Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt 0788502778, 9780788502774

Table of contents :
Cribiore Raffaella (1997) - Writing, teachers and students in Graeco-Roman Egypt text
Contents
List of Tables and Graphs
List of Plates
Abbreviations
Preface
I. Introduction
1 Writing in Graeco-Roman Egypt
2 Evidence for Schools and Teachers
3 The School Exercises
II. Identifying School Exercises
4 Types of Textual Material
5 Writing Materials Used in Schools
6 Distinguishing Characteristics of School Exercises
7 Palaeography: Teachers’ and Students’ Hands
III. Writing in Graeco-Roman Schools
8 The Teachers’ Models
9 Writing and Levels of Education
10 Learning to Write
Conclusion
Appendix 1. List of Teachers
Appendix 2. List of Students Appearing in the Exercises
Catalogue of School Exercises
Items Excluded from the Catalogue
Bibliography
Concordances
Index
Plates

Citation preview

AMERICAN STUDIES IN PAPYROLOGY Series Editor Ann Ellis Hanson

N um ber 36

WRITING, TEACHERS, AND STUDENTS IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

by

Raffaella Cribiore

WRITING, TEACHERS, AND STUDENTS IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

by

RAFFAELLA CRIBIORE

S A

cholars

tlanta,

G

P

r ess

e o r g ia

WRITING, TEACHERS, AND STUDENTS IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT by

RAFFAELLA CRIBIORE

© 1996 The American Society of Papyrologists The publication of this book was assisted by a grant from the Stanwood Cockey Lodge Foundation of Columbia University

Library o f Congress C ataloging in P ublication Data Cribiore, Raffaella. Writing, teachers, and students in Graeco-Roman Egypt / by Raffaella Cribiore. p. cm. — (American studies in papyrology ; no. 36) Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-7885-0277-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Written communication—Study and teaching—Egypt. 2. Literacy— Egypt—History. 3. Paleography—Egypt. I. Title. II. Series: American studies in papyrology ; v. 36. P211.3.E3C75 1996 302.2'244'07062—dc20 96-8012 CIP

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Alberto

Contents

List of Tables and Graphs List of Plates Abbreviations Preface Part One

Introduction

viii ix xi xiii 1

1 Writing in Graeco-Roman Egypt 2 Evidence for Schools and Teachers 3 The School Exercises

3 13 27

Part Two

35

4 5 6 7

Identifying School Exercises

Types of Textual Material Writing Materials Used in Schools Distinguishing Characteristics of School Exercises Palaeography: Teachers’ and Students’ Hands

Part Three

Writing in Graeco-Roman Schools

37 57 75 97 119

8 The Teachers’ Models 9 Writing and Levels of Education 10 Learning to Write

121 129 139

Conclusion

153

Appendices 1 List of Teachers 2 List of Students

161 171

Catalogue 1 Introduction 2 Catalogue 3 Items Excluded from the Catalogue

173 175 285

Bibliography

289

Concordances

298

Index

313

vili

List of Tables and Graphs

Tables

Table 1

73

Table 2

73

Table 3

74

Graphs

Fig. 1

130

Fig. 2

130

Fig. 3

132

Fig. 4

132

Fig. 5

134

Fig. 6

134

Fig. 7

136

List of Plates Plate

E xercises

I

1 16 34 36

II

38 37 56 59 72

III

39 41 57 64 74

42 50 51 52 62 71 73 127

IV V VI VII V ili IX

83 65 93 96 97

X

98 109 111

XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI

99 108 110 123 112 113 126 114 115 128 129 132 140

XVII

137 143 146

XVIII

161 162 179 181 198

XIX XX XXI XXII

182 183 187 184 185 204 208 214

133 131 173

193 201 221

XXIII XXIV XXV

213 234 235 212 233 249 237 242

XXVI

241

XXVII

254

XXVIII XXIX XXX XXXI XXXII XXXIII

240 256 258 262

XXXIV

291 316 292

XXXV

259 270 263 261 273 275 280 281 284

XXXVII

293 294 296 297

XXXVIII XXXIX

298 299

XXXVI

XL XLI XLII XLIII XLIV XLV XLVI XLVII XLVIII XLIX L LI LII LIII LIV LV LVI LVII LVIII LIX LX LXI LXII LXIII LXIV LXV LXVI LXVII LXVIII LXIX LXX LXXI LXXII LXXIII LXXIV LXXV LXXVI LXXVII LXXVIII LXXIX LXXX

315 315 315 315 317 319 326 326 327 329 330 332 336 333 334 337 339 341 343 343 344 347 346 350 361 363 364 366 372 372 374 378 376 380 380 380 385 385 385 389 389 403 403 404 404 405 406 410

Abbreviations

Abbreviations for editions of papyri, ostraca, and tablets follow J.F. Oates et al., Checklist o f Editions o f Greek and Latin Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets, 4th ed. (BASP Suppl. 7, 1992). Journals and standard works are abbreviated as in L ’ Année Philologique and the American Journal o f Archaeology. Modern works cited more than once (and some cited only once) appear in the Bibliography and are indicated everywhere else by author’s name and date of publication; those cited only once are given in full. In addition, the following will be used: CA = Powell, Johannes U, Collectanea Alexandrina (Oxford 1925). CGFP = Austin, Colin, Comicorum Graecorum Fragmenta in Papyris Reperta (Berlin 1973). CO = Crum, Walter Ewig, Coptic Ostraca (London 1902). CPF = Corpus dei papiri filosofici Greci e Latini voi. I (Firenze 1989); voi. II (1992). D = Debut, Janine, "Les documents scolaires," ZPE 63 (1986) 251-78. Kock = Kock, Theodor, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta (Leipzig 1880-88). Nauck = Nauck, August, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Leipzig 1889). P2 = Pack, Roger A., The Greek and Latin Literary Texts from Greco-Roman Egypt (Ann Arbor 1965). PCG = Kassel, R., and C. Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci (Berlin and New York 1983-). PGB = Schubart, Wilhelm, Papyri Graecae Berolinenses (Bonn 1911). SH = Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, and Peter Parsons, Supplementum Hellenisticum (Berlin and New York 1983). SLG = Norsa, Medea, La scrittura letteraria greca dal sec. IV a.C. a ll’VIII d.C. (Florence, 1939). TrGF = Kannicht, Richard, and Bruno Snell, Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Göttingen 1981); Radt, S.L., Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta (Göttingen 1985). Z = Zalateo, Giorgio, "Papiri scolastici," Aegyptus 41 (1961) 160-235.

Preface

Years ago, when I was looking for a topic for my dissertation, Orsolina Montevecchi reminded me of the interest in education and school exercises I had when I was an undergraduate in Milan. I am grateful to her for this as well as for introducing me to the secrets of papyrology. Dissertations, and books in general, have a way of taking a scholar by the hand and leading him. This project started with a general interest in Homeric papyri and higher education, but grew into different directions when I realized that basic work in this field still needed to be done. Scrutinizing school work of ancient students, either directly or in photographs, gives one the curious feeling of standing behind that student, praising or scolding him, and sometimes holding his hand. Moreover, examining the direct writing of the ancients, how it was taught, learned, and developed, gives a peculiar pleasure in an age of computerized skills, from which this book certainly benefited. The help of Roger Bagnali was determinant in defining and shaping this project. Roger’s vision of papyrology as a tool for a deeper and more concrete understanding of ancient society, his rigorous methodology and his enthusiasm at every stage of this project were fundamental for its completion. Another scholar to whom I am deeply grateful is Dirk Obbink. I was fortunate enough to be able to take advantage of his profound knowledge of ancient culture as well as of his strenuous criticism and constant advice to aim higher. In the initial phase of this project, when it became imperative to examine the school exercises directly, at least in photograph, the photographic archive assembled by Paul Mertens and Odette Bouquiaux-Simon at the Cedopal of the University of Liège proved immensely useful. I thank Paul Mertens for making my staying in Liège painless and fruitful as well as" for responding to all my enquiries with unfailing promptness. I also thank Guglielmo Cavallo, who, through his illuminating writ­ ings and advice, helped shape and direct the knowledge of palaeography that would prove fun­ damental to my project. Putting together all the photographs of the school exercises that were either unpublished or published very long ago was a project in itself. I thank all the Universities, institutions, and scholars that made it possible. The list of the persons to whom I am indebted for information and for other help concerning this book would be too long to supply here. I am very grateful to all, especially to the following scholars and institutions for supplying photographs for free, or for providing special assistance: Guido Bastianini of the Università degli Studi di Milano, Alain Blanchard of the Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Bernard Boyaval of the Université de Lille, Adam Bülow-Jacobson of the Institut for Graesk og Latin in Copenhagen, Jean Gascou of the Université de Strasbourg, M. Landfester of Justus Liebig Universität Giessen, Anna Lenzuni e Rosario Pintaudi of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Hermann Harrauer of the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Manfredo Manfredi and Giovanna Menci of the Istituto Papirologico Vitelli, Klaus Maresch of the Institut für Altertumskunde der Universität zu Köln, Livia Migliardi Zingale of the Università di Genova, Peter Parsons of Christ Church in Oxford, G. Poethke of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the Musée de la Vieille Charité in Marseille.

I am also extremely grateful to Columbia University, which I consider my true Alma Mater, for supporting me during the years of graduate studies and for contributing financially to the publication of this book through a subvention from the Lodge Fund. During all these years Columbia’s excellent faculty provided marvellous instruction. I feel especially indebted to Alan Cameron, William Harris, Leonardo Tarän, and James Zetzel for being there when I needed them. The camera-ready copy of this book was prepared using Nota Bene 4.2 on a HewlettPackard LaserJet 5MP. In the last phase of preparation my sincere thanks go to Tim Renner who read through the final draft and provided further advice, as well as to Lucia Parri who helped me check the references. Finally I would like to express my gratitude to Ann Hanson who provided invaluable and painstaking assistance and precious encouragement in all the phases of this project. The remaining errors and omissions are all mine. Φιλοπόνει..

Raffaella Cribiore

PART ONE

Introduction

1

Writing in Graeco-Roman Egypt

I have long had an interest in the processes by which the ancients learned to write. This work sets forth the result of several years spent in examining the papyri that document the teaching and learning of writing in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Scholars who study literacy, and writing in particular, have long recognized that concentrating on a specific society yields more secure results than attempting to create grand theories about writing.1 Such an approach securely locates the results within the target society and limits the dangers of technological determinism. Literacy and writing were not indispensable skills in the ancient Mediterranean world, and they neither determined nor limited socio-economic success. Writing was rather a useful, enabling technology that people cared to exhibit even when they possessed it only to a limited degree. Greek and Roman men and women were proud to be numbered among the literates, but esteem for writing was not enough to spread the skill itself to the mass of the population. Writing depended on need, but those who lacked the skill could resort to various strategies to cope with the demands that need imposed on them. At the same time, case-studies often yield limited results because without some employ­ ment of comparative materials it is easy to focus on modes of literacy and usages, considering them as typical of or even exclusive to a certain society and period. It is important to go beyond the specific area of inquiry and ask questions about the commonness of certain habits and modes of learning and teaching writing. Although my investigation targets the acquisition of writing in Graeco-Roman Egypt, the pharaonic background must play some role, even though during the latter period writing was the patrimony of exclusive groups within the society. Further, the apparent changes in the literate mentality in late Byzantine and medieval society also offer attractive comparanda.2 My study, then, focuses primarily on Egypt during Ptolemaic, Roman, and early Byzan­ tine times, from the introduction of Greek as the language of administration, education, and the upper strata of society, as a result of the conquest by Alexander of Macedon, to the time of the Arab conquest. The native Egyptian language continued to be spoken throughout all periods, and its written literary form, Demotic, continued to be used by a specialized and confined minority for several centuries. Greek, however, became the primary language of Egypt for administrative and official purposes and spread among the upper levels of the population, for knowledge of Greek was one of the keys to social and economic betterment. The conquest of Egypt by the Romans did nothing to change this, although under Roman domination Demotic virtually disappeared. The Coptic script gradually developed thereafter. A uniform Coptic alphabet was created in the course of the third century a d to translate the Old and New Testa­ ments and other religious texts into the language of the Egyptian population. It used the Greek 'For a survey of current views o f literacy, see Thomas 1992, 15-28 and Bowman and W oolf 1994, 2 -5 . 2For a definition of literate mentality, see Clanchy 1993, 186. Using this term does not involve prejudging the question o f whether a literate mentality exists as a separate philosophical entity and whether literacy basically shapes people’s ways o f thinking.

INTRODUCTION

letters with a number of additional signs imported from Demotic. But much before the official invention of the Coptic script, and starting from at least the third century b c , proper names of men and gods, epithets, and toponyms were transliterated using the Greek letters.3 A further stage in the formation of the Coptic alphabet is represented by those texts usually called “Old Coptic,” which are written with the Greek letters and some Demotic signs used in a nonsystematic way. The Coptic script once again gave Egyptians the means to write their own lan­ guage. Through Coptic many Egyptians were able to express themselves in their own language for the first time. Coptic, which was born in bilingual milieus, in its beginning stages was probably taught in conjunction with Greek. Within a few generations after the Arab conquest of Egypt, Greek disappeared as a spoken language and the process of Arabization began. Bureaucracy already characterized the government of the Pharaohs, and governmental con­ trol relies heavily on the keeping of written records. The level of bureaucracy grew under the Ptolemies, and after the Roman takeover the volume of writing increased still more. The government documented all its activities, overseeing and controlling the daily lives of individu­ als and their communities. The random chances that determine which texts survive limit our knowledge of the spread of the Greek language in certain areas, but do not obscure the sig­ nificance of the picture as a whole.4 Under the Ptolemies, and even more so under the Romans, Egyptian society was profoundly literate in the sense that most people were familiar with liter­ ate modes in some way. Written documents proved ownership of property, tax receipts guar­ anteed that a tax had been paid, petitions provided a means for redress of grievances, and the sending of letters kept channels of communication open. Although literacy and writing pene­ trated to most circles, most of the population was still illiterate or semi-literate. Those who lacked the skill had many options for coping with what was essentially a literate system.5 The pool of literates was extensive enough to help the illiterates respond to official demands for Greek documents and for their everyday writing needs. Professional scribes with specialized training were respected and important figures. Private networks were also relied upon: rela­ tives, friends, neighbors, the village school teacher6 were trusted to write a short family letter, a subscription to a document, or to append a signature to a contract. Illiterates were not con­ fined to dysfunctional, segregated circles, but engaged in the same activities and performed in the company of the literates without prejudice. It is not always easy to draw a sharp line between those who could read and write for themselves and those who deputed others, and it is not always necessary to do so. When the body of a letter is written in a different hand than the final greeting, we assume that the parties directly interested asked someone else to perform for them.7 Those who had some ability to write usually appended greetings, often revealing that writing was not a daily activity for them. It is difficult to be sure whether these people were incapable of writing the whole of the letter. The habit of adding greetings in one’s own hand was so widespread in the ancient world that it 3See Quaegebeur 1982 and Jan Quaegebeur, “The Study of Egyptian Proper Names in Greek Transcription. Problems and Perspectives,” Onoma 18, 3 (1974) 403-20. 4Cf. the observations of Thompson 1994, 67 -8 3 especially for Ptolemaic Egypt. The paucity o f papyri from Alexandria and the region of the Nile Delta produces a conspicuous lacuna. 5See Hanson 1991, 162 and Bowman 1991, 119-31. 60 n teachers engaged in scribal activities, see below p. 22. 70 n the final greeting added to a letter, see Parsons 1980-81, 4.

