Professional Documents
Culture Documents
CAMBRIDGE HISTORY
OF
CLASSICAL LITERATURE
i
GREEK LITERATURE
Edited by
P.E.EASTERLING
Regius Professor of Greek in the University of Cambridge
and
B.M.W.KNOX
Formerly Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
http://www.cambridge.org
1
BOOKS AND READERS IN
THE GREEK WORLD
Do you think it is Anaxagoras you are accusing?. .. Do you think the gentlemen
of the jury are illiterate and don't know that the books of Anaxagoras of Clazo-
menae are packed full of these doctrines? So this is what the young men learn
from me, is it? Things they can buy, sometimes for a drachma at most, in the
orchestra and then laugh at Socrates if he claims they are his own. (Apol. 26d-e)
Even with due allowance made for Socratic irony and the rhetorical compli-
ment to the jurymen's literary expertise, the words used (cnrelpous ypauucrrcov)
still suggest easy availability of, and wide acquaintance with, books, and
difficult philosophical books at that. The price at which a copy of Anaxagoras
could sometimes be picked up in the 'orchestra' (an area of die market-place,
not the theatre) was once thought impossibly low; a contemporary inscription
gives the price of two chartai of papyrus (which were once taken to be single
sheets) as two drachmas four obols - more than twice the price of the book.
But an authoritative study of the history of papyrus in antiquity has established
the fact that chartai-were not sheets but rolls - so that, if the copy of Anaxagoras
were a small or second-hand volume, 'the price of the book and that of the
paper would no longer be inconsistent'.1
The book trade was not, however, confined to Athens; the city was an
exporter of books. So much might have been surmised from the fact that it was
the literature produced in Adiens, especially tragedy, which was eagerly
sought after by the rest of the Greek world; a random piece of evidence brings
some confirmation. On the dangerous shore of Salmydessus, Xenophon tells
us, where the local Thracians fought each other over die cargo washed up
from wrecked ships, the Greeks found 'many beds, many small boxes, many
written books and many of the other things that merchants transport in
wooden cases' (Anab. 7.5.14).
It is in this period that evidence begins to accumulate for the use of books
in education. For what actually went on in the primary schools we have prac-
tically no evidence; what little we have suggests that the boys (girls' schools
do not seem to have existed) were taught athletics by a paido tribes, music,
performance on the kithara and singing, by a kitharistes and dieir letters by
1
Lewis (1974) 74.
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(a) The demand for books. It seems clear that the process of Hellenization
depended to quite a large extent on the easy availability of books. What is
striking about the Greek world in the Hellenistic and Roman periods
is its cultural homogeneity despite its enormous geographical range. Writers
from all over this vast area share the same literary attitudes and quote
the same authors; and a long list could be compiled of distinguished intel-
lectuals who came from quite insignificant cities: Alexander of Cotiaeum,
Metrophanes of Eucarpia, Heraclitus of Rhodiapolis, Strabo of Atnasia,
Herodorus of Greek Susa (Seleucia on the Eulaeus).1 All this suggests a
uniform educational system and a common stock of literature, at least of' the
classics'.
There is a fair amount of evidence from the Hellenistic period onwards
for the foundation of libraries, and the sort of figures that are quoted for their
holdings support the view that books were plentiful. Quite apart from the
book collecting on a vast scale financed by the early Ptolemies at Alexandria,
where it seems to be no exaggeration to speak of many thousands of rolls,2
or the rival activity at Pergamum, there is epigraphic evidence for more modest
institutions which perhaps can be taken as more typical. An inscription of the
1
Cf. Jones (1940) 183.
' The evidence is discussed by Pfeiffer 100-z; cf. Blum (1977) cols. 140—4, 156-61.
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(&) The educational system. For the detail of the educational system most of
the evidence comes from Egypt, where the sands have preserved vast numbers
of school exercises. There is a remarkable sameness in these texts throughout
the whole period from early Ptolemaic to early Byzantine times; so far as we
can tell from the much patchier evidence relating to other areas this basic
pattern seems to have been common to the whole Greek world.
Apart from athletics, and to a lesser degree music and mathematics, which
were always part of Greek education, the major focus of attention was correct
understanding and correct use of the language. This illustrates the enormous
prestige that was accorded to fluency in Greek; it is worth noting that there
was never any general interest in learning foreign languages, and even Latin
in the Imperial period had a very restricted role in the Greek world. Great
importance was attached to correctness of form: it was not enough for
an educated person to master die current koine; one must also be able to
read classical poetry with its different dialects, and from the end of the first
century B.C. onwards more and more stress was laid on imitation of Attic
authors.1
The procedure for acquiring fluency was laborious, but we may guess so
thorough as to be quite effective. Children spent the first five years being
taught reading and writing by the elementary schoolmaster, the grammatistes.
He made them learn first the alphabet, then syllables, then whole words, then
scansion and correct syllable division: dozens of papyri and ostraca survive
to illustrate the various copying and dictation exercises that all this involved.2
The texts chosen for the copying exercises were simple but morally instructive:
maxims, fables, little stories about famous people from history or myth. There
is some evidence for girls sharing at least this elementary stage; but we do
not know how widespread the practice was, or what proportion of girls went
on to the more advanced schools.3
These were for pupils between the ages of (roughly) twelve and fifteen,
under the direction of the grammatikos ('language teacher' is a less misleading
translation than 'grammarian'). The emphasis was on reading and composing,
the subject matter mainly poetry, which was studied in an elaborately analytical
way, giving pupils a knowledge of mydaology, geography and history as
well as correct understanding of grammar and style. Work on the chosen
authors seems to have been narrow and artificial but relentlessly systematic:
reading aloud and recitation, 'construes' of the text (for the dialect, vocabu-
lary and style would differ widely from those of the koine), study of the poet's
1
Browning (1969) 49-55.
