Describing the curriculum of a school can be like describing the plot of a novel. The successful summarist reduces the rich texture of discourse to a narrative list. Among the losses arising from the reduction: a summary list suppresses viewpoint—it is the particular, often retrospective scheme of analysis and discourse of one person—and the list of events suggests an evenly paced, progressive narrative. If a novel is not reducible to plot, schooling ought not to be reduced to that other textual list, curriculum, and, to complicate our analogy, the school is not simply a text or a series of linguistic occurrences. As with other modes of analysis in the treatise tradition, describing a curriculum as a canon of texts or as a series of task-oriented textual processes (writing sentences, reading fables, speaking theses) treats the process of education as the graduated booking of the child into the man, as if to say that child is immature when he can merely copy out lines from a book and has become mature when he can read a difficult book or speak like a book. The listlike narrative of curriculum suggests that it is the cultural equivalent of biological maturation, with discernible stages that anticipate and contribute to the final, perfected growth. In fact, accounts of curriculum contribute to schooling’s narrative of order and success, although it is not at all clear that learning occurs in such an ideal, progressive, and verifiable mode.
We live in an age in which assessment—the testing of schoolchildren, the visitation of classrooms and observation of classroom teaching, and the evaluation of schools—is politically mandated and has become an industry in itself, complete with readymade forms, advice-mongering videos, surveys, and treatises. In addition, in the final act of rationalization, these processes of certification have become objects of academic study and debate in the university. At the heart of this complex set of practices lies a belief that the classroom, as at times the wider school, pictures the society in miniature. Consequently, the interests and the parties involved in the study of education are both earnest and varied. The scholastic microcosm is investigated with the zeal of the anthropologist amid an exotic tribe, the psychologist confronted with the nascent mind, the criminologist with derelicts in the making, and the worried parent with visions of what her child may or could be. We should not be surprised, then, that multiple methodologies are applied to schooling and the development of the young scholar. In addition, from the institutional perspective, academic research and the publishing industry share an interest in discovering and propagating new methods (and distributable forms and reports) of analysis and new cures. Schooling never pursues a single objective. The variety of interests and of ends frustrates the theorist and reformer and impels new approaches and “solutions.”1
Certainly, the school has provided a fascinating spectacle. In need of new generations, and thus dependent on parents and on state or church authorities for the guarantee of new clientele, the school has been relatively open to inspection, admitting the nonparticipant more readily than certain courts or houses of worship. New schooling has drawn the curious; it has repeatedly been the place to view reform and the future in the making. The elder Seneca reports Roman notables visiting school speech recitals; the younger Pliny reports his invited participation in the search for a schoolteacher.2 Yet the analyst of the school should be more than a visiting celebrity, just as his or her understanding of curriculum hopes to be more than an overview of the serial encounter of the student with distinct exercises or books. For all the observation of a class’s activity, for all the generalizable data of the individually completed survey and questionnaire, the investigator of schooling hopes to verify what is an internal process—the student learning.
The following three chapters ask how the child, boy and girl, encounters and experiences, assimilates and resists, the structuring habits of the school. We still study the contents of a curriculum but without the assumption that a curriculum is a running course in which the probationary scholar hurtles past one test after another, in a progress toward a single, well-marked goal. Textbook analysis is still practiced, and not solely because of a linguistic propensity—that deeply felt belief that what is learned at school can be gauged, directed, or censored by controlling both what is read and the exercises testing or directing that reading. Modern educational research has contributed a sharp awareness of the importance of the form and context of curricular material. The set text is only the most traditional manifestation of the media of presentation, and in studying it, we examine content and strive to reconstruct the delivery of that content, the pace and manner in which it is to be learned, the description of learning that it communicates, and the sort of learning that it invites in its graphic layout, its use of tables, pictures, or drills. Such an approach, as much the result of literary and art historical studies as of cognitive psychology, hopes to uncover the norms latent in the text and in that text’s use by the student. The modern researcher looks beyond (and sometimes, it has to be said, overlooks) what has been learned of, for example, algebraic equations to ask how the word problem and its schematic, illustrative presentation influenced the student’s attitude toward learning, notions of gender roles and norms of behavior, and even his or her sense of self. Does the exercise communicate a concept of the normal? These questions, which underlie much contemporary educational research, tend to underestimate the artificial and abnormal qualities of the teaching exercise—the use of fantasy, of abstract and extreme settings and characters, of the monstrous, nonsensical, and humorous. The discussions below of fable and declamation try to approach characters, settings, and plots as cultural extremes.
A sensitivity to meta-learning (although I would prefer the term “the rhetoric of learning”) is nothing new: Plato illustrated his theory of learning with the anecdote of a slave boy who is led by drawings in sand to realization of a geometric proof. The conclusion at the level of content is that as a slave he is unschooled and so has recollected the knowledge (thanks to the soul’s prior life); but rhetorically, the message is an a fortiori argument: if a slave can do this, so much more should a free man (and how much more with the right guidance—yet the unphilosophical man, Anytus in this dialogue, will not learn, despite his free status). And, of course, Plato’s readers are also learning to leave unasked why slave and free should not learn alike and be treated alike, and instead to view the slave as an instrument in the free man’s way of life.3
Critical analyses of textbooks, whether the theoretical studies of contemporary America by Alan Luke or the historical studies of Latin schoolbooks in trecento Florence by Paul Gehl, follow ultimately the pioneering and much-disputed conclusions of D. Bernstein, who redescribed the school curriculum as a restricted code, in contrast to the unrestricted code learned at home. This basic observation cannot simply be reduced to the idea of a home language and a school language. Bernstein’s terminology and the arguments for reform that derive from it portray the difference between home and school as artificial and arbitrary. School code is in essence a means of social distinction by which the middle class protects and replicates its language and norms. Reformers, with the aid of sociolinguists, argue that the language of an underclass is equally a language and that difficulties in achievement at school can be ascribed to the novelty and strangeness of the restricted code for those who have not learned it or its precursor at home. The efforts to teach in the vernacular, to tie learning to read to the student’s current language, and to eschew a middle-class normative framework remain debated issues, but without doubt they animated a generation of teachers and researchers.4 It must be said that Walter J. Ong, although he did not have the same influence on educators, had in 1959 anticipated the anthropological approach to the language of schooling. His study of Latin teaching in the Renaissance stressed the divide made between home and school, boys and men, and women and men through the use of Latin.5
In fact, the strong distinction between restricted and unrestricted codes and the reductive view that school simply tries to inculcate an agreed-upon elitist code cannot be maintained, but such research provoked scholars to consider how school language and school texts constituted codes both social and cognitive. Thus we investigate the models of social relations and interaction, the notions of agency and appropriate behavior, implicit in school exercises. Roman schooling sought to inculcate in the elite a consciousness that to them was given the privilege and responsibility of mediating the interests of all of society. This differs perhaps from modern bourgeois school texts, which have been accused of representing their society, a normative nuclear family, as representative of all society. The far less homogenizing Roman exercise, as we shall see, admits slave, foreigner, women, and freedman, as well as a variety of professions, not all respectable, that is, to be pursued by the scholar in later life, and even purports to communicate the points of view of social and political subordinates. This seems a more elaborate social apologetics, wherein division and strife are learned, and where the medium of learning establishes and anticipates the role of the governing class in arbitrating society.
In addition, the ancient exercise differs from the modern and from some medieval school materials because it is not in form a textbook.6 Much contemporary curricular analysis attends to the ideological presuppositions inherent in the form of the textbook. The insightful work of Alan Luke, who explores both the ways the textbook models social relations and the ways it invites its reader’s interaction, calls for a new form of the textbook, one that, following Umberto Eco’s formulation, is an open not a closed text, that is, one that encourages its reader’s engagement, embellishment, and resistance. Luke sets at the head of one of his studies this sententia of Roland Barthes: “For what can be oppressive in our teaching is not, finally, the knowledge or culture it conveys, but the discursive forms through which we propose them.”7 Having Basque or Algerian children learn French in a mode and place foreign to their native culture may be oppressive, but so is their learning the content of French history in a state school from a textbook published in Paris. Barthes’s point of course was that schooling teaches a medium of knowledge, expertise, and elitism that is more formative and tenacious than the learning of content.
