"r St lessons Ofl Hornblower 9 of Western Education Vol I:
The p ere -4.95)nt World John Bowen (Methuen Thro„ inew;g11°1-it this book the name of Plato of ‘:;ahlY, and rightly, recurs. The history hea-,estern education is, to borrow Whiteof s remark about philosophy, a series vvith0c)t,notes to Plato. Bowen deals chiefly tue Academy, with its 900-year lifelaitin; Which represents only one of Plato's thore8 °n the attention of educationists: 8Yrier„,,t,han a millennium separates the Nlain.,--List philosophy of Plato from both-,c4lides's Guide to the Perplexed; but rec4Cre attempts to yoke Platonism to the 'rest Itratit teachings of the Old shap4htent. Neo-Platonism dictated the %taken by Augustine's theology while 114 131110sopher-king reappears in Islamic that th°1311Y as the good Caliph, showing Rot 0.7,71e Was still plenty of mileage to be r,e1341317 of the political doctrines of the qriei,„-,:c,.• When Bowen takes leave of the exten,-,"1. World which he generously tlittli"us to 1054 AD, Psellus is in Byzan Piloting a return to Platonic exegesis. To chart such developments is to write the history of education in the Ancient World. It is, therefore, hard to sympathise with Bowen's treatment of Plato as an educationist, when some of the most exciting studies in Ancient History being carried through at the moment concern Plato in precisely that role. I don't think Bowen would want to take refuge in the mutual contradictoriness of some of the ideas now in circulation, and claim non-committal asylum as an encyclopaedist: his book is too valuable and sophisticated for that. But the gap in his account is a large one: no less than the revolution in learning habits that occurred at some time between the foundations of the Delian League and the end of the Peloponnesian War — the period 479-404.
Bowen recognises that Athenians had become more or less literate by the beginning of the fourth century BC and for that proposition he gives us the evidence in full. (Aristophanes assumes literacy in his audience, Plato describes the mechanics of letter-learning in the Protagoras, while the device of ostracism, and the widespread use of stone to record state and religious business support the fifth century date suggested by the literary sources.) Education was never the same again — and this is what Bowen misses. The transition was that between an oral paideia or training, and a Buch und Lesen culture. The second of these is well-known to us — as bookish Europeans with faulty memories, themselves a by-product of literacy. The first the oral paideia, was the chief method of transmitting culture in pre-Plantonic Greece. The repository of knowledge and values in this period was the bard, whose recitations were not in any modern sense entertainment, but in E. A. Havelock's phrase represented a "social encyclopaedia." Recite Homer, and you would find, in formulaic hexameters, the Correct method of launching a ship; recite Homer and you would find a paradigmatic statement of how a basileus should treat a bumptious social inferior. It would be hard to devise a more powerful instrument for resisting cultural change than such a Lampada Tradam system. Havelock, with great cogency, argues that this is the explanation of Plato's vehement attack on "the poets,' and on Mimesis (imitation) generally. Mimesis has to be understood, not as artistic depiction or representation in our sense, but as the identification of the performer — and of the spectator — with the performance. The consequence is total loss of objectivity. A fifth-century Greek declaiming a speech of Agamemnon became, in a real sense, Agamemnon: his sensory responses altered in sympathy with the role to be played.
Plato understood this, and was repelled by it, and in the oral paideia the mask became part of the face. It was such an education that, in .the Republic, Plato set out to replace, an education spuriously based on Opinion, and therefore hovering between knowledge and ignorance.
The imposition of the "reading trauma." with its attendant neuroses, threatened to end this oral stability. Plato himself was aware of the drawbacks of writing 'a device for providing reminders" he calls it in the Phaedrus not for fostering the faculty of memory. He saw too that dialectic achieved its results by crossing the gulf between minds, like a flash of light. But if memory and spontaneity are the price, critical detachment is the reward.
Plato and his contemporaries paid that price; but we should ask, as Bowen does not ask, why they did, why did Greece not stay " oligoliterate " like Egypt, with writing as the " craft" level of diffusion? The answer is, perhaps that the conservatism that clung to the oral paideia was sentimentally entrenched: it was not religious. The great merit of six-century Ionia, inherited by fifth-century Athens, was that it was not priest ridden. The hold of the Olympic pantheon was not strong: it was different in Jerusalem, where in 444 Ezra instituted readings from the Torah, to foster national and religious solidarity among the Jews after their return from Babylon. When Athens became literate, it was not without misgivings, so much is clear from Aristophanes and Plato. But the change happened; it has been suggested that literacy was the tnabling factor in the emergence of radical democracy. This thesis should be turned on its head: Athens, under a variety of secular pressures, became a democracy first, and a literate society in consequence.
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