Paideia in the Classical period of Ancient Greece

Most countries allow their citizens to raise their children as they please, and when the children grow older, they allow them to behave as they wish; but then they suddenly command them not to steal, not to rob, not to break into houses, not to strike people unjustly, not to commit adultery, to obey the authorities, and so on; and if anyone breaks these laws, they impose harsh penalties.

(Xenophon, “Cyropaedia”, I, 2, 2)

The text regarding ancient Greek upbringing and education requires a preface that creates some connection to our own education system. “Ours” – that is, the one in which we, our parents, and our grandparents studied, and in which, in all likelihood, our children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren will also study, because the changes in the state regime and the turnover of generations do not essentially affect education. The education system is one of the most resilient institutions in Europe and in countries influenced by Europeans. It survives wars and genocides, eras of wisdom and folly, globalisation, informatisation, and artificial intelligence; it will surely also survive attacks by clones, mutants, and aliens, should they occur, standing against all of this as unshakable as the third Stoa.

The modern education system can be described as follows: it consists of three parts or stages (primary, secondary, and higher education); the educational process at all stages takes place collectively, with one teacher educating a group of children or young people assembled by age; at all stages of education, but primarily in the first two, the encyclopaedic teaching method dominates, the goal of which is to provide a comprehensive and superficial introduction to the main fields of science known to humanity; theoretical acquisition of knowledge is only exceptionally supplemented with the teaching of practical skills, yet in the first two stages of education, physical training is mandatory (a couple of hours a week); ethical or moral education plays a facultative role in the first stage of the educational scheme and plays no role in the other two. Simply because no one knows what this moral education is, and also because it is not known what a child is – whether it is an autonomous, fully empowered, and complete being that grows and learns of its own accord, preparing for a new era we may not even live to see, a being that can be traumatised and corrupted by external influence or by being led into some supposedly correct model of life, or whether it is material similar to clay that, without kneading and shaping, will remain mere mud. Unable to resolve this very ancient dilemma, the education system is constantly on the defensive: I do it as I can, if you can do better, come, let us trade places. But no one wants to change. I wouldn't change either, not for all the money in the world.

Theoretically, school should not teach more than a couple of simple basic skills – the only ones that characterise an educated person – reading, writing, conversing, and thinking. Not knowing, but thinking; not being clever, but knowing how to recognise folly and protect oneself from it; not accumulating information, but knowing how to find and apply it. A person capable of reading, speaking, and thinking will find what they are looking for even without any school. But it turns out that there is nothing more complicated than this task, and instead of honestly admitting it, educators plug the gaps with half-truths and pretence, claiming, for example, that solving maths problems develops logical thinking, even though it is well known that solving maths problems can only develop the specific type of thinking necessary to solve maths problems; that learning long poems by heart trains the memory, even though it is well known that a person has not one memory but several, and an actor who easily memorises long Hamlet monologues may be completely incapable of remembering the date of a national holiday; that learning the history of civilisation chronologically creates an understanding of what has happened in the world and what is happening now, even though it is well known that school has never provided such understanding to anyone; that the cultural-historical study of other nations' religions creates tolerance and respect for those who think differently, even though it is well known that tolerance cannot be taught in school; that the pedagogical methods traditionally used by the school teach the diligence, obedience, and discipline so useful in life, even though it is well known... And so on.

I apologise in advance if it sounds like I am using the forever-silent ancient Greeks to vent my spleen on all the schools I have attended and that my children and grandchildren will attend, on this whole dubious wonderland of knowledge that I had to eat my way through. Can anyone be taught anything at all? Who are those who should teach? What good will it do if someone is taught something?

Definitions

Almost all the fundamental questions of pedagogical theory: regarding upbringing and education – private or state-sponsored; regarding the focus of studies – exact or humanitarian; regarding the responsibility of parents in raising children – what to teach at home, what at school; regarding teaching methods – force or persuasion; regarding the relationship between students and teachers – personal or formal; regarding the possibilities of teaching ethical values – “Tell me, Socrates, can virtue be taught or not?”, are at least 2,500 years old, and a series of words used to designate educational institutions – “school”, “gymnasium”, “lyceum”, “academy” – come from the Ancient Greek language.

