Ancient Education and Its Purposes

“Education is a collective technique which a society employs to instruct its youth in the values and accomplishments of the civilization within which it exists. It is therefore a secondary activity, subordinate to the life of the civilization of which it forms a part, and normally appearing as its epitome.” Henri-Irénée Marrou in A History of Education in Antiquity, xiii.

This article will focus on some of the features of ancient education as a way of surveying the field, from its first visible layers. We will, hopefully, build on this foundation as we consider “classical education” which is also largely a historical question. The question of how to pursue a classical education demands that we answer some core questions such as “where did this type of education come from? What are its influences? How has it changed over time? How should we relate to it now?”

Obviously we know that times have changed and we are not dealing with many of the same issues that ancient people were, but there is simultaneously an acknowledgement that while we are not them we should somehow be like them. It can be difficult to discern what the proponents of classical education are actually telling us because they appeal to the authority of the past so often, while at the same time it’s obvious that their actual practice is modern.

1. Just because it is “classical” does not mean that it is actually an ideal we hold today. There are many aspects of “classical education” that are completely odious to us now that we have distanced ourselves from (see Marrou Part 1 Chapter 3 - linked in sources below). Discipline was often brutal, and the methods of teaching the elementary subjects like letters and numbers would strike us as utterly barbaric today.

   Nor does it mean everyone in antiquity was a flawless practitioner of their own ideals, and much like today, it was a lively debate undergoing a continuous evolution in response to external factors.

   Nor was it monolithic, as a reading of Marrou would quickly demonstrate. The Spartan ethos was different from the Athenian ethos of education, and the responses to either form the basis for the educational theory that we rest on now.

   The form of general education that emerges as the dominant form is a literary education (more on that below), but it was far from systematized and revolved around a generally accepted and very small “canon” of literature.

   Just like today, the issue of “what is education and how should we do it?” was a constant question amongst the literate elite whose writings are extant, but it is hard to argue that there is a single answer to this question. Even the principles that we cite today as foundational principles or ideas (e.g. “grammar” and “rhetoric”) were not defined fully until the end of antiquity or even after antiquity.

2. The foundation of “classical education” as we know it today begins, as Marrou argues, with the “Homeric atmosphere.” Homer was considered pretty universally to be the “educator” of Greece. The Homeric epics were studied not merely as stories and a poetic tradition, but even as ethical treatises on a certain moral ideal. We have been trained by centuries of Christianity to be rather baffled by it now, especially the deep pessimism of the Homeric worldview wherein all we have to look forward to is a short, painful life and an unpleasant, gloomy afterlife.

   All of classical education is “worked out” in the light of Homer as its foundational text. Plato defines his educational program in the light of Homer as "educator of Greece.” Aristotle likewise must reckon with the precepts of a Homeric world picture. This fundamental shaping of the ancient “world picture” beginning with Homer is unavoidable, and in many ways, we never move past reckoning with Homer.

   The reason I mention this is because one of the questions I receive most frequently from people who ask me about classical education is “Why are classical schools so obsessed with Homer?” “Isn’t Odysseus kind of a bad guy?” “Why does reading the Odyssey make my kids more moral?”

   People can understand the requirement to read Plato or Aristotle because we all vaguely respect philosophy, but we have no respect whatsoever for literature as a society so this confuses us.

   The reason for the apparent fixation on Homer that outsiders perceive is the correct recognition that Homer is one of the cornerstones of the Western literary canon and cannot be ignored for that reason. But it raises difficult questions. In our modern context, there is much about Homer that is opposed to our modern way of life. In our modern Christian context, it is baffling to see the inclusion of very non-Christian literature in classical schools and the justification offered to parents is usually something along the lines of “it’s old therefore it’s good.”

   But the whole issue points to something deeper. We want connection to our earliest roots, but we often fail to demonstrate how difficult it is to foster that connection, and how much all of humane education has reckoned with these roots over the millennia. I cannot answer these questions in this point, but I think there are better answers available, but it is worth knowing that this is a real, pressing question.

3. One fairly safe generalization is that any sort of formal education in the ancient world was largely a matter of social class and you do not necessarily tend to see the “universalizing” tendency of education that we prize now (as we should). We do have some famous cases of middle-class families achieving high levels of education (Cicero’s family was equestrian and thus middle-class, but had the funds to educate their brilliant young son who would become one of the world’s greatest orators). The Roman poet Horace also was perhaps the son of a freedman who managed to scrape together the funds to send his talented son to be educated. But in general, education as such was for the wealthy elite.

