Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) was born in the town of Stagira in northern Greece, where his father served as physician and advisor to King Philip of Macedon. At age seventeen Aristotle was sent to Athens to be educated and may have initially enrolled in Isocrates’s school, but soon found his way to Plato’s Academy where he apparently began to write compelling dialogues, though only fragments of these have survived. In about 347 Aristotle left Athens to escape the rising antipathy toward Macedon, whose power was growing under Philip. After spending five years in Asia Minor, Aristotle traveled to Macedon at the invitation of Philip to tutor his son, Alexander the Great, who was then about thirteen years old. After a few years of intermittent tutoring, Aristotle returned to Stagira and then to Athens, where he opened his school, the Lyceum, in 335.
The subsequent decade was relatively uneventful in the political life of Athens due to the circumscribed autonomy that the city enjoyed within the Macedonian empire, which Alexander was rapidly expanding eastward. At the Lyceum Aristotle took advantage of this calm to pursue disciplined inquiry into virtually every field of knowledge. To convey his findings, Aristotle customarily lectured to his students while strolling in the covered walk-way (peripatos) of the Lyceum, a practice that gave the name “Peripatetics” to Aristotle’s school. In 323 the sudden death of Alexander precipitated a revolt throughout Greece against Macedonian rule. In the midst of this resurgent antipathy against Macedon, Aristotle was indicted for impiety and fled lest the Athenians “sin twice against philosophy,” as he reportedly said, mindful of the death of Socrates. Aristotle died in 322.
Selection #3 is drawn from the Politics, Book 8, which Aristotle wrote during his Lyceum period. Addressing, in part, the role and nature of education in the state, Book 8 opens with the words: “No one will doubt that the legislator should direct his attention above all to the education of youth; for the neglect of education does harm to the constitution. The citizen should be molded to suit the form of government under which he lives. For each government has a peculiar character which originally formed and which continues to preserve it. The character of democracy creates democracy, and the character of oligarchy creates oligarchy; and always the better the character, the better the government.”57 These observations lead rapidly to this selection, which became the locus classicus within the liberal arts tradition for authorizing a distinction between useful and liberal education, as famously expressed by John Henry Newman in the introduction. Why, how, and even whether Aristotle asserts this distinction are worth careful consideration.
Nevertheless, Aristotle’s argument that leaders should be educated liberally, rather than practically or technically, prevailed. By the time that the artes liberales were codified in the Roman world and adopted by Christians, the cultural elite took for granted the necessity of educating future leaders in the liberal arts, however defined.58
[Bk. 8, ch. 2; 1337a33] That education should be regulated by law and should be an affair of state is not to be denied, but what should be the character of this public education, and how young persons should be educated, are questions which remain to be considered.
[1337a36] As things are, there is disagreement about the subjects. For men are by no means agreed about the things to be taught, whether we look to excellence or the best life. Neither is it clear whether education is more concerned with intellectual or with moral excellence. The existing practice is perplexing; no one knows on what principle we should proceed—should the useful in life, or should excellence, or should the higher knowledge, be the aim of our training?—all three opinions have been entertained. Again, about the means there is no agreement;60 for different persons, starting with different ideas about the nature of excellence, naturally disagree about the practice of it.
[1337b3] There can be no doubt that children should be taught those useful things which are really necessary, but not all useful things; for [pursuits] are divided into liberal and illiberal; and to young children should be imparted only such kinds of knowledge as will be useful to them without making mechanics of them. And any occupation, art, or science, which makes the body, soul or mind of the freeman less fit for the practice or exercise of excellence, is mechanical;61 wherefore we call those arts mechanical which tend to deform the body,62 and likewise all paid employments, for they absorb and degrade the mind.
There are also some liberal arts quite proper for a freeman to acquire, but only in a certain degree, and if he attends to them too closely, in order to attain perfection in them, the same harmful effects will follow. The object also which a man sets before him makes a great difference; if he does or learns anything for his own sake or for the sake of his friends, or with a view to excellence, the action will not appear illiberal; but if done [at the behest] of others, the very same action will be thought menial and servile. The received subjects of instruction, as I have already remarked, are partly of a liberal and partly of an illiberal character.
[ch. 3, 1337b23] The customary branches of education are in number four; they are—reading and writing, gymnastic exercises, and music, to which is sometimes added drawing. Of these, reading and writing and drawing are regarded as useful for the purposes of life in a variety of ways, and gymnastic exercises are thought to infuse courage. Concerning music a doubt may be raised—in our day most men cultivate it for the sake of pleasure, but originally it was included in education, because nature herself, as has often been said, requires that we should be able, not only to work well, but to use leisure well; for, as I must repeat once again, the first principle of all action is leisure.63 Both are required, but leisure is better than occupation and is its end; and therefore the question must be asked, what ought we to do when at leisure?
