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Title Pages
Cheiron's Way: Youthful Education in Homer and

Tragedy
Justina Gregory
Print publication date: 2018

Print ISBN-13: 9780190857882
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190857882.001.0001
Title Pages
Justina Gregory
(p.i) Cheiron’s Way (p.ii)
(p.iii) Cheiron’s Way
(p.iv) Copyright Page
(p.xxv) Cheiron’s Way (p.xxvi)
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

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Title Pages
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gregory, Justina, author.
Title: Cheiron’s way : youthful education in Homer and tragedy /
Justina Gregory.
Description: Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018012183 (print) | LCCN 2018016151 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190857899 (updf) | ISBN 9780190857905 (epub) |
ISBN 9780190857882 (hardback : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Homer—Characters. | Education in literature. |
Centaurs in literature. |
Greek literature—History and criticism. | Greek drama (Tragedy)—
History and criticism.
Classification: LCC PA4037 (ebook) | LCC PA4037 .G696 2018 (print)
|
DDC 883/.01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012183
135798642
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Page 2 of 2
Dedication

Tragedy
Justina Gregory

Print ISBN-13: 9780190857882
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190857882.001.0001
Dedication
Justina Gregory
(p.v) To my students (p.vi)
Page 1 of 1
Plates

Tragedy
Justina Gregory

Print ISBN-13: 9780190857882
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190857882.001.0001
(p.xi) Plates
Justina Gregory
1. A Centaur Battles a Lapith at the Wedding of King Pirithous

2. Cheiron Arrives at the Wedding of Peleus and Thetis
3. Peleus Seizes Thetis While Cheiron Observes the Struggle
4. Cheiron Holds the Infant Achilles
5. Peleus Delivers a Youthful Achilles to Cheiron
6. Addressed by an Old Man, Warriors Prepare for Departure
7. Ajax Makes Preparations to Commit Suicide
8. Neoptolemus Murders Priam during the Sack of Troy
(p.xii)
Page 1 of 1
Preface

Tragedy
Justina Gregory

Print ISBN-13: 9780190857882
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190857882.001.0001
(p.xiii) Preface
Justina Gregory
WHEN HOMER’S AGAMEMNON sends a delegation bearing an offer of

reconciliation to Achilles, one of the three emissaries is Phoenix, who served as
Achilles’ tutor when the hero was a child in Thessaly and subsequently
accompanied him to Troy. As Phoenix pleads with Achilles to let go of his anger
he reminds him, “I made you the man you are” (καὶ σὲ τοσοῦτον ἔθηκα, Il.
9.485). That claim forms the point of departure for this study, which investigates
the social and ethical instruction and formation—processes that would ultimately
be subsumed under the term paideia1—that helped make certain protagonists of
epic and tragedy the men they are. Following an introduction that sketches the
conceptual background for literary representations of teaching and learning,
Chapter 1 considers the pedagogic persona of Cheiron the centaur, the first
teacher in the Greek tradition. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the Iliadic Achilles,
who achieves maturity by way of successive crises of disillusionment and
empathy and who becomes an influential prototype for the tragedies studied
here. Subsequent chapters discuss Telemachus and Odysseus in the Odyssey
(Chapter 4); Ajax in his name play (Chapter 5); Neoptolemus in Philoctetes
(Chapter 6); Hippolytus in his name play, with an excursus on Ion (Chapter 7);
and Achilles and Iphigenia in Iphigenia in Aulis, with a preliminary discussion of
Nausicaa in the Odyssey (Chapter 8).2 (p.xiv) A coda summarizes results and
takes note of the perennial lure (despite its uncertain results) of the educational
enterprise for communities, students, and teachers.
Every fictional character comes with a past attached, a presumed personal

history that is both explicit and implicit.3 The text can evoke this past directly
through reminiscences, flashbacks, or allusions, and the audience can also
reconstruct it4 with the help of information gleaned from the words spoken and
actions performed in the narrative present. Far from succumbing to the
Page 1 of 7
Preface
documentary fallacy and forgetting that “literature operates on a thinnish crust,

and there is nothing underneath this crust,”5 readers and spectators who
deliberately take up a text’s beguiling invitation to animate its fictional
characters with a history antedating the narrative present turn out to be
“wiser” (in Gorgias the sophist’s paradoxical formulation)6 than those who
remain disengaged.7 If carried out with due regard for historical and literary
context, the process of fictional reconstruction can enhance understanding both
of the epic and tragic texts themselves and of the relationship between the two
genres. Furthermore, the historical record for pedagogical theory and practice
in archaic and fifth-century Greece is sparse by comparison to later eras.8 The
depiction of education in epic and tragedy accordingly (p.xv) provides
suggestive evidence, despite being refracted through the prism of the Greek
literary imagination.
Archaic and classical Greek literature is profoundly engaged with education—its

assumptions, contexts, agents, methods, and limits—and the richest and most
illuminating depictions of this process can be found in the epic and dramatic
texts. That is one reason to study the two genres together; another is that
tragedy was profoundly influenced by epic.9 As Gould observes, the tragedians
were “in Homer’s debt for the imaginative projection of a world in which human
action is given a scale, a moral complexity and a seriousness that matched
the[ir] needs.”10 Although the Homeric legacy supplies a template for tragic
depictions of education, the tragedians assert their independence by
purposefully diverging from epic precedent and by incorporating fifth-century
elements that create a hybrid intertextual domain.
Epic and tragedy are not, of course, the only genres that can be enlisted as
witnesses for archaic and classical concepts of education. If I refer to others only
in passing, it is from a consciousness of their limitations as well as to keep my
project within manageable bounds. Hesiod’s hexameters and Theognis’ elegiacs
are avowedly didactic, setting forth authoritative prescriptions for ethical
conduct, but these texts are composed from a single perspective, the
instructor’s, whose message is moreover fixed at the moment of delivery.11 By
contrast, representations of education in epic and drama feature multiple voices
and action that unfolds over time. The audience gains access to students as well
as teachers and witnesses the maturation—intellectual, ethical, social, and
emotional—that is intrinsic to the educational process.
The lyric genre provides invaluable evidence for female enculturation,12 but the
circumstances of its production and performance remain dauntingly opaque.
While Pindar’s epinicians constitute the most important source for Cheiron’s role
as the archetypal educator,13 their unswerving aristocratic viewpoint limits
(p.xvi) their usefulness. Although the pre-Socratics’ statements on pedagogy
are suggestive, the fragments often lack a contextualizing framework.
Aristophanic comedy refers frequently to the educational process and even puts
Page 2 of 7
Preface
scenes of instruction on stage,14 but scholars who undertake the painstaking and
necessary task of adjusting for comic irony, hyperbole, and caricature risk
wandering far afield from the topic of education.15
To be sure, epic and tragedy have their own shortcomings, and their portrayals
of the educational process entail significant absences and elisions. This study
will highlight the educational roles of four female characters: Penelope, her son
Telemachus’ instructor; Hippo, pupil of her father, Cheiron, and teacher of her
daughter Melanippe; Nausicaa, who internalizes her society’s expectations for
young women; and Iphigenia, who initially accepts but ultimately transcends
them. For the most part, however, both genres focus on the formation of youthful
male aristocrats, paying little heed to women and even less to non-elites.16 Epic
and tragedy intermingle public and private, categories that moderns tend to
keep apart;17 they gloss over the relationship between pedagogy and
pederasty,18 and downplay the homoerotic when depicting same-sex pairs of
friends.19 Although they make passing mention of the homosocial groups that
were decisive in the historical formation of the young, they accord them no
prominence.20 (p.xvii) They minimize the pedagogical role of athletic training
(gumnastikē) and of music, song, and dance (mousikē), even though both were
fundamental to what Aristophanes (Nub. 961) calls τὴν ἀρχαίαν παιδείαν (old-
time education).21 They pay scant attention to literacy, an important component
of real-life education from the fifth century on.22 This study, which is literary
rather than historical, takes its cue from the texts in selecting what aspects of
archaic and classical education to emphasize; as a result, its scope is necessarily
affected by theirs. Nevertheless, that epic and tragedy share a common
worldview, participate in an intertextual relationship, and even evince the same
limitations gives promise that studying them in tandem will prove mutually
illuminating.
I thank all who have helped shape this work: Michael Anderson, John Davidson,
Patrick Finglass, Margalit Finkelberg, Andrew Ford, Patrick Gregory, Tobias
Gregory, David Kovacs, Donald Mastronarde, Charles McNelis, Andreas
Markantonatos, Melissa Mueller, Philomen Probert, David Ratzan, Ruth Scodel,
Nancy Shumate, Penny Small, Ernest Suarez, Jill de Villiers, the late Elizabeth
von Klemperer, Joanne Waugh, Krishna Winston, and Tom Zanker. For assistance
and advice in the publication process I am grateful to Gwendolyn Baltera,
Chrissie Bell, Alison Bond, Suganya Elango, Roberta Engleman, Saari Greylock,
Liane Hartman, Eugenia Lao, Leslie Safford, and Emily Zogbi. Special thanks are
due my astute and patient editor, Stefan Vranka, and an anonymous referee for
the press. I am also indebted to attentive audiences at The Catholic University of
America, Georgetown University, Harvard University, Humboldt University,
Smith College, the University of Bordeaux, the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, the University of South Florida, Yale University, and Victoria University
of Wellington. Errors are my own.
Page 3 of 7
Preface
(p.xviii) Some of the material in this book has been previously published.
Portions of Chapter 5 appear in “Sophocles’ Ajax and His Homeric Prototypes,”
in Theatre World: Critical Perspectives in Greek Tragedy and Comedy; Studies in
Honour of Georgia Xanthakou-Karamanos, edited by A. Fountoulakis, A.
Markantonatos, and G. Vasilaros, de Gruyter 2017, 137–55. Material from the
Introduction and Chapter 6 appears in “Sophocles and Education” in Brill’s
Companion to Sophocles, edited by A. Markantonatos, Brill 2012, 513–25.
Portions of Chapter 7 appear in “The Education of Hippolytus” in Wisdom and
Folly in Euripides, edited by P. Kyriakou and A. Rengakos, de Gruyter 2016, 121–
36. Portions of Chapter 8 appear in “Iphigenia in Aulis: A Dual Education,” in
Brill’s Companion to Euripides, edited by A. Markantonatos, forthcoming from
Brill. I thank the publishers for permission to reprint.
Notes:
(1.) Paideia signifies “both the culture or civilization of its time . . . and the
process of education by which a command of the culture and its tradition were
acquired” (Elsner 2013, 137). Convenient though the term is, I avoid it for two
reasons. First, it is attested with the signification “education” only from the last
third of the fifth century (see Perdicoyianni 1994, 260 and Ward 2011, 12–14).
Second, the term acquired disquieting associations in the wake of Jaeger’s
Paideia (1939–44). See Näf 2002; White 2002; and Losemann 2007, 312 for the
affinities of Jaeger’s thought with Nazi ideology.
(2.) Although I discuss the Aeschylean motif of “learning through suffering” in

the introduction and refer to other passages when relevant, I do not devote a
separate chapter to Aeschylus, because the pattern that concerns me in this
study—the social and ethical formation of youthful characters as modeled on the
Iliadic Achilles’—does not loom large in his extant plays. Rogers 2005, 126–93
and 194–252, discusses the didactic theme in the Oresteia and in [Aesch.] PV
respectively; for the latter see also Castrucci 2012, 15–134.
(3.) Even newborns, such as the infant protagonist of the Homeric Hymn to
Hermes or the infant Perseus set adrift in a chest with his mother (Simon. F 271
Poltera), possess a familial history that supplies the audience with crucial
information.
(4.) For “the way [a] text invites us to be actively involved in making
reconstructions” see Easterling 1990, 94. She concludes (1990, 99), “The desire
to construct is perfectly compatible with the knowledge that strictly speaking
there is nothing there at all.” For an illuminating discussion of this process from
the perspective of theory of mind see Budelmann and Easterling 2010.
(5.) Waldock 1951, 15. Narratology’s attention to analepsis (i.e., flashback,

subdivided into internal and external, narratorial and actorial) goes far to
Page 4 of 7
Preface
establish a foundation beneath the crust. For these subsidiary categories see de
Jong 2007.
(6.) ὁ ἀπατηθεὶς σοϕώτερος τοῦ μὴ ἀπατηθέντος, DK 82 B 23. For analysis of

this fragment see S. Halliwell 2005, 396 and Munteanu 2011, 47–51.
(7.) Such readers and spectators are not naive, but neither are they excessively
subtle or “super-competent” (Revermann 2006, 100), because they can follow up
on indications embedded in the text rather than rely on prior familiarity with the
mythical material.
(8.) T. Morgan 1998, 9–10 observes, “While most of the elements of later
educational practice were developed in the classical period . . . what little
evidence we have gives no indication that they were assembled as a regular
group or in a regular order until the early Hellenistic period.” Primary sources
bearing on ancient education are selected and translated in Joyal, McDougall,
and Yardley 2009. For Greco-Roman schooltexts see Cribiore 2001, 127–59; for
education in classical Athens, Rihill 2003. Three handbooks—Too 2001a; Grubbs
and Parkin 2013; and Bloomer 2015—cover selected topics in Greco-Roman
education and offer suggestions for further reading. Older works include
Freeman 1922; Jaeger 1939–44; Marrou 1948 (English translation 1956); and
Beck 1964 and 1975. Of these, Marrou’s study is still regularly consulted; for its
strengths and weaknesses see Too 2001b, 1–4.
(9.) For the relationship between epic and tragedy see Rutherford 1982; Gould
2001; Easterling 1984; Davidson 1999–2000, 2006, and 2012; and de Jong 2016.
(10.) Gould 2001, 33.
(11.) For attempts to recover the addressee of Greco-Roman didactic poetry see
Schiesaro, Mitsis, and Clay 1993.
(12.) For choral training as formative for young women see Calame 1997, 25–34
and passim; Ingalls 2000; and Swift 2010, 186–88.
(13.) For the parallel between Cheiron’s teachings and the poet’s own
“paraenetic relationship with his patrons” see J. M. Halliwell 2008, 87 and
passim.
(14.) For the motif of education in Clouds see Dover 1968, lviii–lxvi and passim;
in Wasps, Slater 1997; in Knights, Morgan 1999, 49; in Lysistrata, Golden 2015,
40–41.
(15.) For the challenges of determining comic tone see Wright 2012, 5–30.
Exemplifying the complexity of the task is Woodbury 1976, a meticulous parsing
of two brief references to literacy in Aristophanes’ Frogs.
Page 5 of 7
Preface
(16.) For (rare) references in tragedy to lower-class enculturation as a trickling

down of aristocratic standards see Eur. Hipp. 407–12 and Eur. Hec. 313–16. For
Helen’s death as a deterrent for women who might be tempted to commit
adultery see Eur. Tro. 1031–32. For the education of Aristophanes’ sausage
seller as a travesty of elite training see Ar. Eq.1235–39. For the dramatic
function of tragedy’s anonymous household slaves see Yoon 2012, 9–21.
(17.) For the blurring of boundaries between public and private see Griffith
2001, 24–25 and passim.
(18.) For pederastic pedagogy see Percy 1996. On Euripides’ lost Chrysippus,
which represented Laius as teaching Pelops’ son Chrysippus how to drive a
chariot and then abducting him, see Hubbard 2006, 223–31.
(19.) For a careful assessment of the bond between Achilles and Patroclus in the
Iliad see Fantuzzi 2012, 187–215. He concludes that their relationship is
depicted by Homer as emotional rather than sexual, but reinterpreted as
homoerotic in the later tradition—for example, in Aeschylus’ lost tragedy
Myrmidons, for which see Michelakis 2002, 41–46. Orestes and Pylades are
portrayed as a devoted pair by all three tragedians, but with no suggestion that
their relationship is homoerotic.
(20.) For acculturation via age groups see M. Griffith 2001, 36–56 and M. Griffith
2015b, 34. For Hippodameia’s eminence among her age mates see Il. 13. 431–
32. At Od. 1.383–85 Athena disguises herself as Telemachus to assemble a crew
of young Ithacans, who, however, remain with the ship and take no part in
Telemachus’ adventures at Pylos and Sparta. At Eur. Hipp. 1179–80 the
messenger reports that a “vast crowd of friends and
contemporaries” (μυρία . . . / ϕίλων . . . ἡλίκων ⟨θ’⟩ ὁμήγυρις) clustered around
Hippolytus as he departed from Trozen, but elsewhere in the play the young man
is characterized as detached and solitary. At Eur. Tro.1182–84 Hecuba recalls
that her grandson Astyanax promised to bring “bands of age mates” (ὁμηλίκων /
κώμους) to her tomb, and at 1209–11 she laments that she is not crowning him
for besting his contemporaries (νικήσαντα . . . / . . .ἡλίκας) in riding or archery,
but instead adorning his corpse. Within the play, however, Astyanax (as Hector’s
son and heir) is the only child singled out for death by the Greeks.
(21.) For the distribution of athletic activities across classes in democratic

Athens see Fisher 1998. For the link between gumnastikē and mousikē see
Bundrick 2005, 74–79. The value of these pursuits was at issue in Euripides’ lost
tragedy Antiope, in which twin brothers, the warrior/athlete Zethus and
Amphion the musician, represented and advocated contrasting ways of life. For
different hypotheses on how their conflict developed see Wilson 1999–2000,
440–49, and Natanblut 2009.
(22.) For references to literacy in Euripides see Wright 2010, 176–79.