WRITING IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

5

appears to have been a common epistolary courtesy, without any necessary relation to the actual writing ability of the sender.8 There were many levels of writing and scripts, the choice of which was determined by the function of the text. Graeco-Roman Egypt does not show the existence of segregated literacies to the extent that pharaonic Egypt does. Different people engaged in different types of writing not only according to their ability but also according to the task that the writing was intended to fulfill. Professional scribes usually copied books, often using formal and highly stylized scripts that were controlled by precise norms. At other times they used more ligatured hands at higher speed. Literary texts are usually recognizable by the regular, legible, and impersonal qualities of the hand that copied them. But sometimes literate people, the readers themselves, copied their own books. Their hands display the same varying degrees of formality observed in scribal writing. Scholars sometimes wrote notes and commentaries in blank spaces and margins of their texts with small, clear, and regular hands. They tended to write more quickly than book hands, but articulation of letters was still observed. While no sharp distinction exists between the writing of books and documents for much of Graeco-Roman antiquity, documents are written in more cursive and less formal hands that tend not to form individual letters with a full articulation. Gradations appear as a result of the speed with which the text is written and the care expended in its execution. Cursive writing is often at its most swift in the writing of expected formulae, such as titulature of Ptolemies or Roman emperors. When the writing is very fast, it is impossible to distinguish the characters individually, but the letters appear as a series of symbols and acquire meaning from the overall context. Documentary hands are not easy to read now and probably were not immediately legible even in antiquity, for documents were not written to be read by the general public. Taxcollectors and scribes in the government bureaus, trained to do this kind of writing and read­ ing, were the recipients of such texts. Document owners knew the message of the receipts and contracts they preserved. They presented their documents· on demand, saved and collected them, sometimes reused them, but had no real need to read them. In contrast, a high degree of legibility characterized the official documents that scribes wrote in the chancery offices of imperial administration. The most formal examples display elaborate letters, of conspicuous size, gracefully linked by few ligatures. The regular and precise formulation of individual letters and the verticality of the letter-shapes confer on the documents a peculiar elegance that also appears, if to a lesser degree, in the less stylized exam­ ples that scribes wrote outside of the main chancery offices of Alexandria. Prime character­ istics of chancery hands are uniformity and attractive clarity, and in these qualities they resem­ ble book hands. Legibility is also a distinctive feature of many hands used for private letters, whether penned by the senders or by scribes and slaves employed for the purpose. Letters aimed primarily at communication, and although they used formulaic expressions and stock phrases, their purpose was to transmit information, orders, and requests over a distance. Scholars have remarked the presence of more gossipy details in Greek letters than in Demotic epistles.9 More 8Thus the same letter closures in personal hands appear not only in Greek letters written in Egypt but also in the Vindolanda Latin letters. See Bowman 1994, 122-25. This usage can be compared with the modern convention of personally signing a letter typed by a secretary. 9See Ray 1994, 5 9 -6 0 . Coptic letters, however, are similar to Greek ones in gossipy details.

INTRODUCTION

often than Egyptian epistles, Greek letters ended up in the actual hands of the recipient and aimed at being understood by him. Epistolary hands tend to exhibit relatively large characters with fewer ligatures than documents. In addition, letters display greater variety in types of hands, from the idiosyncratic and personal hand to the regular writing of the professional writer. Not rarely do they show disjointed hands writing laborious and irregularly-formed characters. Such hands never develop their complete potential; the lack of a regular rhythm is conspicuous in their belabored characters that they copy from a model, or have painfully learned by heart. These are the same types of hands seen in subscriptions and signatures on documents, where the writer is labeled a “slow writer.”10 The “slow writers,” although proba­ bly often on the verge of illiteracy, were nevertheless proud of a skill they had probably acquired in their youth and they preferred to exhibit their minimal degree of ability, rather than be dismissed as illiterates, “those who do not know letters.” 11 All writers, both the professionals and those barely capable of tracing a few characters, had once known a time of uncertainty in using pen or stylus. Whatever their final level of achievement, they went through virtually identical writing exercises, progressing from the copying of individual letters of the alphabet to more extensive passages, and they did so in a setting I shall refer to as “school.” I do not intend “school” in a strict sense, but I do mean to imply that learning to write requires a more authoritarian situation and a more rigid set of pro­ cedures than learning the spoken language.12 Children learn to talk with little or no formal instruction, usually in a familial setting, and they do so a number of years before attempting to learn writing. While I accept the concept of language acquisition that subsumes “vocal” writing and “graphic” writing as subspecies of a single phenomenon,13 communication through graphic writing is less critical to the human condition than speech, and nowhere is this more evident than in the ancient Mediterranean world, with its masses of illiterates. Being able to write, even to a limited extent, implies some degree of instruction. I therefore define “school” on the basis of the activity carried on, rather than in terms of the identity of the person teaching, the student-teacher relationship, or the premises where teaching takes place. The teacher could be a friend, a parent, a priest, or someone hired to teach, and the classroom a room in a private house, the shaded porch of a temple, or the dusty ground under a tree. Speaking of school strictu sensu is often meaningless in the ancient world and prevents us from seeing the reality of alternative systems of learning and communication that were developed to overcome the deficiencies of formal schooling. My study of the ways in which the skill of writing was acquired traces the path ancient learners followed before becoming accomplished writers, or, in the case of the less accomplished, before they abandoned their studies. Its aim is to identify the elements that characterize each step along the way to the various levels of accomplishment individuals attained. Accomplished writers knew a variety of writing styles and knew when and where each was appropriate. For example, in the third century a d Timaios, who worked in the central 10They are called βραδέως Ύράφων and βραδέως γράφουσα in the documents. 11 Αγράμματοι, those who cannot even sign their names. 12See Goody 1987, 287. 13Thus speech would be understood as a form of writing in the nature of linguistic unity. For a general over­ view of Derrida’s idea of the primacy of writing, see Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca 1982) 89-110.

WRITING IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

7

administrative office of a wealthy estate owner, writes a letter to Heroninos, manager of one of these estates.14 Timaios tells Heroninos that he needs to take care of a certain matter in a hurry and to emphasize this, he writes in the margin two verses from the beginning of Iliad 2: “All the other gods and men, lords of chariots, were sleeping the whole night through, but Zeus could not have sweet sleep.” Although Timaios writes the body of his letter in a relatively fast cursive, he employs well-separated, upright, and bilinear letters for the Homeric quotation. By using a book hand for his Homer, in contrast to the rest of his letter, he signals his awareness of the different kinds of scripts and their various function. The same phenomenon can be seen in different types of exercises practiced in schools. As a general rule, both teachers and students reserve more formal and stylized hands for the copy­ ing of literary texts. For example, Aurelius Papnouthis15 employs a semi-cursive hand in his notebook for various exercises and an even more informal and individualized script to write out mathematical problems. When he is copying verses by the dramatist Menander from the model his teacher supplies, he tries to imitate the teacher’s, knowing that such a hand is more appropriate for literary material.16*The model was influenced by the chancery style and by a strict set of conventions that aimed at regularity and pleasing appearance. In the high Middle Ages scribes were exposed first to a kind of simplified script, of elementary type, after master­ ing which they learned more complicated scripts, either by copying models on their own or by following directions from the teacher in the scriptorium.11 Learning to write in the GraecoRoman world seems to have followed a somewhat similar path, with all people who learned to write sharing a common, graphic substratum that did not vary according to the economic or social class of the learner. In what follows I shall trace the training teachers gave their students and distinguish the ways in which they imparted the foundations of writing in teaching literary and cursive hands. It is clear that formal hands of different types and styles, well known to readers of ancient literary manuscripts, follow precise criteria to achieve symmetry, regularity, and impersonal elegance. Much practice, together with innate ability, good coordination, and the desire to excel, was needed to attain the highest levels of penmanship. I shall inquire whether learners always went through a period of training to acquire a basic foundation, or whether they some­ times were taught calligraphic and formal writing right at the start. Documents and private let­ ters, moreover, reveal that, although people often dictated a text to a scribe or a slave, they sometimes wrote themselves subscriptions and signatures at the bottom of documents, closing greetings or, more rarely, even the whole body of letters. A fundamental task of schools was to enable people to function among the literates in everyday life. It is thus very important to take into account the precise details of palaeography and the minutiae of students’ writing. Only the accumulation of small details will suffice to build a pic­ ture of how schools and teaching proceeded in antiquity. School hands have played a very 14See P.Flor. II 259. Many of Heroninos’ business papers survive, see Dominic Rathbone, Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third-Century AD Egypt (Cambridge 1991) 12-13. 16In transliterating names, generally Latin names are latinized and Greek, Egyptian, and Semitic names are transliterated from Greek. I will maintain the latinized forms for the honorific titles Flavius and Aurelius and for names of literary authors, to respect traditional usage. 16See 396 and tablet MND 552L side A for the more formal copy of Menander. See also 383. ^ S e e Petrucci 1995, 61-72.

INTRODUCTION

small role in the history of palaeography, and attention has invariably focused on the skillful hands.18 But the hands of beginners reveal much about how writing was taught. My purpose is not only to refine the terminology for learners’ hands but also to establish a typology of school hands that will be sensitive to the various degrees of attainment students achieved in their efforts to master the technique of writing. I shall correlate types of hands and the different levels of proficiency they reveal with what we know about the ancient curriculum from sec­ ondary sources and the Graeco-Roman anecdotal tradition. I hope, as well, to clarify the educa­ tional steps through which ancient students passed as they achieved the eye-hand coordination sufficient to permit them to advance to more difficult tasks. Palaeography is also an invaluable tool in distinguishing students’ writing from teachers’ writing within the school context. Teachers’ hands stand out for the fluid gracefulness of the handwriting samples they produced for their students, although the content of teachers’ models was likewise that of students’ exercises. I am the first to identify and exploit the distinction between teachers’ hands and students’ hands, markedly different in their levels of ability, as well as in format and layout. The distinction is a crucial one since it aids in separating the activities of teachers and learners. It is also important to investigate whether it is possible to recognize and define the common, unchanging characteristics of a “teacher’s hand” in all peri­ ods, although teachers’ hands followed contemporary notions of what was clear and elegant writing and changed as fashion changed. Teachers’ models played a fundamental role in the classroom. They were made of sturdy materials in order to withstand handling by students in the informal circumstances of the ancient school. Sometimes the models were intended to facil­ itate reading and provide students with less complicated and clearer texts. In these examples the ends of words or of syllables were marked. Other models functioned as exemplars for copying, and from them students learned different scripts, producing their own books. The Graeco-Roman sources discussing education place considerable emphasis on reading, insisting on the completion of mandatory steps before a student advanced to a subsequent stage and paying little attention to a student’s capacities. Success was strictly dependent on the inflexible order of the sequence. Each step built on the previous one, with an apparent con­ comitant increase in difficulty from letters and syllables to words and sentences. Mastery of monosyllabic words preceded the introduction to disyllabic ones, for, because they were shorter, the teachers deemed them easier. The mechanical building up of syllables appears to have been a fundamental precept among ancient teachers, who disregarded the difficulty many monosyllabic words presented, even showing a predilection for obscure terms that most stu­ dents were not likely to encounter again.19 Content was of secondary importance, and new words were even fabricated in order to exemplify all the syllabic combinations, with disregard for the reality of the Greek language. In his Confessions St. Augustine recalls his first years of learning and reflects on the antipathy he felt for school with a sense of guilt that brings a smile to modern readers. While he never questions the merit of the didactic systems of the time, he sees his hatred of learning as part of his own sinfulness. With reflection, however, he charac­ terizes his earliest instructions as more valuable than what he learned later, because these pro18I call “school hands” only the hands of the students, and not the hands of their teachers. 19See for instance the list of monosyllables of 379, lines 2 7 -3 7 . Even ancient grammarians were unsure about the nature and meaning of some o f them.

WRITING IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

9

vided him with basic tools for all further study.20 In spite of plenty of memory and capacity (,memoria vel ingenium), learning for him was a painful experience. Reading was no doubt difficult for many ancient students to master.21 First of all, most students, at least in Egypt, Rome, and elsewhere in the empire, had to come to terms with more than one language. According to Quintilian, it was better for Roman students to learn Greek first in their schooling, since they were exposed to Latin at home.22 Some students even concentrated all their efforts on the Greek language to the detriment of Latin, in which their knowledge of grammar and authors was incomplete. Native speakers of the Egyptian language, like many other provincials in the eastern Mediterranean who first learned to speak the lan­ guage indigenous to their region, had to learn Greek as a second language. Although it is diffi­ cult to assess the extent to which Egyptian was spoken in homes,23 it is likely to have been the dominant language in the villages and in the countryside. Before the invention of the Coptic script, many Egyptians were unable to read and write what was their native tongue. But com­ parative evidence strongly suggests that when in a particular society the written and oral registers use different languages, the interaction between them becomes complex.24 Writtenoral diglossia continues to hamper students’ progress in reading in modern times and surely posed difficulties for ancient learners in a far more rigid educational milieu. Reading in all periods is a mental accomplishment, an intellectual process in which the eyes are driven for­ ward by the mind. Written Greek offered particular obstacles: elements of the text were seldom distinguished and individual words were not separated by spaces—scriptio continua.25 This fea­ ture of ancient writing must have presented a formidable challenge to the beginner, although with practice the mature reader learned to overcome the impediments it presented. The systematic process that beginning readers had to go through was a practical approach to solve the difficulties reading presented. The ancient sources show an awareness of the length of time required to learn to read, since students were expected to know syllabic quantities and accentuation of words before being able to read.26 I shall argue that learning to write in the ancient school was not governed by the same rigid rules that regulated the process of learning to read and that a limited ability in writing usually preceded extensive training in reading. The ancient sources devote much attention to reading-acquisition, or they speak in general terms of an “education in letters,” paying scant attention to the skill of writing in isolation. Nonetheless, the assumption that the two skills were attained at the same time and according to the same pedagogical principles is unwarranted, and more sophisticated studies of literacy now tend to distinguish between liter­ acy’s necessary components—reading and writing. Not only in the Middle Ages and in early modern Europe but also in antiquity, the ability to read and the ability to write were not neces­ sarily interdependent.27 To be sure, both skills belong in school contexts, yet only the priv20 Confess. I 13, nam utique meliores, quia certiores, erant primae illae litterae. 21 About this, see below pp. 148-49. 22See Quintilian Inst. Or. I I 12. 23See Bagnali 1993, 240-41. 24See Goody 1987, 282. 25About this see below, pp. 47 -4 8 and 148-49. 26See, for instance, below on p. 149 how Dionysius o f Halicarnassus regards the whole process. 27See the general observations o f Lane Fox 1994, 128-30.

INTRODUCTION

ileged few progressed through all educational levels. Since the majority who had any education at all attained only minimal ability from limited schooling, it is meaningful to know which con­ stituent of literacy they approached first, for their initial training had repercussions on how they handled literacy as adults. As a term, literate mentality is ambiguous, but I use it to refer to the cluster of attitudes literate or semiliterate people shared. There can be no doubt that inhabitants of Graeco-Roman Egypt preferred to sign documents and letters in their clumsy, belabored characters rather than be considered among illiterates. It was better to possess and exhibit the skill in limited and imperfect degree, however difficult and unpleasant to the eye their efforts were. By contrast, in medieval England people shared a general distrust toward writing.28 Writing was a necessary activity, but, as a manual task, became increasingly special­ ized and was entrusted to a class of technicians. Even those in the upper classes, who read the Scriptures extensively, did not write out their own signatures. I hope to account for some of the differences among earlier literate mentalities. Writing is a multifaceted activity, involving many levels of competence ranging from the ability to trace a few characters or copy a text to the capacity to engage in literary composition. Four definitions of writing are in common use:29 (1) writing as handwriting, the physical act of tracing characters or words; (2) writing as copying and taking dictation, the recording of others’ words; (3) writing as crafting lexical, syntactical, and rhetorical units of discourse into meaningful patterns; (4) writing as authoring, or producing an independent and original text for a specific audience and purpose. Useful for the present purposes is to underscore the dichotomy in the second definition, articulating the different levels of competence required, on the one hand, for mere copying, and, on the other, for writing from dictation. In ancient Egyp­ tian and Mesopotamian schools, copying was an activity in its own right in which students engaged for many years. I shall investigate whether copying was pursued only as a marginal activity in the Graeco-Roman schools or whether students were supposed to dedicate much effort to achieving good standards in it. Writing from dictation was more challenging in many respects, because to reproduce a text from dictation with reasonable accuracy, a student needed to have mastered the formation of syllables and words. In what follows I am concerned mainly with writing as handwriting, copying, and taking dictation, that is, with the first two defini­ tions cited above. Occasionally, I will speak of the challenges students faced when composing and of the mistakes revealing the personal effort involved in rewriting and paraphrasing. Professional scribes also copied texts from exemplars and from dictation, and the two kinds of activity already existed in pharaonic Egypt, at least for the writing of documents. It is still debated whether in the Graeco-Roman world several scribes simultaneously copied a text from an oral reading in order to produce books on a commercial scale.30 While multiplication of copies was the regular work of scribes, drafting a text ex nihilo was a specialized task that only a few could perform. The distinction between copying and composing is spelled out in a contract of Roman Egypt for the hire of scribes to work in a government bureau for the pur­ pose of drafting population lists on the basis of records of preceding years.31 Those who 28See 29See 30See 31See

in Clanchy 1993, 185-318, the discussion o f the whole question. Janet Emig, “Writing, composition, and rhetoric,” in Mercer 1988, 210-23. Skeat 1956, 179-208. P.Mich. XI 603, especially lines 5 -1 3 and note ad 7.

