BMCR 2004.10.20, Two titles on ancient rhetoric

Ronald F. Hock, Edward N. O'Neil, The Chreia and Ancient Rhetoric:
Classroom Exercises. Writings from the Greco-Roman World v. 2.
Atlanta:  Society of Biblical Literature, 2002.  Pp. xi, 411.  ISBN
1-58983-018-0.  $49.95 (pb).

George A. Kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition
and Rhetoric. Writings from the Greco-Roman World.  Atlanta:  Society
of Biblical Literature, 2003.  Pp. xvi, 231.  ISBN 1-58983-061-X.
$29.95 (pb).

Reviewed by Maud W. Gleason, Stanford University (maud@xxxxxxxxxxxx)
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"What is the chreia?
A concise reminiscence associated with some character.
Why is the chreia a reminiscence?
Because it is remembered so that it may be recited ...
Why is it called 'chreia'?
Because of its being useful ..."

This schoolboy catechism from Oxyrhynchus describes one of the ancient
world's most popular sub-genres, the improving anecdote. Many examples
are preserved in Diogenes Laertius. "Diogenes lit his lamp in broad
daylight and went about, saying: 'I am looking for a[n honest] man.'"
The gospels contain many more, "Jesus, on entering the Temple, began to
evict the sellers and said to them: 'It is written, "My house shall be
a house of prayer," but you have made it a cave for brigands.'" It was
presumably to explore the classical prototypes of such anecdotes from
scripture that a group was formed at the Institute for Antiquity and
Christianity at Claremont Graduate University in the late 1970's. In
the course of scholarly investigation, Jesus-sayings and Cynic
tradition receded from sight, and the focus became the role of the
chreiai in rhetorical tradition. The first volume of the group's
researches appeared in 1986[[1]] and contained translations of the
passages in ancient rhetorical treatises that define and classify the
chreiai. These treatises are now known as Progymnasmata, although that
title did not become standard until the fourth century. They include
the works attributed to Theon of Alexandria (1st cent. CE), Hermogenes
of Tarsus (2nd cent CE), Aphthonius of Antioch (4th cent. CE), and
Nicolaus of Myra (5th cent. CE). Kennedy's Progymnasmata, reviewed
below, translates all these treatises in full, plus a 9th century
commentary on Aphthonius attributed to John of Sardis. It should be
noted that rhetorical elaboration of chreiai seems to have been
accompanied by a restriction in the range of their content. While
hundreds, if not thousands, of improving anecdotes survive in the
sententious authors of antiquity, only sixty-eight are attested in the
rhetorical treatises of Hock and O'Neil volume one.

In their second volume Hock and O'Neil focus on texts that illustrate
the role played by the chreia in the classroom at all three levels.
They include Greek texts of the best (or in some cases, the only)
printed editions, with some textual notes of their own. In the
primary-level classroom, students read and copied chreiai. Here we have
eleven examples found on papyri and ostraka. (Why do so few survive, if
these exercises were indeed the foundation of the literate curriculum?)
The content of most is improving but banal: Alexander refuses to attack
by night; Diogenes, on being asked where the Muses dwell, replies, "In
the souls of the educated" (22). A few are startling to the modern ear,
"Seeing a woman being educated, [Diogenes] said, 'Wow! A sword is being
sharpened... Seeing an Ethiopian defecating, he said, 'Look! A kettle
with a hole in it" (10). Although H. and O'N. are not generally
concerned to draw out the implications of their texts for social
history, they do quote Morgan's explanation that such maxims encouraged
students to "identify with powerful high-status Greek or Roman
social-cultural groups" by denigrating women and barbarians.[[2]] What
fascinated the authors of ancient treatises was not the content of the
chreiai but their formal elaboration. This required classificatory
subdivision. There are sayings-chreiai and action-chreiai and mixed
chreiai. And sayings-chreiai can be subdivided into sayings spontaneous
(apophantikon) and sayings elicited (apokritikon). And spontaneous
sayings can be sub-sub-divided into those that are unprompted and those
that arise from a specific circumstance (32-3).

In the secondary classroom under the grammatikos, students began to
join in the grand game of classification. They learned to classify
words into parts of speech. They learned to decline nouns and inflect
verbs. And they learned to take whole chreiai through an advanced
declension exercise called klisis. For example, (nominative)
"Pythagoras the philosopher ... used to advise his pupils to abstain
from red meat." Genitive, "The statement of Pythagoras is remembered
for advising ..." Dative: "To Pythagoras the philosopher ... it seemed
best to advise..." and so on into the dual ("The two Pythagorases, the
philosophers ..." and plural (65-6). It should come as some consolation
to pedagogues of the modern era that the student who labored out this
exercise fouled up his verb forms on a number of occasions,
particularly in the dual (63).