[1337b36] Clearly, we ought not to be playing, for then play would be the end of life. But if this is inconceivable, and play is needed more amid serious occupations than at other times (for he who is hard at work has need of relaxation, and play gives relaxation, whereas occupation is always accompanied with exertion and effort), we should introduce amusements only at suitable times, and they should be our medicines, for the emotion which they create in the soul is a relaxation, and from the pleasure we obtain rest.64 But leisure of itself gives pleasure and happiness and enjoyment of life, which are experienced, not by the busy man, but by those who have leisure. For he who is occupied has in view some end which he has not attained; but happiness is an end, since all men deem it to be accompanied with pleasure and not with pain.
This pleasure, however, is regarded differently by different persons, and varies according to the habit of individuals; the pleasure of the best man is the best, and springs from the noblest sources. [1338a10] It is clear then that there are branches of learning and education which we must study merely with a view to leisure spent in intellectual activity,65 and these are to be valued for their own sake; whereas those kinds of knowledge which are useful in business are to be deemed necessary, and exist for the sake of other things. And therefore our fathers admitted music into education, not on the grounds either of its necessity or utility, for it is not necessary, nor indeed useful in the same manner as reading and writing, which are useful in money-making, in the management of a household, in the acquisition of knowledge and in political life, nor like drawing, useful for a more correct judgment of the works of artists, nor again like gymnastic, which gives health and strength; for neither of these is to be gained from music. There remains, then, the use of music for intellectual employment in leisure;66 which is in fact evidently the reason of its introduction, this being one of the ways in which it is thought that a freeman should pass his leisure. . . .
[1338a31] It is evident, then, that there is a sort of education in which parents should train their [children], not as being useful or necessary, but because it is liberal or noble.67 Whether this is of one kind only, or of more than one, and if so, what they are, and how they are to be imparted, must hereafter be determined.68 This much we are already in a position to say; for the ancients bear witness to us—their opinion may be gathered from the fact that music is one of the received and traditional branches of education. Further, it is clear that [youths] should be instructed in some useful things—for example, in reading and writing—not only for their usefulness, but also because many other sorts of knowledge are acquired through them. With a like view they may be taught drawing, not to prevent their making mistakes in their own purchases, or in order that they may not be imposed upon in the buying or selling of articles, but perhaps rather because it makes them judges of the beauty of the human form. To be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls.69
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.) was born into a prosperous, land-owning family in central Italy and provided with an excellent education at schools in Rome, Greece, and Rhodes. After serving in the military in his early twenties, Cicero began arguing legal cases in court and by 80 B.C. established his reputation as one of the most promising, young advocates of his day. In the following decade, he advanced his legal reputation, and entered politics by assuming a prominent position in the financial administration of Sicily.
During the 60s his political career ascended rapidly as he allied himself closely with the general and statesman Pompey, achieving a lifetime ambition by becoming a consul in 63. In 60, however, Cicero refused to support the First Triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Marcus Licinius Crassus, and Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus on the principled grounds that their military and political alliance was unconstitutional. As a result, Cicero was forced into exile in 58 when one of his political enemies became tribune and Pompey did not step forward to protect him. Returning from exile in 57, Cicero had to ally himself with the triumvirate, and this humiliation led him to retire from public life for about the next six years. During this retirement, Cicero wrote many of his philosophical and rhetorical treatises that attempted to introduce Greek learning into the Latin language and culture. This longstanding interest extended back to his earliest works in as much as the first recorded use of the Latin term artes liberales is found in Cicero’s youthful treatise On Discovery.70 This transmission was not uncreative, because Cicero selected and adapted Greek learning in order to fit the Roman situation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his masterpiece, On the Orator.
Written during the 50s, this dialogue presents two idealized Roman statesmen, Crassus (d. 53 B.C.) and Marcus Antonius (d. 30 B.C.), discussing the qualifications and the education of an orator. Selection #4 is drawn from On the Orator, which, for the next two millennia, became the classic expression of liberal education understood as a preparation for someone seeking to lead the political and social affairs of a republic.
In 51 B.C. Cicero reentered public life shortly before the civil war commenced between Julius Caesar and Pompey, then retired again after the defeat of the latter in 48. Following the assassination of Caesar in 44, Cicero once more entered politics, making the mistake of attacking Marc Antony and underestimating the capability of Caesar’s adopted son, Augustus. In 43 these two, as members of the Second Triumvirate, had Cicero hunted down and executed. His head and hands were cut off and brought back to Rome and displayed on the speaker’s platform at the Forum where he had become renowned as a statesman and orator.