WRITING IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT

11

drafted new texts were paid at a higher rate than those who merely copied. Both kinds of scribes were employed in the duplication of literary texts for the commercial market, and when Cornelius Nepos describes the household of Atticus, he notes a large staff of copyists (plurimi librarii) and a smaller number of specialists who had more advanced training (pueri litteratis­ simi). 32 Because copying was easier than composing, it is inevitable that there were more copiers. Even later in the Middle Ages, drafting a text remained the task of the better educated in the scriptorium, while the less well educated were relegated to copying.33

32Cornelius Nepos, Atticus 1 3 ,3 . 33See the practice o f Ekkehardus I in St. Gallus who quos ad literarum studia tardiores vidisset, ad scribendum occupaverat et lineandum, Petrucci 1995, 99.

2

Evidence for Schools and Teachers

Modern histories of ancient education report that a full course of literary instruction was divided into three levels, each supervised by a different teacher.1 A student started learning let­ ters, grammata, under the care of an instructor who was called grammatodidaskalos, grammatistes, or didaskalos (γραμματοδιδάσκαλος, γραμματιστής, διδάσκαλος), and the curriculum focused upon learning to read and write, as well as some arithmetic. The student later passed under the supervision of a grammatikos (γραμματικός), who was in charge of teaching lan­ guage and literature, the study of Homer, the poets, and, beginning in the first century a d , grammar. In the last stage the student pursued rhetoric and public speaking with a sophistes or a rhetor (σοφιστής, ρήτωρ).2 This tiered system of education originated in the Hellenistic age and was adopted by the Romans. Students entered the different levels of schooling at ages that were not as uniform as in modern educational systems, because not calendar age but ability was the criterion for promotion. In Rome schooling commenced at about age seven; the student graduated to a grammarian at age twelve, while study in the schools of rhetoric—the ancient equivalent of higher education—began when he was about fifteen, or even a bit younger.3 I shall be concerned for the most part with the levels of education supervised by elementary teachers and grammarians. Yet, because it is difficult to draw sharp distinctions among the three levels, I will at times consider advanced education. The papyri contain few references to teachers,4 and, like many other professionals in antiquity, they usually appear engaged in everyday activities, rather than in pursuit of their profession. That is, individuals designated “teachers” appear in documents as they pay taxes, write petitions to high officials, or are buyers, sellers, borrowers, and lenders, but they are seldom seen when they are teaching. Further, since the professions were never monitored, either by the government or by their members, no standards existed for distinguishing the skilled from the unskilled. Nonetheless, the very fact that “teacher” was recognized as a professional title sets the men, and a lesser number of women,5 apart from their fellows. The term grammatistes, which was often used elsewhere in the empire for a primary school teacher, and sometimes for the grammarian at a secondary level,6 does not appear in the papyri. Instead, papyri show grammatodidaskalos, or simply didaskalos. When didaskalos is used without further specifications referring to different arts and occupations, it indicated a teacher involved in formal education in letters. Another term, chamaididaskalos (χαμαιδιδάσκαλος), literally “a teacher sitting on the ground,” appears in only one papyrus of the seventh century a d and occurs in copies of Diocletian’s Edict o f Prices in the fourth century a d and in later ^ e e Marrou 1975, 218, 241-42, 295; Bonner 1977, 4 8 -4 9 , 250-51. 2See Clarke 1971. 3See Kleijwegt 1991, 90 and 117-18. 4See Appendix 1 for a list o f teachers of different levels appearing in papyri. All the references below with numbers in parentheses relate to this list. 5Cf. below pp. 22 -2 4 . 6See in this respect Raster 1988, 447-52, Appendix 2.

INTRODUCTION

writers.7 It was used to designate elementary school teachers, for it provides graphic evidence that primary schoolmasters were not then endowed with the imposing chair that usually serves to identify them.8 Bilingual Latin-Greek glossaries equate chamaididaskalos with the Latin ludi magister, “schoolmaster.”9 In papyri teachers are also called kathegetai (καθηΎψαί), a term that seems to apply to private tutors who taught at different levels of education. Professors at a higher stage of education, sophistai, are sometimes mentioned in papyri and in a private letter an older student studying in Alexandria complains to his father back home about the shortage of skilled professors.10 This letter employs not only the term philologos to designate the scholar the student intends to employ as private tutor,11 but also refers to distinguished profes­ sors whose lectures he will attend (oi ετώεικνΰμενοι). Although the educational system recognized a series of steps through which a student must proceed and a hierarchy of instructors, the lack of centralized educational authority worked against the creation of uniformity in curriculum or among the personnel. The picture projected by various references is multifarious and incomplete at best. Recently scholars have started to question whether the framework of primary and secondary education was really as uniform as was believed in the past.12 The two-track system, such as prevailed in Rome during the first century a d , may have been operative in the large urban centers of Egypt, with some elementary schools providing a basic, craft literacy to the lower classes, while “liberal schools” addressed the privileged classes.13 Privileged students probably learned the first ele­ ments at home or directly under the tutelage of a grammarian. A wooden tablet from Antinoe, 160 in the catalogue that follows, has been dated to the fifth century a d , and several of its fea­ tures tell us about the social level of a teacher. On one side a teacher, Flavius Kollouthos, appends his signature to the maxim he writes as a model. His proficient penmanship marks him as a teacher, and the name Flavius indicates that he is an adult of high station. This honorific name distinguished those who had served in the imperial, military, and civil service from those who were simply called Aurelii.14 Although no elementary teacher is known to have possessed this title, grammarians were sometimes so honored.15 And this suggests that Flavius Kol7See Edict.Diocl. 7.66 ed. Lauffer pp. 124-25; anecdote 61 in the Philogelos ed. Thierfelder; Macarius, Sermones 20.3.6.1 and 23.125.29; Troilus, Proleg.Rhet. (Waltz, Rhetores, Graeci VI, III.23); Scholia in Eccles. ed. Dübner 809.2; Scholia in Demosth. ed. M.R. Dilts 18.228.1; Scholia in Nubes, ed. Koster 770c alpha 2. See also P.Sorb. II 69 p. 63 note 63. 8The identity of a teacher is usually indicated by the presence of a chair in vases from the fifth century BC and later. See, e.g ., the Douris vase, which portrays a typical school scene, Beck 1975, pi. 10, 53-54; or a cup of the Antikenmuseum of Basel, Beck 1975, Ch. II note 7(m). See also Libanius, Progymn. VIII. 9See Goetz and Gundermann 1888, II 475.16. The term is preceded by χαμοαδικαστής, pedaneus iudex

arbiter. ^ S e e in Appendix 1 the reference to καθηγηταί (1-2-3-4). The word κριτικός, which sometimes designated grammarians or even more advanced teachers, is used in P.Bub. I 4.60.10, but the papyrus is extremely frag­ mentary, and the context is completely unclear. ^ S e e P.Oxy. 2190. 7 and 25, Rea 1993, 80 note 7; the word ψιλόλογος was applied to the members of the Alexandrian Museum. 12See Booth 1979, 1-14 and “The Schooling o f Slaves in First-Century R om e,” ΤΑΡΑ 109 (1979) 11-19; Raster 1983, 223-46. 13See Booth 1979, 19. Contra Harris 1989, 307, note 106. The two-track system appears only in sources from or about the great cities of the empire, see Raster 1983, 241. 14See James G. Keenan, “The Names Flavius and Aurelius as Status Designations in Later Roman Egypt,” ZPE 11 (1973) 33-63 and 13 (1974) 283-304. 15See Raster 1988, 109-11, and cf. below, p. 22 and note 78.

EVIDENCE FOR SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS

15

louthos was a grammarian who also taught some privileged children at the elementary level in this provincial capital. In the villages of the Egyptian countryside educational opportunities were more various and haphazard. In some cases the first elements of reading and writing must have been taught at home.16 Some fathers at Rome thought it was their personal responsibility to participate in the teaching of their sons.17 The papyri suggest that parents in Graeco-Roman Egypt, espe­ cially those who were themselves educated, were interested in their children’s education and worried over their progress. In Oxyrhynchos a mother18 recorded among the expenses for her children (bread, milk, a cake, and toys) money for wax and a stylus. Letters are particularly revealing: one mother’s fragmentary letter reports, “Thank God also that the little one liked the town. He attends school and he learns with enthusiasm.”19 Dios, a student away at school, reassures his anxious father, “Do not worry, father, about my studies,”20 while another father urges his son: “Pay attention only to your books, devoting yourself to learning, and they will bring you profit.”21 A mother wants to know from her son’s tutor, kathegetes (9 in the list), which book of Homer her son is reading, and she is distressed by the departure of an instructor she trusted. Parental participation in education is more difficult to document, but nonetheless hometaught literacy did exist, when it attempted to compensate for the deficiencies of formal school­ ing. A Hellenistic terracotta shows a young girl sitting on a woman’s lap. The two are reading together from a roll on the girl’s knee.22 The scene may portray a mother teaching her daughter to read. Aurelia Charite, who lived in the town of Hermopolis in the early fourth century a d , left several samples of her own writing among her papers.23 Her writing is very similar to that of her mother, Demetria, making it quite plausible that Demetria taught her daugher to write. Many motives might induce a child to imitate a parent’s style of writing, some psychological, others economic, and in the case of the imperial family, even political. Suetonius tell us that Augustus taught his grandsons writing-,' swimming, and other elementary notions, “taking special pains to train them to imitate his own handwriting.”24 Instruction at home by the parents was probably limited to the first elements.25 In the third century b c an old man complains that his ungrateful son refuses to help him in his old age. He includes among 16Harris 1989, 307, admits such a possibility. He then adds that, “direct evidence for this is, however, quite thin, and the extent o f such teaching is largely a matter of guesswork.” 170 n the Romans’ conviction that a father’s proper role was to supervise his children’s education, see Thomas Wiedemann, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (New Haven and London 1989) 87 and 143; Raster 1988,

66 - 68 . 18See P.Oxy. IV 736.16. Préaux 1929, 778 calls her a housewife, a ménagère. 19PS/ I 94: τφοσεδρεύει ίς τα μαθήματα. ζηΧόί yà p την μάθησιν. 20P.Oxy. X 1296.5-7. 21 P.Oxy. Ill 5 3 1 .1 0 -1 2 . 22Daremberg-Saglio, s.v. “Educatio,” 477, figure 2605. 23See P. Charite 8, 27, 36, 37, and probably 41, while text 38 represents her mother’s handwriting. 24Suetonius, Aug. 64.5, nepotes et litteras et natare aliaque rudimenta p er se plerumque docuit, ac nihil ae­

que elaboravit quam ut imitarentur chirographum suum. 25Cf. Horsfall 1991, 63. Speaking o f alternatives to orthodox schooling and particularly about learning at home he says, “Neither teaching nor learning was necessarily a full-time activity, nor one carried on beyond the bare minimum.”

INTRODUCTION

the benefits he gave his son the grammar he taught him—or, at the least, the grammar he had his son taught, since the Greek verb “teach” can be used in a causative sense.26 Elementary instruction at home may have been given by the pedagogue (παιδαγωγός). He is a prominent figure on the vases and in the literature of classical Greece, from which it appears that his job consisted of accompanying students to school and monitoring their behav­ ior. In the absence of other teachers, the pedagogue may have been in charge of the children’s elementary instruction in the home.27 The lad Ptolemaios, child of a wealthy family and cur­ rently residing in Oxyrhynchos in order to pursue studies, was taught by an itinerant tutor, kathegetes (9 in the list). Once this tutor departed, presumably to seek his fortune in Ale­ xandria, the slave Eros, who was also Ptolemaios’ paidagogos and clearly respected by the boy’s mother, was put in charge of finding a new teacher. Ptolemaios was at a secondary level of instruction, since he was reading Iliad 6 with his tutor, but his early education may have taken place at home, with the very capable Eros shouldering that responsibility. The kathegetes was in a number of instances an itinerant teacher, ever moving in search of more advantageous positions in new households.28 Didymos (kathegetes 4 in the list), originally taught in the countryside, but he had higher ambitions and decided to compete with the instructors in an urban setting, perhaps in Alexandria. According to the student Neilos, Didymos was better suited to the “country bumpkins.” Neilos, however, could not find a better teacher because only bad teachers were available, “trash, in whose hands most students have taken the straight road to having their talent spoiled,” who also charged enormous and unwarranted fees. To judge from other texts, however, the rates of pay of these teachers do not seem at all exorbitant. Teachers’ salaries were paid at least partly in kind with pigeons and other birds, grapes, oil or wine,29 since it was common for workers in many fields to receive part of their compensation in kind. A grammatodidaskalos (6 in the list) received portions of wheat and barley, and Libanius mentions an elementary teacher who was paid with two loaves and other related foodstuffs.30 A letter from the early second century a d mentions leftovers from the table that are to be sent to the kathegetes (7 in the list) of the young girl Heraidous to encourage him to pay attention to her. Even at higher educational levels payment in kind was frequent and the grammatikos Lollianos (3 in the list) complains that he received only cheap wine and grain full of weevils. Despite compensation that seemed ever inadequate, the 26P.Ent. 25.2: [egoO yàp δί]δάξαντος αυτόν την [...κ]άι την ~γραμ[μαηκην] (sc. τέχνην). The editor, as a matter of fact, translates: je lui ai fait enseigner. Raster 1988, 67, speaks of personal involvement o f the father. 27Although Marrou 1975, I 2 1 7 -1 8 and II 65-66, insists on the moral quality of the teaching o f the peda­ gogue, he cites an inscription (Dessau 4999) with an epitaph from a student to a man who had been his pedagogue and kathegetes. For the pedagogue in charge of some instruction at home, see Schubart 1918, 382; Bonner 1977, 39-40; and Booth 1979, 3. About classical terracottas presenting the figure of an old man leading a boy to school or teaching him how to read and write, see Beck 1975, plate 12 fig. 65, 66, 67; plate 13 fig. 71, 73, 74; plate 15 fig. 81, 82, 83. 28Nilsson 1955, 50 describes wandering teachers, especially grammarians and rhetors. 29See kathegetai 6-7 and 8 in the list. Préaux 1929, 780 believes that these are gifts sent to win the favor of the teacher, but there is no indication of this. 30Libanius, Or. XLII 26.4-7, ήν τις Ό πτάτος 'γραμμάτων διδάσκαλος, δς καί Λικιννίφ τον παιδα ταΰτα

έδίδασκεν από δυοϊν άρτοιν καί της άλλης τροφής η τούτοις συνέζευκται.