For the academic, the textbook is no doubt an emblem of reproduction whose form and content are outside his or her control: printed by the thousands, disseminated easily, an aide to the professional teacher but seldom authored by him or her, the textbook is one vehicle of educational standardization and censorship. For the professor, some resentment may attend the textbook: it symbolizes pre-expert but widespread instruction, the material for high schools, for introductory college courses, in short for the state of a discipline that the advanced teacher-cumresearcher often tries to deflect, moderate, and nuance. The textbook thus seems to attract interest not simply as a vehicle of education or as the lucrative branch of modern academic publishing, but as an account of an academic field that requires the professor’s voice as supplement. So colleagues debate endlessly which is the authoritative or most effective textbook, a debate matched by the ambition of the publisher to issue a comprehensive version, which of course will soon need revision and republication. It is then an object for the teacher, a committee of teachers, a board of education, or a ministry of education to select from among competing sets, and, by its very ubiquitousness, its exercises, definitions, and comprehensive representations of the subject at hand, a homogenizing and labor-saving medium that frees the teacher from providing a guiding narrative. Its closedness seems endlessly normative, iterable, and a guarantor of success.
A single book usually suffices for the modern student to pass a particular stage of the curriculum (this expectation presupposes a certain kind of reading, one for the most part silent and self-contained, directed toward the specific end task of the examination and the sorts of recall and writing it requires). The ancient exercise is a more open text than the modern textbook or even the workbook. Certainly, in learning to read and write or later in the technical exercise in memory and delivery, the ancient student was required to demonstrate strict adherence to the model provided. Lines were to be copied exactly; memorization was aimed at exact, verbatim reproduction. There was much rote learning and rule following, and even when he came to declaim, the schoolboy had to adhere to the set plot of the case (the thesis). We should not imagine an open and inventive process, although as we shall see set texts were modified, abridged, expanded, and inset into larger narratives. Ultimately, the adolescent speaker worked to develop a recognizably superior and distinctive style. Yet we must distinguish a rigorous and set curriculum from a standardized one.
No ancient textbook survives because no such standard book was produced and distributed. The idea of designing a book for pedagogic ends certainly did occur, although most instances of this are from late antiquity. In ancient education, no single book replaced a course of instruction. The late antique Latin grammar manual, Donatus’s Ars minor, comes closest to qualifying as a textbook, but the handwritten schoolbook cannot be approached as if it were equivalent to the modern printed textbook. Quintilian’s book was a guide for teachers and fathers; and in the declamations attributed to him or in Priscian’s account of how to teach the opening of the Aeneid or in the extant guides to the preliminary compositions, we have model texts, books for the teacher, parts of which were to be copied by the student.8 True, the research methods of scholars of modern education adduce questions of the normative framework implicit in an exercise, but the model of modern capitalism, with its abundance of identical objects amid a set of choices, and in particular the modern textbook with graphics and print so voluminous, precise, and complex as to be impossible for a student to imitate, do not correspond to the school materials of the Roman world. We can and should apply categories that are current in research on the modern textbook. What survives of the ancient curricular material can be fruitfully examined in terms of story structure, types of agents, indeed notions of agency, the modeling of the importance and role of the educated, the process of identification whereby the reader-student is invited to identify with the agent of the story, and social norms and background knowledge.
In fact, the curriculum often did not require the reading for writing outcome that the textbook presupposes (where the student reads in order to write a précis or analysis or essay, and the student’s writing becomes the chief mode of evaluation). Copying, memorizing, and speaking played a far more prominent role in the ancient routine of learning. Since silent reading did not constitute the medium of instruction, we need not follow the rather deterministic analysis of textbook research, which presumes the communication of a strong ideological message in a standardized written and graphic form to a receptive, passive audience of individual readers. No standardization of materials pertained within the ancient school or city, much less within Italy or the empire. Verses to be memorized, for instance, could be read from a papyrus roll or taken down on a wax tablet from a teacher’s dictation; they could be copied upon a potsherd or a piece of wood. Despite the variety of material supports and the attendant varieties of reading and writing, we should not assume an impoverished schooling marked by a scarcity of books and writing materials.9 In the Roman school, as in the Roman city, writing spaces were abundant, but not homogeneous. At a certain stage we can imagine many a student had access to a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid. A few well-to-do students will have owned papyrus rolls. Far more would have copied on a wax tablet from dictation, and many, thanks to memory training, could have done without any material text.
A student’s text in such a world is something to be embellished, condensed, glossed, recited, remembered, erased, or written over. The student’s writing is a kind of practice and routine—ephemeral in comparison to the textbook; personal, not in the romantic sense, but in what I will call the authentic sense, that is, a version made one’s own, even though made at times to be inspected and approved, but made also at times for no other’s eyes and simply an aid to memorization or the learning of vocabulary or practice in handwriting.
In the examination of the first stages of schooling, where the student will encounter fable and proverb, Homer and Virgil, we will find no single text occupying as central a role as the textbook in modern pedagogy. The systematicity of first schooling arose not from any standardized textbook, but from the curriculum and rationale that grammar provided. Grammar neither encountered the disdain in which it has languished in modern pedagogic and linguistic thinking, nor had the sublime status accorded it in the Middle Ages. Paul Gehl, Martin Irvine, and G. A. Padley among others present an understanding of grammar as a cognitive system and an intellectual routine.10 Grammar and rhetoric provided at once a rationale for learning, an explanation of the relation of language to reality and society, and the content of instruction and learning. After all, the very language of grammar and rhetoric—imitation, subordination, impersonation, the appropriate—constitutes an abstract vocabulary with which to understand the self, the group, even the political and the religious. More than merely the medium for access to culture, it was the authoritative discourse of the cultured, the rationalized network of textual practices.
This centrality of grammar was not acknowledged in antiquity. Writers of the classical and early imperial ages did not credit the achievement of their writings or the structure of their understanding to the system of grammar. Grammar was considered a complex of the rules for correct reading, writing, and speaking, and as the first presentation of literature, and was the less exalted propaedeutic to rhetoric and, for a few, to philosophy. Nonetheless, “grammar” was the formative stage in literate education. Certainly, the ancient author would have thought of himself as eloquent, trained in rhetoric, not like some schoolmaster full of grammatical detail and quibbling over minutiae. Quintilian the rhetor put grammar in her subordinate place, where she remained handmaid both to idiomatic usage and to rhetoric and was decidedly not authoritative on her own: aliud est grammatice aliud est Latine loqui (“And so I think it well said that it is one thing to speak Latin, quite another to speak by the rules,” 1.6.27).11
While grammar and rhetoric constituted a continuum of training, as Quintilian saw, Quintilian’s distinction of the Latin speaker from the grammatical speaker reflects a truth of ancient schooling. The educated saw themselves as speakers with a knowledge and expertise far in advance of those so unfortunate as to have only the linguistic resources of the grammatical curriculum. Yet grammar deserves more credit. In the far-flung empire, the literate elite were not all practicing rhetoricians or lawyers but writers of every stripe. The rhetorical curriculum, however, encouraged the view that the orator stood at the head of society. In fact, the correct writer was probably of greater service.
The progymnasmata offer the best witness to the educational program and process of grammatical instruction. The exercises, which lead the students from simple reading and writing exercises to more sustained composition, provide an explanation of their purpose and sequence, and sample texts. In reading these guides (or hearing them as the teacher’s lecture), the student is inaugurated into the rationale for the hierarchy of the long series of studies.
In their excellent studies of ancient education Henri Marrou and S. F. Bonner have provided syntheses of the course of instruction. Bonner especially sifted and examined Quintilian and the writers of progymnasmata so as to follow the child from home learning to the grammar-school teacher and on to the rhetorician.12 Whereas Bonner cautiously reminded his reader that particular functions could not be exclusively identified with discrete stages of teaching, A.D. Booth directly refuted the notion of a strong divide between primary and secondary education, that separating the grammatistēs from the grammaticus.13 Marrou had noted the tendency throughout the history of education for advanced exercises gradually to percolate down to earlier stages of education.14 Clearly, there were many ways to educate even the elite. Quintilian, for example, recommended that the rhetoricians reclaim from the grammatical teachers certain exercises.15 In Bonner’s account of the classical and early imperial periods, the child learned the alphabet and elementary reading at home; he or she practiced writing and learned to read poetry at grammatical school (and learned arithmetic there or perhaps under a special teacher, the calculator). Passing on to the rhetorician’s school, the student exchanged poetry for prose and embarked upon the series of composition exercises known as the progymnasmata.
