IF YOU GO LOOKING FOR CHILDREN’S STORIES IN THE earliest examples of the written word that come down to us, then for the most part you look in vain. But not entirely. In 1896, a pair of archaeologists were digging in the rubbish dumps of a ruined and all-but-forgotten city, now called Oxyrhynchus, in a backwater of the then Ottoman Empire. Here, among the detritus, they discovered a cache of papyri, perfectly preserved for a millennium and a half, that have been exercising scholars nonstop for the 150 years since.
As well as innumerable bureaucratic bits and pieces – census returns, wills, bills of inventory and so forth – the rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus have yielded lost poem-fragments of Sappho, Pindar, and Homer; diagrams from Euclid’s pioneering mathematical work; scraps of Plato and an unknown play by Sophocles, Old Testament apocrypha, and some of the earliest surviving Greek texts of the New Testament. But also found there, just under twenty-five by ten centimeters in size, is what concerns us here: volume XXII, Papyrus 2331.
On this fragment, yellow with age, are a few lines from a thirdcentury ce poem in Greek about the first labor of Heracles, the killing of the Nemean lion. The poem is an “elementary text written in simple style and diction and crude meter,” and the words, unusually for the classical world, are written with spaces between them rather than squashed up together. The whole presentation seems designed to make the text easy to read and, perhaps, memorize or declaim out loud. Also, again unusually, it is illustrated. There are three little cartoons embedded in between the lines of the text – and in the best-preserved you can still see the green of the grass on which the lion stands; flashes of yellow in the hero’s hair as he wrestles the beast.
Is this the very distant ancestor of a modern children’s picture book? The literary historian Seth Lerer* writes of this fragment: “It is, perhaps, something of a children’s book itself: a little illustrated drama for the reader weary of rhapsodes and grammarians.” Over a difference of seventeen centuries, in other words, it may just be possible to detect a quality coming off that text like light reaching us faintly from a distant star. It’s a quality that is present in all the children’s writing worth talking about – and that is often present even when it is not intended by the author. That quality: delight.
But let’s not go overboard. Here was a text that was, probably, aimed at children. Yet it was still not a children’s story so much as an adult story truncated, simplified, adapted for the attention span and reading or listening comprehension of a child. The delight is there, but it’s incidental. And it’s all but a one-off. As Lerer writes, in the classical world “the two poles of early learning were memorization and recitation. Students would be given passages from poets and dramatists and would be expected to learn and then recite them.”† Therefore “the study of children’s literature in this period is not the study of particular works written for children, but the study of how pre-existing texts were adapted for children: how Homer gets excerpted into schoolbooks, how virgil was parsed, how plays and lyric poems could be reread and retaught with increasing complexity of grammatical, stylistic and ethical analysis.”
Documents have survived that look a lot like primers. One, a Greek-language scroll discovered in Egypt, was described by the Egyptologists O. Guéraud and P. Jouguet as “un livre d’écolier du IIIe siècle avant JC,”* “a schoolbook from the third century bc.” It begins with tables of letters, numbers and syllables, names of the gods of Olympus, rivers and mythological heroes, moves on to two passages of Euripides “designed to teach word division and the caesura,” and in the second half is an anthology of poetry including passages from The Odyssey, epigrams and extracts from comic plays. The classical canon was clipped down for educational purposes – and the emphasis would have been more on the grammatical or rhetorical parsing of bits of text than on imaginative engagement for the sake of it. Texts were adapted to children’s capacities, you could say, but not their dispositions.
In other words, there wasn’t a distinct children’s literature because there wasn’t a distinctive idea of childhood as we have today. Children were apprentice adults, and the defining virtue of the adult Athenian (or, later, Roman) was rhetorical excellence. Children – male, obviously – were being prepared, as quickly as possible, for the duties of citizenship. And citizenship meant eloquence. Indeed, one Greek word for child, nepion, translates as “no word”: a child was a person who didn’t know how to speak.
But the pleasure principle will always, somehow, win through – and perhaps it is for that reason that the abrupt reverses, anthropomorphic animals, sharp (if, to us, sometimes eccentric) morals, and trickster antagonists of Aesop’s fables have cast so long a shadow over the history of children’s writing.
* Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature, [p].
† Ibid.
* O. Guéraud and P. Jouguet, “Un livre d’écolier du IIIe siécle avant J.-C.,” Publications de la Societé Royale Égyptienne de Papyrologie; Textes et Documents II (Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1938, [p]).