EVIDENCE FOR SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS

17

kathegetai were versatile instructors who taught at different levels of education, some tutoring their charges in material associated with grammarians, or even rhetoricians.31 The instructors considered up to this point—parents, pedagogues, private tutors—gen­ erally taught in the home. It is nonetheless appropriate to consider the lessons they gave as part of the school setting, because of the formality inherent in the process of teaching and learn­ ing.32 On three occasions the papyri employ the word didaskaleion, “school,” to designate the location where instruction took place: Tothes (didaskalos 11 in the list) had a school in Memphis that the twin friends of Ptolemaios and Apollonios attended. Melankomas, grammatodidaskalos (3), taught in a grammatodidaskaleion in an unnamed town in the Arsinoite nome,33 and in this school a much-needed geometry book could be found. The third mention of a didaskaleion occurs in a text that purports to be the speech of an advocate, although the speech may represent an assignment in composition for the classroom (P.Oxy. Ill 471). In the papyrus a certain Maximus is accused, among other things, of maintaining an illicit relation­ ship with a seventeen-year-old boy, distracting the young man from his normal activities and keeping him from going “to the schools and exercises proper for the young.” In such a context “schools,” the didaskaleia, represent places where a young man ought to spend his day— localities in a large town set aside specifically for educational purposes at a relatively high level of education.34 The word scholion, which is used only once in the papyri in connection with grammatodidaskalos (8), also refers to premises where teaching takes place. This reference to the South School in Oxyrhynchos is particularly interesting because it shows that there was at least another elementary school in the city from which this one had to be distin­ guished. The term schole, on the other hand, refers to the activity of learning, the instruction imparted, and even to a group of students attending lectures.35 Thus, the young girl Heraidous needs “material suitable for a school {schole), such as a reading book” {P.Giss. I 85), while the grammarian Flavius Horapollon (10 in the list) has a schole in Alexandria, a group of pupils who received an advanced education from him. Likewise, Didymos, kathegetes (4), has a schole, that is, a group of rather advanced students following his lessons.36 A few Hellenistic terracottas of Alexandrian provenance represent young girls on their way to school, carrying book rolls and tablets in their arms and wearing coats for walking out of doors; one girl wears a hat.37 Once a teacher became available, a group of children appar­ ently congregated at someone’s home for lessons. A building or a room was seldom reserved 31Kathegetai 6 -7 in the list taught at elementary levels, but references 1-5 relate to tutors at higher levels. The Colloquia o f the Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana (Goetz 1892, e .g ., 225.16 and 226.44) and the colloquies preserved in the fifteenth-century manuscript of Celtes (see Dionisotti 1982, 98 lines 12 and 19) refer to teachers or assistant teachers at different levels of education. 32See above p. 6. Cf. also Maristella Pandolfini and Aldo L. Prosdocimi, Alfabetari e insegnamento della scrittura nell’Italia antica (Firenze 1990) 158. 33The name o f the town is not mentioned. Sarapion knew where the person carrying the letter was going and it was enough to direct him to the “school o f Melankomas.” 34Cf. Libanius, Or. I, e.g ., R 52 F 119, where the rhetor repeatedly calls his rhetorical school a didaskaleion. 350 n ly in the school colloquies is schole used as a synonym for didaskaleion, a place o f learning, see, e.g., Goetz 1892, 225.16, 226.44. 36The editor translates the expression σχολήν εχοντα “he has time to spare,” but I agree with Rea 1993, 83 note 21, that the term refers to a group of students. The phrase εχειν σχολήν with the meaning “to keep school” is used e.g. in Arrianus, Epict.Diss. 3.21.11. 3 'See Pomeroy 1984, 60 and plate 7, and Anita Klein, Child Life in Greek Art (New York 1932) pi. XXX C.

INTRODUCTION

for educational purposes when pupils were at the lowest levels. To be sure, rich people’s houses accommodated many activities we would now regard as public: even the household’s father did not leave his home to “go to the office,” but rather used the reception hall of the family’s dwelling for receiving associates and clients.38 Some of these reception spaces in great houses could have been used for teaching. A Ptolemaic papyrus refers to a school, perhaps a school of medicine, in the house of a doctor, where Greek slaves were educated to write in Demotic.39 Comparative evidence often points to schools kept in private houses.40 Nonetheless, the private houses of all but the wealthy inhabitants of the villages and hamlets of the Egyptian countryside during Ptolemaic and Roman times display narrow and badly lit rooms, which were not ideal for reading and writing.41 “I lament for Diotimos who sits on stones repeating Alpha and Beta to the children of Gargara,” says a Hellenistic epigram.42 Many elementary school teachers may have likewise set up school in the open air with a large tree providing the necessary shade and children sitting amid dogs and goats. The vases of classical Athens, in fact, use a tree to symbolize an open-air classroom.43 The British papyrologist J.G. Milne, on finding a group of ostraca all discolored in an unusual way, imagined that a schoolmaster of Thebes “had taught his classes in the open air near a rubbish heap, on which material for writ­ ing exercises might be obtained in plenty, to be thrown away again as soon as used.”44 Although this image is fanciful, there can be no doubt that teaching was organized in a simple way, as teachers and students sat on the ground holding their writing materials on their laps. The term chamaididaskalos “a teacher sitting on the ground,” which only appears in late papy­ ri, seems an appropriate designation not only for the teachers of Graeco-Roman Egypt, but also for those elsewhere in the Mediterranean world. In Pompeii the elementary teacher Sema taught pupils in the portico of the Forum, and another teacher kept classes on the porch of the Campus, both outdoor public areas.45 Dio Chrysostom not only noted that flutists and dancing teachers instructed their students in the city at the street corners, but also described “the most extreme case of all, for elementary teachers sit with the children in the streets and nothing keeps them from teaching and learning in the midst of the crowd.”46 A similar scene was easy to find in Rome,47 and probably also in Alexandria.

38See Yvon Thébert, “Private and Public Spaces: The Components of the D om us,” in A History o f Private

Life voi I, Paul Veyne ed. (Cambridge, Mass. 1987) 353-81. 39t/PZ 148. See R. Rémondon, “Problèmes du bilinguisme dans l’Égypte Lagide,” CdE 39 (1964) 126-46. 40Several thousand years earlier, parents in Mesopotamia sent their children to a teacher who held classes in a private house. The private character of their lesson is underscored by the fact that the teacher was called “father,” or “big brother.” See Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1993, 108. About cuneiform tablets containing school texts that were found in domestic quarters, see Gadd 1956, 25-26. Millennia later, the children of the Jewish community in medieval Cairo also took their lessons in the synagogue or in their teacher’s home. See Reif 1990, 152. 41See, e.g ., the houses in Karanis, Elaine K. Gazda (ed.) Karanis: An Egyptian Town in Roman Times (Ann Arbor 1983) 19-21. 42Ant.Pal. XI 437. Gargara, moreover, was at the edge of the world. 43See, e.g. Beck 1975, plate 16, 84. 44See Milne 1908, 121. Such supposition is not strictly necessary, since the teacher may have provided his pupils with sherds that he had found all in one spot. 45See Della Corte 1959, 622-24. 46 See Dio, XX 9-10, ol ya p των γραμμάτω ν διδάσκαλοι μετά των τταίδων εν ταϊς όδοΐς κάθηνται, καί

ούδεν αύτοϊς έμτοδών έστιν εν Toaoiriy ττΧήθει τοΰ διδάσκει τε καί μανθάνει,ν. 47See Bonner 1977, 116-17.

EVIDENCE FOR SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS

19

Most students received only a few years of formal schooling, and without continued practice in writing, they soon forgot many essential points.48 Nonetheless, there is some evi­ dence of a strong bond between a student and a first teacher, maturing at times into a longlasting friendship. Korax went to the temple of Isis on the island of Philae along with his old instructor Kabatas (didaskalos 13), and he wrote a dedication to the goddess on behalf of his teacher, the son of his teacher, and his own son. The nostalgic letter that young Thonis wrote to his father continues the same motif, for interspersed among complaints about his father’s absence and about missing the doves he left at home come greetings for his old teachers {didaskaloi 22-23). Thonis’ situation is unusual in that he had more than a single teacher to supervise what was presumably his elementary education. Nonetheless, even small com­ munities did on occasion possess more than a single teacher.49 The primitive organization of the open-air school is unheard-of at the higher levels of education. If the advanced teacher could afford it, he rented a room to hold his classes; other­ wise he used his home or any other accommodation. Libanius says that he held his classes in the baths in Nicomedeia,50 but also instructed in his home the fifteen pupils he had brought to Antioch from Constantinople.51 Eventually he thought it to his advantage to move to a room near the square.52 Later on, when his academic appointment became an official one, he trans­ ferred his class to the City Hall, arousing the envy of his competitors, some of whom met stu­ dents in temples or in the Museum. Libanius himself had so many students that he could not get through them all before sunset.53 In Egypt Llavius Horapollon, grammarian (10), had a school in the vicinity of the gymnasium or other sanctuaries.54 Gymnasia were founded everywhere in the Hellenistic world and they existed in Egypt not only in the Greek cities of Alexandria or Naucratis but wherever Greeks established com­ munities of sufficient size, including the larger villages.55 Although scholars in the past have associated the Athenian ephebic schools of the classical period and the Hellenistic and Roman gymnasia with education,56 it has become increasingly clear that no evidence supports the notion that the Egyptian gymnasia were academic institutions.57 Gymnasia did contain areas 48About “slow writers,” see above p. 6 and below, pp. 150-52. O f course, some of them could have learned in alternative ways. See Horsfall 1991, 63 -64 . But see the opinion o f Youtie 1973, 642·. “None stayed at school long enough to develop firm habits of writing.” See also Youtie 1971b, 623. 49See references to didaskaloi (17), (27), (28), and (31), and Raster 1983, 134. See also references to didas­ kaloi 4 -5 - 6 and 7 -8 - 9 that show three teachers in the villages of Tricornia and Lagis, even though it is possible in this case that not all those designated as “teachers” were involved in education. About this, see below, p. 21. 50Libanius I, 55 F 110. 51Libanius I, 101 F 132. 52Libanius I, 102 F 133. 53Libanius I, 104 F 134. 54The expression Flavius Horapollon uses saying that he had a school περί τάς έκε[ϊσε] ακαδημίας is slightly obscure. 55For gymnasia in the Hellenistic period even in small villages as centers o f Greek life, see Wilhelm Schubart, Die Griechen in Ägypten, Beih. zum Alten Orient 10 (1927) 19-20 and Jean Delorme, Gymnasion. Étude sur les monuments consacrés à l'éducation en Grece (Paris 1960) 139, 199-201, 220. 56Nilsson 1955, 1-29, rightly claimed that Athenian ephebes did not receive any public education but merely military training. Regarding the Hellenistic gymnasion, however, and in particular the gymnasion in Egypt, he con­ cluded that it was academically a respectable institution. 57See Harris 1989, 134-35.

INTRODUCTION

reserved for occasional conferences and lectures and they served as centers for the social, athletic, and religious life of a Greek town; evidence for the presence of libraries within their perimeters, however, is lacking.58 In the documents gymnasia per se do not appear, but the gymnasiarchs, their leaders, are often mentioned in petitions and official documents.59 As in the case of the teachers and other professionals, however, their title is given to identify them, and almost nothing is known about the specific duties gymnasiarchs performed within the con­ text of the gymnasium. It was the larger urban centers that offered the greater educational opportunities, and the greater variety of specialized teachers. The typical progression, namely from the rudiments taught by the grammatodidaskalos to the study of language and literature directed by the gram­ marian, might not always have been operative. Some privileged youngsters living in villages were sent to urban centers to continue their studies, and ambitious (and wealthy) parents packed off even their small offspring to the city so that they might join an older brother, already studying there, or be watched over by a friend or relative. One family in Oxyrhynchos not only sent an older brother to the rhetorical schools in Alexandria and a younger brother to the classes of a grammarian,60 but the brothers expected the arrival of a third brother who would also begin his higher education under the tutelage of a grammarian.61 Back in the vil­ lages, the local didaskalos catered to a diverse clientele, from those who would attend classes for only a year or two, or those who would complete the course but not pursue secondary studies, to students who would some day study in the city and were eager to advance as far as the schoolmaster could take them. In such a situation, it is unlikely that the levels of teaching were sharply distinguished. Papyrus 379, Livre d ’écolier, gives a graphic demonstration of the encroachment of one level upon the next.62 The papyrus presents the first rudiments up to two short passages of Euripides in which the words were divided into syllables and a passage from the Odyssey that seems to function as a transitional item to more difficult material. The anthol­ ogy after that becomes demanding, especially two epigrams and a passage of Straton that presuppose a sophisticated knowledge of the language. The passages, intricate and rich in obscure glosses, would have suited the classes of a grammarian or the advanced pupils of a grammatodidaskalos,63 That teachers in the larger villages did bring their pupils to rather high levels of instruction is made clear by the school exercises containing grammar and Scholia Minora to Homer64 found in such villages as Karanis and Theadelphia. Since the presence of 58See what Nilsson 1955, 95 and, more recently, Krüger 1990, 153 say. See also Roberto Nicolai, “Le biblioteche dei ginnasi,” Nuovi Annali della Scuola Speciale p er Archivisti e Bibliotecari 1 (1987) 17-48, 22 -23, 27 and M. Serena Funghi and Gabriella Messeri Savorelli, “Lo scriba di Pindaro e le biblioteche di Ossirinco,” SCO 42 (1992) 59-61. 59A recent assessment of such documents is contained in Wolfgang Orth, “Zum Gymnasium im römerzeitlichen Ägypten,” Festschrift H. Bengtson, Historia Einzelschriften Heft 40 (Wiesbaden 1983) 22 3 -3 2. See also Bagnali 1993, 100. 60See references to kathegetai (1 -2 -3 -4 ). Diogas is said to be learning literature, Ύράμματα μανθάνειν. For this expression’s reference to literature and not to letters of the alphabet, see Raster 1988, 39 note 26 and 43, refer­ ring to Jean Bingen, “N ote,” CdE 45 (1970) 356 and P. J. Sijpesteijn, “Some Remarks,” CdE 51 (1976) 141-45. See Rea 1993, 85-86 note 54 -5 5 . 61Rea 1993, 75 thinks that the younger brother was coming up to university, but it seems unlikely. 62Speaking in general terms Marrou 1975 often describes this phenomenon, see e .g ., I p. 257. 63See Maehler 1983, 200. 64About the provenance of school papyri, see below pp. 57-58 and exercises 330, 345, 359, and 362.