It is possible that the debt of Western European culture to Ancient Greece is nowhere as great as in pedagogical theory and practice. At the same time, it is almost impossible to find a direct point of contact between our upbringing and that of the ancient Greeks – it is something completely different. There is simultaneously something wonderfully liberating and something frighteningly restrictive in ancient Greek upbringing. It can serve as a model for no one, because there are no longer any people to whom this model would be applicable. However, it helps to understand why the education system is the way it is today.

Despite the sense of debt and the lively interest in ancient Greek upbringing, which was visibly demonstrated both by National Socialist Germany in the first half of the last century, searching for ways to ensure unconditional obedience and a readiness to sacrifice for the good of the state, and, closer to the present day, by some neoconservative American philosophers, such as Allan Bloom, who saw a model for building civic engagement from childhood in Greek upbringing, several aspects are characteristic of the ancient Greek paideia (paideia) that cause discomfort for pedagogical theorists and admirers of antique values.

The first aspect is the Greek educators' attitude towards the child – an attitude that balances between a total lack of interest in so-called “child psychology” and a totalitarian approach to upbringing, especially in Sparta – the oldest ancient polis known to us, which established a state-organised and state-funded education system and in no way reckoned with the needs or abilities of the youth subjected to the teaching – to such an extent that young people who could not “endure” this upbringing sometimes even died, and if they did not die, they lost the opportunity to become full-fledged members of society.

The second uncomfortable aspect of paideia is the practice of pederasty. Paideia cannot be understood without understanding the functions and goals of pederasty, and Greek pederasty cannot be understood in isolation from paideia.

The third uncomfortable aspect of Greek education is its elitism: paideia arose and was intended for free people – citizens, and furthermore, mainly those who had money and came from good families, not for everyone born and living in Greek lands.

Pedagogy (paidagogē) meant “accompanying a child” or rather “leading a child” to the Greeks. Leading them nowhere else but into life, because without upbringing and education (paideia), a Greek child has no life – only the life of an animal or the life of a slave, taking another meaning of the word pais as a reference point. “As we see in children and animals,” wrote a Hellenistic philosopher. The word paideia is not applicable in modern pedagogical theory because it is almost intangibly broad – in Greece, the same concept was used to denote upbringing (teaching how to behave in society, respect older people), education (teaching how to speak, write, read), practical training (teaching how to throw a javelin, groom a horse, set nets for rabbit hunting), and everything that we, searching for words, would call “culture” or “civilisation” and which Cicero, translating paideia into Latin, called humanitas. To the Greeks, paideia is essentially everything that makes them Greeks and distinguishes them from both barbarians and animals, which cannot lay claim to a life worthy of a human – language, customs, knowledge, skills, traditions, values, the order of things, and the rest. In the last stage of the development of Greek culture, shortly before the huge body of Rome absorbed the small Greeces, a Greek, reflecting on his predecessors' colonies in Egypt, Libya, and Sicily, wrote that one should not call those born to a Greek man and woman Greeks (hellēnes), but all those who speak the Greek language and have acquired paideia. To write about the culture of Ancient Greece means to write about their education, but to write about paideia means to write about Greek culture.

The aristocratic ideal

Education is what young people who do not work and have no intention of doing so occupy themselves with – those who have free time or leisure (scholē; from this word also comes “school”). Composing philosophical dialogues, participating in state administration, or leading troops, which a well-educated person can occupy themselves with later in life, is not work in the Greek sense. Work is what unfree people do – servants and slaves. One can find exceptions to this basic principle in Greek history, and a transition from one state to the other is possible: for special merits, masters could manumit their slaves and pay for or personally undertake their education; likewise, a free-born and well-educated person could fall into slavery if, for example, their homeland was defeated in war. However, this does not change the essence of the matter. Paideia is not the type of education that a person needs to acquire so that they can subsequently do a specific job, as is the case in modern times, where people first study, and then, if they are lucky, can do what they studied. Paideia is also not training during which one acquires a craft (technē). If someone wants to acquire a craft – to be a doctor, judge, or architect, after acquiring paideia, they go to some celebrated master of the craft and learn this craft. Or, more correctly, the master of the craft chooses an apprentice for themselves, having previously observed and evaluated them for a long time.