[52] “Well, Antonius,” Crassus replied, “those two points which I just ran through—or, better, which I almost ignored—are easy to treat of: namely, good Latinity and clarity of style. The other points are important, complicated, diverse, and weighty; and it is on them that all admiration of one’s genius and all applause for one’s eloquence depend. For no one has ever admired an orator for speaking grammatically. If he fails at this, people mock him and not only do not rate him an orator, but scarcely a human being. Nobody heaps praises upon one who merely speaks well enough to be understood by those present, but rather regards with contempt those who fall short of this. [53] So who is it who thrills his audience? Who reduces them to stupefied awe? Whom do they reckon a god, so to speak, among all? It is the one whose style has variety, precision, and scope, and who knows how to set forth thoughts and words into the light, and who though speaking in prose creates a kind of poetic rhythm and cadence. That is the style I term ‘artistic.’ And if he controls it with due regard to the varied claims of circumstances and persons, he will deserve to be praised for the kind of excellence I call the apt and fitting style.
[54] “Antonius has declared that he has never yet seen anyone speaking at that level, and has said that the title ‘eloquent’ must be attributed to them alone. Have a laugh then, I urge you, and sneer at all those characters who judge that they have mastered the entire oratorical faculty through the precepts of these so-called rhetoricians, but do not understand what role they are playing, nor what obligations their profession imposes.72 For the genuine orator, since the entirety of human life is, after all, his domain, must have examined, understood, read, discussed, treated and acted upon all the questions that are involved in it.73 [55] Eloquence is actually a certain ultimate virtue. All virtues are equal and of the same value, I grant you, yet some seem to have a greater external beauty and luster. Such is this faculty we are speaking of, which embraces all knowledge and then explicates the sentiments and thoughts of the mind with such words that it can compel those who listen in any direction it applies itself. But the greater its power is, by just so much is there the greater necessity of it being conjoined with integrity and the highest wisdom.74 If we find we have handed on the power of eloquence to people who lack the virtues, we shall not have rendered them orators but shall have given virtual weaponry to madmen.
[56] “Yes, this method of reflecting and articulating, this power of speech is what the ancient Greeks called ‘wisdom.’ It was the source of those like . . . Solon, and it was from something similar that came our men like . . . Cato [the Elder] and Scipio—not so learned, perhaps, but characterized by a similar impulse and will of the mind.75 There were, however, others of the same wisdom, but with a different conception in respect of the purposes of life, who followed a life of calm retreat, like Pythagoras, Democritus and Anaxagoras, and who renounced the governance of states to apply themselves totally to the study of nature. And this way of life due to its tranquility and due to the charm of science in itself—a charm sweeter than anything for men—attracted more of them than was useful for the commonweal.76
[57] “You see, as these men of outstanding genius gave themselves over to study, profiting from being free of material care and from having their time at their disposal, these most learned of men abounding in excessive leisure and wealth of intellect considered that they had to have as objects of inquiry and investigation many more things than were really necessary. In the past, at least, the same instruction fostered right conduct as well as good speech. Nor were the teachers distinct, but the preceptors of ethics were preceptors of rhetoric, such as that figure Phoenix in Homer who says he was assigned to the youthful Achilles by his father Peleus to accompany him in the war, and render him ‘an orator of words and a doer of acts.’77
[58] “But just as men who are accustomed to hard, daily labor betake themselves, at times when they are kept from work by inclement weather, to ball, dice or board games, or even think up some new game for themselves in their leisure, so these philosophers, either excluded from public affairs (as if from labor) by circumstances or having chosen to go on vacation, betook themselves the ones to the poets, some to geometers and others to musicians, while yet others as dialecticians begat a new study and amusement for themselves, and used up all their time and their lives in these arts which have been discovered for the molding of the minds of the young humanely and virtuously.
[59] “But while there were some men—even a great number of them—who flourished in public life through this dual wisdom of acting and speaking, which cannot be separated,78 (such as Themistocles, Pericles and Theramenes)79 or others who were less engaged in public affairs but were, nevertheless, teachers of this two-fold wisdom (such as Gorgias, Thrasymachus, and Isocrates), there were men to be found who, through abounding in learning and talent, yet avoided civic affairs and business deliberately and on principle, and denounced oratory and rejected it.
[60] “The leader of these men was Socrates. By the testimony of all the erudite, and in the judgment of all Greece, he was a man who easily led the rest both in prudence, penetration, grace and finesse, as well as in eloquence, variety and abundance regarding whatever subject he addressed. Before his time, those who treated, discussed and taught those things that concern us now were all spoken of with one name, since the knowledge and the practice of the most exalted subjects was named philosophy. But Socrates wrested this name away, and separated two things that had been until then conjoined: judging wisely and speaking elegantly, though they together have a real coherence. Plato has passed on the genius of Socrates and his various conversations to immortality by means of his own writings, since Socrates himself did not leave a scrap of writing.