Page 6 of 7
Preface
Page 7 of 7
Abbreviations

Tragedy
Justina Gregory

Print ISBN-13: 9780190857882
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190857882.001.0001
(p.xix) Abbreviations
Justina Gregory
Ancient Authors and Texts

Abbreviations of ancient authors’ names and the titles of their works generally
follow the Oxford Classical Dictionary, fourth edition. A list of authors and works
mentioned in the text and notes is provided below for convenient reference.
Aesch.,
Aeschylus
Ag.,
Agamemnon
Cho.,
Choephoroe (= Libation Bearers)
Eum.,
Eumenides
Pers.,
Persae (= Persians)
Supp.,
Supplices (= Suppliant Women)
[Aesch.],
pseudo-Aeschylus
PV,
Prometheus Vinctus (= Prometheus Bound)
Apollod.,
Apollodorus
Bibl.,
Bibliotheca (= Library)
Page 1 of 9
Abbreviations
Epit.,
Epitome
Ap. Rhod.,
Apollonius of Rhodes
Argon.,
Argonautica
Ar.,
Aristophanes
Ach.,
Acharnenses (= Acharnians)
Eq.,
Equites (= Knights)
Nub.,
Nubes (= Clouds)
Ran.,
Ranae (= Frogs)
Arist.,
Aristotle
Eth. Nic.,
Ethica Nicomachea (= Nichomachean Ethics)
Poet.,
Poetica (= Poetics)
Pol.,
Politica (= Politics)
Rh.,
Rhetorica (= Rhetoric)
(p.xx) Ath.,
Athenaeus
Deipn.,
Deipnosophistae (= The Learned Banqueters)
Bacchyl.,
Bacchylides
Dith.,
Dithyrambs
Ep.,
Epinicians
Callim.,
Callimachus
Democr.,
Democritus
Page 2 of 9
Abbreviations
Dio Chrys.,
Dio Chrysostom
Or.,
Orationes
Diog. Laert.,
Diogenes Laertius
Eur.,
Euripides
Alc.,
Alcestis
Andr.,
Andromache
Ba.,
Bacchae
Cycl.,
Cyclops
El.,
Electra
Hec.,
Hecuba
Hel.,
Helena (= Helen)
Heracl.,
Heraclidae (= Children of Heracles)
HF,
Hercules Furens
Hipp.,
Hippolytus
IA,
Iphigenia Aulidensis (= Iphigenia in Aulis)
Ion
IT,
Iphigenia Taurica (= Iphigenia among the Taurians)
Med.,
Medea
Or.,
Orestes
Phoe.,
Phoenissae (= Phoenician Women)
Supp.,
Supplices (= Suppliant Women)
Tro.,
Troades (= Trojan Women)
Page 3 of 9
Abbreviations
Gorg.,
Gorgias
Hdt.,
Herodotus
Hes.,
Hesiod
Op.,
Opera et Dies (= Works and Days)
Theog.,
Theogonia (= Theogony)
Hom.,
Homer
Il.,
Iliad
Od.,
Odyssey
Hor.,
Horace
Epod.,
Epodi (= Epodes)
Hymn. Hom. Ven.,

Hymnus Homericus ad Venerem (= Homeric Hymn to Venus)
(p.xxi) Juv.,
Juvenal
Lib.,
Libanius
Progymn.,
Progymnasmata (= Preliminary Exercises)
Nic.,
Nicander
Ther.,
Theriaca
Ov.,
Ovid
Ars am.,
Ars amatoria
Fast.,
Fasti
Paus.,
Page 4 of 9
Abbreviations
Pausanias
Philostr.,
Philostratus
Imag.,
Imagines
Pind.,
Pindar
Isthm.,
Isthmian Odes
Nem.,
Nemean Odes
Ol.,
Olympian Odes
Pyth.,
Pythian Odes
Pl.,
Plato
Ap.,
Apologia (= Apology)
[Ax.]
Axiochus
Chrm.,
Charmides
Hp. mai.,
Hippias maior
Lach.,
Laches
Leg.,
Leges (= Laws)
Men.,
Meno
Prt.,
Protagoras
Resp.,
Respublica (= Republic)
Symp.,
Symposium
Plut.,
Plutarch
Mor.,
Moralia
Page 5 of 9
Abbreviations
Vit. Lyc.,
Vitae Parallelae, Lycurgus (= Life of Lycurgus)
Vit. Thes.,
Vitae Parallelae, Theseus (= Life of Theseus)
Prot.,
Protagoras
Quint.,
Quintilian
Inst.,
Institutio oratoria
Semon.,
Semonides
Simon.,
Simonides
Soph.,
Sophocles
Aj.,
Ajax
Ant.,
Antigone
El.,
Electra
(p.xxii) OC,
Oedipus Coloneus (= Oedipus at Colonus)
OT,
Oedipus Tyrannus (= Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King)
Phil.,
Philoctetes
Trach.,
Trachiniae (= Trachinian Women)
Stat.,
Statius
Achil.,
Achilleis (= Achilleid)
Theophr.,
Theophrastus
Hist. pl.,
Historia plantarum
Thgn.,
Theognis
Thuc.,
Page 6 of 9
Abbreviations
Thucydides
Tyrt.,
Tyrtaeus
Verg.,
Vergil (Virgil)
Aen.,
Aeneid
Ecl.,
Eclogues
G.,
Georgics
Xen.,
Xenophon
Cyn.,
Cynegeticus
Mem.,
Memorabilia
Editions of Fragments and Testimonia

Bernabé
A. Bernabé, ed. 1987–2007. Poetarum epicorum Graecorum:
Testimonia et fragmenta. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner.
Davies
M. Davies, ed. 1988. Epicorum Graecorum fragmenta. Göttingen,
Germany: Vandenhoek and Ruprecht.
Davies-Finglass
M. Davies and P. J. Finglass, eds. 2014. Stesichorus: The Poems.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DK
H. Diels and W. Kranz, eds. 1956. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.
6th ed. 3 vols. Berlin: Weidmann.
Kassel-Austin
R. Kassel and C. Austin, eds. 1983–. Poetae Comici Graeci. Berlin: de
Gruyter.
Maehler
H. Maehler, ed. 2003. Bacchylidis Carmina cum fragmentis. 11th ed.
Berlin: Saur.
Merkelbach-West
R. Merkelbach and M. L. West, eds. 1967. Fragmenta Hesiodea.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Neri
C. Neri, ed. 2003. Erinna; Testimonianze e Frammenti. Bologna:
Pàtron Editore.
Page 7 of 9
Abbreviations
(p.xxiii) P Oxy.
Oxyrhynchus Papyri, edited by B. P. Grenfell and A.S. Hunt. 1898–.
London: Egypt Exploration Society.
Poltera
O. Poltera, ed. 2008. Simonides Lyricus, Testimonia und Fragmente.
Basel, Switzerland: Schwabe.
Snell-Maehler
B. Snell and H. Maehler, eds. 1987–89. Pindari Carmina cum
fragmentis. 2 vols. Leipzig: Teubner.
TrGF
Tragicorum Graecorum fragmenta, edited by B. Snell, R. Kannicht,
and S. Radt. 1971–2004. 5 vols. in 6. Berlin: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht. Note: “Kannicht” and “Radt” refer to the relevant volumes
of TrGF.
Voigt
E.-M. Voigt, ed. 1971. Sappho et Alcaeus: Fragmenta. Amsterdam:
Polak and van Gennep.
West
M. L. West, ed. 1989–92. Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum
cantati. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cypr., Il. Parv. West
M. L. West, ed. and trans. 2003. Greek Epic Fragments. Loeb
Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Note:
Cypr. = Cypria; Il. Parv. = Ilias Parva (Little Iliad).
Reference Works
LIMC
Lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae. 1981–2009. Zurich,
Switzerland: Artemis Verlag
RE
A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, W. Kroll, et al., eds. 1894–1980. Real-
Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft. Stuttgart: J. B.
Metzler.
Texts, Translations, and Proper Names

My principal Greek texts are West’s Teubner edition of the Iliad, Stanford’s
Macmillan edition of the Odyssey, Lloyd-Jones and Wilson’s Oxford Classical Text
of Sophocles, and Diggle’s Oxford Classical Text of Euripides. Translations not
otherwise attributed are my own. I generally use Latinized names for familiar
mythological figures and Greek names for less well-known ones.
Citations of Scholarly Journals

Abbreviations of journal titles generally follow L’Année philologique. (p.xxiv)
Page 8 of 9
Abbreviations
Page 9 of 9
Introduction

Tragedy
Justina Gregory

Print ISBN-13: 9780190857882
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190857882.001.0001
Introduction
Justina Gregory
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190857882.003.0001
Abstract and Keywords

Representations of education in epic and tragedy unfold against a backdrop of
cultural concepts that go stated or unstated, challenged or assumed. The
introduction explores the most significant of these concepts. They include the
assumption that definitive boundaries demarcate the life stages, with youth
considered appropriate for learning and old age for instruction; a surprisingly
elusive concept of youth as the occasion for rites of maturation; representations
of the ideal instructor as a real or surrogate father whose methods include
injunctions (hupothēkai), general reflections (gnōmai), and exemplary tales
(paradeigmata); an understanding of education as complemented, enhanced, or
frustrated by natural endowment; and variations on the theme of learning
through suffering.
Keywords: age classes, ancient Greece, fathers as teachers, gnōmai, hupothēkai, paradeigmata,
learning through suffering, nature versus culture, rites of maturation
REPRESENTATIONS OF EDUCATION in epic and tragedy unfold against a

backdrop of cultural concepts that can go stated or unstated, challenged or
assumed. As a prelude to my readings of specific texts I consider the following
questions: what physical and mental qualities are taken to differentiate youth
from age? In scenes of instruction who is regarded as the instructor, who the
student? How relevant to archaic and classical concepts of education is the
initiatory model of adolescent maturation? Who are the typical purveyors of
instruction, and what are the typical occasions and methods? What balance is
Page 1 of 26
Introduction
assumed between natural endowment and educational acquisition? What

relationship is postulated between experience and learning?
Age Classes and Education

The literature of archaic and classical Greece assumes a sharp demarcation
between the different life stages—a premise that proves highly relevant to
education.1 As archaic and classical poets describe the abilities and pursuits
characteristic of each period, they draw a contrast between time’s effects on the
body and on the mind. Even as the physical flourishing of youth yields to debility,
mental impulsiveness gives way to judgment and understanding. Young men are
feckless; their arguments are incomplete, their judgment fragile.2 The sobriety
and good sense that stereotypically characterize (p.2) the old3 serve as partial
compensation for the physical decline that is recognized as an inevitable
corollary of aging.4
In the Iliad older men take little part in the fighting; when King Priam and his
counselors look down at the battlefield from the walls of Troy, their spatial
distance from the realm of action underscores their chronological and
psychological detachment.5 Exceptionally, the aged Nestor still participates in
the fighting on the Greek side, but even he suffers from diminished powers.
When Agamemnon wishes aloud that the old king’s strength were commensurate
to his fighting spirit, Nestor concurs, adding (Il. 4.322–25)
[b]ut nevertheless I shall mingle with the chariot-fighters

and guide them with counsel and directives, for that
is the old men’s privilege. The younger men will wield their spears,
since they are my juniors and trust in their own strength.
The belief that counseling the young is the “old men’s privilege” (γέρας
γερόντων, Il. 4.323) reflects a widespread assumption that it is for the old to
teach and for the young to listen and learn.6 When a young person offers advice
to his elders, it is with deference and hesitation. At a later point in the poem,
when the Trojans have broken through the Greeks’ defensive wall to threaten
the ships, Agamemnon advocates abandoning the siege and sailing home.
Odysseus attacks his suggestion, at which point Agamemnon invites anyone
“whether young or old” who has a better idea to express his opinion. Diomedes
takes up the challenge, but begins by expressing the hope that his listeners will
not be surprised or annoyed at his temerity, given that he is the most youthful
among them (Il. (p.3) 14.111–12). Though in the event his advice is favorably
received, it is telling that he prefaces his speech with a captatio benevolentiae
that acknowledges his auditors’ prejudice against advice emanating from the
young.
Conventional wisdom ascribes rashness to the young and sagacity to the old,7
but a more fine-grained analysis of the life stages can yield a different result. An
innovator in many spheres, Solon adopts an idiosyncratic perspective on aging.8
Page 2 of 26
Introduction
His poem on the ages of man (F 27 West) divides the life span into ten periods of
seven years each. Solon focuses on the physical changes that accompany the
first four hebdomads: the loss of baby teeth, onset of puberty, growth of a beard,
and attainment of adult strength. The fifth hebdomad is marked by a change in
social status: it is “seasonable” (ὥριον, 27.9) for a man in his thirties, Solon
observes, to contemplate marriage. Only in the sixth, seventh, and eighth
hebdomads do mental qualities come into play: Solon comments that a man in
his forties is no longer inclined to “acts of thoughtlessness,”9 and that someone
of this age is “the best by far in judgment and speaking ability.” He notes that
intellectual debility sets in around the ninth hebdomad, ensuring that a man will
die “not unseasonably” (οὐκ . . . ἄωρος, 27.18) at the end of the tenth. Not only
does Solon not dwell on youth’s vigor and old age’s physical decline as other
archaic poets are wont to do, but he also views mental qualities
idiosyncratically: not as improving over time, but as reaching a peak in midlife
and then gradually diminishing.
Solon’s willingness to challenge conventional wisdom is evident in another