Compared to us, the Greeks had one great advantage: one basic text, one classic work, one authoritative reference in all times and on almost all questions – Homer. From Homer's “Iliad” and “Odyssey” grew the archaic model of Greek upbringing, which was only improved and supplemented in later centuries. Its goal was not simply to raise people, but to raise heroes. Such heroes as the oldest Greek teacher, the mythical prototype of all teachers, the centaur Chiron, raised – Achilles, Jason, Asclepius, Nestor, and others. Chiron taught them to hunt, ride a horse, shoot a bow, throw a javelin, wrestle, play the lyre, and sing, to know medicinal herbs and tend wounds, and, of course, virtue and moderation, self-sacrifice and a thirst for glory, and the most important thing – to be a leader for other equally glory-thirsty and irreconcilable men. A Homeric hero and all Greek men, whose duty it is to resemble him, must know everything – that is exactly what “to be a hero” means – such as Odysseus, who by guile or righteousness is able to get out of all troubles.

The Homeric model of upbringing has left several essential features of paideia as a legacy. Firstly, it is not parents who raise children. Starting from the seventh year of life, the upbringing and education of a child are entrusted to a respected older man – a teacher, and it takes place outside the home, sometimes in a completely different land. A father cannot teach his son because he has no time – Greek culture could be described as one where “dad is never home” – he is busy with his civic duties in the agora, has gone on a distant military campaign, continues to educate himself, for example, in some philosophical community, or has undertaken the upbringing of another young person. In turn, a mother cannot teach her son because she lacks the necessary skills and knowledge. Even when it came to the upbringing of girls (if that happened at all), the girl was entrusted to a teacher outside the home.

Greek paideia has an individual character – it is based on personal relationships between the pupil and the teacher. The centaur Chiron did not raise several boys at once, but one after another. Later, starting from the 6th century B.C., when school-type educational institutions formed in Greek poleis, where one teacher trained several students, the Greeks said that a child goes not “to school”, but “to the teacher” (eis didaskalon), and, becoming older, studies not “with the Stoics”, but “with Zeno” or “with Chrysippus”. Greek schools also did not have a blackboard – a symbol of the impersonality of education. The teacher would walk up to each child and separately show them how to write a letter or a syllable. In the Greek world, it was not important what you can do, know, or have read, or what lands you have travelled, but rather what people you have met, with whom you have conversed, and from whom you have learned. The list of these people's names was an inseparable part of every biography in the antique world.

To raise a child or young person was an obligation and moral responsibility for a teacher that remained for a lifetime – even when the pupil was already an adult. Only by understanding the significance of this moral responsibility in Greek paideia can one understand why the accusation of Socrates for “corrupting the youth” ended up in court. In the case of Socrates, it was purely and solely about moral responsibility (the word “corruption” is sometimes misunderstood as seduction into lechery or something similar), because several of his youthful conversation partners later tried to overthrow the democratic state system of Athens. Regardless of whether Socrates himself believed that he was raising anyone or not and whether a person can be taught anything at all, the case was clear to the Athenians – Socrates did not fulfill his duty and corrupted the youth with anti-state views.

From Homeric upbringing, paideia in the Classical era also preserved something that could be called a utilitarian or pragmatic focus. Historically, paideia consisted of two parts – physical education (gymnastikē) and the arts of the muses, which the Greeks called “music” (mousikē). Later, a third was added to these parts – the skill of reading and writing and the mastery of literary texts. Socrates in Plato's dialogue “Republic” says that gymnastics is intended for the development of the body and music for the development of the soul, but historically, the first goal of physical education is to prepare the future soldier, while the mastery of the arts of the muses allows citizens to participate in the religious rituals and processions so important to the Greeks, which are always accompanied by music and dancing. The mastery of lyrical poetry was not necessary for Greek youth for the development of any “artistic” talents or the cultivation of taste – most of the fundamental texts of Greek culture, religion, history, and even legislation were written in verse. Ideally, the Greeks knew these fundamental texts by heart: Socrates' student Nicostratus recounted that his father made him learn the entire “Iliad” and “Odyssey” so that he would become a “good man” (anēr agathos) – and that is not a rhetorical statement.

If one can allow oneself a generalisation – the ancient Greeks have always seemed attractive to me in that they never carried out any research, made any object, and wrote any text that they did not consider vitally necessary and useful. I have also not succeeded in finding a form of knowledge in the Greek world that was just knowledge for the sake of knowledge – just like that, out of boredom, I went and invented something. It may sound absurd, but the conviction that a child must be taught what, and only what, we think he will need in life has not been true in all cultures and at all times. I read a book, the title of which is now forgotten, about the culture of the islands of Oceania, where children are taught to perform rituals they will never have to perform in life, and where upbringing and education serve some other goals than preparation for adult life.