By Quintilian’s day the grammarian was teaching far more, and the rhetorician had become all but a specialist in declamation. The précis of education is no doubt true to schoolboy experience, that is to say, the child is alphabetic before school, at first school he copies difficult texts that he is not meant to understand, and then he changes teachers for the final stage of learning to compose and to speak.16 The important question is not whether we can discern the separate teachers and divisions of curriculum (such standardization is a feature of later schools, e.g., Jesuit schools or those of the cities of Renaissance Italy) but whether we can deduce the commonality of experience, method, and outlook that made the citizen of Cordoba and the citizen of Rome feel they had a liberal education. The educated man and woman started by reading Homer and Virgil, could quote from memory passages of verse, and shared a particular academic training in how to comment upon poetry, but their education should not be reduced to the least common denominator of a canon of set texts or the forms of discourse (e.g., commentary by gloss or by etymology) upon this cultural capital.
Rather, the progymnasmata and other directives in ancient treatises suggest the mentality that the teachers wished to produce. Teachers’ wishes do not equal student practices (credite experto), and so the pronouncements of the theorists must be weighed against the practices of the child in daily scholastic routine. Thus, rather than redescribe the sequence of an ancient curriculum, I propose through study of a series of exercises to focus on the transformation of the child’s expressive abilities. I want to emphasize three foci in these changes: textual cohesion, story schema, and categorical thinking and training in persona.
Textual cohesion means more and less than the principles of storytelling. It reflects a human tendency to try to make sense of speech, facts, observations, and even shapes. In the school exercises, it is a useful term for the goal of a process in which given elements (the barest outlines of plot or the previously learned supply of maxims, anecdotes, or rhetorical figures) are deployed as narrative building units. As a subset of the techniques of constructing narratives, the student’s efforts to memorize, combine, and contextualize reported speech are particularly important. What were in origin nonnarrative sententiae (sayings copied and memorized at the outset of schooling) will be furnished with a specific speaker and context in the chreia and will in turn form the core of the stylistic recasting of fable once the student supplies two or three speakers with dueling sententiae and frames the dialogue with an opening or concluding moral (sententia yet again). This practice develops longer and more cohesive narratives. The narrative is more cohesive both because of techniques of combination and transition and because a specific, topical setting and interpretation have been added. This last quality makes clear that formal changes such as length of utterance, subordination of syntax, and the introduction of more than one speaker cannot be separated from the development of story schema itself.
Story schema refers not simply to the advanced typology or structural or thematic analysis of the narratives used in school exercises. I will use story schema to describe the learned predisposition to represent the outside world, the individual, and even the process of learning as a story.17 Schooling, and not just schooling, has shaped the young to understand and produce certain sorts of stories. Just as the production of a story is the successful end product of the school exercise, so the child will increasingly understand story as a grammatical-rhetorical form. As nursery story and subliterary fable are to be replaced by school forms, so the child learns to prefer certain kinds of story. Both the shape of the given elements—the way certain situations and characters are liable to make a story—and the process of stylization constitute story schema. Indeed, story production does not so much mean inventing fictions of one’s own as varying standard elements. To anticipate: the student learns to compose so as to remedy an insufficient treatment (the subliterary, the undeveloped) and a social or categorical impasse (the threat of violence that seems incapable of being fixed with words, like the hunger of the wolf, the aggression of the lion, or later in declamatory exercises the act of a parricide or of an uncaring and unjust father).18
Categorical thinking and training in persona are most directly exercised at the final stage of education, declamation, which has as its animating crisis some impasse in social, familial, and political categories that drives the student to write and speak. The student is presented with an intractable situation: the father who ransomed his son from pirates now forbids the son from marrying his deliverer, the pirate’s daughter. The definition of social and familial obligations combined with fantasies of escape from the father and entrance into sexuality make a potent, unpredictable composition exercise. Simply obeying the father, repeating his dicta and not inventing one’s own argument, will never do. The piece must be written and performed, and to do so the boy must learn how to divide the case into a set of critical issues. The training in analysis that underlies these divisions requires the student to apply abstract categories to particular plots. Faced with a seemingly clear-cut case of a guilty client, he may, for example, apply the technique of definition: Does the action fit the definition of murder? Whereas this categorical system, the stasis or status system, may appear a rigid, quasi-legal structure, in fact, it is the final application of the technique the school has trained him in all along—imitation. When he takes the given facts and re-represents them, he engages in the most sophisticated stage of paraphrase, which was both an individual exercise of the progymnasmata and more generally the technique that underlies all the stylization of the grammatical and rhetorical curriculum.19 The declaimer must animate the bare exercise with voices that suit the set speakers and express their motives. As he had the lamb and the fox plead their cases in fable, now he gives the appropriate voices to stern fathers, dutiful sons, stepmothers, heroes of the state, priests, freedmen, and prostitutes. This developed training in persona compels him to express viewpoints that are internally consistent but in conflict with other characters in the case. The speaker ventriloquizes the conflicts of state and family in a way that develops his own claim to authority—the ability to speak for others and to reduce important conflicts in the family and in the state to verbal duels between men.
The present and the succeeding two chapters examine the development of textual cohesion, the qualities of the story schema encouraged by the school, and the underlying analysis by a categorical thinking about persona. The three concerns recur, although with different prominence, in each chapter. Studying model exercises rather than teacher’s descriptions of the curriculum offers a better opportunity for detecting traces of students’ use and practice, although the exercises are neither archival records nor the equivalent of the modern researcher’s observations. In sum, the three chapters devoted to fable, sententia, and declamation examine the formation of the child as composer. I begin with fable because fable provides both the first time the child gets to tell (better, to retell) a story and a first longer writing (one that is not simply the repetition of set lines). This liberating exercise is also probably the first reward, the first time a sequence of exercises seems to make sense (i.e., has a complete outcome and one that seems substantially the student’s work). Fable thus anticipates much of the justification of the difficult work of schooling: arduous obedience and routine are seen as a deferral of reward and as a practice in self-direction. This introduction to discipline comes at a moment of relearning: stories of animals, earlier the amusement of childhood, are now a medium for learning about learning. Part of this lesson is how to transform the familiar (subliterary and domestic) story or experience into a school form. After a discussion of fable, I turn back to the sententia, an earlier exercise but one that itself provides mininarratives of the movement from powerless student to powerful speaker. Understanding fable as an exercise in narrative squares well with modern approaches to first reading stories, and so I begin there rather than with the memorizing of maxims, which is customarily dismissed as rote learning or at best heavy-handed moralizing. But the world of the fable will make clear that sententia was an important element in composing a moral self, which is the schooled subjectivity that treats the self as the object and font of a moralizing discourse.20 With the sententia the boy will adopt for the first time an authoritative persona whose speech is a series of commands. Chapter 7 explores a tremendously popular and long-lived school book of sententiae, the Distichs of Cato, and seeks to understand the microcosm of commands and obedience, faithful copying and study, that the schools’ use of this proverbial literature encouraged. In declamation he will learn to speak other voices, but he still seeks an authority to speak as the powerful orator, a new Cato or Cicero.