A klisis-exercise in Latin survives from late antiquity in the Ars
grammatica of Diomedes (67-77). Here the saying, "the roots of
education are bitter but the fruit is sweet," usually attributed to
Isocrates or some other Greek sage, is attributed to Cato (67-72). Was
this exercise perhaps intended not for native speakers of Latin but for
Greek speakers boning up on Latin to enter imperial service or the law
school in Beirut?

In the tertiary classroom under the rhetor, students learned to
elaborate their chreiai in preparation for full-fledged declamations.
Theon had his own system of elaboration; Hermogenes' system had
Hellenistic roots (as we can see from its similarities to the Rhetorica
ad Herennium); Aphthonius changed some terminology, and his system
continued in use for 1000 years (83-90). Under this system a student
worked up his chreia under eight headings. He would praise it,
paraphrase it, give its rationale, argue from the opposite, argue by
analogy, give an example, cite testimony of the ancients, and conclude
with an epilogue (90). Neither Aphthonius nor his predecessors seem to
have felt the need to explain how this sort of work-out strengthens the
rhetorical aspirant. In the fifth century Nicolaus pointed out that the
first heading corresponds to the encomiastic prooimia of a standard
four-part speech while the paraphrase corresponds to the narrative, and
the next five headings correspond to a diegesis while the last one is
like the epilogue. And Doxopatres, in the eleventh century, explained
that the person who has practiced the encomiastic elaboration of his
chreiai (the first of the eight headings) will be prepared to capture
the goodwill of his audience when he composes the introduction of a
real speech (91).

The rest of this volume consists of worked-out examples of chreiai
elaborations. The earliest to survive are by the fourth-century
rhetoricians Sopatros and Libanius. Sopatros' examples, (recovered from
John of Sardis' commentary on Aphthonius), show that a modicum of
compositional freedom persisted in the elaboration of chreiai until
Aphthonius' recipe became canonical (110). Libanius' examples are
preceded by a useful biographical introduction, with copious footnotes
to his autobiography and letters (now translated in a convenient
selection by Scott Bradbury[[3]]) (113-25). Some points of general
interest to classicists emerge from Libanius' chreiai: the role of fear
and corporal punishment in the ancient classroom (133, 160, 170-1), and
an interesting example of the way typological thinking operated in an
encomiastic context (Alexander the Great credited with affability, a
virtue he is not otherwise known for, perhaps by conflation with the
emperor Julian, whose affability Libanius was wont to praise (127,
143)). And any academic who has written too many recommendation letters
will smile at Libanius' description of the friend's role in
matchmaking, "extolling the qualities [the candidate] does have and
imputing to him those he does not" (147).

The Byzantine chreiai elaborations with which this volume concludes are
likely to be of less interest to classicists than the earlier material,
though the massive inertia of an educational system that kept students
grinding away at the same exercises for a millennium does give one
pause. In the 12th century Basilakes began the practice of developing
traditional rhetorical exercises on Christian themes (for example, an
encomium of humility, an ecphrasis of a baptistery, and an ethopoiia,
"What words the slave of the high priest might say after having his ear
cut off by St. Peter and healed by Christ" (261, 282)). Is the
remarkable thing about this development that it came so late or that it
happened at all?

Kennedy's volume differs from Hock and O'Neil's in that it focuses on
progymnasmata treatises in their entirely, not just on the chreia
exercise. It does not include a Greek text, but a complete English
translation of the treatises of Theon, [Hermogenes], Aphthonius,
Nicolaus, and John of Sardis. Its introductory material for each
selection, though valuable, is briefer.

