ABSTRACT
Although the course of the grammaticus in language and literature could be both interesting and instructive, it was not originally designed to provide any opportunity for constructive work in prose, essential though this was for those whose ultimate objective was usually to become good public speakers. Traditionally, this was part of the province of rhetoric, and Greek rhetoricians, long before Quintilian's day, had evolved a whole series of exercises in composition, each based on a stereotyped framework of rules supplied by the teacher, which, adapting the language of physical education to intellectual studies, they termed progymnasmata, or ‘preliminary training-exercises’. [1] When the series was fully developed there were about a dozen types in all, and much consideration was given to grading them in order of difficulty, for they ranged from fairly straightforward exercises based on the Fable, the Saying (chreia), and the mythological Narrative to much more difficult ones, such as the Speech in Character, the Thesis, and the Discussion of a Law. They were ‘preliminary’ in the sense that they were designed to lead up to the full-scale mock-deliberative and mock-legal speeches, called by the Greeks hypotheses, and by the Romans suasoriae and controversiae. Some of these exercises (e.g., the Thesis) were extremely old, and dated back to classical Greece, but the often-repeated statement that the set of progymnasmata goes back to the fourth century B.C. lacks any firm basis, for the occurrence of the word in the text of the Rhetorica ad Alexandrum in a general sense can hardly warrant this deduction. [2] Moreover, the practice of inventing mock-deliberative and mock-legal themes, for which these exercises afforded a preparation, was itself somewhat later, and was generally associated with the name of Demetrius of Phalerum. [3] It seems likely, therefore, that the formation of the standard set of preliminary exercises, known to us mainly from writers of the imperial period, was a gradual process, which took place during the Hellenistic Age. It must, however, have been fairly complete by the first century B.C., and maybe earlier, for already in the late Republic the set, or a good part of it, was being used by teachers of rhetoric in Latin, [4] who called them exercitationes or, later, materiae. It was not long, however, before the Latin rhetoricians began to hand some of them down to the grammatici, who, by Quintilian's time were dealing with the whole series. Greek teachers of rhetoric, on the other hand, did not go anything like so far as this, but themselves retained for centuries most of what had always been part of their standard rhetorical teaching. [5] The most detailed treatise for our period is that of Aelius Theon, who was probably a younger contemporary of Quintilian, [6] but mention may be made here of later Greek compilations, on which, in view of the remarkably faithful adherence to tradition, it would seem not unreasonable to draw from time to time for the better illustration of the subject. The short manual of Hermogenes, [7] dating from the late second century, shows how stereotyped the system had by then become; but it gives little beyond the bare rules. Although the grammarian Priscian later produced a Latin version of it, [8] far greater success attended the fourth-century work of Aphthonius, for this included worked-out examples of the various exercises. [9] This little manual exercised a quite extraordinarily protracted influence in education, for, long after it had been assiduously annotated and commented upon by Greek scholars, [10] it was reproduced in Latin form in the sixteenth century, with supplementary themes and notes by Reinhard Lorich, [11] and was widely used in schools in that and the following century. Thus the Latin Aphthonius has become very much within the purview of students of English literature, notably in works on Shakespeare [12] and Milton. [13] Very much less widely known has been the substantial collection of model versions in Greek, composed for the use of students by that indefatigable rhetorical expert, Libanius, [14] the teacher of Aphthonius. Nor is the fifth-century treatise of Nicolaus Sophista [15] much used, though he has some quite valuable observations on the reasons which lay behind the order of the exercises and the placing of each one.