EVIDENCE FOR SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS

21

grammarians outside of cities like Alexandria, Oxyrhynchos, and Hermopolis65 is extremely unlikely, either the grammatodidaskaloi or the private tutors, kathegetai, were responsible for the production of these exercises. A private letter provides further evidence for the existence of elementary schools in which some advanced subjects were taught.66 In this letter Sarapion, an advanced student studying geometry,67 asks his old friend Ptolemaios to provide him with a certain papyrus containing geometric explanations. The letter is addressed to the school of the local grammatodidaskalos, which Ptolemaios is presumably still attending. Despite some evi­ dence for considerable proficiency, teachers, and particularly elementary teachers, were not highly esteemed in the social hierarchy, as their relatively low pay68 and the open contempt awarded them by their contemporaries suggest.69 In the last years of Ptolemy Philadelphos, about 248 BC, the elementary teachers were exempt from the salt tax together with teachers of gymnastics, priests of Dionysos, and victors in the public contests.70 What these classes had in common was their involvement with Greek institutions, and through this benefit the king was manifesting his philhellenism. In my list of didaskaloi, nos. (4-6) and (7-9) received the king’s benefit. In the village of Trikomia one among 110 adults was called “teacher,” while in Lagis three out of 323 adults were identified as “teachers”—a woman and two men. The Ptolemaic bureaucracy, however, probably extended exemption from the salt tax to all members of a teacher’s family—wife, children, and slaves—and designated them as “teachers” in the tax records.71 Thus there is no guarantee that all those called “teachers” in salt-tax records were involved in education. Two teachers, a man and a woman, were exempted from the salt tax in the village of Perhemer;72 this village belonged to a larger area, probably a “toparchy,” with a population of 10,876, 24 of whom, all labeled in the Demotic as “Greek teachers,”73 were exempted from the same tax.74 Fifteen of the 24 were males.75 Although royal benefactions enhanced the prestige of schoolmasters, as a group they belonged to a lower socio-economic category than grammarians. Diocletian’s Edict on Prices underscores the distinction by fixing a grammarian’s fee at,four times that of an elementary 65“The search for grammarians in the empire leads one to regional centers,” Raster 1988, 106. See also p. 20, and note 26 for the geographic distribution of grammarians in the earlier empire. 66See γραμματοδιδάσκαλος (3). 67For geometry traditionally associated with secondary schooling, see Petron. Satyricon 58.7. This discipline is associated with liberal studies (specifically the poets and especially Homer and the μήιnv Ά χιλ ί/ο ς), while it is distinguished from basic arithmetic. For geometry taught in secondary schools, see Marrou 1975, II 84-85 and M.L. Clarke, Higher Education in the Ancient World, (London 1971) 45 -5 2 . The well-written subscription that Sarapion adds at the bottom o f the letter further identifies him as an advanced student. 68Cf. Raster 1988, 99-134, chapter 3, “Social Status of Grammarians.” For the economic difficulties of schoolmasters see Bonner 1977, 146-53. 69See Harris 1989, 237-38 and Alan D. Booth, “Some Suspect Schoolmasters,” Florilegium 3 (1981) 1-20. 70See the edict of the king (πρόσταγμα) in P.Hal. 1 260-265. 71Cf. the restoration [οικείους], P.Hal. 1.265, Tony Reekmans, “Parerga papyrologica,” CdE 54 (1952) 406. 72See P.dem.Lille III 99, verso, col. ii. 15. 73Dorothy Thompson (per litteras 10-19-1992) indicated that she was working on a piece (P.Sorb. inv. 212) from the same Demotic roll where one o f the five divisions appearing in P.dem.Lille III 99 verso is broken down in Greek. Here, in col. 2 .1 , the word διδασκ ca δ appears. It is unclear if it designated female teachers or, more likely, the wives o f the teachers who were exempted from the tax. 74See col. iv .1 -7 . See Thompson 1992. 75Thompson 1992, 325, considers at least the 15 males real teachers. She sees reflected in the considerable number of Greek instructors the policy of Ptolemy Philadelphus to promote Greek education to serve the needs of the new Greek administration.

INTRODUCTION

teacher (7.66). Grammarians might own two or three slaves,76 while the grammarian Palladas, who complained bitterly about his poverty, nonetheless possessed at least one.77 Other grammatikoi were land-owners, and some enjoyed not only wealth, but also high rank and status.78 At the same time the range of income and social status possessed by grammarians was diverse.79 Even elementary teachers, who were in a less privileged position than grammarians, sometimes owned a slave,80 houses and land,81 and a not uncommon source of income for them stemmed from their ability to read and write. In the midst of a largely illiterate population, some schoolmasters performed these tasks for others, acting as scribes and notaries.82 The cycle of Demotic tales of Setne Khamwas, where the schoolteacher acts as scribe in drawing up a deed, shows that helping out as scribes was a natural function of teachers not only in Greek­ speaking Egypt.83 At the other end of the Mediterranean, a Latin inscription on a funeral monument has the teacher remembering how he in life wrote out wills for others, performing the service for free when his clients could not afford to pay.84 The evidence suggests that in Egypt education was not exclusively in the hands of men. Among the mummy portrait-heads of the Roman period found in the Arsinoite, the grammatike Hermione stands out with her big, inquisitive eyes and fine and delicate features.85 We know nothing of Hermione’s academic accomplishments, but more is known about several women scholars who worked in Alexandria: under the Ptolemies Agallis, daughter of Agallias and Hestiaea;86 and in late antiquity the philosopher and mathematician Hypatia, who followed in the footsteps of her scholarly father.87 In comparison with women in the classical city-states of mainland Greece, some women in the Hellenistic age participated more openly in community affairs and tried to make a name for themselves in various professions.88 Nonetheless, women who taught at high levels of education remained the exception. Women were accepted among the ranks of the didaskaloi, although this fact has received little attention from scholars. For example, a papyrus letter of Christian provenance of the fourth century a d 89 mentions the 76Cf. Libanius, Or. 31.11 and grammatikos (2). 77Cf. Cameron 1965, 257-58. 78See grammatikoi (13), (6), (7), and (10). Cf. Raster 1988, 109-11. Grammatikos (10) possessed in addition to the Flaviate the title o f clarissimus, λαμπρότατος, which belonged to persons of senatorial rank. 79Cf. the difficulties experienced by grammarian (3). 80See didaskalos (20 ). 81 See didaskaloi (10), (27), (28), and (31). 82See didaskaloi (2), (18), (19), (26), and (29); see also grammatodidaskaloi (1) and (2) whom Maehler 1983, 196-97 considers Egyptian scribes tied to the temple. 83See Miriam Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature III The Late Period (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London 1980) 133-36. Cf. Thompson 1989, 77 -7 8 . 84Idemque testamenta scripsit cum fide, nec quoiquam pernegavit, see CIL X .3969, Dessau 7763. Cf. Bonner 1977, 150 and T.E. Kinsey, “A Poor Schoolmaster?” Mnemosyne 32 (1979) 381. 85Hermione is no. 1 in the list. W. M. Flinders Petrie, Roman Portraits and Memphis, (London 1911) pi.2. Klaus Parlasca, Mumienporträts und Verwandte Denkmäler, (Wiesbaden 1966) 81 and 101-103, with description and tafel 15. Turner 1980, 77 wonders whether Ύραμμαηκή meant “literary lady” rather than “teacher o f letters,” but this is unlikely since the expression, with that meaning, would be odd. 86Sarah B. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt (New York 1984) 61. 870 n Hypatia, see Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York 1946) voi. II p. 1562, chapter XLVII; Alan Cameron, “Isidore o f Miletus and Hypatia: On the Editing o f Mathematical Texts” GRES 31 (1990) 103-27; Alan Cameron and Jacqueline Long, Barbarians and Politics at the Court o f Arcadius (Berkeley 1993) 39-62; Maria Dzielska, Hypalhia o f Alexandria (tr. F. Lyra, Cambridge, Mass. 1995). 88Sarah B. Pomeroy, “Technikai kai Mousikai," AJAH 2 (1977) 51-68. 89See references to διδάσκαλοι (29-30).

EVIDENCE FOR SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS

23

teacher Kyria, greeting her as a “lady didaskalos” (την διδάσκαλον). The first editor of the let­ ter concluded that the letter derived from a Christian milieu and that the title of didaskalos referred to a woman entrusted with the teaching of the religious doctrine. Because the Church did not admit women to the teaching of the Christian doctrine, the editor connected the letter with a circle of Gnostics, even though he could point to no gnostic texts of the fourth century awarding women the title of didaskalos. His refusal to see Kyria simply as a teacher of letters stems, in large part, from what he considered the lack of evidence for the existence of women teachers at lower levels of education. A few papyri from the first to the sixth century a d do testify that women could and did fill the position. Not all these women were called didaskalos, but rather deskale or deskalos: the spelling of didaskalos modulated to dideskalos and then deskalos without reduplication.90 In time reduplication tended to be reduced, and even reduplicated substantives were reduced to their thematic roots. Deskalos was still used at the beginning of this century in the Greek spoken in the Pontus of Asia Minor;91 in modern Greek the word daskalos designates the schoolmaster, and daskala the schoolmistress. Thus, in a letter Apollonous writes to her hus­ band Terentianos, who is a soldier in service, and tells him, “Do not worry about the children; they are well and attend classes with a teacher.”92 Although the editor of this text recognized that deskale was used instead of didaskalos in the sense of “teacher,” he failed to ask whether the deskale was a woman—a suggestion that becomes very likely indeed through an investiga­ tion of the other occurrences of deskalos and deskale, for every one refers to a woman. First there is Sarapias deskalos whose very name guarantees that she is a woman.93 The same is true for Athenais deskalos, mentioned in a mother’s affectionate letter to her children.94 A third let­ ter from Horigenes closes with his greetings for family members and friends, including a des­ kalos, apparently his teacher in the primary years who has remained in contact with the fam­ ily.95 A late Christian letter of the fifth-sixth century a d provides a more ambiguous example, for instead of deskalos the letter says dekale, and although-this individual is twice addressed with words of affection, no gendered article accompanies the designation to put the matter beyond doubt.96 It would seem, therefore, that a male teacher in the Roman and early Byzantine periods was still designated with the full word didaskalos, the word that had been used for “teacher” 90Διδάσκαλος became δίδέσκαΧος, and then δέσκαΧος. About this common phenomenon, see A .N . Jannaris, An Historical Greek Grammar, Chiefly o f the Attic Dialect, (London 1897) 737. 91See Stylianos G. Kapsomenakis, Voruntersuchungen zu einer Grammatik der Papyri der nachchristlichen Zeit (München 1938) 121-22. 92See διδάσκαλος (15). Apollonous’ words, εις δεοκάΧην ταρεδρεύουσι recall the expression ιτροσεδρεύει Ις τά μαθήματα, “attends classes” of another letter, PSI I 94, in which a woman describes the enthusiasm of her son for school. Cf. above pp. 22-23. 93See didaskalos (14) in the list. 94See didaskalos (16). Athenais, who was the village teacher or a slave teacher, is mentioned among the people who greet Sarapias’ children, together with Έρμανοΰβις ή τροφός, perhaps the woman who had raised them. 95See didaskalos (21), where the editor translates δέσκαΧος “the governess.” 96The expression appearing in the letter (didaskalos 35) is κνρι μου δεκάΧη. The term δεκάΧη shows the drop­ ping of sigma, a not uncommon phenomenon even in the middle of a word, for which see Stylianos G. Kap­ somenakis, “P.Iand. VI 1 0 1 ,8 ,” Athena 73 -7 4 (1973) 571. The final alpha o f κυρία may have dropped out, as it is sometimes elided in nominal forms, see Gignac 1976, 317 and 1981, 4; see also P.Mich. V 331.4 and P.Mich. XIII 666.30.

INTRODUCTION

over the centuries, but the noun deskalos (deskale) was reserved for female teachers. Although theirs was neither a prestigious position nor one monetarily rewarding, the teachers, both male and female, often gained the trust and affection of their young charges and their families. A woman teacher may have seemed especially appropriate as an instructor to young girls,97 and since women were the most easily available teachers for their own small children, the expan­ sion of the role to embrace other young students may have seemed a natural one.98 The methods that prevailed in the schools throughout antiquity were less than gentle. Using the strap, or “caning,” seems to have been routine among schoolmasters, and references in literature to corporal punishment are not infrequent in Greek and Roman authors of all peri­ ods.99 St. Augustine recalls all the supplications he made to God not to be beaten in school when he was a small child and wonders at the cruelty of that system, about which his parents used to laugh. “Racks, claws and such varieties of torments...we schoolboys suffered from our masters.”100 Were these punishments right, he wonders—for he is quick to admit that play got in the way of his learning—or was the harsh discipline maintained only because it was com­ mended by the ancestors? The school colloquies, presumably contemporary in origin with Augustine, note that if someone reads well he is praised, but if he does not he is whipped.101 The younger a pupil was, the more likely he would become a victim of the wrathful school­ master, a magister iracundissimus as Seneca dubs him.102 Grammarians were reputed to be milder than the didaskalos, more violent than the rhetor.103 At times children became impatient with the severity, for during the famine in Cappadocia, according to St. Basilius, the children happily left their tablets in school and flocked to the church to join in the prayers, glad to be free from their burdensome teacher.104 Libanius presents a superb portrait of a didaskalos (this time surely a grammarian or a rhetor). He is developing into a more elaborate composition the saying “Isocrates said that the roots of education are bitter, but the fruits are sweet.” To demonstrate how bitter are the methods used in education, he has the teacher sitting on a high chair and venting all his anger on his trembling pupils. If they do not perform well, they receive “anger and insults, beating and threats.“ 105 Corporal punishment characterized the educational system of pharaonic Egypt,106 as well as persisted into later times. A school exercise from Graeco-Roman times (134) required a 97Cf. pedagogue (3), a woman who was in charge of a young slave girl. 98Cf. p. 23. Indeed, one wonders if the terracotta described on note 25, which has traditionally been inter­ preted as a mother teaching her daughter, might not instead depict a female teacher. " S e e , e.g ., Aristophanes, Clouds 972; Herodas, Mim. Ill; Plautus, Bacchides 434; Quintilian, Inst. Or. I 3.14-17. 100Confess. I IX, eculeos et ungulas atque huiuscemodi varia tormenta...quibus pueri a magistris afflige­

bamur. 101See Dionisotti 1982, 101 line 39 (emended version), e i τις καλώς άνη-γόρευσεν, επαινείται, ε ϊ τις κακώς,

δέρεται. 102Seneca, Ερ. 94.9. 1Λ 1 See Horaee, Epist. 2.1 .7 0 -7 1 (but Orbilius plagosus, a grammarian, was Horace’s teacher from the beginning) and Luxorius, Epigr. 8. 104Basilius, Horn.Famis Sicc. 64 C Migne PG 309: της έπαχθείας του παιδευτοΰ. 105Libanius, Progymn. ed. Foerster, V ili, pp. 84-85. Other references to punishment in education are col­ lected by Alan D. Booth, “Punishment, Discipline, and Riot in the Schools in Antiquity,” EMC 17 (1973) 107-14 and “The Image of the Professor in Ancient Society,” EMC 20 (1976) 1-10. 106Cf. Papyrus Anastasi V 3.9 (“The ears of a youth are on his back: he listens when he is beaten”) and IV 8.7, translated by Adolf Erman, Die Literatur der Aegypter (Leipzig 1923) 243 and 267, Eng.trans, by A.H. Black­ man, The Ancient Egyptians (London 1927).

EVIDENCE FOR SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS

25

beginner to copy four times a teacher’s model with a fearful warning: “Work hard, boy, lest you be thrashed.” In another exercise, 257, a more advanced student writes about the same subject: “He who is not thrashed cannot be educated.”107 A Byzantine letter is also concerned with “the physical side of education.” 108 In the letter a father writes to someone, presumably109 a teacher, announcing his intention to withdraw his son Anastasios from his class, he says:110 You have written to me about little Anastasios, and since I owe you money, be sure you will be paid in full. Nothing of what has been told you is true except that he is stupid and a child and foolish. He wrote me a letter himself quite in keeping with his appearance and his empty wits. And since he is a child and stupid then I will bring him home. I am keeping his letter to show you when I come. Chastise him, for ever since he left his father he has had no other beatings, and he wants to get a few, his back has got accustomed to them and needs its daily dose. However young and immature Anastasios was, he was able to write a letter that his father con­ sidered a masterpiece of stupidity. The father mercilessly makes fun of his son, but showing the letter to the teacher seems a veiled gesture of reproach for the schoolmaster, since in all ages parents have held teachers responsible for their children’s failure. The letter apparently demonstrated that the boy did not learn anything. The father alludes to some money he owes the teacher, probably the tuition. He assures the instructor that, although he intends to withdraw the child, he will be paid in full. The teacher was probably apprehensive about this, since teachers did not always receive their due pay­ ment. An inscription from Pompeii exhibits similar unease, for an elementary teacher wrote on the porch of the Campus, “May the person who pays me receive what he wishes for from the gods.”111 Some parents withdrew their children from school prematurely to avoid paying what they had prom­ ised. The grammarian Palladas knew of pupils who changed schools after eleven months without making the year’s payment.112 Anastasios, we understand, was regularly beaten at home, and his father gives the teacher official permission to continue beating the boy in his stead; the images of teacher and disciplinarian father blend.113 Doubts about the efficacy of corporal punishment in the schools became more common in the late Roman period, as milder forms of discipline gained ground 107'Ο μη δαρε'ις 'άνθρωπος ού παιδεύεται, Cf. Mortosi. 573 and Menander, Dyskolos 699-700. 108See SB V 7655: C.H. Roberts, “Two Letters of the Byzantine Period,” JEA 21 (1935) 52. The hand is dated to VI AD. 109Claire Préaux, reviewing Roberts’ article in CdE 11 (1936) 565-66, thinks Anastasios was apprenticed to a trade. His father, who owed someone money, had offered the boy as a compensation. Roberts himself, however, had entertained this possibility, concluding that it was more likely that Anastasios was studying with someone. I believe that he was right. 110A translation o f the same lines is published by W. Schubart, Die Papyri als Zeugen antiker Kultur (Berlin 1925) 80. 111 Qui mihi docendi dederit mercedem (h)abeat quod petit a superis , see Della Corte 1959, 62. n 2 AP IX 17 4 .9 -1 2 , see Cameron 1965, 257. 113For the many ways the two roles were blending, see Raster 1988, 67 -6 9 . For cruel teachers being the sub­ stitutes for fathers in all ages see Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, “Le chiavi fiorentine di Barbablù: l ’apprendimento della lettura a Firenze nel XV secolo,” Quaderni Storici 57 (1984) 773-74. At Macerata (Italy) in 1391 a teacher was supposed to instruct children, but also to punish them, like a father: et ipsos instruere, docere, monere, cor­ rigere et castigare scolastice et paterne. See L. Colini Baldeschi, “L’insegnamento pubblico a Macerata nel Tre­ cento e Quattrocento,” Rivista delle Biblioteche e degli Archivi 11 (1900) 23.