statement about aging. His avowal that “I am constantly learning many things as
I grow older” (γηράσκω δ’ ἀεὶ πολλὰ διδασκόμενος, F 18 West) is cited by a
number of Plato’s speakers10 and also holds appeal for moderns, for its
affirmation of lifelong learning harmonizes with contemporary theories of human
development. In the Greek tradition, however, an old man who continues to learn
(p.4) is as anomalous11 as a young man who offers advice; the Athenian
statesman goes against the grain of tradition when he associates advanced years
with receiving rather than giving instruction. To be sure, a fragment of
Democritus (DK 68 B 183) denies any necessary connection between age and
wisdom: “There is, I take it, comprehension (ξύνεσις) in the young and lack of
comprehension in the old. For time does not teach sense, but seasonable
nurturing (ὡραίη τροϕή) does, and nature.” Solon’s viewpoint also finds some
adherents in tragedy: the unknown speaker of an Aeschylean fragment asserts,
“It is fine even for an old man to learn what is wise” (Aesch. F 396 Radt), and
the Argive elders who make up the chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon declare,
“For the old, constructive learning (εὖ μαθεῖν) remains forever fresh.”12 Yet the
defensive tone of these statements suggests that they represent a minority view.
More often the traditional linkage between youth and foolishness on the one
hand and age and wisdom on the other goes unchallenged. In tragedy, geriatric
learning generally takes place under compulsion and is associated with
misfortune, hardship, humiliation, or defeat.
Rites of Passage
Rites of passage, with their initiatory associations and three discrete stages of
withdrawal, liminality, and reintegration, would seem intuitively related to
education, but in the ancient Greek context the points of contact prove elusive.13
While rite-of-passage motifs appear in scattered form throughout archaic and
classical literature, representations of the complete process are not easy to
Page 3 of 26
Introduction
identify. The most unassailable instance occurs in the Odyssey. In a compressed

but vivid flashback the Homeric narrator recounts how the youthful Odysseus,
(p.5) during a visit to his maternal grandparents, passed an initiatory test by
killing a wild boar and returned home laden with gifts, having acquired a
commemorative battle scar bearing testimony to his enhanced status (Od.
19.392–466). Each of these details can be related to rite-of-passage scenarios
exemplified in other cultures.14 Some scholars have argued that the portion of
the Odyssey known as the Telemachy exemplifies a similar pattern of withdrawal,
liminality, and reintegration, although Telemachus’ initiatory experience is more
drawn out and his trials are more internal in nature.15 I regard initiatory
experiences as secondary to the poem’s portrayal of Telemachus’ education;
what is fundamental is the relationship that develops between father and son.
The Odyssey is probably not, however, the classical text that first comes to mind
in connection with rites of passage. In an influential series of articles dating
from the 1960s to the 1980s, Vidal-Naquet asserted the initiatory character of
the Athenian ephēbeia (military service for adolescents) and then applied his
conclusions to Sophocles’ Philoctetes.16 For Vidal-Naquet, Neoptolemus is a
paradigmatic ephebe who undergoes an initiatory transformation on the island
of Lemnos. The end of the play finds him preparing to return to Troy, having
acquired enhanced hoplite status. This account depends, however, on a highly
selective reading of the text. In the interpretation I present in this study the
primary influences on Philoctetes are intertextual; such traces of the rite-of-
passage motif as can be identified have been filtered through the Odyssey, and
Neoptolemus’ educational trajectory owes most to the pattern of the Hairesis
Biou, or Choice of Life.
Hupothēkai, Gnōmai, and Paradeigmata

Didactic figures in the Greek literary tradition rely on verbal directives and take
a dim view, as we shall see, of the learning that comes from direct experience.
We can single out three formal markers of the pedagogical moment: hupothēkai,
injunctions; gnōmai, general reflections; and paradeigmata, exemplary tales.17
(p.6) Each of these modes conveys (or at least purports to convey)18 to the
listener an experienced speaker’s distilled wisdom. The dispenser of instruction
may or may not be a blood relative: in the Iliad, for example, Achilles receives
advice from his father, Peleus, in the form of injunctions, and counsel from his
tutor Phoenix in the form of exemplary tales.19 Regardless of biological
connection, in the literary tradition the didactic relationship is often conflated
with the parental one. Good counsel emanating from other sources is typically
described as fatherly.20 Paternal advice is assumed to be reliable as well as
benevolent: thus a fragment of Solon (22a West) notes that an attractive youth
should “heed his father, for he will not be obeying a guide who is prone to
mistakes,” and in a fragment of Euripides (362.1–4 Kannicht) Erechtheus, the
king of Athens, tells an unnamed son that “since you are now at an age to
understand—and if I die, you can cherish the paternal counsels (πατρὸς/γνώμας)
Page 4 of 26
Introduction
that I am about to expound—I want to leave you a legacy of advice that is fine
and useful for a young person.”
Whether the counsel dispensed by didactic figures consists of traditional,

generalized hupothēkai (“Pay honor to Zeus and your parents”; “Remember that
Zeus alone knows how our lives will end”21) or warnings tailored to a specific
situation, all that is required of the addressee is to keep the proffered advice in
mind. That task is not, however, as simple as it sounds. A cautionary example of
filial distraction is Euripides’ Phaethon (Eur. F 779 Kannicht): before and even
after his son takes the reins of his chariot, Helios the sun god issues instructions
that the youth fatally ignores. The forgetfulness of the young is repeatedly
deplored in archaic and classical texts.22
(p.7) Sunousia
Communal influence is one aim of the aristocratic, homosocial association that
the Greeks termed sunousia, or “being-with.”23 For a young man, the mingling
that took place at an elite banquet or symposium24 was regarded as indubitably
educational, though not necessarily in a positive way. Addressing his youthful
beloved Cyrnus, Theognis (31–36 West) explains the risks and rewards of
absorbing lessons from such an environment:
Do not associate with wicked men, but always adhere

to the good ones: drink and eat with them, and sit among them,
and try to please those who have great power. From worthy men
you will learn what is worthwhile; if you mingle with the wicked,
you will destroy even the sense you possess.
Sunousia is linked to the traditional oral transmission of cultural values.25

Drinking and eating in company offers training in virtue or, as it may be, vice.26
Presumably, a young man will observe the example and listen to the advice of
good men and bad and shape his own conduct accordingly. The process can be
envisaged as passive and ineluctable; thus Antiphon declares (DK 87 B 62), “One
must necessarily become, with respect to character, of the same sort as the
individual with whom one spends the greatest part of each day,” and Democritus
(DK 68 B 184) remarks that “regular association with wicked men increases the
habit of evil.” On the other hand, it can be envisaged as a conscious, intentional
process of “imitating” (μιμεῖσθαι, DK 68 B 39 and DK 68 B 79) good or bad
exemplars. Either way, sunousia provides a venue and opportunity for youthful
learning.
Tragedy takes the educational consequences of sunousia for granted, although

speakers disagree on whether bad associations are harmful or salutary or simply
(p.8) reinforce a preexisting tendency.27 In Aeschylus’ Persians the queen
mother Atossa attributes her son Xerxes’ strategic missteps to his intercourse
with wicked men.28 Euripides’ Hecuba seems to envisage an education that
keeps bad influences at a safe remove when she describes a fine upbringing as
Page 5 of 26
Introduction
an “instruction in good. And if someone learns this well, he surely knows what is
shameful, having learned it by the measure of what is fine” (Hec. 601–2).
Euripides’ Agamemnon takes the same line when he tells his wife, Clytemnestra,
that Achilles’ father entrusted his son to Cheiron the Centaur “so that he would
not learn the habits of wicked men” (IA 709). On the other hand, Euripides’
Electra maintains that “what is bad holds an example for the good, and attracts
attention.”29 Despite their divergent views of the relationship between positive
and negative exemplars, all these speakers recognize that sunousia entails risks
as well as opportunities for the impressionable young.
The prestige of sunousia appears to dwindle over time as literate instruction

replaces oral enculturation.30 Writing in the fourth century, Plato offers a
reductio ad absurdum of education by association.31 At the opening of Plato’s
Symposium Agathon, who has invited Socrates to dinner, insists that his guest
recline beside him, “so that by touching you, wise as you are, I may get the
benefit of [your thoughts].” “It would be well,” Socrates replies, “if wisdom (ἡ
σοϕία) could flow from the fuller of us to the emptier if we just touch one
another, in the same way that water flows through a woolen thread from a fuller
vessel to an emptier one! If wisdom works like that, I value highly my position
beside you” (Symp. 175c8–e1). Socrates here turns a graceful compliment by
paradoxically identifying his younger companion, rather than himself, as the
source of wisdom. Simultaneously, he frames his conceit as an improbable
condition, for he is well aware that sophia cannot be siphoned from one
individual to another.32 (p.9) For Socrates the transmission of wisdom is not a
matter of simple proximity, nor does he have any use for passive reception on
the part of his interlocutor. While Socratic learning relies on imitating the
instructor’s ethical example, it requires the student’s voluntary, active
participation at every stage.33
Sunousia makes its own demands on young aristocrats, requiring them to be

responsive and adaptable. Changeability is one aspect of the multivalent term
mētis (“resourcefulness”34), which appears frequently in educational contexts.
Whereas moderns associate this quality with the chameleon, to the Greeks it
called to mind the octopus. Athenaeus (Deipn. 317a) quotes a fragment of
Theognis (= 215–16 West) praising the octopus’s gift of protective coloration:
“Cultivate the disposition of the wily octopus, which resembles the rock to which
it clings!” The lines have the ring of paraenetic advice; indeed, elsewhere
Athenaeus adduces a fragment of Pindar35 that employs the same image and
overtly reflects the conventions of mythological advice poetry. According to
Athenaeus, the speaker (presumably Amphiaraus, the Theban seer) is exhorting
(παραινῶν36) the youthful Amphilochus to calibrate his responses to his
company: “My child, bring to your associations in every city a mind that most
resembles the skin of the creature of the rocky sea [i.e., the octopus].
Page 6 of 26
Introduction
Spontaneously praise the man who is present, but adopt other attitudes on other
occasions.”37
Even as aristocratic sunousia demanded adaptability, it also required an

enactment of dignity and integrity. The balance was a delicate one, and a youth’s
comportment in social situations tested both his character and his training.
When Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, decided to choose a son-in-law, he
invited the suitors to stay with him for a year, while “he made trial of their (p.
10) manliness, temper, education, and manners by consorting with them both
individually and all together.”38 Hippocleides the Athenian emerged as the
favorite until at the culminating event of the probationary period, the banquet at
which Cleisthenes was to announce his choice of bridegroom, the young man got
drunk and performed headstands on a table, making a spectacle of himself that
might appeal to carousing youths, but not a prospective father-in-law. Because
he forgot what was appropriate to company and context, Hippocleides forfeited
an advantageous marriage.
Mentoring and Peer Role Models

A more manageable form of education involved tutelage by a single instructor. In
the second and third books of the Odyssey the goddess Athena emerges as the
Western tradition’s first Mentor when she disguises herself as Odysseus’ Ithacan
friend of the same name. Although her attitude is in many respects paternal, she
makes a temporary rather than lifelong commitment to her charge. She rouses
Telemachus to action by combining generous praise with stern exhortation,
develops a full itinerary for him—he is to travel to Pylos and Sparta to inquire
after his missing father—and then helps him set it in motion. Athena in the guise
of Mentor remains at Telemachus’ side after he lands in Pylos, encouraging the
young man to act with confidence, guiding his conversation with his host, and
modeling appropriate behavior. The goddess takes her leave, as befits a mentor,
once she has deemed Telemachus capable of functioning without her. Before
transforming herself into a vulture and flying away, however, she ensures that
Telemachus will have a new guide on the next stage of his journey. It is at her
behest that Nestor’s son Pisistratus accompanies Telemachus to Sparta (Od.
3.369). Pisistratus, who is the same age as Telemachus but possesses more
social experience and self-confidence, serves as a peer role model for Odysseus’
son. By the time Telemachus’ journey draws to a close, not only have the two
young men forged a personal bond (Od. 15.195–97), but Pisistratus has also
taught Telemachus by example how to conduct himself in the social situations
that are a recurrent test of Homeric adulthood. Although the interventions of a
mentor and a peer role model help the youth make up lost educational ground,
they cannot compensate for the absence of his father.
Page 7 of 26
Introduction
(p.11) Curricula
While hupothēkai, gnōmai, and paradeigmata are deployed to convey instruction
on the spot, prearranged courses of study are not unattested. Phoenix gives an
abbreviated description of the warrior’s curriculum when he reports that
Achilles’ father, Peleus, charged him with shaping the youth into “a speaker of
words and a doer of deeds” (Il. 9.443, cf. Od. 4.818). Missing from this précis but
omnipresent in the poem is another crucial aspect of the warrior’s upbringing,
enculturation in the value system that constituted the heroic code.39 Some fifth-
century assumptions about the influence of curriculum on character can be
gleaned from Herodotus, who in the first book of his Histories has occasion to
describe two contrasting courses of study, one designed for the Persians and the
other for the Lydians.
In the course of his leisurely Persian ethnography, Herodotus arrives at the topic
of education. He describes the minimalist curriculum offered the male elite, a
course of study that includes two practical elements and one ethical: the
Persians “train their sons from the age of five to twenty in three things only: to
ride, to shoot a bow, and to speak the truth.”40 Whether or not this report has
any factual basis,41 it complements the historian’s portrayal of the Persians in
Book 1 as a simple, rugged people—a characterization that shifts over the
course of the Histories.42 Herodotus may be reasoning backward, inferring the
Persian curriculum from his observations that adult Persians prize skill in battle
above other attainments (Hdt. 1.136.1) and disapprove most strongly of
deception (Hdt. 1.138.1, cf. 153.1).
Herodotus’ Persian curriculum is diametrically opposed to the one that Cyrus

foists on the natives after his conquest of Lydia. As Herodotus tells the story,
after reducing the country Cyrus allows the inhabitants a measure of freedom
and even favor; he puts a Lydian rather than a Persian in charge of the Lydian
treasure and installs Croesus, the defeated king of Lydia, at the Persian court as
his personal adviser (Hdt. 1.153). When the Lydians use their gold to rise in
revolt, Cyrus contemplates reducing the entire population to slavery. Desperate
to save (p.12) his compatriots, Croesus suggests an alternative: rather than
destroying Sardis, Lydia’s capitol city, and enslaving the population, Cyrus
should impose a new curriculum on the Lydians that will transform their
character. He should issue an edict compelling them to adopt warm, comfortable
dress and to teach their children to play musical instruments and become
shopkeepers. This civilian, artistic, and commercial regimen, Croesus insists,
will turn the Lydians into “women instead of men” (Hdt. 1.155.4), and ensure
their harmlessness in the future. Pleased by this advice, Cyrus issues an edict; in
consequence “the Lydians changed their entire way of life” (Hdt. 1.157.2–3).
Herodotus may once again be reasoning backward from outcome to prior

education, for elsewhere he notes that the Lydians were “the first to become
shopkeepers” (Hdt. 1.94.1). And once again he embeds an ethical element (this
Page 8 of 26
Introduction
time a negative one) in the curriculum: since Greek thought connected

commerce with mendacity,43 by learning to be merchants the Lydian youth will
simultaneously learn to be liars—the polar opposites of their Persian conquerors,
who were schooled in truth telling from early childhood. Both these passages
assume that the curriculum offered to youthful male elites is intended to further
the interests of those in power; that it includes ethical formation as well as
instruction in practical skills; and that a course of study can effectively change
the young either for the better or the worse.
Nature versus Teaching