2
Listed by Zalateo (1961); specimens in Milne (1908).
3
Marrou (1965) 174-5.
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allusions so that the pupil could locate every mountain and river, give the
genealogy or exploits of every hero, retail all manner of precise and curious
detail - a preoccupation shared by the writers of later antiquity. These literary
studies were accompanied by lessons in the rudiments of composition and,
after the time of Aristarchus and his pupils (see pp. 32k), in formal grammar
(morphology but not syntax). The purpose of exercises in composition was
to inculcate correctness and fluency radier than to stimulate original expression.
In the more elementary of these so-called progymnasmata or preparatory
exercises (the rest were the province of the teacher of rhetoric) the pupil was
asked to retell a fable, or write a little narrative based on characters from history
or myth, or take the saying of some famous person and develop it, according
to strictly formal rules, into a short essay — this last was called a chria
Such was the crucial training in literary culture which gave a person a
claim to be called Greek. It was more widely influential than the more advanced
and technical teaching of rhetoric and philosophy which came later; like the
Classics as taught in the public schools of Victorian England it was a shared
basis for all educated people. Even though our evidence (school manuals
and exercises) does not suggest diat much attention was paid to the 'judgement
of poems' (Kpfcns TTOIT)U6CTCOV) which according to Dionysius Thrax (Ars
grammatica 1) is the finest part of the grammarian's craft, we can tell from
the writings of the educated - from Strabo, Galen, Plutarch, Lucian - that
such intensive reading of the poets did have its effect. Educational theory
might not be able to claim anything more than rather limited moral lessons
or a superficial interest in curious erudition as the benefits of the system,
but the material itself must often have made a more direct and exciting
appeal.
The final stages of education were the special province of die gymnasia,
which regularly maintained teachers of rhetoric (rhetores, sophistcu)1 and
sometimes had resident grammatikoi and philosophers as well (clearly the
teaching of 'grammar' might be carried on at a higher level with older pupils:
there was no hard and fast demarcation which ruled it out beyond the age of
fifteen). The ephebes of most cities could expect to be given at least an intro-
duction to rhetoric, but die most serious students would stay on for further
study after the short period of ephebic training. The regular courses given by
the local rhetorician might be supplemented by lectures or performances given
by visiting virtuosi: the line between intellectual and artiste seems to have
been difficult to draw. The heyday of the great rhetoricians was the second
century A.D., when to be a 'sophist' was to be a person of die utmost conse-
quence and influence, political as well as intellectual. Particularly notable
1
Bowersock (1969) 12-14 discusses the different nuances of these terms.
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(</) The classics. One of the major achievements of the scholars seems to
have been to provide the reading public with an authoritative definition of
'classical literature'. This no doubt reflected the popular preferences that
assert themselves when literature is exposed to the test of time (even in the
fifth century Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides clearly towered above their
fellow dramatists, as the Frogs demonstrates), but the corpus of 'best authors'
was given official recognition in the classifications made by the scholars of
Alexandria and perhaps of Pergamum,2 and came to exercise a very powerful
effect on Greek culture. Aristophanes of Byzantium is credited with dividing
literature into what modern scholarship calls 'canons' (there is no equivalent
Greek term, but we may follow Pfeiffer in using the Suda's £yKpi0£vTEs ' the
included' for the chosen authors (Latin classic!))? So in time the nine lyric
poets became established, the ten orators, the three tragedians, and so on.
The scholars tended to concentrate their work in these selected areas, which in
those days were in any case very extensive (the three tragedians had written
about 300 plays between them); the evidence from the papyri and from quota-
tions suggests that the public increasingly confined their reading to the same
authors and to a decreasing selection within those authors' works. Naturally
the demand for a work not ' included' would fade as fewer and fewer copies
circulated and the text became almost unknown. It is interesting to see that the
definition of classical literature was by no means rigid: some of the major
writers of the third century soon became 'included', among them Apollonius
Rhodius and Callimachus, fragments of whose Aetia with a very detailed
running commentary have recently been published from papyri of the third
century B.C.4
The inclusion of new authors must often have been compensated for by
the loss of older ones; and it is not surprising that with so vast a literary heritage
the readers of later antiquity liked their classics in the form of various kinds of
selection or digest or anthology. There are plenty of parallels in the modern
world: how many members of the educated public read, say, Elizabethan
sonneteers except in anthologies; how many of the works of even Shakespeare
are read in schools and generally well known?
We ought to envisage a long and probably rather desultory process of
narrowing down: in the case of tragedy, for example, the number of plays
1 2
Russell (1973) 42-3. Cousin (1935) 565^/2. * Pfeiffer 203-8.
• Meillier (197^).
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Survival
A great deal of ancient Greek literature vanished during antiquity itself or in
the course of the Middle Ages; some of it has reappeared dramatically in the
papyrus finds of the last hundred years: Menander, Bacchylides, Callimachus,
Hyperides, Aristotle's Constitution of Athens. But it was never in danger of
being completely forgotten or destroyed, because the continuity of culture on
which it depended was never wholly severed, and there was no widespread
lapse into barbarism.
The language was one of the most important factors in this story of survival.
Greek has been slow to change in the course of its long history. Unlike Latin
it never broke into a series of separate languages; and from the end of the
1
Roberts (1953) 2 7°-'> Barrett (1964) 50-3; Reynolds-Wilson (1974) 46-7.
1
This seems to have been a gradual process stretching over several centuries; cf. Turner (1968)
121-4; Reynolds-Wilson 46.
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