It is extremely difficult for me to apply the famous definitions of the “mythological worldview” to the Greek world as well – that mythology is what exists before knowledge, that mythology explains nothing, only makes one believe. Greek mythology does nothing but explain everything that can possibly be explained, and then explains why it has explained it. In the Homeric hymns, for example, it is very well explained how and why Hermes made a lyre from a tortoise shell, and how it came to Apollo. That is knowledge necessary for everyone who learns to play it. I also do not much believe that a moment of such a rupture suddenly occurred in Greek history, in which people who had previously been stuck up to their necks in some absurd mythology, where gods shoot lightning at people without any sense and kill them with plague, suddenly out of nowhere began to explain, describe, and understand everything. It is possible that in some prehistoric times that was the case, but starting from the moment a culture begins to raise children in a certain way, it is clear that in a certain way it has also understood and become aware of itself – otherwise, upbringing would not be possible. As Greek paideia in the Classical era was not unified and generalised but was passed from person to person, it very quickly (albeit inhomogeneously) adapted new knowledge, inventions, directions of philosophy, and theories. When it was turned into a system in the Hellenistic era, the process of adapting innovations shifted by almost a generation; at the moment, it has shifted even further – so much so that the latest theories in physics, biology, philology, or anywhere else do not reach standard education programmes at all.

The spread of reading and writing skills in Athens occurred in parallel with the stabilisation of the democratic system, because in a democratic system, citizens had a much greater need for these skills. Athenian officials ordered the latest laws to be engraved on stone slabs and displayed these slabs in visible places. An Athenian citizen also had to know how to write so that during the procedure of ostracism, he could write the name of the citizen whom he thought should be expelled from the borders for ten years for actions harmful to the state on a potsherd. In practice, however, it is seen that not all citizens were able to do this: Greek biographers recount with pleasure the incident with Aristides the Just, to whom some illiterate citizen approached during the ostracism procedure with his potsherd (ostrakon) and asked him to write his own name on it.

One of the paradoxes of Greek paideia is the fact that, based on our notions of an educated person, a portion of the slaves living in large cities seem more educated than free citizens. Slaves often worked as scribes, as readers of texts (a papyrus scroll must be held with both hands and reading always takes place in a loud voice), accompanied children to school, and, if necessary, checked how homework was completed. However, these skills did not in any way make the trained slaves equivalent to citizens who had acquired paideia – reading and writing skills can belong to a slave's qualifications, but do not bring them closer to the standards of a Greek educated person, because these skills were only a part of paideia and, historically, not the most important ones at all.

What I called the practical focus of paideia is reflected not only in its technical but also in its ethical dimension. The aretē of a Greek man – this difficult-to-understand concept, which is translated as “virtue” but which rather means “worth”, as when one says “to be worth it” (not “worth something”, but specifically “worth it”), with a touch of the meaning of Machiavelli's virtú, and includes all these noble qualities: respect for family traditions, self-control, unconditional submission to laws, readiness to sacrifice for the good of one's state, courage, and so on – changed as methods of warfare changed. The Homeric hero strived for a personal heroic deed, for victory in a duel or a “beautiful death” (kalos thanatos), after which let even the flood come; whereas in the hoplitic – the battle of heavily armed rank-and-file soldiers in the Classical era of Greece – a personal heroic deed could even be harmful, and the duty of the hoplite was not to die beautifully, but to hold the line at any cost, where his shield covered not his own, but the body of the person standing next to him. As the art of battle changed, aretē became a collective ideal directed towards the good of the polis – at times even such that an individual soldier was a man without a name and history.

Upbringing and love

The goal of paideia is to cultivate the kalokagathia of a young person and bring it to perfection. Kalokagathia, literally translated, means “to be beautiful and good”, where “good” includes moral, correct, and proper behaviour, but “beautiful” – good physical preparation, bodily strength, agility, and grace that radiates an erotic aura. Cultivating bodily beauty was one of the main pillars of the meaning of life for Greek men, a way and instrument with the help of which to realise oneself in life both personally and socially. Young men were desired, loved, cared for, and pampered. Throughout their lives, their youthful beauty and the feelings it awakened in others were invoked – as a pledge that life had not been lived in vain. Young men in Greek society had roughly the same role as teenage girls do in Western society in modern times – not yet adult women, but already sexually mature, who are often the object of older men's fantasies, longings, and desire and symbolise the opposite of the cares, duties, and routine associated with marriage.