When learning to read and write, the student began with the names of the letters and moved on to recognizing and reproducing their shapes, to write the simplest possible combinations of these (the nonsense syllables) and to study written sentences whose meaning or at least some of whose vocabulary was beyond him.21 This process initiated the ancient student in the movement of education. Exercises are presented as items in a graduated, progressive whole.22 The student need not now understand all that he does. To progress he must move up the line of exercises by demonstrating a faithful representation of the assigned lesson. In combination, the exercises themselves, the system of rewards and punishments, and the comments and assumptions of fellow students, pedagogues, siblings, and parents would have contributed to the sense that schooling is a progression from simple to greater things with an underlying coherence that will gradually be appreciated. Similarly, the progymnasmata set as the basic, initial sequence the series maxim, chreia, fable.23 In formal terms, as a graduated progression in composition, these exercises teach the student how to make a narrative. The individual exercise creates the building blocks of the later compositions (the sort of thing to be inserted into a larger structure—where, when, how, and why would be taught later). But as an immediate sequence, occupying probably less than a year’s time, the series develops smaller units into larger units. The sentence gives way to the paragraph as the unit of expression. Indeed, the later exercise cannibalistically recombines and subordinates the prior.
In practice this means that the boy first wrote and memorized a sentence: in Greek, a line from Menander, “Whom the gods love dies young,” or the much copied “Work hard lest you be beaten”; in Latin, sayings like the collection attributed to Cato. Quintilian urges that one choose verses for writing practice that are moral and not frivolous (1.1.35); perhaps he meant to discourage the use of verses taken from the mimes, like the extant collection of Publilius Syrus, although that collection’s alphabetical order suggests a later, nonscholastic reordering of the material. The Distichs of Cato begin:
Si deus est animus nobis, ut carmina dicunt, |
1.1 |
hic tibi praecipue sit pura mente colendus. |
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Since our intellect is divine, as the poems tell, |
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its cultivation with purity of mind should be your special obligation. |
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The student receives regular encouragement to scholarly diligence and personal self-improvement:
Instrue praeceptis animum, ne discere cessa; |
3.1 |
nam sine doctrina vita est quasi mortis imago. |
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Fortify your mind with precepts; do not stop learning: |
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for the unlettered life is a likeness of death. |
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Repeatedly, the verse imperatives direct the young student to focus on the self and his or her own words and text making:
Cum recte vivas, ne cures verba malorum, |
3.2 |
arbitri non est nostri, quid quisque loquatur. |
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Since you would live morally, do not worry about the words of the wicked; |
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it is not for us to control what anyone else says. |
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The maxims of the elder Cato were used in schools probably before the early third century A.D.24 Aphorisms like the austere and minimalist rhetorical advice Rem tene, verba sequentur, “Stick to the matter at hand, the words will come,” could be directly reworked into chreiae, sayings stories. Thus one could append Cato’s line to “When Cato was asked what he thought of fancy Hellenistic rhetoric, he said...” The chreia takes a one-liner and gives it a dramatic context, such as “Diogenes, on leaving the baths said ‘No’ to the one who asked if many men were bathing, but ‘Yes’ to another who asked if a large crowd was there.”25 The world of the chreia is transfused with literariness and education itself. Quintilian and Theon took their sentences from literary works. The characters are often Socrates, Isocrates, or Diogenes the Cynic; the topics often youth and education, and encounters of the educated with the uneducated. In the chreia the mention of the protagonist and his challenger provides a minimal setting, whereas the sentence has almost no context. The maxim’s general applicability is its virtue; its difficulty, at least on Quintilian’s recommendation, should come from its erudite vocabulary: with well-chosen sententiae, the beginning student could learn glosses as well as moral sentiments drawn from literature.26
The fable like the chreia requires a context, not “once Socrates was asked by an impudent boy,” but “once upon a time there was an ass who wanted to go hunting with a lion.” Just as with the chreia, the character type affects behavior—so the student learns types of character from reading and repeating the context given to words and then learns composition by fitting words to character (although in fable the role of the animal in the structure of the fable and not stereotypical character dictates behavior; for example, the sheep or goat is not always the victim, the fox can be tricked or disappointed in his hunting). Even at these elementary stages, composition requires a selection of registers so that, for instance, ass and lion speak their appropriate words. In practice, composition most fundamentally depends on a technique of combination that directs the student not so much to invent context as to find the right way to relate two or three snippets of direct speech, support these few speakers with a slim indication of setting, and perhaps sum up the whole with a final maxim.
The chreia and the fable thus share a strong formal similarity: both narrate a single episode and conclude with a sententia. In fact, the story structure of chreia and fable is similar: setting, problem, and solution.27 At the level of plot, the solution may be that the wolf eats the sheep, but the writer’s conclusion comes in the moralizing close—the maxim that expresses the moral and connects the fable to the world of the reader and writer. Here the writer practices evaluation of his narrative content by offering what we would call authorial comment, and this comment takes the form of the maxim.28
Although the ancient writers do not comment upon this, sententia, chreia, and fable have another formal alliance. The sententia is quite often direct, unattributed speech, examples of which the student reads, writes, and memorizes. He will redistribute this supply of memorized citations throughout his life in writings, speeches, and conversations. He will hear and know and use quotations from Menander, Sophocles, Cato, or Virgil. The first stages of the progymnasmata rehearse this use of speech: with the chreia the student learns how to attribute dicta and with the fable has his first practice in deploying rival, agonistic quoted speech, for the fable quite often takes a form one step more complex than the chreia’s structural formula of when asked A by speaker Y, speaker Z said B. The fable, after introducing animal Y and animal Z with some minimal notice of setting, has Z offer a provocative or trouble-producing remark that Y then answers (B is a more aggressive or even silencing response to A). Consider this first fable of the literary writer (not school collector) Phaedrus:
Here we can present the story scheme as setting, problem/verbal challenge 1, response 1, problem 2, response 2, problem 3, response 3 (solution), evaluation. However, the structural scheme, the typology of the fable, fails to reveal the formal similarity of fable to earlier school exercises. The lamb speaks entirely in sententiae, the pithy ripostes that are meant to produce closure. The individual episode takes the form of a chreia: when asked by a wolf why..., the lamb said... (except that the fable has two speakers). Phaedrus’s first fable has a more complex structure than most and is also something of a virtuoso display of dialogue. The poem strikes one as a creative-writing exercise, one of those compositions where the teacher has restricted the writer’s resources: tell a story using only (or mostly) direct speech. We shall return to these formal demands of the fable, but it is important also to take note of what modern analysis of the fable makes clear: the fable mediates violence.
With chreiae the student learned philosophers’ witty replies to challenge and to violence.29 Now he tries responses not quite of his own invention but of his own stylistic redevising. He learns a more sophisticated linguistic treatment of violence, one of the graduated series that will culminate in the declamatory controversia where the worst manifestations of violence—parricide, adultery, incest, and treason—are repeatedly reopened and resutured by the adolescent declaimers. With stories of talking animals, occasions for craft and wit, the boy is assembling the first weapons of his linguistic arsenal. By composing speeches about animals in violent conflict, a child is practicing the great social good of mitigating conflict between humans without yet facing the grave reality of human conflict (and the proper, advanced linguistic means to frame the conflict).
Throughout the Greco-Roman world, fable was a genre of school practice, the student’s first extended writing, and a genre of scholastic literature. We have literary collections from two first-century A.D. practitioners, the Latin of Phaedrus and the Greek of the Roman Babrius; Horace’s Satire 2.6, on the town mouse and the country mouse, stood as an invitation to others to try the fable as a higher literary form. So Seneca, perhaps ignoring and insulting the freedman Phaedrus, recommended with a mix of flattery and condescension that Polybius, Nero’s freedman and official, try his hand at the literary fable.30 As the grammarians loved to point out, poets, philosophers, and orators used fables and sententiae. In the school, after the maxim and the chreia had introduced the boy to philosophers and sages, the fable offered more scope than the repetition of their terse sayings.
Roman and Greek boys and girls probably first met the fable in school as a reading and copying exercise. They would return to the fable when they advanced to the first of the progymnasmata, the exercises designed to lead the student who already knew how to read and write through a series of steps to full declamatory composition.31 After chreia, fable, and narrative, Theon has his students advance to commonplace, description, prosopopoia (speech in character), praise and blame, parallel, thesis, law, refutation and confirmation, public reading, listening to lectures (and the techniques of memorizing them), paraphrase, elaboration, and contradiction.32 Quintilian’s program is not so complex, and other authorities differ from Theon in points of detail.33 Also, the system is not so discrete as the list implies. In learning fable (or another exercise of the early sequence), the student in fact practices some of the techniques that later will receive special treatment, such as description, elaboration, and compression, and returns to the genre that was one of his first writing exercises. Quintilian wanted the grammaticus to teach fable, maxim, chreia, and etiology (explanation of causes); and only then should the rhetorician take over. Theon, however, assigns the whole series under the tutelage of the rhetorician. Clearly, what was taught, by whom, and when varied considerably.
