This book examines ideals of classical learning in order to make a significant and provocative contribution to current and past discussions on the role of education in society--why we teach and learn what we do. Essays by classicists, historians, philosophers and literary scholars argue for seeing the history of ancient education as an aspect of political theory and history, the figure of the teacher and of the student being inevitably implicated in various structures of intellectual, social and political authority.

This book examines ideals of classical learning in order to make a significant and provocative contribution to current and past discussions on the role of education in society--why we teach and learn what we do. Essays by classicists, historians, philosophers and literary scholars argue for seeing the history of ancient education as an aspect of political theory and history, the figure of the teacher and of the student being inevitably implicated in various structures of intellectual, social and political authority.

This volume contains the first scholarly commentary on the puzzling work Busiris - part mythological jeu d'esprit, part rhetorical treatise and part self-promoting polemic - by the Greek educator and rhetorician Isocrates (436-338 BC). The commentary reveals Isocrates' strategies in advertising his own political rhetoric as a middle way between amoral 'sophistic' education and the abstruse studies of Plato's Academy. Introductory chapters situate Busiris within the lively intellectual marketplace of 4th-century Athens, showing how the work parodies Plato's...