Croesus’ belief in the efficacy of education is not universal. Whether teaching
can alter essential character is vigorously debated in the archaic and classical
periods. The polarity between innate qualities and acquired attitudes or skills
emerges as a subdivision of the grand antithesis between phusis (nature) and
nomos (culture, convention, law) that dominates fifth-and-fourth-century
intellectual discourse—an antithesis with religious, historical, political, legal,
philosophical, and psychological applications. The antithesis subsumes a variety
of issues: “Do gods exist in nature or only in custom? Does human society exist
as a result of human nature or by convention? Is morality natural or only a
product of custom? Are the optimal political arrangements for a state
determined by the facts of human nature alone, or should laws be introduced to
provide a control on nature? [Is the individual] better off to follow the dictates of
nomos or those of phusis?”44 The efficacy of the educational process, whether
regarded as revealing, (p.13) enhancing, or correcting natural tendencies,45
fits squarely into this debate. Education is a topic that attracts both skeptical
dismissal and defensive praise, with most assessments falling in between.
The teaching of skills, as opposed to values, appears unproblematic. According

to Democritus, skill and knowledge can be attained only through learning46—a
rule of thumb that applies to all artisanal accomplishments, from a single trick
(such as the complex knot that Circe teaches Odysseus, Od. 8.447–48) to an
entire technology such as seafaring. The term sophia, which comes to mean
“wisdom,” in its earliest appearances refers to the mastery of artisanal skills that
can be taught and learned.47 So prestigious is craft knowledge that in Homer
and the Homeric Hymns such skills as carpentry, weaving, and poetry are
credited to the instruction of a sponsoring divinity.48
Language is a different kind of skill, for it is not limited to certain gifted

individuals but mastered by most human beings. Whether language is innate or
acquired, however, becomes a source of contention. That children pick up
speech from their environment is a matter of observation,49 as is the fact that
they can learn a language even in the absence of a linguistic community to
reinforce their efforts: Herodotus has heard of Greek-speaking women who
successfully instructed the sons they bore to Scythian and Pelasgian fathers in
Greek language and culture (Hdt. 4.78, 6.138). Coexisting with these observable
Page 9 of 26
Introduction
facts, however, is the postulate that speech—not just the capacity for meaningful
sound, but knowledge of a particular language—is inherent rather than learned.
Herodotus reports an experiment devised by King Psammetichus of Egypt to
ascertain whether the Egyptians are (as they themselves believe) the world’s
oldest race.50 The king arranges to keep two infants isolated from any human
speech, bringing in goats to suckle them and forbidding their caretaker to
address them. His hypothesis is that they will speak their initial utterance in the
world’s oldest language. When at two years of age the toddlers pronounce their
first intelligible word, it is bekos, which inquiry reveals to be Phrygian for
“bread.” The Egyptians thereupon conclude that the Phrygians are the world’s
oldest race (while maintaining, despite a (p.14) glaring lack of evidence, that
they themselves are the second oldest). They do not consider what (as
Herodotus hints) the experiment actually reveals: the children are imitating the
bleating of the goats.51
The liveliest controversy with respect to instruction centers on the possibility of

teaching ethical values—in particular aretē, a term that originally refers to
excellence or success but comes to connote virtue.52 The aristocratic perspective
on the issue, reflecting the self-serving belief that elite individuals are superior
by heredity, is represented by Theognis’ forceful claim that intellect and
character are determined at birth (429–32 West): “To beget and raise a human
being is easier than to place a decent disposition in him. No one has ever
devised how to make a foolish man sensible or a bad one good.”
In a fable that likens Helen to a lion cub (Aesch. Ag. 717–36), Aeschylus’ chorus
emphasizes the persistence of instinct in animals and human beings alike. Torn
from its mother and reared among humans, the lion cub is gentle and beguiling
at first, but “in the course of time it showed the character that came from its
parents”53 and polluted the house with bloodshed. Maturity brings out a natural
savagery that nurture cannot erase.
Reflecting a different perspective are those who privilege instruction and affirm
that aretē can be taught. This anti-elitist point of view is particularly associated
with the sophists, who as the first professional teachers to offer an advanced
level of instruction54 have an obvious stake in the argument. According to Plato’s
Meno, all the sophists with the exception of Gorgias claim to be instructors in
aretē (Pl. Men. 95c). The anonymous author of the Dissoi logoi (6.1) dismisses
“the claim, neither accurate nor [especially] new . . . that wisdom and virtue can
be neither taught nor learned.” Plato’s Protagoras promises to make any pupil
who comes to him a better man whose improvement will continue every day he
is exposed to his instruction (Pl. Prt. 318a–b), and proclaims it as both his own
and the Athenians’ belief that aretē can be acquired (Pl. Prt. 324c).
Page 10 of 26
Introduction
At first glance there seems to be a clear-cut chronological and ideological

antithesis between the traditional, aristocratic outlook, which asserts the
decisive role of phusis and the futility of instruction, and the innovating,
democratic claims of the sophists, who ascribe a transformative power to
instruction and (p.15) training. A closer look, however, suggests that such is
not the case. For one thing, there are different emphases within the traditional
camp: for example, Theognis is concerned to champion innate morality and
Pindar innate distinction. If the traditionalists do not speak with one voice,
neither do the sophists. Some are careful to qualify the claims that they make
with respect to teaching in general and their own brand of adult education in
particular.55 They propose to supplement phusis by instruction, not supplant it,
and they insist that in order to succeed, instruction must begin early in life.56
That the opposition between nature and education is hardly absolute is

suggested by the sophist Prodicus’ allegorical account of the Choice of
Heracles.57 The youthful Heracles arrives at a crossroads where he encounters
two personified female figures, one representing excellence or virtue (aretē) and
the other wickedness (kakia). As Aretē invites Heracles to choose her as his
guide, she explains that she has singled him out because “I know your parents
and have come to know your phusis [as formed] through your education.”58
Education, she here implies, has the effect of bringing out inherited qualities. A
fragment of Democritus (DK 68 B 33) also stresses the points of contact between
phusis and education: “Instruction and nature are similar. For instruction
reconstitutes the individual and in so doing creates his nature.” For Democritus,
early instruction becomes internalized and sets the direction for future
development. It is thus virtually indistinguishable from phusis.
Traditionalists and sophists alike recognize that multiple factors contribute to

character and accomplishment. It is widely understood that three elements
rather than two are at play in the educational process: practice (meletē and
askēsis are the usual terms) counts just as much as nature and teaching.59 The
opening of Meno dispenses with Plato’s customary elaborate scene setting;
instead the young aristocrat Meno immediately assails Socrates with questions
(Pl. Men. 70a): “Can you tell me, Socrates, whether virtue can be taught
(διδακτόν)? Or is it not taught, but rather attained by practice (ἀσκητόν)? Or is
it attained neither by practice nor through learning, but resides in human beings
through nature (ϕύσει) or (p.16) some other means?” While this abrupt
opening serves to characterize Meno as a headstrong youth,60 it also assumes
that his chosen alternatives require no contextualizing. Indeed, nature, teaching,
and practice recur as familiar variables in the tragic texts.
Lycurgus’ Experiment
It appears that a stark antithesis between nature and teaching is the exception
rather than the rule, and that both traditionalists and sophists acknowledge the
interplay of these factors, together with the third element of practice or
Page 11 of 26
Introduction
application, in the formation of the young. The precise weight of each factor
remains subject to debate and (according to Plutarch) inspires the following
tendentious experiment:61
Lycurgus, the lawgiver, wishing to recall the citizens from the mode of
living then existent, and to lead them to a more sober and temperate order
of life . . . reared two puppies from the same litter; and one he accustomed
to dainty food, and allowed it to stay in the house; the other he took afield
and trained in hunting. Later he brought them into the public assembly
and put down some bones and dainty food and let loose a hare. Each of the
dogs made for that to which it was accustomed, and, when the one of them
had overpowered the hare, he said, “You see, fellow-citizens, that these
dogs belong to the same stock, but by virtue of the discipline to which they
have been subjected they have turned out utterly different from each other,
and you also see that training is more effective than Nature for good.”
In an alternative version (also recounted by Plutarch) Lycurgus selects two

different breeds of puppy, one intended for domesticity and one for hunting; he
successfully trains the house dog to hunt and vice versa (Mor. 226b). In both
versions acculturation trumps heredity—a result that might be expected to
gratify Lycurgus, who was credited with devising not only the Spartans’
stringent laws but also their austere educational system (Plut. Vit. Lyc. 14–16).
Then as now, the outcome of scientific experiments seems to have been affected
by their patrons’ preferences.
(p.17) Fathers and Sons

When children manifest positive qualities, the persistence of heredity becomes
cause for celebration. Praising the epigonoi (the sons of the Seven against
Thebes), Pindar remarks that “noble resolve stands forth by nature from the
fathers to the sons.”62 Neither nature, instruction, nor practice, however, can
fully account for the phenomenon of bad sons who are born of good fathers.63
Theognis, a tireless champion of phusis, nevertheless concedes, “If a disposition
could be manufactured and inserted, never would a bad man issue from a good
father, for he would obey the counsels of good sense. But no one will ever make
a bad man good by instruction” (435–39 West). Even as he insists that education
cannot remedy natural deficiencies, he admits that good character is not
necessarily inheritable. Pindar looks to nature to explain generational variation:
“Traditional attainments (ἀρχαῖαι ἀρεταί) take turns producing strength in the
generations of men. For neither does the black soil give forth its harvest
uninterruptedly, nor as the years circle round are the trees apt to bear sweet
blossoms in unvarying abundance, but in alternation. Fate guides the mortal
race in the same way.”64 Familiar with olives and other fruit-bearing trees, the
poet adduces their biennial habit to make metaphorical sense of hereditary
variation in human beings.
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Introduction
Imagery of Nature and Education

Pindar is neither the first nor the last to use agricultural and arboricultural
analogies to illuminate the relationship between nature and education. The
Homeric poems repeatedly suggest a link between the growth of a young person
and the maturation of a sapling.65 In the most elaborate example, the death of
(p.18) Euphorbus at the hands of Menelaus is likened to the fate of a young
olive tree that has been carefully planted and tended, only to be blown down by
a strong wind (Il. 17.53–58). Pindar likens the excellence that thrives through
beneficial associations to the growth of a sapling: “Aretē leaps upward, like a
tree with the help of the fresh dew, raised up among wise and just men to the
liquid sky.”66 Both passages note the enrichment that nurture gives to growth—
Homer describes how the gardener sets out and waters the young olive, while
Pindar notes the contribution provided by dew—but also make it clear that the
tree shoots up through the powerful impetus of its own nature. Both factors67
are essential to growth and development.
The sophists appropriate and modify this imagery. Instead of likening children to
saplings, Antiphon adopts the metaphor of the plowed and sown field, which for
Pindar evokes alternation, to express the indispensable contribution made by
early education (DK 87 B 60): “In my opinion, the primary human concern is
education. For when you make a correct start in any endeavor it is likely that the
end, too, will come out well. So for the soil: however the seed is sown, so must
one expect the harvest. So also, whenever someone sows edifying education (τὴν
παίδευσιν γενναῖαν) in a youthful body, it lives and flourishes for an entire
lifetime, and neither tempest nor drought destroys it.” The same agricultural
imagery recurs in Protagoras (DK 80 B 11): “Education does not sprout in the
soil unless one goes to a great depth.” The metaphor affirms the value of a deep-
seated—that is, both early and thorough—formation. A passage from Euripides’
Hecuba (592–602) elaborates the conceit. Informed of her daughter Polyxena’s
noble death, Hecuba is moved to contrast agricultural yields with the growth
and development of human beings. Whatever the natural properties of the soil,
she observes, the quality of the harvest depends on external factors, on getting
“what is needed” (ὧν χρεών, Hec. 594) for growth.68 Human beings, in contrast,
are unvarying: the bad remain bad and the good good, regardless of
circumstances. Yet Hecuba then proceeds to mute her original contrast by
introducing an external factor that does in fact affect human beings: upbringing
as well as parentage, she concludes, has a role to play insofar as it teaches
goodness (ἔχει γε μέντοι καὶ τὸ θρεϕθῆναι καλῶς / δίδαξιν ἐσθλοῦ, Hec. 600–
601). Morality can be (p.19) inculcated: by learning in the first instance what
goodness is, a child comes to recognize deviations from that norm.
As arboricultural imagery is replaced by agricultural, the young pupil is now

identified with fertile soil, ready to be plowed and sown by education. The
student thereby becomes a passive recipient of instruction, while the teacher’s
role increases in importance.69 This imagery takes hold in both Greek and
Page 13 of 26
Introduction
Roman literature.70 It reflects the hope that timely, enlightened teaching can
offer protection against mistakes, suffering, and sorrow. The futility of this hope
is reflected in the proverbial concept of learning through suffering or
experience, to which I now turn.
Prometheus and Epimetheus

For the most part the archaic tradition regards teachers as transmitters of
wisdom and teaching as an honorific activity. Its attitude toward learning,
however, is ambivalent: learning in advance (what moderns associate with
abstract or theoretical learning) is commended, whereas learning from
experience (roughly comparable to one common modern understanding of
experiential learning71) is deplored.72 Hesiod associates learning in advance
with the figure of Prometheus, whose name he derives from promētheia, or
forethought.73 He associates belated learning with Epimetheus, “Afterthought,”
who, though warned by his brother Prometheus against accepting any gift from
Zeus, received Pandora into his household and “realized the evil he had” only
“once he had it.”74 Without suggesting that (p.20) forethought like
Prometheus’ guarantees freedom from suffering,75 the archaic tradition regards
heedlessness like Epimetheus’ as a prescription for disaster.
In Prometheus Bound the Titan Prometheus delivers a rhetorical display speech

in which he takes credit for human progress. He explains that he made human
beings, “feckless as they previously were (νηπίους ὄντας τὸ πρίν), sensible and
masters of intelligence” ([Aesch.] PV 443–44). Initially, Prometheus continues,
human beings lived “muddled” and “at random,” “like little ants, in the sunless
interiors of caves,” until Prometheus taught or rather “showed” them76 an array
of technologies. These included astronomy, numeracy, writing, mathematics, the
domestication of animals, and navigation, as well as medicine, divination, and
metallurgy.77 The speech concludes, “All human arts come from
Prometheus” ([Aesch.] PV 506)—that is, both from the Titan and from
forethought.78 In Prometheus’ formulation, learning in advance enables human
beings to control their environment and avoid costly mistakes.
Paired with his heedless brother Epimetheus, Prometheus makes a second

appearance in the narrative of cultural development that Plato puts into the
mouth of Protagoras the sophist (Pl. Prt. 320c–23a). At the dawn of creation
Epimetheus distributes to the animals all the attributes they will need for
survival, realizing too late that he has doled out everything he had to give and
left human beings unprotected. Prometheus intervenes and steals fire for them;
human beings also help themselves by devising language, shelter, clothing, beds,
and agriculture. What proves crucial to their survival, however, is a belated gift
from Zeus: the art of civic life (πολιτικὴν τέχνην, Pl. Prt. 322b), which frees
them from destitution and chaos.
Page 14 of 26
Introduction
By figuring Prometheus and Epimetheus as brothers, Hesiod does more than

draw attention to the contrast between forethought and afterthought.
Simultaneously, the poet encourages his audience to ponder the contrast
between siblings—not just Prometheus and Epimetheus, but Hesiod himself and
his irresponsible brother, Perses, to whom Works and Days is addressed. Since
(p.21) the Titans share the same parents79 and, presumably, the same
upbringing, their divergence must be a matter of innate disposition. They thus
illustrate familial variation, an observable fact that (like the difference between
fathers and sons) demanded acknowledgment even if it defied explanation. Most
importantly, however, Hesiod’s pairing of Prometheus and Epimetheus implies
that an intelligent individual will be able to take the measure of a situation in
advance (either by listening to advice or learning from others’ mistakes),
whereas someone who is naturally heedless will be compelled to learn from
painful experience.80
Learning through Suffering