Theoreticians have remained keen to discern divisions in the curriculum according to function, teacher, and requisite ability. It is tempting, for instance, following Piaget, to assign certain cognitive functions to certain exercises. Bonnie Fisher plots the progymnasmata on Piaget’s map of the development of a child’s cognitive abilities with the following segmentation: the first stage of egocentrism and concrete operations when the child is seven—eleven years old suits the ludus litterarius, where reading and repetition of the unconnected fable occupied the child to age ten. Piaget situates first abstract thinking and formal operations in the second stage (the preadolescent age of eleven—fifteen), which corresponds to the grammarian’s school with its play with the form of the fable and development of point of view and sentence complexity. Piaget’s final stage of classification and reflection/evaluation would then coincide with the rhetorician’s school.34 Piaget’s three stages do describe the progress, if not necessarily the process, of learning as a movement from reading and rote work to expression, from the linguistically simple to the complex. Yet the ancient schools do not have the strict tripartite division here imagined, and the learning of classifications, for instance, begins much earlier. Clearly, the exercises were understood in antiquity as a series of steps, yet neither the rather grand divisions of the exercises into abstract skills nor the overly minute and discrete enumeration of functions explains why these exercises were successful.
The key to understanding their success will come, rather, from probing the overlapping forces operating on a curriculum, including the rationalizations, some quite wrongheaded, that teachers, theoreticians, parents, and participants give to an exercise, from defining the set of skills—cognitive, physical, and social—an exercise required and promoted to, finally and more subjectively, gauging the attractiveness of an exercise, which is to say, its appeal to the student’s and teacher’s sense of what is appropriate, useful, and even fun. Under the last heading, the appeal of the exercise, one must take seriously the faith of the ancients that school exercises rendered the student moral.35 The appeal of an exercise extends well beyond the moral concerns discovered in it by adults. Fisher, in her dissertation on the use of the fable in ancient, medieval, and nineteenth-century American schooling, noted the applicability of modern, child-centered research. She cited the investigation of Nicholas Turner into the characteristics of stories that children choose to read. The contemporary child is said to prefer concrete event to abstraction, unambiguous morality, simple causation, satisfactory closure, direct speech, and simple vocabulary.36 The well-moraled fable of the school suits these preferences well, although one might want to qualify the idea of a child’s preference. Children are not drawn to, nor indeed do they compose, narratives on these lines out of some natural disposition. The student learns certain forms of narrative. Because these are commonly thought of as simple, as modern teachers speak of students mastering the simple sentence or the basic paragraph, it has been easy to consider them natural. Simplicity often seems to mean an economy of language, a linearity of plot, and a consistency of motive or setting, all of which are learned skills. Each exercise arranges and presents knowledge in a miniroutine, which is not novel but related to other aspects of the curriculum and to the child’s social and cognitive worlds.
Before we turn to what the ancient teachers said they did with fables in their school, it is important to remember that we are not examining student copies. Instead, the evidence for school fables, especially in the more advanced exercise of the ancient school, is indirect.37 The artistic fables of Phaedrus and Babrius were turned into prose and as such became major school collections. Verse fables also passed to the Middle Ages in the book of Avianus, which in fact became part of the basic schoolbook, the liber Catonianus.38 In addition, from a third-century A.D. account of a schoolboy’s routine, we have sample fables; but again these are models for the student, even though they purport to be the work of a model child. The exercises in rhetorical composition known as the progymnasmata were texts for teachers, although James Butts has argued that the rearrangement of Theon’s text in the fifth century represented a change in use from teacher’s to student’s copy (but decidedly not student versions).39 Fables from the hand of an ancient student do survive; the so-called Assendelft Tablets, wax tablets that contain versions of fables of Babrius (and others), are the copy work of a schoolboy or girl of Antioch in the third century A.D.40 These wax tablets come from the first use of fable as a writing and memorizing exercise. The student has probably taken these down from dictation or perhaps from the master’s copy. The pupil was not doing well, for he or she made many mistakes. Perhaps this copy was not for the master’s eye but for the student’s own use in memorizing the fables.
The various exercises of the progymnasmata do not require that students compose original works. Rather, the student is required to transform language already presented.41 The student has already learned to adapt received language at a simple level with the chreia. The rationale for beginning with the chreia was that it was short and easy to remember (Theon 64.29–30), but practice with this simple sentence did not end with a merely accurate reproduction. Given a chreia or a fable, the student declined them, that is, changed the case of the grammatical subject.42 So instead of “When asked, Socrates said” or “A wolf and a sheep came to the same riverbank,” the student put the subject through the various cases and numbers of the nominal declension: “The reply of Socrates was . . .,” “When to Socrates the question ...,” “Someone asked Socrates . . .,” “By Socrates, when asked, the reply was made . . .” The accusative is easy, for the student can simply put the direct speech in indirect form. He learns to cast direct expression in subordinate syntax. So while this technique may seem mechanical, even tedious, it offers exercises in syntax that were also something of a stylistic lesson, since variation was a stylistic desideratum. Indeed, although parataxis was allowed in a simple narrative style, beginning each sentence with the same subject was not. But real esteem was accorded to one’s Latin and Greek prose style when it employed complex, subordinated sentences. The sentence also becomes longer or shorter depending on transformations of the syntax to accept changes in the case of the noun (itself the rhetorical figure known as polyptoton). To paraphrase, to elaborate, or to compress were more systematic transformations of the model text, which extended the ability to manipulate synonyms and periphrases, which was first learned in first writing out glosses on Homeric lines.43
These exercises may sound like a mechanistic stylistic algorithm, but they provided practice in flexibility of expression on the very best material. Theon gives perhaps the fullest account of what models to set the student. His selections are not so much a canon as an anthology of purple patches. Tidbits of Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Demosthenes, and Isocrates serve as the sample exercises.44 This sort of educational technique has been almost abandoned in modern vernacular language pedagogy, where the child learning to read is thought to be well served by language close to his expressive level; and even in contemporary teaching of the classical languages, where the modern undergraduate is said to deserve full texts. Perhaps we should remember that Herodotus has meant, for millenia of schoolchildren, the stories of Marathon and Thermopylae, as Livy has meant Hannibal and his elephants. Theon seized upon such memorable passages. And consequently the ancient student received lessons in the stylistics of the canonical authors (and admittedly not, at this stage, their structure or themes).
Each of the progymnasmata forms a discrete unit of argument and of composition, which can be inserted into a more extensive text. As rhetorical building blocks, they will eventually be parts of a composition, but they also share and develop pedagogic techniques. Certainly, the fable is longer than the maxim, even if less ambitious than the fully developed, literary fables of Phaedrus or Horace. Where the boy had learned the single sentence of a chreia, whose sentiment must fit the crusty Diogenes or rather generic Socrates, he now must recall perhaps two or three short sentences, in which the ethos of the nonhuman speaker-actor is also set by tradition. The fable can be as simple as the following from the Ps.-Dositheana: “A wolf came to visit a sick ass and began to prod his body and ask what parts hurt the most. The ass answered: ‘Those you touch.’ In this way evil men though they seem to help hurt the more.” (Asinum egrum lupus visitabat et coepit corpus eius tangere et interrogare quae magis partes ei dolerent. Respondit asinus quae tu tangis. Sic homines mali si et prodesse videntur magis nocent.)45 The form of question and answer, with only two parties, recalls the chreia,46 but an epimythium—the closing moral—has been added. Perhaps in such a simplified form, the student could easily build a stock of fables: Theon implies that students will have learned “all the fables of the simple style among the ancients” (74.14), but Quintilian, Theon, and the rhetoricians have something grander in mind.47
Theon remarks that the fable is a multiform exercise.48 First, in what the rhetorician calls presentation, apangelia, the student repeated a fable recited by the teacher. This could be a simple act of memory, but the student might use different diction (although only in the spare, simple style) and might be required to narrate the fable from the middle, that is, not in linear chronological order. At this point the student has practiced his oral memory and made modest recasting of the diction and narrative order of the fable. Declension of the fable follows, where the student varies the subject by grammatical case and number. One clue to the utility of this exercise comes from an example given by Theon. In a lost dialogue of the Socratic philosopher Phaedo, the Zopyrus, Socrates tells a fable about a lion in which the lion, on first mention, is in the genitive, and later in the nominative. After such practice, narrative likely seems less like a fixed text than a medium for the student’s variations in the many available stylistic modes. Two strong qualities of the fable are being learned, although without being directly addressed: fables are literary texts that provide the student variety of diction within a fixed structure, and fables lend themselves readily to moralization (Theon says he considers only fables equipped with morals suitable for school use, 72.30–31). Fables are thus source material, a narrative mode, and a medium that can accommodate a particular kind of evaluation.
