The child from 7 to 14 years of age went to the school of letters, conducted thither, as in the Classical period, by the paidagōgos, whose role was not limited to accompanying the child: he had also to educate him in good manners and morals and finally to act as a lesson coach. Literacy and numeration were taught in the private school conducted by the grammatistes. Class sizes varied considerably, from a few pupils to perhaps dozens. The teaching of reading involved an analytical method that made the process very slow. First the alphabet was taught from alpha to omega and then backward, then from both ends at once: alpha–omega, beta–psi, and so on to mu–nu. (A comparable progression in the Latin alphabet would be A–Z, B–Y, and so on to M–N.) Then were taught simple syllables—ba, be, bi, bo—followed by more complex ones and then by words, successively of one, two, and three syllables. The vocabulary list included rare words (e.g., some of medical origin) chosen for their difficulty of reading and pronunciation. It took several years for the child to be able to read connected texts, which were anthologies of famous passages. With reading was associated recitation and, of course, practice in writing, which followed the same gradual plan.

The program in mathematics was very limited; rather than computation, the subject, strictly speaking, was numeration: learning the whole numbers and fractions, their names, their written notations, their representation in finger counting (in assorted bent positions of the fingers and assorted placements of either hand relative to the body). The general use of tokens and of the abacus made the teaching of methods of computation less necessary than it became in the modern world.

Secondary education

Between the primary school and the various types of higher education, the Hellenistic educational system introduced a program of intermediate, preparatory studies—a preliminary education, a kind of common trunk preparing for the different branches of higher culture, enkyklios paideia (“general, or common, education”). This general education, far from having “encyclopaedic” ambitions in the modern sense of the word, represented a reaction against the inordinate ambitions of philosophy and, more generally, of the Aristotelian ideals of culture, which had demanded the large accumulation of intellectual attainments. The program of the enkyklios paideia was limited to the common points on which, as noted earlier, the rival pedagogies of Plato and of Isocrates agreed—namely, the study of literature and mathematics. Specialized teachers taught each of these subjects. The mathematics program had not changed since the ancient Pythagoreans and comprised four disciplines—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics (not the art of music but the theory of the numerical laws regulating intervals and rhythm). The primary function of the grammatikos, or professor of letters, was to present and explicate the great classic authors: Homer first of all, of whom every cultivated man was expected to have a deep knowledge, and Euripides and Menander—the other poets being scarcely known except through anthologies. Although poetry remained the basis of literary culture, room was made for prose—for the great historians, for the orators (Demosthenes in particular), even for the philosophers. Along with these explications of texts, the students were introduced to exercises in literary composition of a very elementary character (for example, summarizing a story in a few lines).

The program of this intermediate education did not attain its definitive formulation until the second half of the 1st century bce, after the appearance of the first manual devoted to the theoretical elements of language, a slim grammatical treatise by Dionysius Thrax. The program then consisted of the seven liberal arts: the three literary arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic and the four mathematical disciplines noted above. (These were, respectively, the trivium and the quadrivium of medieval education, though the latter term did not appear until the 6th century and the former not until the 9th century.) The long career of this program should not conceal the fact that, in the course of centuries, it fell into disuse and became rather largely a theory or abstraction; in reality, literary studies gradually took over at the expense of the sciences. Of the four mathematical disciplines, only one remained in favour—astronomy. And this was not merely because of its connections with astrology but primarily because of the popularity of the basic textbook used to teach it—the Phaenomena, a poem in 1,154 hexameters by Aratus of Soli—whose predominantly literary quality was suited to textual explications. Not until about the 3rd and 4th centuries ce was the need of a sound preparatory mathematical education again recognized and put into practice.

Higher education

Higher education appeared in several forms, complementary or competitive. First was the ephebeia (“youth” culture), a kind of civic and military training that completed the education of the young Greek and prepared him to enter into life; it lasted two years (from 18 to 20) and corresponded quite closely to the obligatory military service of modern states. It was a survival from the regime of the old Greek city-states, but in the Hellenistic Age the absence of national independence erased all reason for this military training; between the 3rd and 2nd centuries bce the Athenian ephebeia (eventually reduced to a single year) was transformed into a leisured civilian college where a minority of rich young men came to be initiated into the refinements of the elegant life. Military training came to play only a modest role and gave way to athletic competition. To this were added lectures on scientific and literary subjects, assuring the ephebe a polish of general culture. The same evolution took place in other cities: the ephebeia became everywhere more aristocratic than civic, more sporting than military. What the Greeks, especially those who had emigrated to the barbarian lands, demanded of it was above all that it initiate their sons into Greek life and its characteristic customs, beginning with athletic sports. Especially in Egypt, it was intended to legitimize the privileged status of the Hellene relative to the “native” Egyptian. In any event, the ephebeia no longer was the setting for the highest forms of education.