   For that matter education was not necessarily for the sake of itself, but it contained the things that members of these societies thought would prepare their sons best for careers and success in their world. And this has always been true - it’s just that our definitions of success probably do look rather different. How many of the great talents of history been pushed into the legal profession because it was the safe and lucrative option? Petrarch, Thomas More, Martin Luther, Handel, to name but a few.

   We want to judge ancient education based on figures who were most likely extreme outliers: Plato, Aristotle, Vergil, Cicero, et al. Extraordinary polymaths like Pliny the Elder or Varro were rare and were considered outliers in their own time.

4. One other fairly “safe” generalization is that the way typical education developed in antiquity was primarily literary, especially once the shift from the “old Athenian” paradigm took place. According to Marrou, “old Athenian” education was aesthetic and physical primarily, but it would be Athenians (Plato and Isocrates and assorted others) who would change the tone and tenor of Athenian education moving forward, though they were interacting with this older aesthetic paradigm that changed over time. Education thereafter became more literary in nature.

   As you read more ancient authors, you might start seeing that when ancient authors wanted to display their learning, they did so in the form of quotations and anecdotes and allusions. Some fun examples of this are authors like Athenaeus and his work Deipnosophists (Philosophers at Dinner) where the characters exchange quotations and allusions and stories, or Aulus Gellius and his Noctae Atticae. These sorts of books aren’t unlike conversations we might have with good friends where we just quote movies at each other for an hour straight. For many of these ancient authors, the poets and quotation-laden conversations were the entertainment, but the real focus of education was on mastering the canonical body of literature.

   Plato quotes from Homer and the other poets like Pindar and Simonides frequently. Aristotle quotes tragedians and other philosophers constantly. Knowing the great authors of the Greek (and later Roman) literary canon was paramount to being considered well-educated. Facility with language is important for a number of reasons in antiquity: eloquence for any occasion is highly prized as an accomplishment, especially if you could use it in the law courts, or for politics or in a military context.

These are the general considerations that I have found useful while thinking about education and reading primary sources. I have derived a lot of this information from authors like Marrou, but then gone on to read the primary sources with a better sense of context.

"A child's identity as a member of the elite and so his future power and prestige were to a great extent determined by that passage and by the schooling that followed. Typically that schooling was purely literary. From about age seven or eight (although the age was variable), the student's experience was governed by three goals, pursued first in the grammarian's school, then in the rhetorician's: mastery of correct language, command of a fairly small number of classical texts, and an ability to turn the knowledge of language and literature to a facility in composition and speech. Set in a form already centuries old, the grammarian's main contribution to those ends consisted of 'the knowledge of speaking correctly' and the 'explication of the poets.'" (pg. 59).

1. Physical (athletic) and military training as your primary emphasis. Look no further than Sparta for the most extreme example of this, but some flavor of this is present everywhere in some form because the necessity of soldiers for warfare. Besides that, ancient Greco-Roman adoration for athletes is very readily apparent. This is certainly not unlike our own present focus on athletics as a means to success, since parents still put their kids into sports programs in the hope that it might turn into college scholarships. The Greeks especially loved their athletes. Of course, we have the Greeks to thank for the Olympics, but they had many other large-scale games at other times of the year as well. Their winning athletes became celebrities and some are immortalized by the odes of Pindar and Bacchylides, testifying to the solemn importance of athletics in Greece, especially as one of the relatively few things that could bring squabbling city-states together.

   Xenophon’s version of Socrates argues that the only effective training happened as a result of athletics and “gymnastics,” which was part of why physical training was so popular (Memorabilia 3.12; Marrou pg. 65), as a microcosm of the greater societal concern about war.

   Another aspect of the physical-training model is the lingering aftereffect of the old Athenian ideal of “kalokagathia” which means something like “being good and beautiful.” The Athenian ideal was aesthetic (wanting its ideally educated students to have beautiful physical forms) and moral.

