Greek lessons: discovering the elements of ancient education. . - book review - Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt

Education Next, Spring, 2003 by Mary Lefkowitz

By committing at least large portions of these texts to memory, students acquired a ready store of poetic phrases and vocabulary. They also learned how to structure a speech and present their arguments. They learned how to give a "true" account of a word (etymologia) by using puns to make it mean whatever would best suit their purposes. By memorizing the words of others, they learned how to structure the elements of their own compositions. It was this kind of education that the precocious young Maximus drew on when he composed his remarkable mythological "impersonation. It is not a curriculum that would appear to have encouraged exploration or originality, and it would not have won the approval of John Dewey. Nonetheless, as Cribiore points out, it instilled a lasting respect for hard work. The same learning, drill, and impersonation lie behind the work of the greatest poets of the time, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid, to name just a very few.

Mary Lefkowitz is a professor of classical studies at Wellesley College and the author of Nor Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History.