[61] “This is the point from which there arose that severance of tongue and brain—shocking, injurious and condemnable though it be—resulting in a situation where it is one group who teaches us to judge and another group who teaches us to speak. Furthermore, though the greatest number of philosophical schools, you see, virtually owed their existence to Socrates, each attached itself to some particular idea out of his varied and diverse discussions inquiring in all directions as they were, and a whole series of virtual doctrinal families were disseminated, becoming far apart and disparate and warring amongst themselves, even as all in their role as philosophers wished to be called and considered Socratic.
[62] “And first, it was from Plato himself that Aristotle and Xenocrates derived, the former establishing the name of Peripatetics for his school; the latter, that of the Academy. It was next from Antisthenes, who fell in love chiefly with the lessons in patience and firmness in Socratic conversation, that the Cynics and then the Stoics derived. Then the Cyrenaic philosophy derived from Aristippus,80 who was seduced more by those discussions about pleasure, which he and his followers defended in a straightforward way, whereas, those who nowadays measure everything by pleasure, while doing so more timidly, do not do enough to satisfy the demands of reputation (a thing which they do not reject), nor yet protect pleasure (the thing they intend to embrace).
“There were, in addition, other sects of philosophers,81 roughly all of which tried to say they were Socratic: Eretrians, Erillians, Megarians, and Pyrhhonians; but they have long been broken up and quenched by the force of the discussions of the aforementioned philosophers. [63] Of these schools which remain, however, the philosophy that has undertaken to plead for pleasure—though some may think it genuine—is yet far distant from the kind of man we seek, and whom we wish as initiator of public policy, executor of civic governance, and leader in ideas and eloquence whether in the senate, among the people, or in political trials. And yet we shall commit no injustice against that philosophy, for we shall not be barring it from a place to which it will seek access. Rather, it will reside quietly in the little gardens where it wishes, where still reclining it summons us with gentle charm away from the rostrum, the courts, the senate house: a wise plan, perhaps, considering the present state of the republic. [64] . . .
“Wherefore . . . [69] just like rivers from the Apennine peaks, so the stream of learning from the common watershed of wisdom divides, with the result that philosophers flow into the upper sea, Greek and rich in harbors, while orators slide down into this barbarous Tuscan sea with its dangerous rocks in which even Ulysses82 went astray.83 [70] Hence, for you to content yourselves with the kind of eloquence taught at present and the kind of orator who knows [merely rules of pleading in court]. . . . in a word, if you are content with this view of the orator, even adding to it what you have wished to hear from me, then you are forcing the orator back from a huge and boundless field into a truly paltry little rink. [71] But if you wish to follow the famous Pericles or even your Demosthenes, who is more familiar to us owing to the number of his writings, and if you have fallen in love with the glittering and outstanding image of the complete orator and with its beauty, then you must embrace this recent power of Carneades or that earlier method of Aristotle.
[72] “For as I have said, those masters of old right down to Socrates used to join with the art of speech, all knowledge and understanding of all things appertaining to the customs of men, to their ways of life, to virtue and to the republic. After they were dissociated by Socrates, as I have laid out, and then by all the Socratics in a similar way, philosophers came to despise eloquence and orators, wisdom. Nor was there the least contact among them except to the extent that the former borrowed from the latter, and the latter from the former; whereas they would be drawing from the same source, if they had chosen to maintain their pristine community. [73] But just as the priests of old were led by the great number of sacrifices to designate three men to be in charge of the public banquets, even though by [traditional] regulations the banquet which accompanied the games was also part of their job, in a similar way the Socratics separated practicing advocates from their ranks and from the name of philosophy common til then, although the masters of old had wished for a remarkably close alliance between speaking and reasoning.
[74] “Since this is the situation, I shall briefly beg your leave and ask that you take what I say as spoken not with regard to myself but with regard to the orator. For if in my youth my father presided over my instruction with the greatest of zeal and if I brought to the forum as much talent as I am aware of and not all that which you perhaps suppose me to have, I would not be able to claim that I have learned these matters now in view as well as I believe they must be learned. In point of fact, I presented myself to plead political cases younger than anyone else, and I was just twenty-one years old when I arraigned a man of great ancestry and eloquence before the bar of justice. I have had no school other than the forum, no teachers other than experience, laws, and institutions of the Roman people and the custom of our ancestors. [75] Despite my thirst for these arts of which I am speaking, I have tasted of them but little. . . .
“And so, as to the fact that I uphold such great science and power of doctrine, it not only is not special pleading on my behalf but is far more directed against myself and against all these ridiculous characters who profess arts of rhetoric, for I am not talking about what capacity I have, but what the orator has. Those characters write only about their technical precepts about the classification of litigation and rules of narrative; [76] yet that power of eloquence is so great that it controls the origin, nature and modifications of the totality of reality, of all virtues and duties of all nature regarding the characters, emotions and conduct of men. It goes on to determine customs, laws and covenants; to rule the republic; and to articulate everything with brilliance and abundance on whatever subject they address.”84