The linkage between heedlessness and retrospective insight is forcefully
asserted in Hesiod’s maxim that “through suffering the feckless man comes to
understanding” (παθὼν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω, Hes. Op. 218). This gnōmē comments
self-referentially on the difference between learning in advance through
proverbs (and presumably also through injunctions and exemplary tales) and
learning belatedly through painful experience. Τhe verb πάσχω, from which the
participle παθών is derived, denotes either “experience” or “suffer”; here the
pejorative substantive νήπιος imposes the latter sense. The connotations of
νήπιος—naive, irresponsible, ineffective—are various enough to make
translation a challenge. The term is generally rendered as “childish” or
“infantile,” and indeed it often refers to children; in Hesiod’s myth of the races,
for example, the members of the silver race experience a childhood that lasts a
hundred years, and this group is described as “very nēpios” (Hes. Op. 131).
However, the term is also applied to adults, and here the translation “feckless”
seems more appropriate. Edmunds explains, “Adults who are called nēpioi . . .
are disconnected from the past and, especially, the future. . . . [T]his
disconnection is both mental (they do not have foresight) and social (their lack of
foresight almost always has fatal consequences).”81 A variation on Hesiod’s
maxim (“once a thing has been done, the νήπιος recognizes it”) appears in the
Iliad.82 In both Hesiod and Homer the context suggests unequivocal disapproval
(p.22) of the tardy learning that results from ignoring warnings or advice. This
judgment is mirrored in English idioms like “learning one’s lesson” and
“learning better,” but other attitudes toward belated education are possible, as
we shall see.
Sanctions
It is not only nēpioi who learn by means of painful experience. Ιn the Iliad
Agamemnon frames his appropriation of Briseis as a lesson for Achilles: “I shall
go myself to your dwelling and lead off Briseis of the fair cheeks, your prize, so
Page 15 of 26
Introduction
that you may learn well how superior I am to you.”83 In tragedy the same kind of
didactic justification accompanies warnings that an adversary will learn,
belatedly and through punishment, a lesson he ought to have grasped earlier of
his own volition.84 Such threats often signal a tyrannical disposition,85 as when
Aeschylus’ Clytemnestra and Aegisthus deliver harsh warnings to the Argive
chorus, noblemen whose seniority entitles them to heightened respect. In the
wake of Agamemnon’s murder Clytemnestra tells the old men, “You will learn
through instruction—late in the day, to be sure—to exercise good sense” (γνώσῃ
διδαχθεὶς ὀψὲ γοῦν τὸ σωϕρονεῖν, Aesch. Ag. 1425). Her statement combines
threats with reference to the opsimathia (late learning) that constitutes a
recurrent tragic theme.86 Clytemnestra’s lover, Aegisthus, is even more brutal
and dismissive. When the members of the chorus threaten Aegisthus with
stoning as the penalty for regicide, he likens them to the lowliest oarsmen on a
trireme and threatens them in turn with opsimathia in a double sense: learning
will come to men who are themselves old when it is too late to rectify their
mistakes (Aesch. Ag. 1617–23):
Is this the way you talk, you who are rowers seated on the lower
decks,
while those on the [steersman’s] bench are masters of the ship? (p.
23)
Old as you are, you will recognize how grievous it is to learn lessons
at such a time of life, when good sense (σωϕρονεῖν) is enjoined.
Chains
and starvation are two outstanding healer-seers (ἰατρομάντεις) of
the mind
for teaching even old age.
In these passages the tyrannical appropriation of the learning-through-suffering

motif is associated with a threatening use of the future tense. It can also be
signaled by a menacing imperative, as when Odysseus cautions the frantic
Hecuba against resisting her daughter’s sacrifice (Eur. Hec. 299): “Take
instruction (διδάσκου), and don’t from agitation of mind construe someone who
speaks sensibly as ill-disposed.” Either way, the threat of a salutary lesson casts
the speaker, not the addressee, in a negative light.
Recognition and Gain

Gnomic expressions and tyrannical threats are only two instantiations of a theme
with potential for an extended application.87 When not restricted to fools, and
uncoupled from warnings designed to intimidate, the learning-through-suffering
motif turns out to have much in common with the theme of anagnōrisis
(recognition) described by Aristotle as characteristic of the best tragic plots.88
Although Aristotle largely restricts anagnōrisis to recognitions that turn on
personal identity, scholars have not hesitated to extend the term. Thus
Rutherford regards anagnōrisis as “a sub-class of a broader and more significant
kind of recognition, which I should prefer to call ‘realisation.’ ”89 In such
Page 16 of 26
Introduction
“broader and more significant” recognitions the lessons of experience not only
shed light on the past but also hold potential for the future. Once irrevocable
mistakes have been identified and regretted, a residue of fruitful wisdom
remains—if not for the sufferers themselves (in tragedy it is usually too late for
them), at least for the internal and external audiences who witness their fate and
can take warning from it.
Aeschylus’ Oresteia hints at a positive transmutation of the motif, although the

passages in question are obscure and controversial. In the section of the parodos
that is known as the Hymn to Zeus, the chorus of Agamemnon interrupts an
account of the sacrifice of Iphigenia to propose πάθει μάθος (“through suffering,
learning,” Aesch. Ag. 177) as a law set in place by Zeus: remembered toil (p.24)
and grief90 ensure that mortals acquire good sense even against their will.91 In
this context the maxim πάθει μάθος92 sounds like a pithier reformulation of the
traditional Hesiodic principle of painful retrospective learning. There are two
crucial differences, however: the proverb’s application is no longer limited to the
nepioi, the feckless, and it is described as a universal principle whose guarantor
is none other than Zeus. These alterations make for an extended application and
a more affirmative message.
After breaking off their account of Iphigenia’s sacrifice, the old men of
Aeschylus’ chorus hint at retribution to come with another echo of πάθει μάθος,
this one more clearly in the punitive Hesiodic vein: “Justice inclines its scale for
some so that they suffer and learn.”93 The Hymn to Zeus is not, however, the
trilogy’s final pronouncement on this theme. The overarching theme of the
Oresteia is routinely described as the evolution of dikē (justice). As the trilogy
traces the crimes and punishments of successive generations of Atreids it charts
a shift from retaliatory to institutionalized justice; concomitant with this
development, the significance of πάθει μάθος appears to evolve as well.
Variations on the theme recur throughout the trilogy.94 Most strikingly, at the
close of the third play the chorus of Furies, now reconciled to an outcome
(Orestes’ acquittal on the charge of matricide) that they had previously opposed,
praise the citizens of Athens for “acquiring good sense at last” (σωϕρονοῦντες
ἐν χρόνῳ, Aesch. Eum. 1000). This learning represents not punishment but
rather positive growth; it will enable the Athenians to govern their city in the
future with wisdom and restraint.95
Herodotus’ Croesus has no doubt that painful experience can produce wisdom:
he assures Cyrus that his advice is sound because “my sufferings, unwelcome as
they were, have been instructive for me.”96 Tragedy too finds redemptive (p.25)
value in suffering, as both internal and external spectators discover by
observing the travails of others that “the best kind of emotional engagement is a
form of empathy that involves understanding.”97 Indeed, once we know where to
look it becomes evident that the concept of acquiring wisdom from experience is
already present in Homer, even if it is not made explicit in the text. The close of
Page 17 of 26
Introduction
the Iliad intimates that the most important lesson witnesses of misfortune can
learn is not to steer clear of similar mistakes, but to empathize with the sufferers
and follow up with remedial action.
The relationship between suffering and learning will prove fundamental both to
the concept of education and to this study. To be sure, there is little consensus
either on this issue or on others surveyed in this chapter. The teaching and
learning appropriate to each life stage, the connection between education and
initiatory experience, the didactic role of positive or negative exemplars, the
influence of nature as opposed to teaching, the bitter or redemptive lessons
imparted by experience—all these topics receive divergent interpretations in the
literature of the archaic and classical periods, and even the fragmentary
evidence that survives shows that in every era at least one voice is raised
against the dominant viewpoint. Yet recurrent patterns also emerge. As the
following chapter suggests, the template for the traditional instructor is
established by an unlikely figure, Cheiron the centaur. (p.26)
Notes:
(1.) The most succinct statement of this attitude is Hesiod’s ἔργα νέων, βουλαὶ
δὲ μέσων, εὐχαὶ δὲ γερόντων, F 321 Merkelbach-West. For a summary of the
contested nomenclature of age-classes see Chankowski 2013.
(2.) “Feckless” is my translation of νήπιος; for the term see p. 21. For youthful
incompleteness in argument see Il. 9.56. For λεπτὴ μῆτις in the young see Il.
23.590 and Chapter 2, p. 63.
(3.) For the contrasting mental outlook of young and old see Il. 3.108–10. For
older men (and older gods) as more knowledgeable than younger ones see Il.
19.216–19 and 21.439–40. For “the association between age, wisdom, and
veracity” see West 1966 ad Hes. Theog. 234. Like other archaic poets, however,
Hesiod characterizes old age as baneful and wretched (Theog. 225, 604, Op.
331).
(4.) For a catalogue of the symptoms of old age in archaic poetry see Preisshofen
1977, 111–14.
(5.) Il. 3.146–53. The old men appear again on the ramparts, in the company of
the women and children, in the scene of the besieged city that figures on the
shield of Achilles (Il. 18.514–15); there, however, they play a more active role,
endeavoring to defend the city. In addition to a physical, mental, and spatial
contrast between young and old, there is also an aesthetic dimension: the corpse
of a young man who has died in battle is beautiful, whereas that of an old man is
sad and pitiful (Il. 22.71–76, Tyrt. F 10.15–32 West).
Page 18 of 26
Introduction
(6.) The assumption finds its comedic reflection in Better Argument’s promise
(interrupted and subverted by a lubricious reference to erotic misadventures)
that he will teach his pupils to hold their tongues and not talk back to their
elders (Ar. Nub. 990–99). For the young as superior in action and the old in
counsel cf. Eur. FF 291, 508, and 619 Kannicht.
(7.) Cf. Garvie 2009 ad Aesch. Pers. 744. The so-called fifth-century generation
gap (Forrest 1975, followed by Strauss 1993) may reflect the persistence of this
stereotype rather than any dramatic change in intrafamilial relations. Jordavic
2007, 10 concludes that while Thucydides represents young men as “reckless,
prone to violence and light-minded” and their elders as “experienced, moderate
and level-headed,” nevertheless “a fundamental generation gap does not seem
inferable from [Thucydides’] accounts.”
(8.) See Ober 2006, 455 on Solon as “an ethical and political reformer,” and
Irwin 2006 on Solon as an anomaly among the elegists. For the innovative age-
classifications of Solon F 27 West see Falkner 1990.
(9.) ἔργ’ ἀπάλαμν’, 27.12. For the sense of the adjective see Noussia-Fantuzzi
2010, 375–76.
(10.) It is cited approvingly by Nicias at Pl. Lach. 188b and by Laches at Lach.
189a, and skeptically by Socrates at Resp. 536d.
(11.) For the novelty of Solon’s sentiment see Schadewaldt 1960, 1.127. For the
conventional view that it is inappropriate for adults to receive instruction cf.
Thgn. 578 West and Soph. Aj. 594–95 and Ant. 726–27.
(12.) Aesch. Ag. 584; see Judet de la Combe 2001, 1.225–26 for discussion of the
connotations and syntax. As Lebeck points out (1971, 19), learning in old age is
subsequently thematized in Eumenides when the older Furies take instruction,
albeit reluctantly, from the younger Athena.
(13.) For the three stages see van Gennep 1909, 10–11 and passim. For a protest
against the indiscriminate application of van Gennep’s model to literature see
Dowden 1999, 222. For female rites of passage in Athens see Brelich 1969, 229–
311 and Golden 2015, 40–43. For rites of passage in tragedy see the essays in
Padilla 1999, 29–180, and for a skeptical approach see Dodd and Faraone 2003.
Redfield 2003, 256 articulates the distinction between education and initiation
as follows: “Education seems to add something on; initiation seems to make a
change. . . . Through education we know more, but initiation also involves the
loss of innocence.” But of course education can also make a change and can also
involve the loss of innocence. M. Griffith 2001, 38 prefers Bourdieu’s “rites of
institution” (Bourdieu 1991, 117–20) to van Gennep’s “rites of passage”—
terminology that seems more appropriate to the ancient Greek context. (By
Page 19 of 26
Introduction
contrast, the classic rite of passage is clearly operative in ancient India; see M.
Griffith 2015a, 19.)
(14.) See Eliade 1958, 4–40.
(15.) For the Telemachy (= Hom. Od. 1–4, plus most of 15) as a rite of passage
see Eckert 1963, Moreau 1992, Wöhrle 1999, Petropoulos 2011; contra, Toher
2001. For rite-of-passage motifs in relationship to Odysseus see Dowden 1999,
230–31.
(16.) For his initial treatment of the ephēbeia see Vidal-Naquet 1968, and for his
initial treatment of Philoctetes see Vidal-Naquet 1971. Revised versions of this
material subsequently appeared in both English and French. Winkler 1985, 30
goes further than Vidal-Naquet, arguing that the City Dionysia was “by, for, and
about” the ephebes.
(17.) On hupothēkai and gnōmai see Kurke 1990, Lardinois 1995, and Cuny 2007.
On paradeigmata see Willcock 1964 and Held 1987.
(18.) Sometimes there is a mismatch between speaker and sentiments. For

example, when Nausicaa assures Odysseus that Zeus distributes happiness to
mortals just as he pleases (Od. 6.188–89), “there is a gentle humour in
Odysseus’ hard-won insights being echoed . . . by Nausicaa’s sententious
naïveté” (Rutherford 1992, 154).
(19.) Injunctions: Hom. Il. 11.784 (= 6.208, spoken by another father to his son),
Hom. Il. 9.254–56. Exemplary tales: Hom. Il. 9.447–84, 502–12, 529–605.
(20.) See Hom. Od. 1.307–8, Thgn. 1049–50 West. The 1960s and 1970s saw a
vogue for psychoanalytic and often anachronistic accounts of ancient Greek
family relationships and developmental patterns. For bibliography see M. Griffith
1998, 57 n. 122 (to his list one could add MacCary 1982). Griffith himself makes
careful and judicious use of the psychoanalytic approach (1998, 31–35 and
passim).
(21.) Cf. Pind. Pyth. 6.25–27, addressed by Cheiron to Achilles, and Semon. F 1
West, addressed to an unnamed youth.
(22.) See Hom. Il. 9.259, 11.790, Od. 1.308. For Theseus’ failure to substitute a
white (or, according to Simon. F 242 Poltera, a scarlet) sail for a black one when
sailing back to Athens from Crete see Plut. Vit. Thes. 22. Although fragmentary,
Erinna F 4.28–30 Neri appears to refer to a young woman who under the
influence of Aphrodite forgot her mother’s advice. For forgetfulness induced by
Aphrodite see further Sappho, F 16.10–11 Voigt. For Xerxes’ forgetfulness of his
father’s instructions see Aesch. Pers. 782–83.
Page 20 of 26
Introduction
(23.) For the noun sunousia and the verb suneimi used in this homosocial sense
see (e.g.) Pl. Ap. 19e, Prt. 316 c–d. Not coincidentally, given the pederastic
overtones of a youth’s association with an older man, the terms also denote
sexual intercourse.
(24.) For the relationship between Homeric feasting and the archaic and
classical symposium see Wecowski 2014, 191–247 and passim. For music, wine
pouring, and pederasty at the symposium see Bremmer 1990.
(25.) Robb 1994, 198 and passim.
(26.) See schol. Od. 1.284a (quoted in Chapter 4, p. 115) on how the wrong kind
of sunousia has put Telemachus at risk.
(27.) A fragment from Euripides’ Phoenix (F 812.7–9 Kannicht; Collard and