In the last hundred years, no small number of books have been written about Greek pederasty (a compound from pais, “child” and erastēs, “lover”). These books have been engaging to a broad public for whom the ancient Greeks as such are indifferent, they have illuminated a series of details of Greek intimate life that philologists and historians had not even thought of before, they have pleased with openness and frankness in the presentation of the topic, but they have one drawback – by concentrating on the physiological aspect of pederasty, they have created a distorted notion of what antique pederasty actually is. People imagine ancient Greece as a paradise of sexual freedom, almost an institutionalised bisexual culture, a dreamland where people run around naked, tugging at each other's genitals – in short, a place where, at least in this area, one could do as one pleased.

Such a notion is completely wrong. It is inconceivable that the ancient Greeks – a patriarchal, conservative culture regulated by ancestral traditions and laws, in which there is constant talk about virtue and a correct life and where people are sentenced to harsh penalties for incorrect views, would have neglected such an important thing for the balance and renewal of the population as the regulation of sexual life. Anyone who looks into the texts of Greece's Classical era – in the accounts of historians, in the precepts of moralists, in court materials, or even in the works of philosophers, will encounter harsh judgements about the sexual life of same-sex partners (“disgrace”, “unnatural acts”, “defilement”, “vice”). True, they will also encounter praises of male love and acknowledgements that it is the highest form of love, which creates ties that are impossible neither between parents and children nor between a man and a woman. How to understand this?

It seemed natural and self-evident to the Greeks that a young man is an object of desire and love for an older man. They believed that the relationship between an adult, mature man (naturally, a citizen) – the lover or erastes (erastēs) and a teenage boy from a good family – the beloved or eromenos (eromenos) is valuable and useful both for those involved and for the state. These relationships were fundamental in Greek social life and in the process of educating the youth. The thirteen to eighteen-year-old eromenos was introduced to the adult world, the duties of a citizen and a soldier, and the circles of Greek intellectuals by these relationships. The erastes was in the place of a teacher and father for this young person, and the Greeks saw no problem in a relationship that was simultaneously paternal and erotic. They did not think that the transition from same-sex relationships to relationships with the opposite sex at the time of marriage could cause discomfort or difficulties for anyone. It was the duty of every man and woman to marry and have children when the time came, and in some poleis, unmarried, childless men were fined for failing this duty.

Pederastic relationships imposed duties on both those involved. The eromenos' duty was to follow the erastes' example in all areas of life and to be worthy of his love and care. The erastes was morally, and in some poleis also legally, responsible for the eromenos' behaviour – if the eromenos committed some offence, the erastes suffered the punishment for it, similarly to how parents are sometimes punished for teenagers' crimes nowadays. In Crete and Thebes, it was the erastes' duty to give his pupil a full set of armour when he reached adulthood. In Elis, the erastes had to assume financial care for the eromenos' family if it was destitute or in difficulty. The eromenos' relationship with the erastes was controlled by the boy's father, to whom the erastes reported on the boy's progress. The eromenos' activities until adulthood were also monitored by a “pedagogue” – a slave, a companion of children.

In battle, erastai and eromenoi fought side by side, protecting each other. It is precisely in the military function of pederasty that its pragmatic character, which I already mentioned, is revealed – the Greeks were convinced that an army in which soldiers are united by personal, intimate ties would be invincible, because soldiers would defend each other to the death. This conviction was well-founded, because the Theban commander Gorgidas created one of the most famous Greek infantry units – the “sacred band” (hieros lochos), which consisted of 150 pairs of erastai and eromenoi; it was invincible for 33 years, until the huge army of Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander surrounded the band and, unable to force surrender, killed 254 and wounded the rest. It is important to understand that to the Greeks, the concept “love” – regardless of which word was used – does not include our romantic notion of love as intimacy with someone in whose presence you can afford to be weak, fragile, and vulnerable (precisely because it is the closest person) – to the Greeks, love is a relationship in which each must present himself as the best, the most courageous, and the most self-controlled. The goal of pederastic love is to cultivate manliness and bring it to perfection.