Later, the student learned to link fable to larger narratives. Although the composition is growing more complex, it incorporates earlier stages of the curriculum: for example, as the sententia had received a narrative frame in the chreia, the fable is now associated with the narrative of a historical event. With this new task, the student connects the fabulous with the real. This is most directly an elaboration of moralization—the student has hitherto joined a moral to the fable, and now he does not abstract a timeless truth but finds it, as enunciated in fable, incarnated in another, more extensive narrative. The relation of fable to sustained narrative is also important, since fable is to be used ultimately, as Aristotle directed, as an argument embedded in a larger narrative.49 The succeeding exercises practice stylistic variation. Elaboration and abridgment add or subtract direct speech and topical description (prosopopoia and ekphrasis, both of which are later progymnasmata).
The next variation on the fable, epilogos, requires the student to add a closing moral to a fable or conversely supply a fable or fables to illustrate a given moral. The latter problem presents the greatest freedom yet encountered. The student must recall a fable from the repertory he has heard in school or frame one of his own invention. Next, anaskeuē and kataskeuē, confirmation and rebuttal, require the student to evaluate the verisimilitude and persuasiveness of the set fable. While such criticism anticipates future evaluative functions, its primary function here is to promote internalization of the criteria of composition. The student must address questions about the cohesion of the fable, such as whether the introduction given does or does not fit, and is thereby marched through basic ancient rhetorical aesthetics. He can refute or undercut a fable, as he may some day an opponent’s speech, by indicating the following failures: obscurity; lack of verisimilitude (to apithanon) or appropriateness (to prepon) in the relationship of the character to the words or deeds, or of any of these to the place, time, circumstances, manner, or motives; default or excess in narrating an element of the story (i.e., omitting something necessary or including something unnecessary for the plot); violating norms of expectation (e.g., making the fox stupid); inconsistency (demonstrating that a detail does not fit with the whole); faulty narrative sequence; unsuitability, especially of the moral; non-applicability or nonuniversality of the moral.
Having matched fables with narrative and with its intended moral, the student now directly considers the criteria of likeness. The fable was defined by Theon and others as a false story that presents a likeness of the truth. This definition will never satisfy the anthropologist, but it does address fable’s central function as a compositional exercise in the ancient school. The fable comes to be understood as a fiction whose relationship to the world of experience must be carefully established while it is presented in such a way as to convince others of the accuracy and consistency of the fiction.50
Whether or not the precocious nine-year-old or average eleven-year-old rang all of these changes on fables, the student learned with fable to use an easy and familiar mode as a medium of rhetoric. Just as the progymnasmata were a graduated series, the degree of proficiency required in the uses of fable was graduated. The ancient theorists seem to have recognized both the flexibility of the early exercises and the utility in returning to the same form at different points of the student’s development. Theon enjoins that the master should not correct all the mistakes at the early stage (72.4–7—just as we have seen Quintilian allow the young to have a more fulsome, less corrected style). At its most developed, the fable treats questions of violence, justice, and redress with two or more characters pleading their cases. It is little wonder that Theon compared the fable to the judicial hypothesis, in Latin the controversia, the imaginary courtroom case (78.11.13 and 60.6–10). But even on its own, not as an anticipation of the curriculum to come but as a discrete, compelling narrative, mastery of the fable represents a significant step toward authentic writing, by which I mean that schooled conviction that one’s writing is one’s own, a fresh creation to be recognized by its audience as the work of one author.
Fable lent itself especially to the first exercise in fiction because as a genre it retains a certain openness. The structure and cast of characters were relatively fixed but allowed for amplification. No fixed canon of fables precluded the efforts of young writers, and as a fictional and fantastic form, fable encouraged innovation. Fables could be presented as bare-bones plots or as virtuoso poetic texts, yet even the literary collections of Babrius and Phaedrus did not prevent augmentation. Fables encourage other fables in great part because the genre (and the teacher’s or theorist’s directions) encourages the reader to draw likenesses, and like jokes or limericks, in their playfulness fables dare the reader to make another. The suspension of the everyday, the use of mythic time or, better, fictive time, the interplay of generic characters, and variation in the (simple) setting are inducements to new versions. The fable can be made simple, or embellished with borrowings from more elevated genres, like the fables of the fourth-century Avianus, a staple of medieval education, who drew his diction and style from Virgil.51
Michel Patillon has noted that the addition of the moral to the fable breaks the narrative order of the text; a change in tense must occur even in the sparest of fables, the change from the imperfect of once-upon-a-time to the timeless gnomic present.52 Fable thus does not stand apart from present experience; it does not have the distance or linguistic difficulty of epic. It invites the reader to relate what has been written to present experience and so enacts in miniature an attitude to texts that will recur in the student’s education, especially as the student gains the linguistic skills that will diminish the difficulty of writing in grander registers. The old text is something to be moralized, and to be used for one’s own argument and composition.
The ancient reading and writing curriculum employed forms of teaching texts far more varied than the modern. Most school materials were linguistically remote from colloquial language: their distinctiveness evident not only in diction (the hard glosses that the first sentences contained), but also in meter. The prosodic and rhythmic patterns of the hexameter may have facilitated memorization, but there is no evidence that they made learning to read or write any easier. The idea of beginning students with easy texts allegedly close to their experience and to their supposedly limited vocabulary is a modern one. Priscian, translating Pseudo-Hermogenes, reports that orators gave children fables first of all. In practice, no doubt, this reflects the same reality of suiting materials to young children’s abilities; however, the justification for the practice is entirely different from the modern. Priscian offers a moral explanation: in some unexplained way he believes “fables easily shape the still soft minds of children to better paths of life.”53 Ease of learning was not the primary consideration, and simplicity of language does not characterize the elementary exercises beyond maxim, chreia, and fable.
We would replicate the ancient practice if we taught children to read by setting them a piece of Shakespeare, Milton, or even Chaucer. In first composition, in the fable, we do see language easier than the linguistically distant Homer and Virgil. And yet the very difficulty of the epic texts had advantages: at the outset of studies it would discourage vernacular paraphrase or summarization and demand instead a faithful, verbatim copying. The child begins by imitating, whether through writing or reciting or speaking, as if he were the undistorting medium for the text. Indeed, he is but a copy of the text, as much a support of reading as the papyrus or the wax that held the letters. A faultless performance, at this stage, means simply that the child reperforms the text in a fashion indistinguishable from the master’s copy. The child’s particular capabilities, as Quintilian described them, were a quickness to retain and a quickness to parrot what he was set. Quinitilian’s desiderata do testify to the importance of memory and of oral delivery in ancient literate culture, but they are also idealizations of the child and child learning. The good student at this stage is almost invisible: that is, his performance is identical to his master’s script. He leaves no mark upon the text to be reproduced. But this practice of textual performance has implications for the future. Starting a child on Homer (or with the Bible) begins the familiarization of difficult texts. The centrality of large, archaic, and complex literary works in different curricula marks their texts not simply as cultural icons but as difficult and yet daily texts, which require revisiting and reworking, and whose reading is never complete. It is decidedly not the case that throughout their various histories such complex works were given the very young for lack of other materials. The process of gaining basic literacy rehearses the future, lifelong textual practices of the student. The child may have begun writing or sounding out portions of Homer or other literary texts, and in preparing these for memorization and reading, the schoolchild punctuated, glossed, erased, and corrected. The fable, and the multiple uses to which it was put in the schools, provide an almost complete contrast. The plasticity of the fable made it the ideal medium for reading, copying, commenting, paraphrasing, composing, abridging, expanding, and reciting. The fable certainly would not displace Homer in the ancient world, but it offered great opportunity for practice and transformation.