Formal education in science also lacked any institutionalization. There were, however, some establishments having scientific staffs of high competence, of which the most important was the Mouseion (Museum) established at Alexandria, richly endowed by the Ptolemies; but, at least initially, it was an institute for advanced research. If the scholars endowed there were also teachers, this meant only that they dispensed instruction to a small circle of chosen disciples. The same informal character of personal training was to be seen in all the special disciplines—medicine, for example, which saw such a fine development between the time of Hippocrates (5th century bce) and that of Galen (2nd century ce). If there were in the Hellenistic era certain “schools” of medicine—old (Cnidus, Cos) and new (Pergamum, Alexandria)—these were less the equivalent of today’s medical faculties than simply centres to which the presence of numerous qualified masters attracted a large number of aspirants. Whatever theory these “students” were able to learn, they learned largely through self-training and practice—by associating themselves with a practicing physician whom they accompanied to the bedsides of patients, taking part in his consultations, profiting by his experience and advice.

Philosophy and rhetoric were subjects of education most highly institutionalized. Although philosophy was taught privately by individual masters-lecturers—who could be either itinerants or residents of one place—these teachers were well organized and, in groups, possessed a kind of institutional character. On the model of Plato’s Academy, the new Athenian schools of philosophy—Aristotle’s Lyceum, Epicurus’ Garden, the Porch (stoa), which gave its name to the Stoics—were brotherhoods in which the posts in both teaching and administration were passed from generation to generation as a kind of heritage. It was in philosophy that the personalistic character of the Hellenistic era most clearly asserted itself in contrast to the more communal idea of the preceding period; when philosophy turned to the problem of politics, for instance, it dealt less with the citizens of a republic and more with the sovereign king, his duties and character. The central problem was henceforth that of wisdom—of the purpose that man should set for himself in order to attain happiness, the supreme ideal. The teaching of philosophy was not entirely contemplative: it involved the disciple in an experience analogous to a religious conversion, a decision implying a revision of his life and the adoption of a generally ascetic way of life. Such a vocation, however, could obviously appeal only to a moral, intellectual, and financially secure elite; philosophers were always quite a small number within the Hellenistic (and Roman) intelligentsia.

The reigning discipline was always rhetoric. The prestige of the oratorical art outlived those social conditions that had inspired it; political eloquence operated only in the context of an embassy coming to plead the cause of a particular city or pressure group at the court of the sovereign. Legal eloquence maintained its function, and the profession of advocate retained its attractiveness, but it was above all the eloquence of showy set speeches—the art of the lecturer—that experienced a curious blossoming. Also, as a result of the customary habit of reading aloud, there was no sharp line between speech and the book; thus, eloquence imposed its rule upon all literary genres—poetry, history, philosophy. Even the astronomer and the physician became lecturers.

Hence, great importance was attached to the teaching of rhetoric, which developed from century to century with an ever more rigorous technicalism, precision, and systematization. The study of rhetoric had five parts: (1) invention (the art of finding ideas, according to standard schemes), (2) disposition (the arrangement of words and sentences), (3) elocution, (4) mnemonics (memory training), (5) and action. Action was the art of self-presentation, the regulation of voice and delivery and above all the art of reinforcing the word with the expressive power of gesture. Each of these parts, equally systematized to the tiniest detail, was taught with a technical vocabulary of extreme precision. Such an education—which in addition to theory comprised a study of the great examples to be imitated and exercises in practical application—required many years of study; in fact, even in maturity, the cultivated Hellene continued to deepen his knowledge of the art, to drill himself, to “declaim.”

A rivalry existed between philosophy and rhetoric, each trying to draw into its orbit the best and the most students. Even in the time of Plato and Isocrates, this rivalry did not proceed without mutual concessions and reciprocal influences, but it remained one of the most constant characteristics of the Classical tradition and continued until the end of antiquity and beyond. The long summer of Hellenic civilization was extended under the Roman domination; the great centres of learning also experienced a long prosperity. Athens in particular was the unchallenged capital of philosophy; its ephebeia welcomed foreigners to come to crown their culture in the “school of Greece.” Its masters of eloquence also had a solid reputation, even though they had competition from such schools of Asia Minor as those of Rhodes (in the 1st century ce) and Smyrna (in the 2nd century bce). Under the later Roman Empire, Alexandria—already famous for medicine—competed with Athens for preeminence in philosophy. Other great centres developed: Beirut, Antioch, and the new capital Constantinople. The quality of the teachers and the number of students attending permits one to apply to these centres, without too much anachronism, the modern designation of “universities,” or institutions of advanced learning.