While accepting this model of relationship and even promoting it, the Greeks did not agree on how this relationship should be expressed. The historian Xenophon, writing about Spartan customs, carefully tells us that according to tradition, even married Spartans continued to sleep in barracks until the age of thirty, and immediately also claims that the love relationships of Spartan men, sleeping in pairs on one cot, were “virtuous”. Historians who study this text are convinced that Xenophon, so to speak, is lying, looking one in the eye, but it is much more valuable to try to understand why he, writing not for us but for his contemporaries, considers it necessary to lie.

The physical side of pederasty was a problematic issue for the Greeks in the Classical era. The laws of several Greek poleis sanctioned not only violent relationships but also the prostitution and seduction of young people, and it is possible that it was not easy to draw the line between falling in love and an attempt at seduction. More importantly: the possibility of physical relationships was difficult to combine with the ideal expression of manliness – self-control, the ability to renounce empty and body-depleting pleasures. Most Greek philosophers and doctors counted sexual pleasures among exactly such. It is senseless to talk about Greek “sexuality” or “sex” because they did not use such concepts, but if there is anything that can be said about Greek sexual life, it is a lack of understanding of mechanical, impersonal “sex” with an indifferent person for the satisfaction of some spontaneous desire.

That, at least, was the theory. But in practice – in practice, it seems that the entire Greek social system and culture was arranged so that this self-control would be extremely difficult to realise: boys and men trained naked in gymnasiums; men married late (Aristotle believes that the best time for marriage and having children is 37 years) unlike girls, who were given in marriage already at 14 years of age – that is, at the same age as boys began to look for male mentors for themselves; marked gender segregation prevailed in Greek society: women spent time together with women and men with men – not only in gymnasiums, the army, political meetings, but also at feasts and in philosophical communities, in the morning, during the day, in the evenings, and often also at night. Ancient Greece, to use the words of a historian, was a “men's club”, outside of which are women – “unsuccessful men”, and pederasty naturally crowned the misogynistically oriented ethics in this club: if the highest virtue and grace can be embodied only in a man, then a man will also be the one to love.

Teachers of the new era – sophists

In the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., Athens experienced several unpleasant periods of political instability and, with the start of the long Peloponnesian War, an economic, ideological, and moral crisis. The Athenians saw an exit from this crisis in moral renewal and the deepening of the education of youth in order to create a generation of more capable and responsible political leaders who would not allow the mistakes that had previously been made. It turned out that this intention already had immediate possibilities to be realised and the new education programme already had teachers. Those were the sophists.

The divine Plato showed the sophists in a disdainful light in his dialogues and turned the very word “sophist” (from the adjective sophos – “wise”) into almost a swear word – a synonym for charlatanry, the selling of wisdom, and empty chatter. Because of Plato's dazzling influence, the texts of the sophists were methodically destroyed already by the Roman era and especially later, therefore the sophist movement itself is very poorly known today – actually only one sentence has been preserved from what Protagoras wrote (“Man is the measure of all things...”), and a couple of fragments from Gorgias' fundamental work “On Non-existence”. Only at the end of the 19th century did German philologists begin the process of “rehabilitating” the sophists, which continues to this day.

The sophists shifted the centre of gravity of aretē or “worth” from the life of sports, military, and aristocratic amusements to political and intellectual life. This step was of extremely great importance not only for Greece but for the further development of all of Europe. The sophists did not represent any political direction and any school of philosophy, grabbing ideas here from one, there from another, and at times inventing something themselves. The goal of the sophists was not to theorise, but to “educate people” (paideuein anthrōpous), as Protagoras says in Plato's dialogue – they were united not by ideas, but by the profession of a teacher. Sophists gathered young people who knew how to read and write around themselves and undertook their education in rhetoric (eloquence) and dialectics (the skill of arguing), which lasted three or four years.

The financial success of the sophist schools and the commotion they caused in the circles of the old aristocracy prove that this service was in demand despite the astronomical tuition fees. It is said that Protagoras supposedly charged 10,000 drachmas for a three or four-year course of education. [1. A drachma in the Classical era of Athens was the average daily wage of a skilled worker. If we carry out a very rough conversion into lats (our economic and monetary systems and those of the ancient Greeks differ sharply) and assume that the worker's average daily wage is 10 Ls (that is, a sum of money for which a worker can feed his usually large family, in which there are no other incomes, but part of the food products are grown in the garden or on a field belonging to the family), then Protagoras asked for a payment of 100,000 Ls. Some historians consider this sum – 10,000 drachmas, strongly exaggerated, but there is evidence about other less famous sophists who asked for half – 5,000 drachmas, which also seems a lot. Thus, when the members of Plato's dialogues express outrage at the sophists' greed, it must be taken into account that we are not talking about a small allowance-type salary for a teacher, but about a very large amount of money.]