Cropp 2009 ad loc. suggest that the speaker is Cheiron the centaur) opines that
anyone who enjoys associating with wicked men is of the same sort himself. The
positive influence of consorting with the good and the negative effect of
consorting with the bad is a Euripidean commonplace. Cf. Andr. 683–84 and FF
7, 609, and 1024 Kannicht, adduced by Collard and Cropp 2008, 383 n. 3.
(28.) ταῦτά τοι κακοῖς ὁμιλῶν ἀνδράσιν διδάσκεται / θούριος Χέρξης, Aesch.
Pers. 753–54. Cf. Artabanus’ remark to Xerxes (Hdt. 7.16.1) that Xerxes is both
sensible himself and willing to accept good advice, but that the company of bad
men (ἀνθρώπων κακῶν ὁμιλίαι) has tripped him up. M. Griffith 1998, 53
suggests that Xerxes feels the need—in this resembling an aristocratic Greek
youth—to “live up to his father’s expectations.”
(29.) τὰ γὰρ κακὰ / παράδειγμα τοῖς ἐσθλοῖσιν εἴσοψίν τ’ ἔχει, Eur. El. 1084–85.
(30.) Robb 1994, 203–204.
(31.) For a more sweeping reductio ad absurdum see Pl. Ap. 24d–25c.
(32.) For Socrates’ ironical and humorous tone see Tarrant 1958, 95.
(33.) O’Connor 2015, 79. For the pedagogical aspects of selected Socratic
dialogues see Pancera 2006, 69–186. For Socrates’ seductive strategies with
youthful followers see G. A. Scott 2000, 4–5; for his inability to bring about “a
clear, measurable, and lasting benefit for the life of his target interlocutors” see
G. A. Scott 2000, 170.
(34.) Detienne and Vernant 1978, 27 and passim translate the noun as “wily
intelligence,” but it is important to recognize that the emphasis falls sometimes
on the wiliness and sometimes on the intelligence.
(35.) 12.513c = F 43 Snell-Maehler.
Page 21 of 26
Introduction
(36.) For paraineseis as synonymous with advice poetry see Paus. 9.31.5 and
Kurke 1990, 91. For the identical advice given to his son by Amphiaraus in the
Thebaid (F 4 Bernabé) see Torres-Guerra 2015, 237–38, who suggests that the
context may have been the seer’s departure for war—a traditional occasion, as
the Iliad and Sophocles’ Ajax demonstrate, for fathers to dispense their wisdom.
(37.) Pindar is all in favor of deviousness toward an enemy, which he compares

to the circuitous pathways followed by a wolf (Pind. Pyth. 2.84–85; for discussion
see Pratt 1993, 58), but this fragment shows that he also recommends
adaptability in other situations. For more on the mētis of the octopus see
Detienne and Vernant 1978, 38–39.
(38.) διεπειρᾶτο αὐτῶν τῆς τε ἀνδραγαθίης καὶ τῆς ὀργῆς καὶ παιδεύσιός τε καὶ
τρόπου, καὶ ἑνὶ ἑκάστῳ ἰὼν ἐς συνουσίην καὶ συνάπασι, Hdt. 6.128. L. Scott
2005, 424 comments on the Homeric tonality of the passage, noting that “the
sixth century was a time when [Homeric] values were losing ground as political
power spread more widely. . . . [T]his story can be seen as a deliberate attempt
to uphold traditional values.”
(39.) For discussion see Chapter 2, pp. 68–71.
(40.) παιδεύουσι δὲ τοὺς παῖδας ἀπὸ πενταέτεος ἀρξάμενοι μέχρι εἰκασαέτεος

τρία μοῦνα, ἱππεύειν καὶ τοξεύειν καὶ ἀληθίζεσθαι, Hdt. 1.136.2.
(41.) Asheri, Lloyd, and Corcella 2007 ad loc. suggest that Herodotus may have
misunderstood an inscription containing “some oriental formula of royal self-
glorification.” How and Wells 1928 ad loc. give more credence to Herodotus’
report.
(42.) See Hdt. 1.126. For shifting categories of otherness, whereby the Persians
are constructed differently in relation to the Scythians and to the Greeks, see
Hartog 1988, 46–47.
(43.) Kurke 1989, 538–39.
(44.) McKirahan 1994, 390. Guthrie 1969, 55–31 remains fundamental on the
nomos/phusis antithesis. For fifth-century literary uses of phusis see Beardslee
1918 and Hadjistephanou 1975.
(45.) For these possibilities as represented in Plutarch (a late witness who,

however, reflects earlier understandings) see Pelling 2002, 307–15 and Duff
2008.
(46.) Democr. DK 68 B 59: οὔτε τέχνη οὔτε σοϕίη ἐϕικτόν, ἢν μὴ μάθῃ τις.
(47.) See Hom. Il. 15.410–12 and Hes. F 306 Merkelbach-West.
Page 22 of 26
Introduction
(48.) Carpentry and weaving: Hymn. Hom. Ven. 12–15. Poetry: Hom. Od. 8.479–
81. For further discussion see Chapter 2, p. 60.
(49.) See Dissoi logoi 6.12, discussed by Gera 2000, 23.
(50.) Hdt. 2.2. For analysis of this experiment see Gera 2003, 68–82.
(51.) Benardete 1969, 33.
(52.) Kerford 1981, 131 defines aretē as “all those qualities in a man which made
for success.” For the range of the term see further Nehamas 1985, 3–5.
(53.) χρονισθεὶς δ’ ἀπέδειξεν ἦ- / θος τὸ πρὸς τοκέων, Aesch. Ag. 727–28. For the
stylistic characteristics marking this passage as a fable see van Dijk 1997, 172–
73. For time as revealing the truth see de Romilly 1968, 50–51 and 107–8.
(54.) For the sophists as “graduate professors” see Ford 2001, 88.
(55.) Heinimann 1987, 99–100; de Romilly 1992, 49–50.
(56.) See Protagoras DK 80 B 3. Plato’s Protagoras also claims that nurses,

pedagogues, and parents instruct children in virtue (aretē), “beginning from
early childhood and throughout their life” (Pl. Prt. 325c).
(57.) Prodicus DK 84 B 2 = Xen. Mem. 2.1.21–34. For further discussion see

Chapter 6, pp. 165–66. For the imagery of a choice of paths cf. Hes. Op. 287–92
and Thgn. 911–14 West.
(58.) τὴν ϕύσιν τὴν σὴν ἐν τῇ παιδείᾳ καταμαθοῦσα, Xen. Mem. 2.1.27. For
discussion see Rose 1992, 312.
(59.) See Democr. DK 68 B 242, Critias DK 88 B 9, and Shorey 1909.
(60.) On Meno’s “peremptory, almost tyrannical streak” see D. Scott 2006, 12.
(61.) Mor. 225f–26a, trans. Babbitt 1989. The same experiment is reported at
Mor. 3a–c.
(62.) ϕυᾷ τὸ γενναῖον ἐπιτρέπει / ἐκ πατέρων παισὶ λῆμα, Pind. Pyth. 8.44–45.
The Homeric poems allow more leeway for generational variation. Athena/
Mentor comments that few children equal their fathers; most are worse, only a
few better (Od. 2.276–77). More optimistically, Hector prays that his son,
Astyanax, will be commended as a better warrior than his father (Il. 6.476–80);
Sthenelus asserts that he and Diomedes have been more successful than their
fathers (Il. 4.405–10); and the Iliadic narrator describes Periphetes as better
than his father in every manner of excellence (ἀμείνων / παντοίας ἀρετάς, Il.
15.641–42), including running, fighting, and intelligence. Yet the narrator
repeatedly situates individual capacities in a context of generational
Page 23 of 26
Introduction
deterioration when he comments that men of the present are physically weaker
than those of the past. Although Hesiod’s narrative of the five human races (Op.
109–201) also operates within a framework of general deterioration, the race of
heroes reverses the pattern of decline. For this “ambiguous paradigm” as a
“didactic strategy” see van Noorden 2015, 75.
(63.) For Plato’s take on this issue see Men. 93d–94e, Prt. 327a–328d, Resp.
549c–550b.
(64.) Pind. Nem. 11.38–43. For the same analogy see Nem. 6.8–11.
(65.) Il. 4.482–87 and 18.436–40, Od. 6.162–69 and 14.175.
(66.) Pind. Nem. 8.40–42. For a suggestive reading of the passage see Nussbaum
1986, 1–3. For a catalogue of plant imagery in Pindar and Bacchylides see
McCracken 1934. For a presumably playful comparison of Neoptolemus’ growth
to that of a well-watered cucumber (σικυὸς δροσερῷ ἐνὶ χώρῳ) see Il. Parv. F 31
West.
(67.) It is critical, however, to avoid excessive nurture, lest a plant (or, by

analogy, a human being) fall prey to hubris. See Michelini 1978.
(68.) For another unexpected outcome, again phrased in agricultural terms, cf.
Eur. Andr. 636–38.
(69.) T. Morgan 1998, 256.
(70.) T. Morgan 1998, 255–57. Analogies are also drawn between the training of
children and the training of horses (see Duff 2008, 9 with n. 39). For harsher
imagery (like a piece of warped or bent wood, the disobedient child receives
correction through threats and beating) see Pl. Prt. 325d. Aristophanes stresses
the role of corporal punishment in education via comic inversion: a son beats his
father and threatens to do the same to his mother (Ar. Nub. 1321–1446).
Aristophanic fathers, however, are generally kind, even indulgent (see French
1999).
(71.) For the term in common parlance as emphasizing “direct sense experience
and in-context action as the primary source of learning [and] often down-playing
a role for thinking, analysis, and academic knowledge” see Kolb 2015, xviii.
Kolb’s own definition, based on the work of William James, among other
predecessors, comprises a “learning cycle” made up of concrete experience,
reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation
(Kolb 2015, 50–51).
(72.) On the advantages of learning in advance cf. Pind. Ol. 8.59–61 and Isthm.
1.40.
Page 24 of 26
Introduction
(73.) For this (dubious) interpretation of Prometheus’ name see West 1966 ad
Hes. Theog. 510. For a more plausible etymology from Vedic pre math- (“rob”)
see Watkins 1995, 256 n. 3.
(74.) Op. 89. For Epimetheus as ὀψίνοος (tardy of realization) see Pind. Pyth.
5.28.
(75.) For the claim that it does see Dörrie 1956, 319.
(76.) ἔδειξα, [Aesch.] PV 458 and 482. Prometheus says elsewhere that he
“devised” (ἐξηῦρον, PV 460, cf. 503), “ordered” (ἐστοίχισα, 484), “made
known” (ἐγνώρισ’, 487), and “defined” (διώρισ’, 489) the technai. Whatever the
verb, he takes credit for human progress.
(77.) For the first set of technai see [Aesch.] PV 454–68, and for the second see
478–506.
(78.) [Aesch.] PV 506. For the verbal play see M. Griffith 1983 ad loc. For the
gods as teachers of human beings see the Homeric Hymn to Hephaestus 3–4 and
Eur. Supp. 201–13. For progressive theories that emphasize the capacity of
human beings to teach themselves see Democr. DK 68 B 5; Soph. Ant. 332–75;
and, in general, de Romilly 1966 and Dodds 1973, 1–25.
(79.) Their parents are Iapetus and Clymene (Hes. Theog. 507–8).
(80.) Moore 2015, 382–83 distinguishes two pre-Platonic connotations of the

term promētheia, one “temporal” and the other signifying “due regard,” but the
distinction seems scarcely hard and fast. For praise of forethought in tragedy
see Finglass 2007 ad Soph. El. 1015–16. For the advantages of learning in
advance through discussion (προδιδαχθῆναι . . . λόγῳ) before proceeding to
action see Thuc. 2.40.2.
(81.) Edmunds 1990, 60. For nēpios as a marker of Homeric narratorial

subjectivity see Briand 2011.
(82.) ῥεχθὲν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω, Hom. Il. 17.32 and 20.198. As Verdenius 1985
observes (ad Hes. Op. 218) in the Homeric variations “the idea of suffering is
expressed in the form of a warning preceding the proverb,” i.e., in πρίν τι κακὸν
παθέειν, which occupies the first half of both hexameters.
(83.) Hom. Il. 1.184–86. In the Odyssey (22.444) Odysseus frames the execution
of Penelope’s slaves as a kind of unlearning: they are to “forget the [joys of]
Aphrodite” they experienced with the suitors. Punishment can also be described
as a deterrent for others (Il. 1.186–87 and 3.351–54).
(84.) Cf. [Aesch.] PV 8–11; Soph. OT 402–3; El. 1458–63; and OC 852–55; Eur.
Hipp. 730–31; Andr. 706–9, 999–1001, 1006; Tro. 1039–41; and Ba. 39–42.
Page 25 of 26
Another random document with
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the words of one of the few clever commercials I had heard. I
stopped doing that when it began to sound idiotic—but then I started
asking myself: "Right about here wouldn't you like a beer?" and the
answer was almost beginning to be yes.
This led to my becoming cigarette-conscious. My mind flitted from
one slogan to another. Twenty thousand filter traps (or was it
40,000?). You can light either end. Protects the T-Zone. Independent
laboratory tests prove.... Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet. (I
wasn't even old enough to smoke when that one was current.) I'd
walk a mile for a Camel. Travels the smoke further. Wherever
particular people congregate....
Stop it, I told myself. You don't want a cigarette (wanting one). You
don't want a drink, Sam; they teetotalled you (but it was wearing off).
Why not go out to dinner tonight? (Medium rare, waiter; and lots of
mushrooms.) And then Mae—Mae, Mae! I wanted my cute little
pregnant wife, walking around flat-footed in her maternity blouse and
smiling secretly to herself over our burgeoning child.
It was right about here that the radio man dug out and started to play
an extremely associative song of Mae's and mine—Who's Your Little
Whoozis. And then I blacked out.
13 (AUG. 3, SUN.)
I have been in such a pickle since I saw you last.
—Shakespeare
I wasn't in my cell any more. I was lying back in an armchair in a