INTRODUCTION

in the home as well.114 In the seventh century the physician and medical writer Paulus Aegineta thought it best if boys and girls from the age of seven were entrusted to nice, gentle teachers who would teach them with joy.115 Evidence from the papyri on teachers and schools has been useful in creating this general pic­ ture of the people and places devoted to educating children. The private letters and the anecdotal tradition offer some specific examples, and afford a glimpse into people’s mentality, habits, and assumptions with regard to education. Usually anecdotal evidence can clarify generalizations and it is especially welcome when the data are unverifiable. But this is not the case with education in GraecoRoman Egypt, where the school exercises themselves reveal the content of ancient lessons and the pedagogical methods used to impart instruction, documenting the reality of ancient education.

114See Marrou 1975, II 72. See also Pierre Riché, École et enseignement dans le Haut Moyen Age (Paris 1979) 208-10 with examples of gentler methods o f teaching used in the Middle Ages. 1^Paulus Aegineta, Corpus Medicorum Graecorum 9 11.14: ^ραμματισταις παραδιδόναι πραέσι και φίΚανθρώποις' ούτοι yàp μετά άνεσεως και χαράς διδάσκουσι.

3

The School Exercises

The school exercises of Graeco-Roman Egypt have attracted limited attention and have never been thoroughly examined in their own right. Modern scholars researching ancient education regard the exercises as a source of illustrative material confirming information from the ancient authors about education.1 They consider the actual testimonies of the school work of teachers and students not only to be an endless repetition of certain patterns but also to be straightfor­ ward evidence that does not deserve to be closely investigated.2 School exercises do not often attract unreserved attention, even by papyrologists, and so remain in the gray area that lies between literary and documentary papyrology: documentary papyrologists consider the exer­ cises to belong to areas of interest and capacity beyond their own, while scholars who study literary papyri look at school work with some suspicion and disdain.3 The lack of attention school exercises have attracted also derives from the difficulty of gaining access to them, since they have often appeared, especially in the past, in obscure journals, reviews, and Fest­ schriften. Although a complete and reliable catalogue of exercises, listed by educational typologies, would be a necessary tool for researchers of ancient education, all of the few exist­ ing lists of school exercises present notable shortcomings. Paul Collart was the first to compile a catalogue of exercises, which is less objec­ tionable than those published later on.4 A quarter-century later, Giorgio Zalateo attempted to complete Collart’s list, cataloguing not only the school exercises but also the school texts—that is, texts produced for the use of students.5 The resulting list is a haphazard collection of material, some of which does not offer any guarantee of having been used in a school context.6 More recently Janine Debut updated Zalateo’s catalogue, but her list is the most problematic of all: texts and exercises are classified according to levels of difficulty and by genre; the material

*See, e.g ., Beudel 1911. 2See for instance Harvey 1978, 64: “Very little will be said about the papyrological and epigraphic evidence, which is comparatively straightforward.” 3School exercises are generally dismissed as being unable to provide reliable information about the state and tradition o f a certain text. 4Collart 1937 only included the exercises in his list, not the school texts, listing them according to general typologies corresponding to the growing difficulty o f educational levels. Before him, Ziebarth 1913 made a valuable selection o f exercises. 5See Zalateo 1961. A cco rd in g to Zalateo, students at every level used a remarkable number of texts and dictionaries. Judging from the list and the related notes, one has the impression that this scholar considered schools in antiquity in terms o f the same standard applied to schools in nineteenth and twentieth-century Italy. This list is definitely too inclusive, as noted by Turner 1980, 190, note 42. See in “Items Excluded from the Catalogue,” pp. 2 8 5 -8 8 , a detailed explanation o f the items excluded with reasons for the exclusion.

INTRODUCTION

is not well distributed in the different categories;7 identical items appear several times;8 and there is a large number of mistakes and inconsistencies throughout the work.9 The various and not completely successful attempts of scholars to classify both school texts and school exercises make it necessary to formulate a clear distinction between texts and exercises. While exercises represent both the work that students did for and in school as well as the models that teachers prepared for their pupils, school texts are books professionally pro­ duced to circulate in class and be used by students. Since it is problematic to identify sufficient and objective marks distinguishing texts used in schools from texts circulating among the gen­ eral public, it is difficult to be sure about the school provenance of texts, aside from a few that are manuals presenting very elementary material.10 I decided to concentrate my attention on the exercises, both because my primary interest is to investigate the acquisition of the skill of writ­ ing, and because elementary students did not use many texts, but relied heavily on copies, dic­ tations, and teachers’ models. As a rule I have not taken into consideration the products of higher education—that is, the exercises that originated in rhetorical schools—even though it is not always feasible to draw a sharp line between educational levels. In general, I have considered exercises whose content appears to be typically rhetorical when the hand of the student seems still to be a “school hand”—that is, not completely developed. In addition, I include the few rhetorical exercises that exhibit specific features that are common to other less advanced exercises, since these can be useful to outline and identify the essential distinguishing characteristics of an exercise. I also do not study bilingual glossaries, because they are written by well-developed and some­ times completely professional hands. It is doubtful that any of them were produced in schools, nor it is certain that they were produced for learners rather than as specialized reference works for the proficient.11 Since my principal aim is to investigate the acquisition of writing by beginners, I will not specifically treat the activity of scribes. It is generally assumed that scribes needed technical training in scribal schools to acquire professional ability in one or more scripts and to master the complex vocabulary and syntax of legal and bureaucratic writ­ ing.12 Nonetheless, the modalities and timing of a specialized scribal education are unclear: it is difficult to know for certain whether technical training started after the completion of a few years of regular schooling or during those years of general education. I decided to take into 7See Debut 1986: the section Les Textes includes many exercises (e.g. Debut 231 and 308), and conversely many texts are classified as exercises in the relevant section (e.g., Debut 325 and 329). Equally, the section dedi­ cated to the learning of handwriting, where one could expect to find the poorly written exercises, lists many per­ fectly written texts (see e.g ., Debut 150, 151, 155, 156.) 8See, for instance, 379, which appears up to 11 times; in addition, simpler exercises, and not only notebooks, are listed many times when they contain exercises o f different kinds and levels. The splitting of the exercises reaches paradoxical proportions in the syllabaries and the lists o f words, which are further divided according to the number of syllables. d escrip tio n s of the different items often do not correspond (see e .g ., Debut 131, 133); some items are impossible to find, probably because they are listed incorrectly (see e.g ., Debut 138, 162, 198, 279, 281); and some are listed twice by mistake (see e .g ., Debut 120 and 121 bis). 10These are included in the Catalogue, see 81, 84, 97, 120. 11 For bilingual glossaries, see Johannes Kramer, Glossaria Bilinguia in Papyris ei Membranis Reperta (Bonn 1983). 12See Ulrich Wilcken, Urkunden der Ptolemäerzeit (ältere Funde). I, Papyri aus Unterägypten (Berlin and Leipzig 1927) 474-75 and Thompson 1994, 7 6 -7 7 .

THE SCHOOL EXERCISES

29

consideration elementary scribal exercises such as the writing of letters, alphabets, and simple repeated words, since they probably represent the work of apprentice scribes and have in com­ mon the learning of the script. Even though in these exercises the characters are not always completely skilled, they do not resemble real beginners’ letters and are elaborately executed.13 I consider more advanced scribal exercises that presuppose specific notarial training or display professional book hands to be outside my area of inquiry.14 I also include in my consideration the elementary Greek and Coptic school exercises, when they cover letters of the alphabet, alphabets, and syllabaries—that is, the learning of the Coptic script and alphabet, and not the Coptic language—and when they were produced in or before the eighth century a d . 15 Maintaining the strict traditional division between Greek and Coptic material, with exclusion of any item containing Coptic letters, involved deep conceptual problems. Coptic developed in bilingual milieus and its ties not only with the Greek script but also with the Greek language are multiple, involving the importation of Greek religious terms as well as a permeation of the Greek vocabulary of everyday life and Greek constructions and methods of word-formation.16 Much is unclear about the teaching of the Greek and Coptic alphabets, their relationship in centuries before the eighth, and the structure and organization of Coptic education. It is essential to distinguish between Coptic language and Coptic script, since not everything is clear about the correspondence of written and spoken Coptic. Exercises at the first elementary level traditionally considered as Coptic17 do not yet involve the Coptic language itself but only the Coptic alphabet. They show four types of occurrences: (1) series of letters of the alphabet that do not display the specific Coptic signs imported from Demotic; (2) Coptic alphabets where the special Coptic signs are separated from the Greek letters and are listed in a distinct section of the exercise; (3) exercises displaying Greek and Coptic letters together; (4) exercises containing Coptic proper names, where students practiced their own names or wrote lists of names. When the exercises do not appear to have been written after the eighth century a d and only evidence a knowledge of the letters of the Coptic alphabet, it is problematic to draw a sharp line between Greek and Coptic education.18 For methodological reasons I did not classify and study Latin and mathematical texts and exercises, because the relative expertise of the script in the majority of them makes it diffi­ cult to identify those specifically deriving from a school.19 Latin texts that were used to learn the Latin language appear similar to those employed in Greek education: alphabets, writing 13I call scribal exercises presenting these characteristics scribes' trials. 14I did not include in my study scribal exercises containing formulas, dates, beginnings o f epistles, or whole documents. In this respect, I do not share with the editors o f MPER NS XV their idea o f school, which seems too inclusive. For the same reason I did not consider proficient scribal exercises in book hand or in chancery style, such as P.Ryl. I 59 or P.Hawara 24. I also excluded the tachygraphic commentaries and exercises, which seemed to address a specific area o f specialization. 16This is the likely date o f the disappearance of Greek as a spoken language in Egypt, see above p. 4. 16SeeR ay 1994, 60. 17For Coptic school exercises, see Hasitzka 1990. 18I did not cover the bilingual Greek-Coptic lists of words that Hasitzka 1990 includes in section V ille since, as far as I could check plates and originals, they appear to be written by professional or advanced hands, and it is doubtful whether they were school exercises. See, e.g ., no. 256, written by Dioscoros o f Aphrodito. 19Only Zalateo listed both Latin and mathematical texts, while Collari included a category for mathematical exercises only.

INTRODUCTION

exercises, glossaries, fables, maxims, passages of authors,20 and grammatical treatises. Although traditionally scholars regarded these texts as always originating from ancient schools,21 they are all written by experienced hands and show that students at an advanced level studied Latin as a second or third language.22 It is difficult, moreover, to exclude the pos­ sibility that many of these texts might have served adults who needed to learn the Latin lan­ guage for business reasons.23 The majority of tablets, papyri, and ostraca containing mathe­ matical material are also written in expert hands. Although some texts certainly were used for instruction,24 the purpose of other texts, such as multiplication tables and tables of fractions, cannot be determined exactly, since some of them might have been employed in a lawyer’s, businessman’s, or bureaucrat’s office as an aid to reckoning.25 An essential prerequisite to making a catalogue of school exercises is sifting all the material to ascertain its provenance and place in a school context on the base of clear and trustworthy criteria.26 Although the criteria that I adopted in identifying school material will be treated in more detail in the course of the work,27 it is important to state them at the beginning in unequivocal terms. They are the following: (1) types of textual material contained, (2) writ­ ing materials and their use, (3) special distinguishing characteristics of an exercise, (4) mis­ takes, and (5) evaluation of the hand. While sometimes the application of one criterion is suffi­ cient to determine that a given text is a school exercise, more often it is necessary to combine different criteria. The content of an exercise is in direct relation to the educational level of the student especially at an initial stage, but when one confronts the copying or dictation of pas­ sages of prose and verses, diverse criteria must come into play. In devising the different categories, and especially for the first seven levels,28 I have kept in mind above all the amount of writing they required and have considered a traditional student’s progress from easiest to most difficult. In the Catalogue, exercises are grouped according to the categories below. I will show in later chapters, however, that at least in Roman and Byzantine times levels 5 and 6 fol­ lowed after level 2 when a student was learning how to write. After a basic exposure to the alphabet, students had to copy a limited amount of writing letter by letter, without yet being able to read, merely to strengthen their hand. I chose to maintain in the Catalogue the tradi­ tional order of educational levels that the ancient literary sources hand down29 for several 20Only the passages that are translated into Greek or contain Greek explanations and glosses can safely be regarded as addressing the needs o f someone wanting to learn Latin. 21See among others Clifford H. Moore, “Latin Exercises from a Greek Schoolroom ,” CP 19 (1924) 316-28. 22See Dionisotti 1982, 91. 23William Brashear, “A Greek-Latin Vocabulary,” Proceed.XVI Congr. (Chico 1981) 34, says, “Soon after the battle of Actium someone very eager to learn the language of the new rulers set out to study Latin even before he could properly read it. The economic and social advantages it would bring him were strong incentives.” 24See, e.g ., SB 11527, MPER NS XV 143, 147, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 179, Pap.Flor. XVIII 71 -7 8 , P.IFAO 88, P.Michael. 62, P.Akhmim 5, P.Harr. 50. 25“La distinction entre un exercice scolaire et une copie professionnelle est loin d’etre toujours aisée,” says Bernard Boyaval, “Tablettes mathématiques du Musée du Louvre,” RA 2 (1973) 243. Cf. also the doubts expressed by Frank Egleston Robbins, “A Greco-Egyptian Mathematical Papyrus,” CP 18 (1923) 329-30. 26A difficulty that one encounters when using the three existing lists of exercises and texts is that the authors did not sufficiently explain the criteria for selection that they followed. 27The description of the items of the Catalogue will often reiterate the relevant criteria for inclusion. 28See below, p. 31. 29See below p. 139.

