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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. 194
Comprehension 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. 142
Early 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.
167
Maxims and sayings, which remained the basis of learning in medieval schools,
were examples of the first language of authority that a student encountered. 17879
The 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. 206
Another 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 synonym207
The 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
There 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. 250
Hard work (ponos) is a leitmotif in the orations and epistles of Libanius. 251