large comfortable-looking room. There was one other person in it, a
kindly looking middle-aged man in another armchair next to a wall
under a painting of a country scene, with trees and cows and a sky
studded with tiny clouds.
"Hello," the man said. "I am Mox." He was wearing one of those
Monolithian cloaks. "How are you?"
I felt too weak to answer. I tapped my finger on the arms of the chair
and the effort made me terribly tired. I closed my eyes again.
"Lunch is about to be served," Mox said. "Perhaps you would care to
freshen up first? To shave?"
I opened my eyes and rubbed a hand over my cheeks. They were
pretty whiskery.
"How are you fixed for blades?" I said. Don't ask me why. One gets
conditioned.
"Amply," Mox said. He made a gesture with his left hand and
somebody in another woolen cloak came in with shaving equipment,
put it on a table at my elbow and went out, bowing.
I looked at the steaming bowl of hot water, the tube of shaving cream
(brush versus jar, I thought, remembering the old ad), the razor and
mirror. I looked in the mirror, expecting the worst. The beard was
pretty heavy and the cheeks under it looked more sunken than I'd
remembered. But my eyes were clear and my tongue looked normal.
"There will be no deleterious effects," Mox said. "You'll be good as
new after your lunch."
"Lunch? What time is it?"
He seemed to do a mental conversion before he replied: "Twelve-
seventeen P.M. Eastern Daylight Saving Time; 1617 Greenwich."
"And an hour later on the Rue de la Paix," I said. "I'll have the snails
and some Beaujolais." I was feeling light-headed.
"Interesting," he said, watching me with an encouraging smile.
"But irrelevant. I couldn't eat snails on an empty stomach. I just said
that because it rhymes. What have you got for American times?"
"Lamb chops," Mox said, looking at me closely now, "baked potato,
broccoli, tossed salad, strawberry shortcake and coffee. Or——"
"That's for me. Stop right there. Can I have it now and shave later?
I'm starved."
"Certainly. Without further ado." Mox raised his right hand again and
the same man came in, though he couldn't have seen the signal,
wheeling a tray. An almost overpoweringly delicious smell reached
my nostrils and I shivered a little in my chair.
Mox got up. "I'll leave you while you fall in," he said. I didn't answer
him, being busy taking the covers off the serving dishes. I suppose
he meant "fall to," which I did, with a will.
My curiosity returned as I appeased my appetite. Having wolfed
down the meat and vegetables with hardly a conscious thought, I
went through the salad in more leisurely fashion, rehearsing
questions to ask Mox. I positively dawdled over the cake and coffee,
it having just occurred to me that this could be the equivalent of the
doomed man's last meal.
"Look, Mox," I said when he came back. "Thanks all the same, but I
don't think I'll shave. Just give me my clothes and I'll go now. No;
don't bother. I'll go as I am. I don't live very far. Oh—and thanks for
the lunch."
Mox smiled and sat down. "You're a very amusing man, Mr. Kent.
We couldn't possibly let you go. We have great plans for you."
"Plans?" The well-being induced by the lunch began to seep away.
"Like what?"
"Details later. First we should discuss the terms of your employment.
The salary will be substantial, so there'll be no problem there, but
you might be interested in the fringe benefits, such as the size of
your paid-up life insurance policy, the beneficiaries...."
"Now, look. I haven't said I'd join your organization...."
"Ah, but you've already joined. We had planned to come to you, but
you saved us that trouble. You came to us voluntarily and have
already taken part in one of our minor missions—that of working for
the repeal of antiquated traffic laws."
"I did not. That wasn't me."
"Who would believe you? You previously espoused our cause on a
nationwide radio-and-television program."
"That wasn't me either, and you know it. I don't know how you did it,
but that double you rigged up isn't going to be able to get away with
it much longer."
"I think he can. You see, Sam, for all practical purposes that double,
as you call him, is you. There's nothing about you that he doesn't
know and everything he does or says is perfectly in character with
what you would do or say—presupposing one slight shift in
motivation. And you may be sure that adjustment has been made."
"You mean you've been picking my brains all the time you had me
cooped up in that cell?"
"You could put it that way. Not all the time, of course. Only while you
slept. We know as much about you as you do about yourself. More,
probably, because we've probed your subconscious as well as your
surface self-awareness."
"Oh yeah? What was my mother's maiden name?"
"Clemens," Mox said instantly. "Hence your full name, with its literary
if not strictly genealogical connection—Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Kent. You know you are not directly related to Mark Twain, of
course?"
"I was told I was," I said defensively. "Way back."
"Way, way back, perhaps," Mox said. "Not in any modern sense."
"That's no proof that you read my mind. There must be genealogical
tables...."
"Certainly. But there are no written records of the time you stole
money from the newsstand outside the candy store in Ozone Park."
"I never ..." I started to say before I remembered. I'd been about ten.
The way to do it was to scoop up the coins boldly on your way into
the store and hand them to the owner while buying a candy bar or a
roll of caps. Of course you palmed a dime or so on the way. I'd never
told anybody about it and I felt suffocated in shame.
"Or the seventy-five wingless flies in the mayonnaise jar," Mox said
relentlessly. "You were trying for a hundred, weren't you? But you got
sick to your stomach. Or the time you sold your brother's bicycle and
claimed it had been stolen. Or the college exams with the dates
written in your palm. Or...."
"Stop it! That's enough!"
"I don't condemn you, Sam. No one is wholly free of blame. I have
not mentioned these things to bring you pain but to prove to you that
the Monolithian Sam Kent is as aware of your potentialities as you
are yourself. He has done nothing you would not do, given the
proper conviction or opportunity."
I couldn't look at him. "Swiping a dime off a newsstand isn't the same
thing as betraying your country," I said miserably.
"It would depend, wouldn't it, on which was the greater good? If the
dime you stole bought a quart of milk for your family during the
depression when your father was out of work—if the candy store
man was obviously better off—if your country were Nazi Germany
——"
"The United States isn't Nazi Germany," I said. I could reject that
one, at least.
"True," Mox said. "But I said 'if.' You're a man of perception. You
don't need an overt act, such as six million deaths, to persuade you
that something is wrong. You see it every day in the news reports
that are your business—in the United Nations debates on nuclear
testing, in the reports on the strontium-90 in food, in the disfigured
Hiroshima women getting plastic surgery, in the perennial radiation
scares."
"Is that what you're up to?" I asked him. "You think we're going to
wipe ourselves out and you're altruistically going to preserve us?
You're going to step in and run our world for us because you think
we're not capable of handling our own affairs?"
"If necessary," he said.
"The end justifies the means, you think. You have no faith in our
ability not to commit suicide."
"Not as much as you seem to have. Look, Sam, we've got a job for
you to do and we'd like you to take it because you want to. It would
be better for all of us that way. But if you are reconsidering your
decision to volunteer, we have ways of conscripting you."
"Torture?" I tried to speak calmly. "Brainwashing?"
"Neither you nor anyone else will ever be tortured. As for the other,
we'd prefer that you washed your own brain of its misconceptions
about us. Try to realize that what we are trying to do—and what we
will do—is for your own good and for the good of all of us."
He was the soul of sincerity, this Mox. I was relieved about the
torture. I was even half tempted to believe the other things. But I
wasn't going to brainwash myself or anybody else.
On the other hand, I could let him think I'd been won over and bore
from within whenever I got the chance. The standard injunctions to
the prisoner of war were no longer name-rank-and-serial-number.
That had gone out after the lessons of the Korean war. The new
instructions were to lie. Tell them whatever they wanted to hear.
Confess to anything, no matter how outrageous. Embrace the enemy
with lies until he had no idea where the truth lay. I decided to try it,
but not so fast as to arouse suspicion.
"If I do volunteer," I said, after a period of what I hoped appeared to
be profound thought, "will I be able to see my wife?"
"Of course," Mox said, beaming at me.
"I'm more worried about her than I am about strontium-90," I said
ingenuously. "She's going to have a baby."
"How marvelous."
"Her name is Mae," I said. "We haven't been married long and this
will be our first child."
"Congratulations."
"A man's got to think of his family first," I said, pouring it on, "doesn't
he?"
"Absolutely."
"I mean it's all very well to expect every man to do his duty, but
where does that duty lie? We've signed a treaty of peace and
friendship with you, haven't we? Through the UN, I mean. And if
that's good enough for the President, I guess it's good enough for
me. Poor Mae. She must be worried to death. I've got to see her."
"And so you shall, Sam."
"That's all I ask. I volunteer. We've got to stop this ridiculous
experimentation with the very seeds of our own destruction." I was
washing the old brain with everything I had. "What's the job you have
for me?"
I hoped I hadn't overdone it. But Mox was beaming.
"I am happy to inform you," he said, "that the position is that of press
secretary to President Gouverneur Allison."
"My, you're home early," Mae said, giving me a kiss.
It wasn't a big, fat, oh-I'm-so-glad-to-see-you're-safe kiss. Not at all. I
looked at my watch: it was a little after 3 P.M. Early? Here it was
Sunday. Mae hadn't seen me since Thursday night and she said I
was home early. Had the Monolithians played a trick with time? Was
it only Friday afternoon?
"Listen, Mae," I said. "Did you watch your story today? What
happened after this girl with the amnesia walked into Dr. Kindfellow's
office, not realizing he was the very one she had fled a thousand
miles to avoid?" Mae watches this television serial come hell or high
water. It's one of her few vices.
"Silly," Mae said. "You know it's not on on Sunday. I thought you
wouldn't be home till six. We were just going to take our nap."
"You thought I wasn't going to be home till six? Is that what I told
you?" I was feeling my way, full of inklings and forebodings.
"Well, you usually get home at six when you're on the day shift—or is
it five-thirty on week ends when you drive right in? Anyway, you're
early. I'm glad. I guess we can skip our nap. Do you want to eat
early?"
All I wanted to do was get to the bottom of this. It was beginning to
be obvious that this double of me that the Monolithians whipped up
actually had been living in my house as well as doing my job. I
wanted to ask a dozen questions—but I couldn't without either giving
Mae a terrific shock or making her think I was out of my mind.
"No, I'll eat whenever it's ready. Listen, Mae—have I been acting
strange lately? I mean in the last couple days?"
"I've got some nice lamb chops for supper. Strange? Well, no
stranger than usual, Sam. I mean, you've been a little bit nutty ever
since the spacemen came. Naturally I've made allowances. I guess
it's a pretty big story and a person has to take sides the way you did
on that TV show."
"Oh, you saw that, did you?"
"Well, of course I did! You said only last night how the check will pay
for the play pen and the bathinette. Surely you remember that?"
"Sure I do," I lied. "It wasn't awfully much, I guess."
"Fifty dollars is what you said it was. It helps."
"Sure. What else did I say?"
"When?"
"Last night."
"You said—honestly, Sam, are you sure you're all right?—you said
we'd take an early vacation next year and go to Bermuda, all three of
us."
"Sure, Bermuda," I said. "Sure I'm all right. I'm sorry, Mae; I've been
a little confused ever since I got my new job."
"What new job? You didn't tell me that."
"No, I guess I didn't. It wasn't set until today. I'm leaving World Wide.
I'm going to be press secretary to the President."
Mae did a double take—or at least a double blink—and said without
more than a second's hesitation: "Isn't that wonderful!"
"I guess so," I said.
"What do you mean you guess so? It's marvelous! Of course you did
say once you didn't think much of Gov. I think you said he doesn't
have a brain in his head. Isn't that the way you put it?"
"I may have made some such remark," I said. "Such a thought has
crossed my mind. But now I'm in a position to help him. I may even
be able to put a thought or two into his head. I'll be the chief factotum
of the White House mimeograph machines—the disseminator, if not
molder, of executive policy. Then there's the big old unsneezable fact
that it pays a fast eighteen thousand a year."
Mae's eyes went sort of glazy and I could see her trying to divide
that mentally by 52. "That's a lot, isn't it?" she said finally. "Now we
can afford to replace that storm window that fell out last winter and
maybe repaper the nursery."
"We can take care of the storm window, anyway. It's the least we can
do for whoever rents the place when we move to Washington."
"Oh—of course. I forgot we'd have to move to Washington."
"I don't see any way out of it. It's a little too far for commuting."
14 (AUG. 4, MON.)
They are waiting on the shingle—will you come and join the dance?
—The Mock Turtle
My appointment with Frij was for one P.M. Mox had telephoned on
Sunday night and told me about it. He didn't say who Frij was. He
merely gave me the address and the room number and hung up.
Frij had an office on the thirty-ninth floor of a building on Fifth Avenue
in the forties. He had, in fact, the entire penthouse. A small plaque
on the front door said simply: PEERLESS PROMOTIONS.
I rang the bell.
The door opened and a tall gray-haired man grabbed my hand.
"I'd know you anywhere, Sam. Come in, old man. Frij is the name.
Frij by name but warm by nature. Like a drink?"
I suppose he was punning on the British nickname for a refrigerator.
"Not right now, thanks," I said.
Frij wore a dark, pin-stripe suit, a plaid waistcoat and bow tie. He
looked about forty-five. He was solidly built, like a football player
gone only slightly to pot. He nodded and half closed one eye.
"Very smart," he said. "I admire your restraint. Sit down, old man."
He indicated a deep leather chair on the visitor's side of the huge
wooden desk. He dropped himself into a swivel chair on his side,
leaned back and propped his feet on a corner of the desk, which was
clear of everything except two telephones and three animal figurines
made of heavy-looking black plastic. I recognized two of them. One
was an elephant and the other was a donkey. I couldn't figure out the
third, which was bigger than either of the others. It must have been
some kind of Monolithian animal.
It seemed to be up to me to say something, so I said, "Nice place
you have here. Quite a view." And so it was. The Empire State
Building loomed up to the south and Rockefeller Center to the north.
The third set of windows gave a good view of the Hudson River.
"Without a peer," Frij said. "Peerless, in a word. Peerless
Promotions. That's us. My name, I've decided after considerable
thought, will be Addison Madison. What do you think of it, old man?"
I thought very little of it but I pretended to turn it over in my mind. "It's
got class," I said finally. To myself I thought, With a capital K.
"Exactly," Addison Madison-Frij said. "That's what they want—class.
Frij is too alien-sounding for their ears. They must have something
that inspires confidence."
"Confidence in what, if I may ask?"
"Ask by all means. That's what I want you to do. Ask and criticize
and suggest. This thing must roll, on all sixteen. It must purr, like the
contented kitten. Or is it cow? I need you, old man, I tell you frankly.
The closest kind of collaboration is necessary if we are to achieve
our objective." He took his feet off the desk and sat up purposefully
in his chair. "If you follow me."
"Not entirely," I said. "What exactly are you promoting? Public
acceptance of Monolithia?"
"Secondarily," he said, giving me a sincere, old-school-tie look.
"President Allison primarily. Through him, us. Didn't Mox brief you?"
"Only briefly. I thought you were going to fill in the gaps."
"That I will," Frij said. "But in good time. First lunch. Then there's the
cocktail party. Both excellent gap-fillers. There's no urgency at all."
He rang and a girl came in. A pretty girl, about five-feet-four and
black-haired, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and carrying a notebook.
"Joy," he said, "put down in your book that you're to take Mr. Kent to
lunch and keep him occupied until it's time for the party. Joy, Sam.
Sam, Joy Linx. That's all for now, Sam. See you at the party."
I followed Joy out, not unwillingly.
At her desk she took a manila envelope from a drawer and counted
out two hundred dollars. "I'm an old-fashioned girl, Mr. Kent," she
said. "You take me out to lunch." And she pushed the bills over to
me.
"What's this?"
"Expense money. There's more when that runs out."
"Want me to sign for it?"
"No. That's petty cash; it's off the books already."
We took a cab to the Algonquin and sat next to each other on the
leather couch along one wall and had Scotches and made small talk
about the waiter with the two-foot-high pepper grinder and the old
Thanatopsis and Inside-Straight Society that used to meet there.
Joy Linx spelled her last name for me, emphasizing that it had no "y,"
and took off her glasses. She said to call her Joy. You can say all
you want about glasses not hiding a girl's beauty, but Joy was much
more of a looker without them. "I'm near-sighted," she said, "and
they're heavy."
"I approve," I said. "How long have you been with Peerless
Promotions, Joy?"
"With the aliens, you mean? You can speak frankly. They hired me
last Friday and I started today. How about you, Mr. Kent?"
I told her to call me Sam, but decided not to say, as I was tempted
to, that I wasn't sure I was with the aliens, exactly, even though I was
on their payroll. "I started today, too, officially," I said. "It's been very
pleasant work so far. Another Scotch?"
"Just one more," she said, and we smiled at each other a bit stiffly
and tentatively.
I ordered the second round and the lunch, trying not to look at the
prices. They were academic, of course, considering the expense
money in my pocket, but I couldn't help contrasting this with my
hectic lunches at World Wide—often a sandwich brought down from
the cafeteria and eaten on the desk with a cup of office-brewed
coffee—total cost under half a dollar.
I risked telling Joy about this. You never know what kind of reception
such a sad little anecdote may have and I was relieved when she
laughed with genuine understanding.
"I used to do the same thing," she said. "Only I brought my own
sandwich. I liked egg salad on whole wheat."
"I'm a liverwurst and swiss cheese on rye man myself. With lettuce
and mustard. Who were you with before Peerless?"
"A theatrical agency. I had some far-fetched dream of becoming an
actress by association one day."
"You've certainly got the looks for it."
"Thanks, Sam, but I'm afraid my only talent lies in being a secretary."
I made some gallant reply, then asked what she did, exactly, for Frij
—alias Addison Madison.
"Isn't that a scream of a name?" Joy said. "So far all he's told me is
that I'm to be his Girl Friday—I guess he picked that up when he was
studying his role. And to take you out to lunch. It's a fine job." Joy
looked straight at her plate of beef au jus and said, "I suppose you're
married."
"Yes," I said, looking at my scallops.
"Just like to get the facts. I'm divorced, myself. Incompatibility. Linx is
his name. I kept it because it's more euphonious, professionally, than
Kaplan."
"I see."
"I wish you much better luck, Sam."
"Thanks," I said, and almost told her Mae was pregnant. For some
reason I didn't. I don't think it was entirely because I was reluctant to
compare her unhappy state with my excellent one. Joy was a very
pretty girl indeed. "Thanks," I said again, and left it at that. "How
about another drink?"
"Okay." She looked up and smiled. "Forgive the personal history."
"Not at all." I got the waiter's eye and ordered, and a bus boy took
away the plates. "Tell me about this cocktail party. Who all's
coming?"
"Some of everybody, I gather. Everybody who is anybody, that is."
"Oh? Big names?" I didn't know anything about the social life of the
aliens, come to think of it. So far all I was familiar with was their
public appearances, in a news sense, and their cloak-and-dagger
intrigues, such as locking me up in that air-conditioned dungeon.
"The biggest," Joy said. "You'll see. They've been mingling like mad."
"What for, I wonder."
"Your guess is as good as mine. Ten times better, probably."
"Will you be going to the party?"
"Yes. In my Girl Friday capacity. Wearing my glasses, so I can
recognize people across the room, and seeing that Addison Madison
shakes hands with everybody."
"How about shaking hands with me now, just in case you're too busy
later?"
"I won't be," Joy smiled. But she put her hand in mine. I neglected to
give it back right away.
Then the drinks came and after a while Joy put her glasses on and
we took a cab back to the office. She sat on her side and I sat on
mine and we talked about the weather. It was hot.
The party had got to the point where everybody seemed to be talking
at once. Enough liquor had been consumed for the initial
tentativeness to have worn off and the Monolithians were no longer
standing apart as they had been at the beginning. It was impossible
to tell who was from where, except that the women were all from
Earth, presumably, and I heard several variations on the question
"Are you one of Them or one of Us?"
The din of the talk, the overworked air conditioners and the
mechanics of barkeeping made every conversation a private one
within its own area, even though it was carried on at the top of the
voice.
"I'm one of us," I shouted to a short, stout martini fellow who
cornered me in an alcove where I'd gone to put out a cigarette. "Sam
Kent, World Wide." I'd forgotten for the moment that I'd resigned.
"John Blobber," the martini said. "I'm with the Yarbutta people."
That's what it sounded like. "Good name, Sam. Sam Clemens, Sam
Goldwyn, Sam Spade. Lots of people named Sam. Sam Levene,
Sam Behrman—good American name."
"I never thought it wasn't, Mr. Yarbutta," I told him, trying to edge
away.
"No. John Blasher," he said, approximately. "I'm with the Yollawa
people."
"Oh, sure. I guess I've heard about them."
"Make tunsleys," he said, waving his glass dangerously in my
vicinity. "Business very good, at the moment, thanks to the
Monolithians." He set his glass down on the little wooden table that
held the ashtray I'd sought out, knocked on the wood and picked up
his glass. "Sam F.B. Morse—great inventor. Sam Lincoln, great
preshident."
"I think you've got that last one wrong," I said, backing off. "Fellow
named Abe, he was, I believe. Look, Mr. Blasher, you just reminded
me—I've got to see Abe Copeless about that story in Hammerslam
this morning. You know the one I mean."
I left him nodding in polite confusion. At the bar I got a fresh Scotch
and turned around to find myself trapped in a group playing Real
Names.
"You with the Scotch," a red-haired woman said. "You can't go till you
tell us who Archibald Leach is."
"Cary Grant," I said instantly out of my storehouse of copy-reader's
lore. I tried to go, but the woman put a hand on my drinking arm and
said, "Oh, this is one we've got to keep. I'll bet you don't know Joe
Yule, Junior."
"Why, madam," I said, "everyone knows Mickey Rooney."
"This man is a gem," the woman—she was a gin and tonic—said.
"Arlington Brugh?"
"S. Arlington Brugh," I corrected. "Robert Taylor. Now may I go?" I
smiled, so she wouldn't think my rude question was rude.
"Not a chance, my dear boy. You're an absolute fount. Irwin, give him
that one that stumped us before." Irwin was a tall, lean Screwdriver.
"Lucille LeSueur," he said defiantly, wrinkling an eyebrow.
"Joan Crawford," I told him instantly.
The gin-and-tonic lady shrieked with glee—"That's right! We all
guessed Lucille Ball. How do you do it?"
"It's really very simple," I said modestly. "You see, I'm their lawyer
and they have no secrets from me."
"I doubt that very much," the third Real Names player said frostily.
He was a Bloody Mary and I figured it served him right. "James
Stewart," he said, as if he were playing the ace of spades. "Let's see
you get out of that."
"You're doing it backwards," the gin lady said reprovingly.
"No, I'm not," the Bloody Mary man insisted.
"No, he's not," I said, lifting my Scotch and her arm for a sip. "That's
Stewart Granger. And Charles Pratt is Boris Karloff and Rita
Hayworth is Margarita Cansino, and Roy Rogers is Leonard Slye
and—if you will unhand me, my good woman—Frederick Bickel is
Fredric March."
"Don't let him get away," she shrieked. "He's priceless!"
But I did get away. I weaved my way among clusters of people who
were making sounds of our time touching on Lorca, Kerouac, Glenn
Gould, Lenny Bernstein, Brendan Behan, Sinatra, Astaire, Gielgud,
Philip, Kennedy, Marlon, Ingrid, and Marilyn, and found myself cheek
by jowl with my old friend Eurydice Playfair, who used to be a
newspaperwoman herself.
My Real Names ploy, which I had been savoring along with my
umpteenth Scotch, turned to ashes as it recalled itself forcibly to me
that I was no better than dear Riddie, having sold out to the aliens
myself.
"Dear boy!" she said. "Where have you been keeping yourself?"
"Between you and me, Riddie," I said, "between the devil and the
deep blue tax collector, up to just about now. Can I get you a drink?"
This is one way of vanishing. You just don't come back from the bar.
It's understandable at such a conclave. But Riddie was not to be put
off that easily.
"I'm well fixed, Samuel, my old," she said, waving three-quarters of a
bourbon on the rocks at me. "What I want to know is who's running
the store, now that Kent and double-you double-you have phfft? Not
old pinchpurse Hyatt, surely?"
"I have put all those mundane cares behind me," I said in an attempt
to be sprightly. "Greater things are afoot."
"How very true," she said. Riddie was dressed to the hilt in a lamé
thing that clung to her well-preserved curves. "I'm delighted you've
got yourself a handhold. There's room enough for all."
"Listen, Riddie," I said, "I know you can't tell the Monolithians without
a scorecard, they're so assimilable, but what the good hell is the
object of all this? For what greater gain is the tab being picked up?
What's the deal, old pal? Spill, will you?"
"You're too suspicious, Sam. This is conviviality rampant. We drink
and be merry and ask not the reason why. Live, man! Pluck the
daisies while you may. How is Mae, by the way?"
"Just fine," I said. "Just absolutely fine. That's an interesting
philosophy you have there, about plucking."
Riddie gave me a close look. "How many have you had, my friend?
How about a sandwich?"
"Don't worry," I told her. "I'm not going to disgrace anybody. I've had
three, is all." Besides miscounting I was ignoring the three I'd had at
lunch with Joy Linx.
"Well, maybe," Riddie said. She acknowledged a high sign from
somebody (an alien?) at the other side of the room and said quickly,
"Don't worry about a thing. If you have any problems, just take them
to Mox or Frij. Or me. I've got to run now, Sammy."
And she was off.
I made for the farther bar across the room, where I'd spotted Joy
Linx.
Joy had changed from her severe lunchtime suit into a low-cut black
satin which matched her hair and did all kinds of things for her figure.
I cannot tell a lie and say I hadn't noticed this figure heretofore, but
hadn't had the opportunity to notice it to such advantage. Bee-lining,
I reached her side.
"Your recent acquaintance presents his compliments," I said, "and
don't you look lovely."
Joy smiled hello and said, "You look just the same as at the
Algonquin, which is all one could ask. Do you know Mr. Masters? Mr.
Kent, formerly of World Wide—Mr. Masters of Hollywood and all
over."
Everybody knew Spookie Masters, the comedian, singer, dancer,
dramatic actor and husband of beautiful women.
"Not personally," I said, shaking hands, "but I'm a long-time fan. How
do you do."
"It's a pleasure, Kent," Masters said. "Joy tells me she's taken the
vows and joined the Martians. I envy her. Their coming is probably
the most exciting thing that's happened since the wheel."
"They're a pretty lively bunch, all right," I said. "I don't know where
it's all going to end, but it should be fun while it lasts."
"They sure beat the beatniks," Spookie Masters said, and I
remembered that he'd been on a beatnik and bongo drums kick for a
while. "I've got half a mind to take out a card myself. Who's the head
alien, Joy? Where do I get the poop?"
"I think you're pulling my leg, Spookie," she said ("Love to," he said),
"but if you're serious I'll speak to Frij. Just what is it you'd like to do?"
"Oh, just be an altar boy. Sit at the feet of the high priests and absorb
their philosophy. I did that in Tibet once and I've never got over it.
There's something more to life than chasing the old dollar. I've
learned that much."
This Spookie Masters was a pretty charming guy. He was about
forty, maybe five-feet-ten, and slender. Not handsome, but honest-
faced.
A sort of cult had grown up around him. Spookie Masters was more
than a million-a-year (net) entertainer. He was, to innumerable
moviegoers and TV fans, a way of life. They'd followed his career
from his beginning as a poor boy whose father had died in the
electric chair. They knew about his several marriages to, and
subsequent divorces from, some of the world's most glamorous
women. They'd followed his rise to fame and plunge to obscurity and
his comeback.
They knew about his coterie of big-name hangers-on, and they
parroted the group's own special language. They marveled that his
intimates and admirers included not only the mayor of a big city, the
head of the philosophy department of an Ivy League university, the
president of one of the world's biggest industries and the pretty sister
of a reigning queen, but that he also had plenty of time for people
who rode in subways and went to ball games and boxing matches.
Spookie usually dressed like a prince, but when the whim took him
he got into sport shirt, dungarees and sneakers and lounged through
the streets, keeping in touch, as it were, with the life he'd known
before fame struck. He'd browse in book stores, talk to panhandlers