THE SCHOOL EXERCISES

31

reasons, but chiefly because this was certainly the order followed in teaching reading and was perhaps the order followed in teaching writing in the Classical and Ptolemaic periods.30 The different educational levels and categories used in studying the exercises are: 1. Letters of the Alphabet 2. Alphabets 3. Syllabaries 4. Lists of Words 5. Writing Exercises 6. Short Passages: Maxims, Sayings, and Limited Amount of Verses 7. Longer Passages: Copies or Dictations 8. Scholia Minora 9. Compositions, Paraphrases, Summaries 10. Grammatical Exercises 11. Notebooks While the first category comprises the writing of single letters of the alphabet practiced several times, and letters that are joined without following an alphabetical order, the second level includes complete and incomplete alphabets. Syllabaries and lists of words are placed in the third and fourth categories, without being further distinguished according to number of let­ ters or syllables, solely to avoid too many distinctions and to leave all the material in chronological order. The next level, Writing Exercises, comprises the types of exercises that focus on the acquisition of better writing skills, that is, exercises copied from teachers’ models and words or short passages repeated several times.31 This level somewhat overlaps with level 6, which generally includes texts not longer than eight lines. Level 7 includes passages of vari­ able length and degree of difficulty, generally longer than eight lines. Scholia Minora, those Homeric commentaries where the Homeric text is divided into lemmata and is accompanied by the corresponding glosses, occupy level 8. I have considered only exercises containing Scholia Minora that appear to be written by students or that display hands which can be designated as “teachers’ hands.” Level 9 comprises paraphrases, compositions on a given subject, summaries of Homeric episodes or of whole books, and dialogues, while Grammatical Exercises make up category IO.32 I considered it necessary to include grammatical material in a special category, although most texts were probably copied and could be regarded as Longer Passages·, this is an area in which it is preferable to make a useful and operating distinction in the mass of the Longer Passages. Finally, I have decided to include in a category by themselves what I call Notebooks—that is, collections of exercises of multifarious content that sometimes were com­ piled by more than one student.

30I realize that my choice could be somewhat controversial, but, because o f the lack o f evidence for teaching writing in the Classical and Ptolemaic periods, I prefer to respect the traditional order o f stages in a general Catalogue o f exercises that were used to teach both reading and writing. 3fin this category appear also a few single words, written only once, simply because it was hard to find a more suitable placement for them. 32The order followed for levels 8-1 0 is not dictated by any particular reason, since all the exercises in ques­ tion were practiced in the class o f the grammarian.

INTRODUCTION

The process of selection and identification of school exercises must take into account the different writing materials on which the exercises appear and their usage in schools.33 I shall try to ascertain when and under what conditions a particular writing material is per se a sufficient guarantee that something was written in a school context. The particular ways in which students and teachers used and selected the most appropriate writing materials for their needs are worth noticing, since an investigation of the conditions of writing will contribute to a more realistic idea of the modalities of teaching and learning in ancient classrooms. Setting out the distinguishing features of exercises is also of fundamental relevance.34 Since the exercises as a group have never before been examined from this point of view, this promises interesting results. Some of the distinguishing characteristics concern the layout of an exercise and are mostly motivated by the desire to display it in an attractive and efficient manner. Other charac­ teristics, such as the presence and types of dates included in some exercises, or punctuation and lectional signs, are related more to the content. I hope that the consideration of special fea­ tures, such as the division of words into syllables or the separation of words from one another to facilitate reading, will elucidate how students worked and learned, and how their instructors taught reading and writing. Mistakes in writing down a particular text are also of crucial importance for the identification of an exercise. Since most of the exercises I consider are copies or dictations, mistakes are most frequently orthographic, while morphological and syn­ tactical errors are more unusual. A direct evaluation of the hands of teachers and students must be at the base of the process of selecting the material.35 Palaeographical criteria and our standards for the beauty or ugliness of a hand change with time, above all because of the discovery of new texts. Thus, for instance, what was considered in the past the ungainly hand of a student may appear to be the informal hand of a scribe on a more balanced view. In addition, the palaeographical descrip­ tions of the hands of exercises are often quite superficial and can lead to gross mistakes. One example will suffice. Exercise 284 preserves the short story of King Adrastus and his daugh­ ters, which was always considered a composition and thus listed by the different cataloguers.36 But a direct examination of the writing unmistakably reveals the work of a beginner with a quivering, uncertain hand throughout the whole text. The story of Adrastus was not the prod­ uct of the student’s creativity, but was either copied or written from dictation, as the total lack of mistakes pointing to a composition and the simple and elementary content confirm.37 Although I will discuss in a later chapter all the palaeographical characteristics of the hands of 33See pp. 57-72. 34See pp. 75-96. 35The previous cataloguers refrained from such procedure, trusting the subjective opinions o f the various editors. In Pack7 1965, the exercises are assembled in a separate section, School Exercises and Writing Exercises, and in addition some exercises, which are listed under the different authors, are marked as sch.ex. Pack all but fol­ lowed the opinion o f the editors, with the consequence, for instance, that Scholia Minora published in the past, when it was automatically believed that they were compiled by students, are distinguished as school exercises, while those published more recently do not appear as such. The new catalogue, Mertens-Pack3 , which is in preparation, will follow the same method. 36See Zalateo no. 188 = Debut no. 376. 37Works such as M.-H. Ibrahim, Ή ελληνορωμαϊκή παιδεία èv Alyùtttq (Athens 1972, 13 Suppi. Athena), who followed the previous lists in order to study ancient education, inevitably reflect the mistakes o f the cataloguers. Thus this scholar considered the story o f Adrastus the composition of a student under the guidance of a grammarian, even though he had previously said that at this stage students wrote in a much better way (p. 93).

THE SCHOOL EXERCISES

33

students and teachers,38 it is essential to call attention right now to the types of students’ hands that emerge from the data, in order to establish a conventional way to identify them and to be able to use this terminology throughout the work. School hands can be classified into four dif­ ferent types on the basis of the maturity and ability of the student.39 Hand 1, “the zero-grade hand,” represents the handwriting of the absolute beginner with lack of coordination and insufficient knowledge of the letter shapes; Hand 2, “the alphabetic hand,” is characterized by an identical clumsiness, but shows that the student has learned the basic shapes of the letters; Hand 3, “the evolving hand,” still exhibits many irregular and clumsy features, but is moder­ ately fluent and does not shy away from writing; Hand 4, “the rapid hand,” is completely fluent, even if not always tidy and even. Since the process of learning writing is a dynamic one, it is unrealistic to keep on speaking in general terms of a “school hand” as if of a frozen state and condition of writing. Palaeography is also a decisive factor pointing to a teacher’s model, and the main aim of a study of teachers’ hands40 will be to establish the principal char­ acteristics they share in order to identify more teachers’ models. I have spoken above41 of the teacher Flavius Kollouthos son of Isakios, apparently a grammarian, who inscribed on tablet 160 the model of a maxim for his pupil: αρχή μεγίστη τον φρονεϊν τά γράμματα “Letters are the greatest beginning of understanding” The student painfully copied the maxim over and over again down the tablet. He tried to write two distinct columns, perhaps imitating the mise en page of a real book, brutally dividing the words whenever he started a new line. Since this student does not seem to have been able to read, one can only hope that he knew the meaning of the words he was writing or that he learned it later on, when letters brought him understanding. I hope this study of writ­ ing, of how students learned their letters, and how teachers inscribed models with beautiful, exemplary grammata, will lead to a deeper understanding of how schools in antiquity worked and how the letters learned in school affected adult writing.

38See pp. 97-118. 39I will sketch them quickly, but see below, pp. 111-12, for a more accurate description o f each hand. 40See below pp. 97-102. 41See pp. 14-15.

PART TWO

Identifying School Exercises

4

Types of Textual Material

In the fourth century a d the grammarian Troilus reflected on a commonly recognized aspect of ancient education: teachers continued to impart the same knowledge without ever deviating from the usual course.1 The general scope of education was rather limited even for the privileged few who pursued a secondary instruction: writing, reading, some formal instruction in the Greek language, and the study of the works of a few writers, almost exclusively poets. The content of education remained unchanged for many centuries, and very little was left to the creativity of teachers. The school exercises of Graeco-Roman Egypt confirm that education consisted of a set of notions and concepts verified and proved by tradition and imparted according to gradual stages of difficulty. The changes that occurred over the centuries in the content and methods of education were few and of limited range, but I hope to show that they were still significant.2 Definite types of textual material emerge from an inspection of the work of students and teachers. I will start from what Quintilian calls sua etiam studiis infantia, the infancy of learning, the first moment in which a student ventured to form the outline of a letter of the alphabet. To justify the significance of this moment it is not necessary to pretend with Quintilian that it is the child Alexander of Macedon who held the reed pen or the stylus.3 It was a momentous occasion for any student in Graeco-Roman Egypt who was fortunate enough to receive some education. Letters, Alphabets, and Exercises on the Alphabet The ancient authors describe different methods used to expose beginners to learning letters: let­ ters were permanently incised in a wooden tablet, and the student had to follow the outlines; the master made the outlines, and the pupil filled them in; the teacher guided the pupil’s fin­ gers through the letter shapes; ivory and wooden letters were given to children, and perhaps even cakes in the shape of letters.4 The school exercises testify only to the existence of models of alphabets inscribed by the teachers and show that about two-thirds of the alphabets preserved as individual items are models for copying. The data show that teachers did not write down examples of letters in random order for their students and that the models ^ e e Troilus, Προλεγόμει/α της ρητορικής (C. Waltz, Rhetores Graeci, voi. 6, III 23), παράδειγμα δε αυτής ο γραμματιστής ήτοι ο χαμαιδιδάσκάλος' αεί γάρ την διδασκαλίαν ποιείται μηδέν μετατρέπων των είθισμένων. 2Beudel 1911, 5 -6 , strongly believed that there had been no development in educational methods and thus did not make any distinction between the different periods: optime intellegitur rationem docendi semper eandem fere

fuisse. 3Quintilian, Inst.Or. I 1, 21 -2 4 . Quintilian reflects on the fact that Philip o f Macedon had entrusted the early education o f his son to Aristotle for good reasons, and that the best philosopher o f those times had accepted because he was aware that the rudiments, those studiorum initia, were fundamental. Thus, as Quintilian describes the first years o f learning, he pretends to have on his lap young Alexander, fingamus igitur Alexandrum dari nobis

impositum gremio, dignum tanta cura infantem. 4About all these methods see Harvey 1978. See also below, pp. 143-44.

IDENTIFYING SCHOOL EXERCISES

reproduced only whole alphabets.5 However, exercises done by students include examples of individual letters of the alphabet written in random order6 as well as examples of partial or whole alphabets,7 and I have considered these two as separate and sequential stages in the learning of the alphabet. Although one might object that the two stages could be com­ plementary, since students who were in the process of learning the alphabet and who knew how to write letters in alphabetical order might need to practice individual letters, two con­ siderations make the separation of the two stages desirable. First of all, the texts in which mere beginners write letters not in alphabetical order show more untrained hands than the texts where entire or partial alphabets are written;8 secondly, examples that exhibit individual letters written by beginners belong exclusively to the Byzantine period.9 Even though, as always, the random nature of the texts that have survived may be partially responsible for the finding that in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods students did not practice letters outside of the alphabetical sequence, another explanation needs at least to be taken into consideration. Practicing individ­ ual letters appears to have been a favorite scribal exercise, and about half of the examples of exercises in this category were written by more or less proficient and advanced scribes.10 One can venture to say that this scribal trial, which has something in common with the practicing of scales by a musician, influenced the process of teaching letters in Byzantine schools, where teachers required students to practice the letters they had just learned or that gave them some trouble. Examination of the various hands is of crucial importance in distinguishing exercises in which scribes practiced letters from those of beginner students, since the relative proficiency and the elaborate traits of a scribal hand are usually evident.11 It appears that scribes did not practice whole rows of alphabets, one after the other, as students did.12 Conversely,13 when students were able to write letters without assistance, they did not persist in the practice of whole rows of identical letters in turn, since they were not required to strive toward that fluency and perfection in writing that was the evident goal of a scribe.14 A student had to acquire real familiarity not only with the name, the sound, and the appearance of the letters of the alphabet but also with their place in the alphabetic sequence and out of the regular sequence, since this enabled him to recognize the letters when part of words. 5Exercises 5 and 38 are only apparent exceptions, since the look of the script, and the repeating of the exercise by the more proficient hand, makes more likely a scenario of students’ cooperation and work on the same piece. 6See nos. 1 to 40 in the Catalogue. 7See nos. 41 to 77. 8About this, see p. 131. 9The fragmentary exercises 1, 2, and 3, which belong to the Ptolemaic period, are too ambiguous to be taken into account, since the letters seem to be followed by faint traces o f other letters and could thus be the initial letters of a list of words. 10Many more examples, not included in the Catalogue, testify to this scribal practice: sometimes scribes prac­ ticing writing in scribal schools interrupted what they were writing, for instance formulas or documents, to practice identical letters in rows. 1'Debut 1986, 251 complains o f the tremendous difficulty in distinguishing students’ and scribal hands, but her problems derived mainly from a lack of direct examination o f the hands. 12See, e.g ., 160. 13According to Bonner 1977, 168, students practiced this kind of exercise, but then the examples that he cites in note 19 are all written by scribes. 14An exception is 404, where it is unclear whether the student of tablet 5 was imitating a typical scribal exercise or was an apprentice scribe at the very beginning.

TYPES OF TEXTUAL MATERIAL

39

The most common exercise concerning the alphabet that a student was required to practice was the writing of letters in horizontal rows in reversed order,15 an exercise in which mistakes and erasures testify to pupils’ struggle to remember the correct sequence. A more difficult exercise consisted of pairing the letters, the first with the last, the second with the last but one, and so on, an exercise that supposedly forced students to recall the exact order of a letter in the sequence. At times some cheating came into play, as ostracon 44 shows: the student had to write down two alphabets, one in regular and one in reversed order, coupling the letters and setting them side by side in vertical columns. But an examination of the letters and of the ink reveals that, instead of writing alpha next to omega at the start, continuing to pair the letters in this fashion down the column, he wrote the first alphabet in its entirety and then wrote the sec­ ond starting from the bottom of the column up, proceeding therefore again in regular, ascend­ ing order. Students were not asked to write down more difficult exercises, which consisted of regularly skipping a fixed number of letters, as in writing alpha, epsilon, iota, and so on to the end of the alphabet, and then going back to beta, zeta and continuing in this fashion.16 These exercises only appear in teachers’ models, sometimes in conjunction with syllabaries: the let­ ters were supposed to be recognized and perhaps pronounced aloud by the pupils. Quintilian alludes to this kind of exercise when he says that the instructors should write letters in various orders so that the students can learn to recognize them by their appearance and not by their place in the alphabet (varia permutatione turbent donec litteras qui instituuntur facie norim., non ordine).17 Another exercise used in the Greek and Roman schools to reinforce knowledge of the alphabet consisted of the so-called chalinoi (χαλιροί).18 These were alphabets in scrambled order which joined together sequences of letters that were difficult to pronounce. In spite of the ancients’ attempts to attribute some meaning to these strings of letters, they did not form real words. The chalinos most popular in papyri is κναζζβι,χ, θυπτης, φλεχμο, δρωψ, which was also used in the training of scribes19 and appears twice in the school exercises.20 Clement of Alexandria testifies to the existence of two more chalinoi used in schools and calls them “models of copying for children.”21 According to Clement, Apollodorus of Corcyra referred to a magical usage of these alphabetical formulas: children and the common people sang them together to heal Miletus from the plague.22 Clement quotes in addition the fourth Iamb of Cal­ limachus, who knew of the same usage of this formula.23 Parts of the formula also appear in a fragment attributed to Thespis, the description of a sacrifice to Pan consisting of milk, cheese, 15See, e .g ., 43 and 83. 16See, e .g ., 60 (verso). 12See Inst. Or. I I , 25. 18See Quintilian, Inst.Or. I 1, 37. 19See P.Köln IV 175, where an accomplished scribe also practices parts o f Psalms and tachygraphy, and the exercise repeated on the back o f a Coptic letter: F. W isse, “Language Mysticism in the Nag Hammadi Texts and in Early Coptic M onasticism,” Enchoria 9 (1979) 110 no. 9.

20See 60 and 79. 21See Clement, Strom. V 8 48.4-9; 49.1; 359.1-9; 360.3 Stählin-Früchtel: ύποχραμμοι παιδικοί. 22Clement, in Strom. 8 4 8 .8 -9 and 359-360, also gives a Christian explanation o f the various “words” o f our chalinos. According to Cornelia Römer, P.Koln. IV 175, Porphyry had explained the words in a different way, as reported by Richard Bentley, Epistula ad Millium (Introduction by G.P. Goold, Toronto 1962) 301-304 (the frag­ ment has not yet been published). 23See Callimachus fr. 194, 2 8 -3 1 , Pfeiffer I 179.

