Raffaele Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001.Starting with the fourth century BCE gymnasia were not only places of athletic activity but also centers of intellectual pursuits It is particularly from the third century B.C.E. on[ward] that inscriptions testify that gymnasia were centers of intellectual and educational activity in attica and in several parts of the Greek world. Numerous inscriptions in Hellenistic gymnasia preserve lists of victors in agonescontests not only in gymnastics but also in poetry or other academic subjectsand occasionally the inscriptions themselves testify that teachers tested students by examination in the gymnasia. 34-35In the Ptolemaic period gymnasia existed in Egypt not only in large centers but also in the most Hellenized villages, wherever Greeks established communities of sufficient size. In the Roman period, on the other hand, they appear to be present mostly in the nome capitals, metropoleis. In the gymnasium local male youthws received athletic and military training, and the Greek members of the elite gathered to socialize and to pursue intellectual activities. Festivals with gymnastics displays and celebrations of every sort were held around gymnasia. 35Models continued to be useful when a pupil was required to recognize syllables in whole words: teachers wrote lists of words on ostraca and tablters, wome in which the words were divided into syllables, others in which words were separated from each other. Students used these models not only to practice reason and writing whole words, but also to memorize their contents. Thus, when a teacher w2rpte a long list of names mostly from the Iliad in alphabetical order on a very large ostracon, this waqs used as a mythological reference that was always at the students disposal. 134Since Homer was the subject of constant study on many levels, it is among the Homeric papyri that books used in schools are most often found. 140 empeiria (expertise acquired through practice and experience) and a techne (an art or a science). Paideia (education) proceeded in a circulatr motion, by revisiting previous material. After following all the steps required for fluent reading, a student had to learn to dissect parts of the texts of the authors, distinguishing all their [grammatical] components. A passage, which was a thing closed upon itself, was at the ssaame tome a dense cluster of interwoven linguistic and historical elements. It could swell up ad infinitum, becoming a microcosm of erudite, fragmented knowledge. When the grammarian pointed out to his class glosses, figures, tropes, relations of elements of language, similarities with other parts of an authors work or the work of other authors in a proliferation of exegesis, a text became the perfect model to which other texts had to conform. 187-88These were principally Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Euripides, Mernander. Starting with Homer was mandatory, since he was considered in antiquity the poet par excellence, a moral and religious authority, and the teacher who inspired reverence from the early years of study. Plto Resp. 10.595b-c and 606e. About a thousand Homeric papyri have been discovered, compared to a hundred of Euripides the next most popular. 194Comprehension of Homeric diction was furthered by glossographical works that 0presented translation of difficult terms Other tools of exegesis were texts that concentrated on mythological, periphrastic, and explanatory material. In elucidating the texts of other poets, ancient grammarians drew heavily on school commentaries. These handbooks differed from scholarly commentaries insofar as they concentrated on mythological material and on a type of exegesis geared toward rendering the text more easily approachable. 142Early education was not so much concerned with developing artificial memory, but rather with nurturing the natural memory of children memory was the storehouse of education and had the capacity to create and foster Pupils developed a peculiar abiloity to calculate with the letters that is unknown in the modern world. Thus the alophabet became as flexible a tool as numerical order for organizational purposes. The maxims that the students had to memorize and copy letter by letter at the next educational stage were sometimes organized in alphabetical acrostics. 167Maxims and sayings, which remained the basis of learning in medieval schools, were examples of the first language of authority that a student encountered. 178-79The historical side of the activity of a grammarian consisted of extracting from a text all of its constitutive elements, dealing not only with realia of persons and historical, geographical and mythological components but also with glosses, figures and tropes. When in his definition, Dionysius said that grajmmatik covered the explanation of potikoi tropoi contained in a text, his words referred to poetic modes of expression rather than specifically to poetic tropes, and includes aty least figures of speech. 206Another aspect of a grammarians teaching concerned the elucidation of unfamiliar vocabulary. Systematic glossographical analysis, which started in the Roman period, survives particularly fpr Homeric epic. Scholia minora to homer are preserved in about a hundred papyri, some of which undoubtedly originated in the schoolroom They consist of lists of Homeric lemmatasingle words or short expressionstaken from the text, which are translated into an eeasier form o Greek that corresponded to current usage. The technique of metalepsios, that is, the translation of a word to a synonym207The discovery of etymologies represented a further facet of a grammarians activity in which he could display the effectiuveness of his tools. A grammarian was a master at playing this hame, which was centered on the meaning and origin of a word; nothing seems to have been prohibited as long as one reached the desired explanation. Though implicit etymologies could be found in the Greek poets, there was a long tradition of explicit etymologies exemplified by Platos Cratylus. A student was guided though the meandering rules of the game: letters could be changed, omitted, added or interchanged in order to reach the desired meaning. Ineke Sluiter, Ancient Grammar in ContextL: Contributions to the study of ancient linguistic thought, Amsterdam 1990, 12-13. Though some etymologies reached by these methods were humorous, this aspect was probably untouched by the solemn grammarian: an etymology attempted to discover the thruthful nature of a word, and it needed to be taken serious. A discovery of etymoliogies, which would normally accompany the perusal of a text, might also be done in the course of systematic technical grammatical inquiries in which grammarians expounded their linguistic knowledge. 209-10

It is not a coincidence that the fiorst texts containing elementary explanations of the text of literary authors, such as scholia minora to Homer, appeared in Roman times. As time went by, the distant heirs of the Macedonian and Greek conquerors felt a more urgent need for explanatory tools, not only to master a language whose acquisition became increasingly less automatic and spontaneousand particularly Attic Greekbut primarily to understand poetic texts on a deeper level. 210Some of the verbs used in exercises such as didaskein, graphein and typteinto teach, to write and ti thrash--seem to allude to school practice. 214The educational process evoked the analogy of linguistic training. In his work on the progymnasmata, preliminary rhetorical exercises, Theon knew and employed this word but preferred to apply the terms gymnasia or gymnasma (exercise) to the individual exercises; he was followed in that terminology by the second-century rhetor Hermogenes. The progymnasmata were supposed to teach a student how to write on set themes: they were meant to warm up his muscles, stretch his power of discourse, and build his vigor. According to Quintilian, the athlete of the word, like gladiators and wrestlers, learned the technique of his art from the trainer, had to follow a strict regiument of diet and exercise, and built up his pwer of memorization by strenuous exercises, just as athletes train their muscles. Libanius regarded himself not only as a wrestlerthat is, an oratorbut as a good trainer (gymnasts). His dtudentsthe emperor Julian includedwere athletes of the logoi who were building up the weapons they would need for their future careers. All the vocabulary employed in rhetorical practice alluded to gymnastics and physical encounters. 221-22Homer never lost his grip on the practitioner of rhetoric. 226Schools engaged in the practice of reading texts closely and of reaching a deep textual experience through careful verbal analysis. 248There is a disillusioned student of LOibanius who lamented the futility of the hard work he had done on poets, rhetors and other writers, since he thought that the result of the sweat was goi8ng to be to wander about ad be despised, while another is rich and happy. :ibanius himself thought that traditional Greek education was threatened to a degree by ew technologies such as stenography, and by the study of law, which required the knowledge of Latin. 250Hard work (ponos) is a leitmotif in the orations and epistles of Libanius. 251