Theon's treatise affords a number of valuable opportunities to observe
the ancient teacher's mind at work. When he recommends that teachers
select from ancient prose authors good examples of each type of
exercise for their students to memorize, he gives a useful picture of
the sort of chestnuts venerated by Greek teachers of the early Roman
period (Sophocles abjuring the pleasures of Aphrodite in Republic 329c
as a chreia, the ring of Gyges from the Symposium as a mythical
narration, Cleobis and Biton from Herodotus as a factual narration,
etc.) (9-12). Theon is unique in that he pays attention to educational
psychology. He advises the teacher not to correct every mistake in
every composition lest pupils become discouraged. His rationale for
assigning "problems already elaborated by the ancients" is that
students "may acquire confidence if they have written similarly, and if
not that they may have the ancients as correctors" (14-5). When Theon
defines the chreia against the maxim and the reminiscence, his logic,
based on exclusive alternatives, shows the classificatory mentality
that produced phenomena as diverse as stasis-theory and Galen's
endlessly sub-divided typology of the pulse. Creativity was not a
buzzword in the ancient classroom, but Theon, unlike his more hidebound
successors, apparently can envisage young students making up their own
fables -- after their minds have been suitably primed with examples
from the ancients (26). He even endorses the occasional composition of
essays about student's own friends or experiences of public events,
"such as a riot, a procession, a spectacle, or political agitation" --
what Kennedy in his note endearingly calls "What I did on my summer
vacation," observing dryly, "There would have been ample opportunity to
describe riots, processions, spectacles, and political agitation in
ancient Alexandria" (69 with n. 206).

When it comes to narrative, Theon anticipates Strunk and White: "As for
style, in aiming at clarity one should avoid poetic and coined words
and tropes and archaisms ... And do not use a phrase instead of a word;
for example, "he departed this life" rather than "he died," and things
like that" (30, 33). He gives us pages of examples of how students
might rework Thucydides' narrative of how the Thebans seized Plateaea:
as a question, as a command, as a wish etc. (33-8). Theon appears to
have been a great partisan of Thucydides, and rails at how he has been
butchered in the classroom, "Avoid doing what some teachers do, leaving
aside the brilliance and sublimity in Thucydides, while cutting him
down into an imitation full of obscurities and stressing whatever is
abstruse and difficult in his writing" (68).

Aphthonius was a pupil of Libanius, and his treatise attained canonical
status because it included examples (though Kennedy observes that some
of these are weakly argued) (89). This work attained an astonishing
popularity in the Renaissance: 114 printings of 10 editions between
1507 and 1680 (90). Of special interest to classicists is his encomium
of Thucydides, which refers to a selection of purple passages in vogue
among rhetoricians (almost all from the first three books) (108-110).
When Aphthonius mouths platitudes about the moral failings of the poor
in his elaboration of a protreptic maxim or dutifully rehearses the
failings of Philip, we are reminded how the endless repetition of
commonplaces against adultery, murder, and temple-robbery --
commonplaces that seem so platitudinous to us -- formed the reassuring
moral armature of ancient society.

Since post-Aphthonian treatises are fairly repetitive, the reader will
value Kennedy's little introductions all the more, since they set out
the features that make each one distinct. Nicolaus was particularly
interested in identifying which parts of an oration each progymnastic
exercise prepared students to handle (130); after-dinner speakers will
appreciate his advice about how to compose encomiums for boring and
undistinguished people (156-7). While Aphthonius' ecphrasis of the
Serapeum of Alexandria (a place he may have never seen) attains at
least to the complexity of Solomon's temple, John of Sardis' attempted
elucidation of this ecphrasis in his commentary must be comparable to
the Nuptual Number squared (if any Platonist can imagine such a thing)
(118-20, 219-221). Yet Kennedy's patience and erudition shows no sign
of strain.

Who will benefit from these books? They are in some ways more learned
and encyclopedic than the average classicist requires. The die-hard
enthusiast of Byzantine rhetorical theory probably owns Walz and may
not need translations, while the Greekless amateur may be defeated by
the untranslated technical terms that appear in Hock and O'Neil. One
can never grasp the cultural significance of rhetoric from technical
treatises alone. Those who are interested in broader cultural questions
in ancient education will also want to consult Morgan, whom both these
books cite, and Cribiore, who appeared too late for them to use.[[4]]
(Norman's translations of Libanius also provide a valuable glimpse of
the late antique educational scene in Antioch).[[5]] But cumulatively
these books do a tremendous service in making available a body of
knowledge that was once universally familiar among the educated but has
since become arcane.


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Notes:


1.   These examples come from the introduction to volume one in the
series, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric: Volume I: The Progymnasmata
(Society of Biblical Literature, 1986).

2.   Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman
Worlds (Cambridge, 1998) p. 150.

3.   Scott Bradbury, Selected Letters Of Libanius From The Age Of
Constantius and Julian (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

4.   Teresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman
Worlds (Cambridge, 1998); Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind:
Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton, 2001).

5.   A. F. Norman, Antioch as a Centre of Hellenic Culture as Observed
by Libanius (Liverpool, 2000).