2. The pragmatic literary education that was supposed to prepare one for ordinary careers in law and politics. Many such careers revolved around being able to impress audiences with your eloquence and ability to use quotations and build arguments with support from the literary canon. There is a distinctly Athenian flavor of this, and a distinctly Roman flavor of this. Of course Demosthenes is our most famous example of the former, while Cicero is our most famous example of the latter. Both were educated in a highly literary way, and were prized for their ability to interact with the literary canon as a source of appeal in legal argumentation, or in their eloquence on other occasions such as political deliberations or in eulogies or funeral orations. It was a mark of success and could pave your way to important offices and positions of great influence. This is true today too, though we might not view it quite as bluntly as I have described it. Still, we tend to like smooth-talkers while we should also prefer our smooth-talkers to have substance behind what they say, which isn’t often the case.
   

3. The philosophical life, which will intersect with the other two strains in various ways depending on the author you are reading. I will begin with Plato.

   In Plato’s immediate context, he is swimming upstream from the general cultural obsession with eloquence for the sake of it. We can infer this from other literature at the time. The comic playwright Aristophanes mocks this tendency to idolize eloquence in his play the Clouds where the central premise is that a spendthrift son wants to take a class to learn how to argue his way out of having to pay his gambling debt. Socrates shows up as a character in this play though here he is lumped in with the rest of the Sophists who had a reputation for teaching young men how to speak well and win any argument, regardless of the substance of their argument. One extreme example of this is the famous sophist Gorgias who was very adept at exploiting the ambiguity of language to prove impossibilities, which led to a general view of language as a mere tool in human hands to attain some other goal. Plato himself counters this general outlook on the value of speaking by asserting consistently through his philosophical work that there are things worth pursuing for their own sake, and that we ought to pursue the truth about reality, and that there are indeed moral absolutes that we are bound to.

These are the three major strains that you will detect if you try to read the primary sources on the topic. And as I said before, they will mesh differently depending on the author.

“Now, all this study of reckoning [arithmetic] and geometry and all the preliminary studies that are indispensable preparation for dialectics must be presented to them while still young, not in the form of compulsory instruction.”

“Why so?”

“Because,” said I, “a free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly; for while bodily labors performed under constraint do not harm the body, nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.” “True,” he said. “Do not, then, my friend, keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play. That will also better enable you to discern the natural capacities of each.” 7. 536d-537a (trans. Shorey).

“Observe then,” said I, “that this part of such a soul, if it had been hammered from childhood, and had thus been struck free of the leaden weights, so to speak, of our birth and becoming, which attaching themselves to it by food and similar pleasures and gluttonies turn downwards the vision of the soul—If, I say, freed from these, it had suffered a conversion towards the things that are real and true, that same faculty of the same men would have been most keen in its vision of the higher things, just as it is for the things toward which it is now turned.” 7. 519b (trans. Shorey).

But these professors have gone so far in their lack of scruple that they attempt to persuade our young men that if they will only study under them they will know what to do in life and through this knowledge will become happy and prosperous. More than that, although they set themselves up as masters and dispensers of goods so precious, they are not ashamed of asking for them a price of three or four minae! Isocrates, Against the Sophists 13.3 (trans. Norlin).

But I do hold that people can become better and worthier if they conceive an ambition to speak well, if they become possessed of the desire to be able to persuade their hearers, and, finally, if they set their hearts on seizing their advantage—I do not mean “advantage” in the sense given to that word by the empty-minded, but advantage in the true meaning of that term and that this is so I think I shall presently make clear.
For, in the first place, when anyone elects to speak or write discourses which are worthy of praise and honor, it is not conceivable that he will support causes which are unjust or petty or devoted to private quarrels, and not rather those which are great and honorable, devoted to the welfare of man and our common good; for if he fails to find causes of this character, he will accomplish nothing to the purpose.
Isocrates Antidosis 275-76

Isocrates places a larger emphasis on the common good of mankind and the common good of the Hellenic state.

Therefore, the stronger a man's desire to persuade his hearers, the more zealously will he strive to be honorable and to have the esteem of his fellow-citizens. Antidosis 278.

If we shift over to the Late Roman Republic, we find one of our next major proponents of oratory and moral philosophy in Cicero, who has a very strong alloy of the pragmatic and the philosophic. Cicero was one of the “Academic Skeptics” who were liable to pick and choose elements of various different philosophical schools.

