized villages, wherever Greeks established communities of
sufficient size. In the Roman period, on the other hand, they appear to be present
mostly in the nome capitals, metropoleis. In the gymnasium local male youthws
received athletic and military training, and the Greek members of the elite gathered
to socialize and to pursue intellectual activities. Festivals with gymnastics displays
and celebrations of every sort were held around gymnasia. 35
Models continued to be useful when a pupil was required to recognize syllables in
whole words: teachers wrote lists of words on ostraca and tablters, wome in which
the words were divided into syllables, others in which words were separated from
each other. Students used these models not only to practice reason and writing
whole words, but also to memorize their contents. Thus, when a teacher w2rpte a
long list of names mostly from the Iliad in alphabetical order on a very large
ostracon, this waqs used as a mythological reference that was always at the
students disposal. 134
Since Homer was the subject of constant study on many levels, it is among the
Homeric papyri that books used in schools are most often found. 140 empeiria
(expertise acquired through practice and experience) and a techne (an art or a
science). Paideia (education) proceeded in a circulatr motion, by revisiting previous
material. After following all the steps required for fluent reading, a student had to
learn to dissect parts of the texts of the authors, distinguishing all their
[grammatical] components. A passage, which was a thing closed upon itself, was at
the ssaame tome a dense cluster of interwoven linguistic and historical elements.
It could swell up ad infinitum, becoming a microcosm of erudite, fragmented
knowledge. When the grammarian pointed out to his class glosses, figures, tropes,
relations of elements of language, similarities with other parts of an authors work
or the work of other authors in a proliferation of exegesis, a text became the perfect
model to which other texts had to conform. 187-88
These were principally Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Euripides, Mernander. Starting with
Homer was mandatory, since he was considered in antiquity the poet par

excellence, a moral and religious authority, and the teacher who inspired reverence
from the early years of study. Plto Resp. 10.595b-c and 606e. About a thousand
Homeric papyri have been discovered, compared to a hundred of Euripides the next
most popular. 194
Comprehension of Homeric diction was furthered by glossographical works that
0presented translation of difficult terms Other tools of exegesis were texts that
concentrated on mythological, periphrastic, and explanatory material. In elucidating
the texts of other poets, ancient grammarians drew heavily on school
commentaries. These handbooks differed from scholarly commentaries insofar as
they concentrated on mythological material and on a type of exegesis geared
toward rendering the text more easily approachable. 142
Early education was not so much concerned with developing artificial memory, but
rather with nurturing the natural memory of children memory was the storehouse
of education and had the capacity to create and foster Pupils developed a
peculiar abiloity to calculate with the letters that is unknown in the modern world.
Thus the alophabet became as flexible a tool as numerical order for organizational
purposes. The maxims that the students had to memorize and copy letter by letter
at the next educational stage were sometimes organized in alphabetical acrostics.
167
Maxims and sayings, which remained the basis of learning in medieval schools,
were examples of the first language of authority that a student encountered. 17879
The historical side of the activity of a grammarian consisted of extracting from a
text all of its constitutive elements, dealing not only with realia of persons and
historical, geographical and mythological components but also with glosses, figures
and tropes. When in his definition, Dionysius said that grajmmatik covered the
explanation of potikoi tropoi contained in a text, his words referred to poetic
modes of expression rather than specifically to poetic tropes, and includes aty least
figures of speech. 206
Another aspect of a grammarians teaching concerned the elucidation of unfamiliar
vocabulary. Systematic glossographical analysis, which started in the Roman period,
survives particularly fpr Homeric epic. Scholia minora to homer are preserved in
about a hundred papyri, some of which undoubtedly originated in the schoolroom
They consist of lists of Homeric lemmatasingle words or short expressionstaken
from the text, which are translated into an eeasier form o Greek that
corresponded to current usage. The technique of metalepsios, that is, the
translation of a word to a synonym207
The discovery of etymologies represented a further facet of a grammarians
activity in which he could display the effectiuveness of his tools. A grammarian was
a master at playing this hame, which was centered on the meaning and origin of a

word; nothing seems to have been prohibited as long as one reached the desired
explanation. Though implicit etymologies could be found in the Greek poets, there
was a long tradition of explicit etymologies exemplified by Platos Cratylus. A
student was guided though the meandering rules of the game: letters could be
changed, omitted, added or interchanged in order to reach the desired meaning.
Ineke Sluiter, Ancient Grammar in ContextL: Contributions to the study of ancient
linguistic thought, Amsterdam 1990, 12-13. Though some etymologies reached by
these methods were humorous, this aspect was probably untouched by the solemn
grammarian: an etymology attempted to discover the thruthful nature of a word,
and it needed to be taken serious. A discovery of etymoliogies, which would
normally accompany the perusal of a text, might also be done in the course of
systematic technical grammatical inquiries in which grammarians expounded
their linguistic knowledge. 209-10

It is not a coincidence that the fiorst texts containing elementary explanations of

the text of literary authors, such as scholia minora to Homer, appeared in Roman
times. As time went by, the distant heirs of the Macedonian and Greek conquerors
felt a more urgent need for explanatory tools, not only to master a language whose
acquisition became increasingly less automatic and spontaneousand particularly
Attic Greekbut primarily to understand poetic texts on a deeper level. 210
Some of the verbs used in exercises such as didaskein, graphein and typteinto
teach, to write and ti thrash--seem to allude to school practice. 214
The educational process evoked the analogy of linguistic training. In his work on
the progymnasmata, preliminary rhetorical exercises, Theon knew and employed
this word but preferred to apply the terms gymnasia or gymnasma (exercise) to the
individual exercises; he was followed in that terminology by the second-century
rhetor Hermogenes. The progymnasmata were supposed to teach a student how to
write on set themes: they were meant to warm up his muscles, stretch his power of
discourse, and build his vigor. According to Quintilian, the athlete of the word, like
gladiators and wrestlers, learned the technique of his art from the trainer, had to
follow a strict regiument of diet and exercise, and built up his pwer of memorization
by strenuous exercises, just as athletes train their muscles. Libanius regarded
himself not only as a wrestlerthat is, an oratorbut as a good trainer
(gymnasts). His dtudentsthe emperor Julian includedwere athletes of the logoi
who were building up the weapons they would need for their future careers. All the
vocabulary employed in rhetorical practice alluded to gymnastics and physical
encounters. 221-22
Homer never lost his grip on the practitioner of rhetoric. 226
Schools engaged in the practice of reading texts closely and of reaching a deep
textual experience through careful verbal analysis. 248

There is a disillusioned student of LOibanius who lamented the futility of the hard
work he had done on poets, rhetors and other writers, since he thought that the
result of the sweat was goi8ng to be to wander about ad be despised, while
another is rich and happy. :ibanius himself thought that traditional Greek education
was threatened to a degree by ew technologies such as stenography, and by the
study of law, which required the knowledge of Latin. 250
Hard work (ponos) is a leitmotif in the orations and epistles of Libanius. 251