In fact, the fable provided a site for a range of textual practices different from the earlier stages of the curriculum. Like the first reading exercise, the praelectio, where the master read a bit and the student then tried to reproduce that bit, and where occasionally the master explained the sense or word order of a difficult portion, in making his fable the student again replicated what was given him. But as with paraphrase, practiced soon after fable, or the more advanced précis and augmentation, he has begun a different practice with a different attitude to the text. He learns to transform the text, which is a feature of language learning and of cultural learning of great importance, for here he acts not as ventriloquist for the sententious style of Cato or the hard-bitten wit of the Cynic philosopher in a chreia, but, like the teacher himself, he has one version of the text that he may choose to give his public in a different form.
The student has begun to exhibit expertise and not personless mimicry. In the learned play with adult speech forms, his or her practice treated language, the text received, as an object to be manipulated, altered variously, and as the stuff of play. In the recombinative technics of fable, language itself became the focus of study and of display.54 The student has been habituated to the idea of text and apograph, the teacher’s version and his or her own, lesser version.55 Here apograph became autograph. Without the constraints of a grand literary genre, the fable invited invention and variation; it did not have the linguistic fixity of epic or of any of the canon of authors the student reads and recites; it was closest to the declamatory topic in its insistent replotting of a confrontation from a slender cast of characters and a plot. The fable did have an archetype—a mélange of plot, character, setting, speech, and moral that could be handled variously. Fable offered multiple, competing instantiations, including the prose version of the fable that the student read or perhaps had read to him, the fables he heard at home in his pre-schooldays, perhaps even his peers’ versions (for the school was open, and the student could see and hear others at varying degrees of competence), and also fables embedded in Homer, Virgil, or Horace. The student probably had not yet read in extenso the prose texts that contained the occasional fable. But he has begun a textual practice that requires a different attitude toward the text, one that will continue in paraphrase, practiced soon after fable, and in the more advanced précis and argumentation.
Later, when the schoolboy came to versify, he may have attempted first the easiest of classical Latin meters, the meter of Phaedrus’s fables, the iambic senarius.56 Still, the appeal of fable cannot be limited to formal aspects. Fable has a breadth of applicability akin to the maxim: for every situation, for every conflict or impasse, one can summon a fable. Again and again, fable represents the literate in action, not simply because the student takes it as his first extended effort as a writer, but because the plot itself lets the clever, though at times weaker, agent prevail. Even with the most negative fables, where the fox does not get the grapes or the deer gets lured down a well, the reader learns through plot and maxim the way to avoid a mistake. The fable offers precautionary tales for potential victims, and the mentality of the reader presumed by the fable is that of a victim. The world is hostile, and its agents more powerful than we—but we can learn to be clever if we will but attend to story structure and to linguistic mastery. This cleverness has a special quality: the best protagonist is not simply the trickster but a fellow like Aesop himself who can foil a more powerful, larger foe with his innate verbal artistry. The ancient schoolchild learned to internalize the admonitory voice of school texts.
In repeating the maxims, the student adopted the persona of maxim giver and spoke in a style and tone foreign to a child’s everyday speech. This first exercise inaugurated the student’s identification with a powerful speaker. At its most advanced, the direct exercise in speech in character would involve specific directives to capture the tone and substance of various kinds of people. But even in this act of impersonation, the student learned to speak as the sage (male) adult, one who, like the fox or prudent sheep, has learned from experience. Ancient schooling’s intensive training in literacy promised to redress the injustice that the young sense in their lack of power and worldly experience. Taking Cato’s voice, the boy instructed himself to cultivate his soul, to work hard (study hard), and not to worry about those who insulted him or threatened him with harm. Fable provides the scenario for playing out the central situation of the schoolboy as child, as learner. Smaller, less powerful, but now more resourceful as an initiate into the huge world of literate culture, he may use his wit, intelligence, and concision of speech to face parents, teacher, and the writers of old, all of whom are allied against him in the daunting discipline of education. In his brief speech and writing he can deflect their authoritative accounts. The process of identification with the oppressor, involving a deflection and repression of resentment and its redirection to diligent reading, writing, and speaking, lies at the basis of schooled subjectivity.
I have stressed the subjective, attitudinal aspect of the fable, since the exercises with fables provided the first opportunity for authentic learning. The fable is not a learned form; we know of one eleven-year-old boy whose talent in composing extemporaneous verses (on a mythological theme) won him a prize, but aside from such technical, metrical brilliance, no one in antiquity would have been much impressed with the schoolboy who could recite and compose, abridge and embellish, the modest genre of the Aesopic fable.57 The boy or girl who is competent in fable is still at an early stage in the progymnasmata and in rhetorical training generally. He is not yet erudite; he may not yet be able to versify; and he would not be able to answer the more arcane questions about the poets that so delighted the grammarians. Fable is an interesting stage because it stands before such erudition. We observe textual processes and attitudes but not yet the hard stuff of learning and the end product customarily equated with education: the knowledge of authors, mythology, history, and rhetoric. Like wit more generally, fable is a technique for dealing with knowledge, power, and expertise. Fable also reinforces a most fundamental feature of ancient schooling: it justifies the elite education of which it is a part. We see verbal artistry in action, mediating not simply conflict, but competing claims and discourses. As he learns to present two conflicting voices in the same story schema, the boy learns also a lexicon and rhetoric of self-correction (not simply moralizing). He has learned how to talk of deceit, cheating, and trickery, but with the specific twist of a universalizing self-address. The allegory of fable consistently exploits acts of violence as an occasion to counsel the self. The moralizing opening or close constitutes an act of interpretation that is directed to the self but also is a generally applicable conclusion. Often the direction is negative, apophatic: do not pretend to be someone better than you are, do not bother with what others say about you. The directives constitute a genre of social comfort: the reader is all right and protected from folly, his own and the world’s, even if he is not yet of high status, because he is learning (verbal) self-restraint and self-reference. This is one of the high conceits of education: literature and the words of the past generation address the present reader, whose success in education is determined not simply by the accumulation of lore or technique but by the internalization of the lessons of the past. Thus education holds out the promise to be free: we shall not be victims any more than we shall be slaves. The moralizing mode is as much a routine as an attitude: as he practices reading and writing and speaking, the schoolboy learns to await with patience the achievements of pleasure, reward, and maturity. His daily labor and self-definition are bound up in this moralizing rhetoric. The young fabler is also the disengaged, evaluative observer who draws conclusions for himself and the rest of humanity from the errors, wrongheadedness, and cleverness of the wholly engaged, barely self-aware actors in the fable. The fable-making student draws him-and herself away from the dumb, unreflecting crowd.
The student has moved from copying maxims of circa eight words to the prose chreia, a text of approximately twenty-five words, which introduces a protagonist, a challenge, and the verbal riposte. As he turns to fable, he writes perhaps seven lines of a structure similar to the chreia but with an introduction (setting and possibly promythium) and a conclusion (epimythium). He has also moved from the anonymous or unattributed one-liner (save that the collection of sententiae might be attributed to Cato or Menander) to the attributed chreia (whose main speaker is a famous sage, while the prodding agent is usually nameless, but a character type, such as a poor student or a lazy pedagogue). With fable he repeats the more complex attribution given by his model (roles and beast characters are set and are usually two or three in number). He also writes with evaluation, an aspect of more sophisticated writing—the lazy pedagogue of the chreia, for example, may now be, say, the wily fox, but the boy must also communicate motivation at several levels and places, not simply with an epithet when he introduces his characters, but also in narrating and especially when concluding their conflict.