IDENTIFYING SCHOOL EXERCISES

and wine, in which the different “words” are glossed with made-up meanings apparently intended to make fun of school practices.24 It is bizarre that from here they found their way to Hesychius’ Lexicon, acquiring the status of real words.25 In traditional education scribes and students used these formulas as writing exercises. Quintilian also remarks that all these difficult sounds together helped students to improve their pronunciation, and tablet 60 testifies to that, since both exercises of this teacher’s model were supposed to be read aloud. It is interesting that κναξ, a word glossed by Hesychius as “white milk” (γάλα λευκόν), already appears in the early Ptolemaic 379 (line 36) as part of a list of words that contains several rare terms, which were probably all chosen because of their challenging sound combinations. It is likely that Quintilian, who describes chalinoi as “words and verses of studied difficulty, formed of many syllables that go badly together and are harsh and rugged in sound,”26 also classifies under this term those pseudo-epic hexameters containing all the letters of the alphabet, which were part of traditional scribes’ training.27 Verses such as “he kindled the altar for the gods, and the fire flame gushed forth very strongly” (βωμόν o y'rj\j/e θεοίς ξαμενη δε πυράς κεχυτο φλόξ) were used as writing and pronunciation exercises and appear in both teachers’ models and students’ work.28 They continued to be popular in medieval times, as evidenced by their presence in var­ ious manuscripts,29 and correspond to analogous Latin verses containing all the letters of the alphabet that were used in education until the Middle Ages.30 Even though it is never mentioned by modern histories of ancient education, the evi­ dence from Roman and Byzantine school exercises proves that the most immediate goal of a student learning the letters of the alphabet was to be able to inscribe his own name. I shall con­ sider this question in a later chapter,31 but for now it will suffice to say that exercises showing individual letters and alphabets exhibit at times the name of the student who wrote them. Apakire, for instance, the student of 40 , had clearly just learned to hold a reed pen when he traces his name on a tiny piece of papyrus, adding beneath it a few more letters that are barely recognizable. We can only hope that his education continued beyond this first attempt. Syllabaries One of the elementary stages of education was combining the letters of the alphabet into syll­ ables and mastering a syllabary. The school exercises show that syllabaries could come in dif­ ferent forms.32 Usually they exhibit the series of vowels written vertically in a column, with the consonants running horizontally, combining with the vowels in turn, and with the different 24See TrGF 833 fr. 4, Snell 1 F 4.66. The fragment was probably falsely attributed to Thespis. 25See Reinhold Merkelbach, “W eisse K N A SZB I-M ilch,” ZPE 61 (1985) 293-96. 26See Inst. Or. I 1, 37: nomina quaedam versusque adfectatae difficultatis ex pluribus et asperrime coeuntibus

inter se syllabis catenatos et velut confragosos quam citatissime volvant. 27See PSI XII 1293. 28See 48, 61, 66, 287. Particularly interesting is exercise 253, which preserves several examples o f verses starting and ending with the same letter as well as verses that could also be read starting from the end {καρκίνοι). Unfortunately the section with the verses containing all the letters o f the alphabet is extremely fragmentary. 29See Dieter Hagedorn, “Zwei Spielverse,” ZPE 2 (1968) 65-69. 30Bischoff 1966, 7 9 -8 6 discusses several examples o f this kind of verse. 31 See pp. 146-48. 32See nos. 78 to 97 in the Catalogue.

TYPES OF TEXTUAL MATERIAL

41

sets separated by vertical and horizontal lines.33 At times, however, the consonants were writ­ ten in a vertical series (82), and the various sets ran horizontally without much separation between them (93). Although generally syllabaries started with a consonant followed by the various vowels in turn, sometimes vowels came first.34 In triliteral series the same consonant or a different one followed the changing vowel, while two consonants preceded the vowel and one followed it in quadriliteral sets.35 Especially in quadriliteral series the combinations of sounds were sometimes harsh and unusual, and this is probably why some teachers’ models occasionally skip a series, a mistake done quite on purpose.36 Mistakes of various kinds abound in syllabaries written by students,37 which are approximately half of the syllabaries considered. Since this kind of exercise generated a great deal of boredom, after the first sets the student started to tire and lose concentration. The syllabary of Apollonios, 78, provides a good example. Even though Apollonios starts by writing tiny and careful capitals that deteriorate and become more cursive as he goes along, nonetheless the general appearance of his exercise is neat enough. An examination of the content, however, reveals mistakes, omis­ sions, whole series skipped, and some series reintroduced on second thought. Among the mis­ takes committed by students, three are interesting in so far as they show that students at this level often could not distinguish vowels and consonants: iota and omicron were treated both as vowels and consonants and combined with all the vowels in turn.38 The result was that bizarre sets were produced, which consist of two or three iota’s or omicron’s side by side.39 In addition to seven teachers’ models, three schoolbooks containing syllabaries are included in the Catalogue.40 They are pages of codices with page numbers and are made of fine papyrus. In each case the hand writes fluently in the so-called “Alexandrian majuscule” style.41 Although these schoolbooks were professionally produced, the type of elementary exercise they contain undoubtedly points to a school product. Syllabaries were fundamental in teaching read­ ing, and books of this kind continued to be produced in the Middle Ages to help children acquire a rapid command of this skill.42 Quintilian stresses that all the syllables had to be learned, there were no shortcuts, and a pupil had to gain command of the most difficult and unusual combinations.43 According to 33See, e .g ., 78 and 83. 34See, e .g ., 86 and 96. 35See 79, 80, 91, 379. 36See, e .g ., 379 lines 9 -2 0 , p. 4. 37See the various mistakes in 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 96. 38See iota treated as a consonant in 83 and 96, and omicron also combined with all the vowels in turn in 82, line 9. 39Thus, for instance, in 83 after the theta series (θα,θ-θεθ-θηθ-θιθ and so on) the iota series begins: ιαι-ιει-ιτμu i.

40See 81, 84, 97. 41This is a style already attested in the second century AD, but it reached its peak in the fifth-sixth centuries. Starting from the ninth century, it was used exclusively for Coptic texts. See Guglielmo Cavallo, “Grammata Alexandrina,” JÖBG 24 (1975) 23 -5 4 and Antonietta Porro, “Manoscritti in maiuscola alessandrina di contenuto profano. Aspetti grafici, codicologici, filologici,” Scrittura e Civiltà 9 (1985) 169-215. 42See the examples from the fifteenth century cited by Bischoff 1966, 75 note 12. The introduction o f one of these syllabaries, called tabula coniunctionum litterarum (Cotton Titus D. XVIII foil. 5 -6 ), stresses that the aim of the exercise was to help children to learn to read quickly, tabula alphabeti quae multum valet ad instruendum

pueros ut citissime bene ubique legant. 43See lnst.Or. I 1, 30: syllabis nullum compendium est; perdiscendae omnes nec, ut fit plerumque, difficillima quaeque earum differenda.

42

IDENTIFYING SCHOOL EXERCISES

Plato, children were exposed to the easiest syllables first and learned with time to recognize the most complicated by comparison.44 Teachers needed to keep syllabaries handy for their stu­ dents and most of the time wrote them on models that provided the basis for the recitation aloud of the different combinations. Athenaeus relates that in the fifth century BC the Athenian poet Callias had composed a play, an “Alphabet Show” {γραμματική θεωρία), in which the 24 women of the chorus, who represented the letters of the alphabet, were paired and came on the stage singing the different sets.45 On one of the models, 92, a teacher writes out only the initial and final columns of a syllabary. The sets in between are left blank after the first two combina­ tions so that the students had to make them up themselves, either writing them down or pro­ nouncing them aloud. It was one of those “hateful songs,” odiosa cantio, frequently used in elementary education in antiquity.46 Lists o f Words According to the ancient Greek and Roman testimonia, after the syllabaries students were exposed to words (οράματα).47 The school exercises present a considerable number of lists of words of various content, length, and accuracy, and organized according to various princi­ ples.48 But long before entering into Greek and Roman education, lists of words were an integral part of ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian education. In Mesopotamia, where such lists were continuously copied throughout the third millennium, the entries formed semantic groups: trees, animals, toponyms, titles and professions, and so on.49 Didactic texts, termed Onomastica and entitled “Teachings,” were also a fundamental part of the school syllabus of ancient Egypt, where their scope was to present and organize everything in creation.50 These lists were supposed to be learned by heart and copied, as passages from them written by stu­ dents on writing boards and ostraca show. Like the Mesopotamian lists, the Egyptian lists cov­ ered the most various and extensive material: gods and their shrines, parts of the human body, features of nature and of everyday life. The aim of these lists was to learn the graphic signs of the writing system, achieve an elementary vocabulary, and categorize the surrounding world, helping archaic societies understand themselves. A similar aim was claimed for the lists of words used in Graeco-Roman schools: stu­ dents were supposed to learn them by heart, receiving from them a good general education.51 But although memory played a great role in ancient education, and Quintilian regarded it as a sign of intelligence in young learners, to be carefully cultivated,52 none of the ancient sources 44See Polit. 278 B. 45Athenaeus X 453 d-f. See Svenbro 1993, 183-86. 46St. Augustine, Conf. 1 1 3 , applies the words to songs used to learn number additions, one and one makes two and so on, and declares his total dislike for them. 42See, e.g ., the account o f Gregory o f Nyssa, De beneficentia IX 12-13. 48See nos. 98 to 128 in the Catalogue. 49See Nissen, Damerow, and Englund 1993, 105-106. 50See H. Brunner, Altägyptische Erziehung (Wiesbaden 1957) 93-98 and Eyre-Baines, 1989, 94-95. 51See Janine Debut, “De l ’usage des listes de mots comme fondement de la pédagogie dans l ’antiquité,” REA 85 (1983) 261-74; J. Debut, “La didactique du grec après la conquète de l’Égypte par Alexandre,” IL 37 (1985) 21-27. 521st. Or. I 3, 1 : ingenii signum in parvis praecipuum memoria est. Memory should be trained from the beginning, not to lose precious time, Inst.Or. I 1, 19: non ergo perdamus primus statim tempus, atque eo minus, quod initia litterarum sola memoria constant. For the importance of training children’s memory see also Plutarch, Περί παιδων ά^ωγης 9 E.

TYPES OF TEXTUAL MATERIAL

43

speaks of such use of lists of words,53 while they regard the introduction of whole words as a mandatory step in teaching reading and writing. Undoubtedly this was how most of the lists in the exercises were used. About three-fourths of the lists present either words divided into syll­ ables or words arranged in groups according to the number of syllables—that is, lists of bisyll­ ables, trisyllables, and so on. Starting from the Roman period most of these lists follow an alphabetical order or are organized in sets starting with an identical letter. While about half of the lists were copied by students, the other examples appear in teachers’ models, mostly on tablets, which were passed around in class or used to teach reading individually.54 Some of these lists seem a curious and extreme application of the principles that governed syllabaries. On model 124, for instance, where a teacher inscribed names from history, geography, and the Bible with many spelling mistakes, in the columns of words starting with a consonant, the con­ sonant is followed by each of the vowels in turn, in the same order as in the syllabaries. One cannot but suspect that, when the teacher could not produce a suitable word but still wanted to follow the correct vowel sequence, he simply made one up.55 The same scenario applies to exercise 100, in which many of the common nouns copied by a student appear to have been totally fabricated for the occasion. Since this rather immature student was probably incapable of devising independently such an organized list, one must conclude that a teacher made up this bizarre hodge-podge with total disregard for the reality of the Greek language.56 The remainder fourth of the lists, which were organized by subject and consisted of names from history and mythology, names of gods, proper names, and months and days of the week, were not used specifically to teach reading. These lists, particularly those that were of limited extension and presented items of general knowledge, might have been drawn up by stu­ dents as an aid to memory.57 Finally, it is likely that a few longer lists were compiled by teachers as an aid to teaching. Thus the long list of the papyrus codex 390 was probably writ­ ten by a teacher who wanted to jot down the words that he intended to use.58 Likewise, in ostracon 113, which was originally quite large, appear three"incomplete lists of names, which were inscribed by a hand fluent but not completely even because of the irregular surface. It is likely that a teacher inscribed the big sherd and kept it at hand to draw from it the names that he intended to dictate to his class: the ostracon functioned as a reference book. Writing Exercises The aim of writing exercises was improvement of the handwriting: beginners practiced letter shapes imitating teachers’ hands in the models, while older students attempted to acquire more fluent hands or to learn more elaborate styles, going beyond the basic kind of script that they 53Janine Debut, “L'apprentissage du grec en Égypte ou le changement dans la continuité,” STCl 25 (1987) 12 admits that this is a difficulty, but ignores it in her other articles (cited in note 52). In elementary education memory was trained by learning maxims, sayings, and chosen passages from the poets, see Quintilian, Inst.Or. 1 1, 36 and Seneca, Ep. 33, 7. 54In addition to the models containing lists that appear in the section Lists o f Words, other models presenting lists are 308, 379, 380, 390, 395, 400, 411. 55See, e .g ., in col II line 2, the strange word (?) δελεφαντα. 56This is the opinion o f Jean Bingen, “L'exercice scolaire PUG II 5 3 ,” CdE 113 (1982) 107-10. 57See 108, 110, 117, 118, 119, 122, 150. See also the more specialized lists o f birds in 116 and 123.

58The fluent hand influenced by the chancery style, the professional look of the decorative paragraphoi, and the remarkable lack of mistakes point to writing done by a teacher. See also 99, 380.

IDENTIFYING SCHOOL EXERCISES

had practiced in the first years. Writing exercises consist either of the repetition of an identical example or of the imitation of a teacher’s model inscribed on the same papyrus or tablet or on a different tablet of the same notebook.59 It is in this category of exercises that the most homo­ geneous group of teachers’ models can be found: about half of the writing exercises were penned by teachers on models together with the student’s copy.60 A consistent group of trials of scribes, which exhibit the repetition of very simple patterns, generally conjunctions or iso­ lated words, are also included.61 About half of the writing exercises consist of maxims, mostly taken from the poets: the practice of “making a selection from the leading poets of the maxims into which they have put their best thought” was very widespread.62 The gnome (-γνώμη, sententia) was a basic part of students’ education from the first to the later years.63 While Seneca relates that young adults continued to memorize them even later, to the detriment of a more complete education, he approves of an early use of maxims in elementary instruction, “for single maxims sink in more easily when they are marked off and bounded like a line of verse...they can be comprehended by the young mind that cannot as yet hold more.”64 It was only necessary to enter a school to see maxims of important philosophers inscribed on teachers’ models.65 Quintilian too speaks of verses set for practice in writing and advocates the use of maxims of moral value, which could convey some useful exhortations.66 Children were supposed to learn maxims by heart, for they could form their character and would be remembered till old age. “This is why,” says Aes­ chines “we memorize as children the maxims of the poets, so that we can make use of them when we are adults.”67 Elementary schoolmasters were known to indulge in the use of maxims. Galen relates that Chrysippus filled his treatises with quotations from famous poets, from whom gnomai were drawn to illustrate every point, and that he was criticized for being guilty of “the garrulity of an old woman, or perhaps of a school master who wishes to list as many verses as possible under the same thought.”68 In later years, under the tutelage of the gram­ marian and the rhetorician, students were still supposed to collect maxims to study and develop in compositions.69 59As was explained above on p. 31, note 31, a few exercises that do not follow these patterns are included in this category. See 131, 140, 143, 173. 60But notice 139. In this case the pupil’s copy was probably lost. 6'Tw elve exercises are likely to have been penned by apprentice scribes. 62See Isocrates, Ad Nie. 44: εϊ τις έκλέξειε των προεχόντων ποιητών τάς καλουμένας γνώ μας , έφ ’ αίς

εκείνοι μάλιστ1 έσπούδασαν. 63For the use o f maxims in education and compilations known as gnomologia, see John Barns, “A new gnomologium: with some remarks on gnomic anthologies,” C