In his treatise De Oratore, Cicero says:

In my opinion, indeed, no man can be an orator possessed of every praiseworthy accomplishment, unless he has attained the knowledge of everything important, and of all liberal arts, for his language must be ornate and copious from knowledge, since, unless there be beneath the surface matter understood and felt by the speaker, oratory becomes an empty and almost puerile flow of words. [21] Yet I will not lay so great a burden upon orators, especially our own, amid so many occupations of public and private life, as to think it allowable for them to be ignorant of nothing; although the qualifications of an orator, and his very profession of speaking well, seem to undertake and promise that he can discourse gracefully and copiously on whatever subject is proposed to him. De Oratore 20 (trans. Thomas Watson).

Oratory is the rarest and finest of all the arts, in Cicero’s estimation, because the ideal orator must know a vast amount on a wide array of topics. He must be well-bred, graceful, pleasant to the eye, and have an excellent voice and memory. Oratory and eloquence is the crowning grace of a man who has learned philosophy, which is often used as a kind of shorthand for all kinds of learning and not the more limited boundaries we set on philosophy now.

Most of what remains in De Oratore is anecdotes and quotations and stories from famous orators and philosophers of the Greco-Roman world, including some extensive dialogue between the characters of Scaevola and Crassus and others, who debate on the nature of oratory and the ideal orator. Such an ideal orator has the power to steer the state itself with his persuasive abilities.

Elsewhere in Cicero we see advanced the importance of service to one’s state. This especially comes forth in De Officiis which was addressed to his son wherein he elaborates on one’s moral responsibilities.

If these errors are successfully avoided, all the labour and pains expended upon problems that are morally right and worth the solving will be fully rewarded. Such a worker in the field of astronomy, for example, was Gaius Sulpicius, of whom we have heard; in mathematics, Sextus Pompey, whom I have known personally; in dialectics, many; in civil law, still more. All these professions are occupied with the search after truth; but to be drawn by study away from active life is contrary to moral duty. De Officiis 1.6. (Loeb library translation).

The key here is that active life should not be ignored for study. Cicero has a deeply engrained sense of duty to one’s society, which must be balanced with study, hence his strong emphasis on the nature of oratory since oratory is a very political pursuit, and the orator stands to have tremendous influence if he is successful.

Hence, much of the educational atmosphere that is described and promoted by Cicero is one that places one’s duties to the state and one’s participation in the political sphere in the chief position, and eloquence is the way to get there.

Turning to one last author who wrote explicitly about education and oratory being the chief of the arts, we meet Quintilian who wrote about the whole process of education from beginning to end. He is of course deeply indebted to the influence of Cicero, and one of the remarks of his that I find most interesting is this:

'excutiendum omne scriptorum genus non propter historias modo sed verba, quae frequenter ius ab auctoribus sumunt.' 'Every type of writer must be studied not only for the purpose of its subject matter but also for its vocabulary which frequently acquire authority from their use by our authors.' 1.4.4

Or this part where Quintilian describes grammar as two things:

"...recte loquendi scientiam et poetarum enarrationem" or "...right knowledge of speaking and the narration of the poets." Institutio Oratoria 1.4.2 (translation my own).

Quintilian of course elaborates on the necessary moral character of the ideal orator, and the ideal result of such an education, but one of the primary means by which one gets there is through “grammar” (that is, the study of literature, primarily poets).

At the end of this lengthy post, I hope I have shown sufficiently the general threads one will find in discussions about ancient education. There is a good mixture of the pragmatic with the philosophical, and all of them are in some way concerned with moral formation in various ways, but might differ on the means and methods for attaining it, or on the source of moral standards.

The Christian innovation in educational thinking is set against the backdrop of what I have been describing above: various intermingling of the three strains of thought, and what those particular strains looked like in their historical context. Ancient education was not a static thing, as Marrou shows, but one that was undergoing continual development, and we have shed some aspects and retained others, but it remains the bedrock of our own educational practices (progressive and otherwise, whether acknowledged or not).

A History of Ancient Education by Henri-Irenee Marrou, trans. George Lamb. New American Library, 1964. Available on archive.

Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature. Donald Feeney, Harvard UP: 2016.

Guardians of Language: Grammarians and Society in Late Antiquity by Robert A. Kaster. U of C Press, 1988.

Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. 2nd edition. Werner Jaeger, trans. Gilbert Highet, Oxford UP, 1986.

Roman Literary Culture: From Cicero to Apuleius. Elaine Faytham. Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.