Demanding payment for education was one of the most criticised steps of the sophist movement, because previously paideia and knowledge were passed on to the next generation as a gift – in love and friendship. There was no lack of accusations of speculation, relativism, erosion of morality, and cynicism, teaching young people not to strive for truth and virtue, but to manipulate the techniques of language usage and the listeners. Pindar disdainfully referred to the students of the sophists as “those who know only because they have learned” in contrast to the golden youth of the past era, who came from the highest circles of the aristocracy and thus “knew” already at birth.

On the other hand, the sophists introduced a series of innovations into Greek intellectual and social life. Werner Jaeger in the early 20th century dubbed the sophists the greatest “humanists” of Greece. I would say more: the sophists were the greatest pedagogues of Greece – they created a pedagogical tradition that is still in force today and to which no one has yet found a viable alternative. By demanding and also receiving money for education – more specifically, for teaching how to learn, converse, argue, think, the sophists as if forced the entire Greek world to acknowledge that this is something special and valuable that does not belong to people either from birth or through inheritance. And, of course, also – that it is something that can be bought.

The sophists created the genre of public speaking or conferences. Together with the sophists, discussion in Greece became almost the only way to arrive at the truth in philosophy. Demonstrating excellent art of eloquence, the sophists turned their listeners' attention to the most diverse topics – arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, acoustics, philology, the history of mythology, and others. The sophists captivated the crowd by being able to discuss any question without difficulty – or at least by making unprepared listeners believe in their competence in all areas. Socrates easily unmasked the lack of covering of this omniscience (polymathia), but it cannot be denied that it was precisely the sophists who created the ideal of erudition and encyclopaedic knowledge still relevant in Western European culture and pedagogy. A “wise” person – that is someone who has an opinion on all issues and knows how to justify it. Western European culture – that which happens here, around us, that which I also occupy myself with – follows the traditions of thinking and action of the sophists much more faithfully than the legacy of Socrates.

One of the sophists in Plato's dialogue “Gorgias” says that nimble orators are just like tyrants who can sentence any person to death, send them into exile, or confiscate their property. The comparison of the orator to a tyrant probably made the Greeks shudder, especially in democratic Athens, which had suffered from the violence of tyrants less than just a century earlier. Paradoxically, the affluent Greek citizens who bought their children the art of sophist oratorical agility to strengthen Athenian democracy had obtained a new, equally tyrannical generation – a generation of masters of the word. Instead of doing, this generation much more willingly talked – talked so well that they talked away any non-doing. The biggest battles were no longer decided on the battlefield, but in public squares between speakers. Fighting no longer meant covering a companion standing next to one with a shield and holding one's place in the hoplitic rank, but a duel one against one for the strongest argument (logos). To live no longer meant to practise javelin throwing or a 200-metre run in full armour all day long, but to go to meditate in the countryside with the notes of Protagoras' lecture, as Socrates' conversation partner Phaedrus does. Power and influence in society no longer belonged to the army and commanders, but to educated speakers – the sophists created this rift, which in later centuries grew so huge that people had only two alternatives: to study at university or to go to the army. The generation of sophist students no longer believed in state good and happiness, in the ensuring of which every small person must lend a hand, but only in personal and private [good and happiness], for which each one is also responsible for themselves. And virtue or “worth” each had to provide for themselves, if only they could believe in it.

The sophist movement, it seems, also crystallised the concept of “meaninglessness” – in any case, a couple of generations later in the Hellenistic era, people began to use it extremely often. Meaningless is this and meaningless is that – to run and busy oneself, and to get an education, and then to work, and to build a house, and to raise children. Epicurus, by the way, called paideia itself meaningless. True, he had an opinion on how to make life meaningful even without it. Others did not think so and invoked various arguments, and he again answered with other arguments. However, the concept of meaninglessness is like an infection – if it is once invoked, it jumps from one thought to the next and in the end eats everything – like the cloak poisoned with the blood of the hydra that ate the flesh of the heroic god Heracles.
Article first published in the September 2006 issue of the magazine "Rīgas Laiks"