A Tragical History: The Function of Disaster Narratives
about Early Classical Greek Schools

Brett M. Rogers (University of Georgia)

The history of Greek education is a history mired in scenes of physical violence, destruction, and death.  Multiple reports dating to the fifth century BC survive about incidents in which children were killed at school, crushed by a collapsing roof (Herodotus 6.27) or murdered at the hands of frenzied athletes (Pausanias 6.9.6) or marauding barbarians (Thucydides 7.29.5).  These disaster narratives provide some of our primary evidence for the reconstruction of the rise of Greek ‘schools’ – i.e., formal settings for the systematic learning of skills such as grammatikê, gumnastikê, and mousikê – that were becoming increasingly commonplace by the 490s BC and throughout the fifth century BC.  The eminent scholar of Greek education Frederick Beck wrote that these schools must in fact have been so commonplace that their very existence failed to appear innovative to the eyes of our historical sources; hence the very few references in ancient Greek literature to early classical schools survive not due to any interest in the educational institutions themselves, but rather due to their status as incidental details associated with “some startling event or some national crisis” (1964:78).

In this paper, I argue that this ‘tragical’ history of early classical Greek schools is not incidental but rather reveals a more precise role for the notion of the ‘school’ in classical Greek political discourse.  Various ancient authors (such as Plato and Aristotle) consider educational practices to be effective indicators both for evaluating whether or not a community had been established on solid foundations and for predicting the future success of that community.  Based on these views, as well as recent scholarship on individual disaster narratives (e.g., Nagy 1990, Kallet 1999), I suggest that these educational disaster narratives function in a similar manner, working to reveal the fissures in the foundations of the community, to show the polis teetering on the edge of destruction.  In essence, schools provide an effective means for viewing, talking about, and thinking through the polis in microcosm and the general health of the community.