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Cheiron s Way Youthful Education in

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Cheiron's Way: Youthful Education in Homer and

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(p.i) Cheiron’s Way (p.ii)

(p.iii) Cheiron’s Way

(p.iv) Copyright Page

(p.xxv) Cheiron’s Way (p.xxvi)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cheiron's Way: Youthful Education in Homer and

Print publication date: 2018

(p.v) To my students (p.vi)

Cheiron's Way: Youthful Education in Homer and

Print publication date: 2018

1. A Centaur Battles a Lapith at the Wedding of King Pirithous

Cheiron's Way: Youthful Education in Homer and

Print publication date: 2018

WHEN HOMER’S AGAMEMNON sends a delegation bearing an offer of

Every fictional character comes with a past attached, a presumed personal

documentary fallacy and forgetting that “literature operates on a thinnish crust,

Archaic and classical Greek literature is profoundly engaged with education—its

(2.) Although I discuss the Aeschylean motif of “learning through suffering” in

(5.) Waldock 1951, 15. Narratology’s attention to analepsis (i.e., flashback,

(6.) ὁ ἀπατηθεὶς σοϕώτερος τοῦ μὴ ἀπατηθέντος, DK 82 B 23. For analysis of

(10.) Gould 2001, 33.

(16.) For (rare) references in tragedy to lower-class enculturation as a trickling

(21.) For the distribution of athletic activities across classes in democratic

(22.) For references to literacy in Euripides see Wright 2010, 176–79.

Cheiron's Way: Youthful Education in Homer and

Print publication date: 2018

Ancient Authors and Texts

Hymn. Hom. Ven.,

Editions of Fragments and Testimonia

Texts, Translations, and Proper Names

Citations of Scholarly Journals

Cheiron's Way: Youthful Education in Homer and

Print publication date: 2018

Abstract and Keywords

REPRESENTATIONS OF EDUCATION in epic and tragedy unfold against a

assumed between natural endowment and educational acquisition? What

Age Classes and Education

[b]ut nevertheless I shall mingle with the chariot-fighters

Solon’s willingness to challenge conventional wisdom is evident in another

identify. The most unassailable instance occurs in the Odyssey. In a compressed