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Raffaella Cribiore. Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Princeton, 2001.
What is the best metaphor for education? The one from which this book takes its title –gymnastics of the mind–is surely a strong candidate. In this excellent analysis of ancient education, Rafiella Cribiorri credits Isocrates with the phrase. On the very first page, she also cites the Roman imperial satirist, Lucian, who suggests another image that will become a theme across this work: the hill of learning. In his Hermontimus—a satire of contemporary schools of philosophy—Lucian describes the arduous journey required to reach the heights of learning: "Very far off dwells virtue, as Hesiod says, and long and steep and rough is the way thither." Many will start the journey, but few will summit. This is the ordo docendi, the “fixed order that characterized knowledge and its inculcation…and the meticulous mental gymnastics required to master it.”
The subtitle is potentially off putting but it is a good historical anchor: “Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt.” Nearly 1,000 years are covered by Prof. Cibiari’s bibliography, from Isocrates (flourished 400 BC) to her hero, Libanius (died AD 393). The geography is similarly wide-ranging, from Syria to Spain. Like “Western,” the classical is “cosmopolitan” by 90% of the definitions of that term. But this is no triumphalist Western Civ text. Arguably one of the best pictures of ancient education in the region, Cribiore says, is a nineteenth-century photograph of an Egyptian teacher. Six boys are gathered around him, sitting outdoors on the ground. The teacher sits in a chair—and holds a stick—that Greeks and Romans (even two thousand years earlier) would have recognized as tools of the educational trade.
Egypt is home to Oxyrhynchus, the ancient landfill that since its discovery around 1900 has been one of the most significant archaeological finds of the last century. The giant mound of papyri and ostraca continues to influence the field of classical studies today. Cribiore (who passed away in 2023 after a long career at Columbia and NYU) is an internationally renown papyrologist, and her passion for the ancient artifacts shines through her scholarly prose. It is best to think of Cribiore in this work as a curator, or a guide, rather than merely a specialist. She includes many illustrations and photographs of objects. Images and translations of many of the papyri are available at an Oxford University website.
One of the great strengths of this work is highlighting both the familiar and the foreign aspects of ancient education. Teachers (low-paid, with little job security) complain about students; students moan about teachers, and both tend to be under unwelcome supervision of parents. Cribiore has at her disposal a relatively little-known trove of delightful letters between students and their parents that keep the work grounded. Probably the strongest example of this is the chapter on books, methods, and writing materials (5)—a valuable survey of the realia of ancient classrooms. Here, the same Lucian is cited, but this time he is describing a fascinating scene where his father encourages him to become a sculptor because of the tiny figurines (“horses, oxen, and sometimes men") that the young student created out of wax. The wax belonged in his writing tablet—a prized “school supply.” Its misuse resulted in Lucian being whipped by his teacher more than once. The episode is rather like a parent suggesting architecture as a future career for a child who removed the keys from a laptop, repurposing them as “building blocks.”
This book is pretty straightforwardly divided by theory and praxis. The first half is practical, the second more analytical. One walks away from the first half—a survey of ancient school models and their inhabitants—with the same impression that results from reading the most well-known ancient Greek and Roman sources, from Plato to Quintilian: “Uniformity and consistency did not characterize ancient schools.” Education was a competitive “market,” and there was a remarkably independent ethos, even something approaching “DIY.” So far, so familiar to those of us excited about Classical Education. On the other hand, there are a few aspects of ancient education that I would call unfamiliar or at least unsettled within the 21st-century iteration of Classical Ed. I’ll end by commenting briefly on these: first, the trivium; second, reading; and third, aristocracy.
Cribiore does not use the term “trivium,” but the final three chapters are on what we could call Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. While her descriptions of the nature of ancient grammar and rhetoric will be familiar to some, they deserve careful attention—particularly because the are so well-documented. Though these terms do not map onto the ancient world, their contents overlap our current categories to some extent. Cribiore sees three “circles of learning.” These overlap. In other words, the student who would climb the hill of learning takes a circuitous path. I imagine a spiral; material previously studied is revisited at each successive level. Cribiore's analysis of the definition of grammar in Dionysius of Thrax should be compared to the famous essay by Dorothy Sayers. (This is a conference paper panel waiting to happen.)
Chapters 6 and 7 are particularly significant where reading pedagogy is concerned. Reading was fundamentally different before books (2nd century) and punctuation (7th?). Cribiore’s descriptions of the difficulty of task—hard for moderns to imagine—are brain-bending, and in conversation with historical scholarship on reading, the book, and technology. As to aristocracy: Lucian’s vision of mountaineering (like Plato’s of a celestial chariot, also cited by Cribiore) are obviously less than democratic. Paedeia is not for everyone. Or is it? The evidence Cribiore marshals suggests to me that this complex issue is worth pursuing further.
If Classical Education’s relationship with the period that used to denote Greece and Rome (ca. 750 BC - AD 470) is less than obvious in the twenty-first century, this book is a significant reminder that the “Classical” denominator is worth preserving in part because it can refer to a specific time and place that is far removed from, but intimately related to, our own.
Joshua Kinlaw is Affiliate Assistant Professor Of Classical Education at the University of Dallas.