Raffaella Cribiore, who transformed the study of ancient education by systematic and rigorous use of papyrus evidence, had a short but highly productive career that closed abruptly with her accidental death in 2023. This book, seen through the press by her mentor Roger Bagnall, is one of several posthumous works testifying to the intellectual fecundity of her final years (the preface informs us that fortunately it is not the last of those works, as an edition of Coptic school ostraca is also expected: p. x). It is a typical Cribiore product: fearless, insightful, lucid, and thought-provoking.
The aim of this book is to discover what actually went on in the classrooms of Roman-period and late-antique philosophers, by examining four philosophical works that probably derive from students’ lecture notes: Epictetus’ lectures in Arrian’s Discourses (chapters 5 and 6), Zeno’s in Philodemus’ On Frank Criticism (chapter 8), the lectures of Didymus the Blind (chapter 9), and Olympiodorus’ lectures that became the Commentary on the First Alcibiades (chapter 10). Although these works appear at first sight to report lectures that were largely monologues, Cribiore argues that all four of the courses they represent involved extensive interaction between teacher and students. The students’ words are often omitted from the lecture notes, but the teachers’ words only make sense if some of them were responses to questions – or to arguments, criticism, and blame. In fact, since students could vote with their feet, ultimately the teachers were forced to operate within the limits of what the students were prepared to put up with, limits that the teachers revealed by complaining about them. The dynamic, lively, interactive lessons that emerge from Cribiore’s book stand in striking contrast to some previous impressions of Roman-period philosophical teaching.
The longest section of the book is devoted to Epictetus, whose teaching style was uncomfortably harsh by our standards; Cribiore comments that some of his reactions appear ‘out of bounds’ (p. 113), and while reading this I wondered whether Epictetus might have insulted his students in order to goad them into practising Stoic indifference to problems that were not up to them. But his praise was all the more precious for being rare, and Cribiore wonders if the student recorded as receiving a particular expression of admiration could have been Arrian himself (p. 160). Although Epictetus was a Stoic and Philodemus’ teacher Zeno an Epicurean, in theory the polar opposite, Zeno’s practice of ‘frank criticism’ strikes a modern reader as very similar to Epictetus’ classroom style. One emerges from these chapters grateful not to have studied with these philosophers.
It is not universally agreed that these works do all derive from student notes, and considerable space is therefore devoted to arguing this case. The argument is easiest to make in the later period—Olympiodorus’ commentary is conveniently labelled apo phones, ‘from voice’, in its manuscripts – and particularly challenging in the case of Epictetus, since Arrian’s Discourses have sometimes been seen as his own literary compositions with perhaps a tenuous connection to Epictetus’ actual classroom. Here Cribiore convincingly invokes the significant linguistic and stylistic differences between the Discourses and Arrian’s other works, concluding that ‘the text as we have it transmits Epictetus’ authentic voice’ (p. 248). She also seeks to demonstrate that the authors of the notes were actual students, as opposed to scribes or stenographers, and here the results are less convincing. Cribiore’s argument that the productions of stenographers tended to be more accurate and coherent than the lecture notes (p. 78) depends on evidence that she published elsewhere and does not repeat here; without seeing that evidence I cannot really evaluate it, but the argument seems to move from evidence that some stenographical productions were highly accurate to the conclusion that all such productions must therefore have been so accurate that the notes examined in this book cannot come from stenographers. That logic worries me: surely ancient stenographers, like ancient teachers and students, could have varied in quality?