This increasing differentiation of role and motive requires that the boy’s attitude to his writing (and speaking) also change. In copying chreiae, he was to believe that Socrates or Diogenes or Cato really said the words he repeated. With fable he recasts a story, one by definition fictitious, whose nonfacticity creates space for his own version and implies a need to comment, to modulate in what sense the story is true. He is moving from truth telling to the processes of attribution, as, for instance, the modern undergraduate writes of what Homer meant, but the graduate student learns greater obliquity: he writes of what others have said Homer meant, and is most concerned with learning an advanced mode of attribution and evaluation. In the ancient curriculum, the fable begins the process of attribution whereby competing narratives are compared and contrasted, their plausibility subjected to vigorous, systematic evaluation, even as declamation deals with at least two narratives arising from the same minimal “facts.” In both the rudimentary and the advanced exercises, the student takes the given, underexpressed material as facts, and his function is to represent these as truth through the techniques of augmentation and stylization taught him.
When the fable may have more than one episode, the student must provide transitions as well as introduction and close. Narrative making is here especially a matter of coherence. Two or more characters are introduced, their hierarchy signaled by place in the animal kingdom and by reference to the genre of fable. They must be brought to a single crisis. The grammarians do not stress unity of place, for at this stage theoretical prescriptions are kept to a minimum. The student learns the shape of a story from the models provided. Temporal order is also observed and importantly is signaled. The maxim is timeless; the chreia, while an episode, has no strict indication of its time. Despite the historicity implicit from the name of the speaker and interlocutor, the situation is general and iterable. Indeed, often it does not seem to matter whether Diogenes or Socrates is the subject. So “Cato” can take over a number of sentences from “Menander.” The fable has of course “once upon a time,” and though this is abstract compared to the scene setting the boy shall learn from his future reading of history or political speeches or even from his master’s commentary on the poets, it is internally coherent. Notices of time help to articulate what is narrated as an event. In point of style, this means that the student will use an opening formula (especially the indefinite adverbs or pronouns, “once upon a time” and “a certain . . .”) and without further ado bring on two characters.58 The speech of the two characters, separated by a sentence to advance the narrative, and brought to closure with a concluding sentence and/or the epimythium, forms the sum of the structure. At times the mere mention of an animal and the imperfect tense suffice as opening formula: for example, for Phaedrus (who uses comparatively few introductory markers) Lupus arguebat . . . or leporem obiurgabat passer (1.10.4 and 1.9.4 respectively). Certain temporal formulas feel like a familiar stage. “Once upon a time” or “A certain farmer” represents the lifting of the curtain: the audience is primed for the entrance of the characters. Extremely brief notices of occasion add the scenery and tone. Thus from “It was winter” the reader can expect that scarcity and famine are going to be the backdrop for a provident and a spendthrift character, and so on comes the ant (Babrius 140 begins: Kheimōnos hōrēi). The literary fabulists Babrius and Phaedrus use temporal clauses or a movement from the perfect to the imperfect tense and participles to express relations, sequence, and causation.
The style of the fable is for the most part paratactic (encouraged by a striving after compression and brevity that favors the genitive or ablative absolute or the use of participles rather than conjunctions and complex, subordinate constructions), and the lines are often end-stopped (the unit of sense thus corresponds to the line). But the young reader and imitator of these collections learns some syntactic subordination. The simple sentence of the maxim has been reworked to the more complex formulation of “When X said, Y said” or “When X saw, X said,” where an initial subordinate element (more often the absolute participial expressions or a past participle agreeing with the subject; both are simpler versions of the subordinate clause, which in Greek and Latin often requires a nonindicative mood) communicates the setting and the challenge. And where the causation and motivation of the chreia may be riddling, requiring the reader’s decoding of the underexpressed, terse saying, the fable is comparatively overexpressed, redundant at times with opening advertisement to the reader (the promythium), plot, notices of evaluation, and final moral (the epimythium)—the chreia being more like a riddle or a punch line, the fable a more sustained story-joke. In its completeness, the fable does not ask for the hearer’s interpretation, nor need we supply a setting or names to the words expressed. As readers we are coming closer to aesthetic appreciation: when we laugh or admire the wit of the fox or the author, we are confidently in the know, not making an interpretation but accepting the one we are invited to share. The story’s wholeness allows us to attend to other features, those of style and language. Part of the value of a set curriculum comes from the scope granted to stylization. This is why inventio is so restricted in the writing exercise (up until declamation). The process of finding material must not be an additional task. The repertory furnished by the list, whether of maxims, anecdotes, or declamatory categories (types of status), and the mental crutch of memory contribute to inventio. So too should the student’s reading—this is why Quintilian and Plutarch encourage wide reading, so that the student will excerpt and have ready for use a stock of maxims, exempla, and rhetorical figures. The fable for the first time allows the boy or girl to redeploy his or her small stock, and to compose and be evaluated on a stylistic plane.
School practice with fables taught the student to compose by joining, augmenting, and elaborating discrete smaller blocks and parts. Good writing then required a technique of appropriate subordination and recombination of learned forms. In rewriting fables the student also learned notions of causation and linear order. Transforming the sententia into a fable changed received information into an object to be studied with a view to embellishment or reconfiguration. Such transformations reinforced in students the consciousness, initially acquired in the glossing of difficult texts, that words are manipulable objects. In addition to a self-consciousness about language, the student learned specific uses of language. Most immediately, excellence in language was rewarded by progress along a graduated curriculum, but language was used within the plots of the exercises to model conflict. The student learned verbal skills of attack, pacification, resolution, and deferral.
The ongoing practice of stylization leads ultimately to declamation. While there were several intermediate exercises, I shift our focus directly to declamation because we have extant samples close to school practice, whereas for narrative or exemplum we have nothing so close to an actual exercise, but we must rely instead on the theorists’ directives and the literary collector’s near-encyclopedic efforts. Sententia, fable, and declamatory speech clearly manifest the thread of moralizing composition that wove together the school curriculum. Of course, the extant collections are more whole than the actual practice of the schools. We have no interruptions, no bad examples, no failures of memory or lapses of taste (except in the criticisms recorded by the elder Seneca). Further, school collections invited an omniumgatherum inclusivity. After all, writing is being encouraged: maxims, fables, and exempla are the sort of thing every scholar is to collect and memorize for himself. Fable is a magnetic and agglutinative genre, inviting each collector to revise and even occasionally to fabricate wholesale. As these forms invite collection and reproduction, they ascend from the practice of the ancient schoolroom and become valuable collectibles in themselves, gathered in books meant to be read as literary productions in their own right and not as a helpmeet for the maturing speaker. Even if we could win our way back to some archetype, the master who wrote sample exercises would have made them better, more consistent, polished, and integrated than those he delivered or had his students deliver in a packed and noisy room. The decontextualization involved in putting them into book form brings attendant changes in the form of the fable (so Phaedrus, no doubt following the lead of the poetry books of the Augustan period, takes great care over thematic unity, programmatic initial and final poems, guides to the reader, and variety of beast fable and anecdote). And as the master collecting and writing up fables or exempla did not strictly replicate his teaching role, so too the reader is far more than a student. We do not take in the fable by listening or copying it onto our wax tablet. Far more like the scholar of late antiquity, we live in a world where school curriculum and associated texts form a literature of their own, especially when in the large book (codex, textbook, monograph). Still I will ask the reader to play the voyeur, to consider several exercises in detail, exercises that would not have filled up a codex but would cover only a few pages or tablets. These briefer exercises, treated below in chapter 7, are the collection of maxims called the Distichs of Cato and a Greek-Latin learning aid with the unwieldy title of hermeneumata, the ancestor of the glossary and the colloquy. The final chapter devoted to declamation charts the development sketched above in the context of the fable, the sequential progress to a fluency of expression, which brought with it an attitude of mastery, dominion over self, over style and speech, and over those for and to whom the student spoke. Now I return to the maxim, since we have a collection that was actually designed for students’ use (unlike the collections of fables), and since, after a description of the formal lessons of the fable, we can better appreciate the exercise’s imaginary, the world it imagines for its young practitioner and the roles it presents and requires in its own execution.