Introduction

From the late Hellenistic period to Late Antiquity and beyond, elite young men in the Greek and Roman worlds studied a literary-rhetorical curriculum consisting of learning to read and interpret classical poetry and prose, composing their own brief prose texts, and composing and delivering declamations (meletai), fictional judicial speeches in which they impersonated mythological, historical or stereotyped characters. They learned prose composition primarily through the progymnasmata, or ‘preliminary exercises,’ which prepared them for the more advanced study of stasis theory (a method of determining precisely what is at issue in a case and constructing one’s speech accordingly) and declamation. Although their number and sequence varied, the progymnasmata consisted of up to fourteen exercises, generally proceeding from simpler to more complex tasks: fable (mythos), narration (diēgēma), anecdote (chreia), maxim (gnōmē), refutation (anaskeuē), confirmation (kataskeuē), common topics (koinos topos), encomium (enkōmion), invective (psogos), comparison (synkrisis), speech in character (ēthopoiia), description (ekphrasis), thesis (thesis) and introduction of a law (eisphora tou nomou). These progymnasmata not only show us how written composition was taught in the Greek-speaking world for more than a thousand years, but also illustrate one important method by which each successive generation of the elite became ‘completely educated’ (pepaideumenoi).