In order to combat arguments that the works we have cannot come from students, Cribiore devotes considerable attention to the note-taking process itself. How could students not trained in stenography have written fast enough to record the apparently complete lectures we now have? The answers emerge from careful examination of the evidence: the notes are probably not complete, omitting for example students’ portions of dialogues; lecturers did not necessarily speak very fast and sometimes stopped and/or repeated for the benefit of note-takers; writers probably used abbreviations, which although not common in Greek manuscripts appear in a few papyri (p. 93; here it would have been nice to see some examples); multiple listeners at the same lecture sometimes later combined their notes to create a composite version; one student sometimes recorded the same lecture on multiple occasions and created a composite set of notes on it. Like many university graduates, I have used all these techniques myself and can testify that they work—and copies of my student notes have occasionally circulated without my knowledge or that of my teachers, as Cribiore reports for some of the ancient lecture notes. I thus find her reconstruction of ancient note-taking highly plausible, and am happy to agree that all the texts she discussed could be simply student notes – but I am not sure it follows from that that they must be simply student notes. Other practices from my own student days spring to mind: could the teacher have provided a written framework that listeners expanded? Could students have persuaded the teacher to correct a copy of their notes? Fortunately, doubts on such points make little difference to Cribiore’s overall argument: even if lecturers (or stenographers) sometimes contributed to the texts we have today, Cribiore’s conclusions about how these texts capture the teachers’ voices and the complex dynamics of ancient philosophical classes still stand.
The book contains numerous challenges to widely held views; on most of these points Cribiore is clearly right. One is particularly notable: ‘Ancient schools, especially in late antiquity, were not divided into uniform and discrete groups; teachers could cover various roles, and students learned subjects at several different levels’ (p. 226). The view challenged here is one for which Cribiore’s own Gymnastics of the Mind (2001) is often cited in support: that ancient education was rigidly divided into three distinct levels taught by elementary teachers, grammarians, and rhetors. She now wryly remarks ‘I fear that what I wrote especially in 2001 was taken too literally … I … did not take into account that the diversity was more nuanced’ (p. 210 n. 35).
Another notable challenge is to the idea that all factual mistakes in works derived from student notes must be due to the students’ misunderstanding: Cribiore argues (pp. 230-1, 240) that some mistakes could have been made by the lecturers. Those of us who teach will acknowledge, sadly, that she has a point.
Nevertheless, a few of Cribiore’s arguments are unconvincing. Views expressed by characters in Plato’s dialogues are assumed to be Plato’s own opinions, though this is unfair e.g. when he represents Socrates speaking negatively about writing (p. 231): given the amount that Plato wrote, he can hardly have been as opposed to writing as Socrates was. Discussing harsh corporal punishment of children, Cribiore says (p. 108) ‘The occasional voices that condemned such methods remained in the realm of theory’, with a reference to Quintilian – but Quintilian was not merely a theorist. For twenty years he ran a large, important school where he probably practised what he preached, setting an example that some others will have followed. And this book has a disconcerting tendency to change the level of certainty in a claim when referring back to it later; for example ‘But this raises a doubt. Is the picture of a single student taking down the commentary still realistic, or did the “editor” work together with others?’ (p. 241) becomes in the conclusion ‘in the past scholars have surmised that apo phones texts were jotted down by a single notetaker who was guilty of all imperfections. These assumptions have been proven wrong’ (p. 248).
The book is less polished than Cribiore’s other works; Bagnall’s intervention was clearly restrained, and that was probably the right choice given the need to preserve Cribiore’s distinctive voice. Nevertheless some of the issues that she would presumably have fixed if she had lived are disconcerting: they include footnotes apparently irrelevant to the text to which they are attached (e.g. p. 207 n. 26) and occasional verbatim repetitions (e.g. ‘The authors who denounced the practice of disseminating texts against their will were responding to an actual need to protect their work’ appears on both p. 94 and p. 95).
One point that might to advantage have been explored more fully is the question of why these texts were written in the first place, in other words what students normally did with their notes. We see only the ones that were eventually published, but those were probably the exceptions (just as modern students’ notes only exceptionally appear in print), and even in those cases publication was probably not the students’ original goal when taking their notes. Considering one of the modern parallels, Cribiore observes that Mommsen would have been aware of the note-taking of the students whose notes on his lectures were later published (p. 246), but that does not mean he had any inkling of what might later be done with those notes. Modern students’ notes are typically used to help the person who wrote them study for an exam, and teachers observing note-taking often assume that that is its purpose. Ancient students did not have exams in the modern sense, but they were no doubt expected to demonstrate acquisition of knowledge in some way. Is there evidence on how the authors of our notes would have done this, or how those demonstrations would have related to their notes? Alas, without Raffaella to answer that question we may never know.