An ambassador’s education mattered because education (paideia) meant something grander than just the training ofthe young. It was a term that encompassed the whole
Greek claim to cultural supremacy. In inscriptions honoring the achievements of successful adults, as well as in the poignant epitaphs of those who died young, one often finds skill with words praised in tandem with virtues of character (Marrou 1964; Schmitz 1997: 136-46). The chief goal of educational training, as practiced by the elite, was extempore eloquence in an archaizing dialect of Attic Greek. The eloquence obtained through paideia was assumed to entail both personal virtue and political success (unscrupulous persons who could sway a crowd were deemed to be using illegitimate techniques). Training in eloquence was training in the deportment and self-assurance necessary to perform the part of aristocratic manhood (Gleason 1995). To be successful in a legal contest or in a hearing before the emperor, one had to be able to impose one’s own interpretation of a situation on one’s audience in the face of competing claims to equity and truth. It was important to be logical; it was important to speak fluently; it was important to demonstrate that one had the self-discipline to master Attic Greek. But it was also important not to be intimidated by the opposition. In meeting the emperor or a Roman governor, one had to strike the right note of selfassurance, without being rude (a sophist from Seleucia once barked ‘‘Listen up!’’ to an inattentive emperor). One also had to avoid drying up altogether, as Aristides was prone to do.
Paideia helped an ambassador because its arduous training procedures prepared an elite man for successful self-assertion; and a governor could accede to a request made elegant by eloquence without losing face: he would look like a connoisseur of culture, not like someone yielding out of weakness. Most ambassadors were cultivated men who were politically active in their city of origin. Sophists, rhetorical stars who practiced competitive paideia as full-time teachers and performers, also undertook embassies - sometimes to spectacular effect. Dio won his native city the right to add 100 new members to the Council, their entry fees filling the city’s coffers (D. Chr. 45.3-7; 48.11). He also got his city promoted to the governor’s assize circuit (40.13, 33). And Polemo helped Smyrna beat out Ephesus in the race for a second imperial temple. He appeared before Hadrian (a soft touch, as a self-conscious philhellene) and persuaded him to contribute one and a half million drachmas towards the foundation of new imperial games (IGRR 4.1431). Sophists often came from the best families (Bowersock 1969; Bowie 1982), and legitimated the dominance of the land-owning class by embodying eloquence as if it were a product of their ‘‘natural’’ superiority (Schmitz 1997).
‘‘The root of paideia is bitter, but its fruits are sweet.’’ Students at the elementary levels would have to expand upon such platitudes. They would take a phrase through various changes of case and tense, then work their way up to telling fables, such as the one about monkeys founding a city, in direct and indirect speech. Older boys would learn to ring the changes of imaginary court cases. ‘‘A man found his son was in love with a prostitute and tied him up. The prostitute, in full revel, burst in on him. The son broke his bonds and hung himself. The father accuses the prostitute of murder’’ (Sopater 365). One would have to take up in turn the cause of plaintiff and accused, finding plausible motives and justifications for each. Or one might have to impersonate Demosthenes deciding whether to beg pardon of Philip of Macedon.
What was the effect of this training on the boy who practiced it? He would have to be patient, dutiful, and ambitious to assimilate the required canon of classical texts.
He would be expected to make allusion to these (in old-time Attic) for the rest of his life. He would learn to be competitive: every rhetorical performance was a competition, whether the performers were beginners in the schoolroom or professionals in a public place. He would experience himself as part of an endless continuum of classical Greek culture as he improvised in traditional language on traditional themes (Webb 2001). He would learn to frame his case in terms of social status and general considerations of equity, as he might in a future courtroom (Winterbottom 1982). He would learn to fear humiliation in front of his peers if he made any errors as defined by the norms and rules of grammarians. But he would also learn that those norms and rules were to some extent arbitrary, and could be ignored with impunity by authors of high status - good preparation for an adult life that would be governed both by norms and rules, and by arbitrary authorities above those norms and rules (Atherton 1998).
The praises left on marble and in the pages of Philostratus give to lives of outstanding rhetorical accomplishment a triumphant sheen that seems almost designed to distract our attention from questions about what cultural forces were at work beneath the surface. First of all, we might wonder: what is the real meaning of archaism of content? Why did Greeks under Roman rule elaborate in their rhetorical exercises topics either from a fantasy world of soap-opera themes or from the classical Greek past? Bowie (1970) initiated an ongoing discussion of how aristocrats of this period coped with the restricted scope of their political activity in the present by focusing their cultural productions on the past.
We might also wonder, what was the point of archaism of style? The Greeks who claimed paideia spoke neither the Latin of their rulers nor the common Greek of their own city’s streets. To modern readers accustomed to the rhetoric of social equality, there is something surreal about this situation. But the ancients practiced a rhetoric of social differentiation. Choosing to display one’s knowledge of a rarefied literary dialect was a way of making a statement about one’s identity (Swain 1996). Elite identity was not monolithic, however. Portrait sculptures show that there was a range of stylized identities available to elites of the Greek east (R. R. R. Smith 1998), and some aristocratic families emphasized athletic rather than rhetorical success (van Nijf 2001).
Scholars speculate about what might be the political implications of this educational system. Some suggest that the highly textured allusiveness of sophistic literary production made it possible to create texts that could be read - if one were sophisticated enough - on multiple levels, not all of them favorable to Rome (Whitmarsh 1998b). Others wonder about the incongruity of using exempla from the Athenian democratic past to inculcate proper deportment in a decidedly undemocratic elite (Connolly 2001). One of the perquisites of elite citizens under Roman rule was immunity from corporal punishment. What were the social and psychological consequences of an educational system that relied on corporal punishment of elite children even as it prepared them for privileged status as adults (Atherton 1998; Gleason 1999b: 300-2)? Finally, were Greek claims to cultural hegemony so insistent because some of their Roman rulers were insufficiently impressed? When Cicero wrote his brother that the Greeks were the original discoverers of humanitas, and that it was time for Romans to return the favor, he seems to be implying that Greeks were in decline and civilization was now for Romans to bestow.
World History
