by Raffaella Cribiore (Editor)

This book is at once a thorough study of the educational system for the Greeks of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, and a window to the vast panorama of educational practices in the Greco-Roman world. It describes how people learned, taught, and practiced literate skills, how schools functioned, and what the curriculum comprised. Raffaella Cribiore draws on over 400 papyri, ostraca (sherds of pottery or slices of limestone), and tablets that feature everything from exercises involving letters of the alphabet through rhetorical compositions that represented the work of advanced students. The exceptional wealth of surviving source material renders Egypt an ideal space of reference. The book makes excursions beyond Egypt as well, particularly in the Greek East, by examining the letters of the Antiochene Libanius that are concerned with education.

Back Jacket

"This is a significant contribution, bringing together disparate material and offering new perspectives on the curriculum. I particularly applaud the attention to rhetoric."--Glen W. Bowersock, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton

"There is no one better positioned to write on the education of post-Classical antiquity than Raffaella Cribiore. Gymnastics of the Mind is a Herculean effort."--Ann Ellis Hanson, Yale University

Author Biography

Raffaella Cribioreis Associate Curator of Papyri and Adjunct Associate Professor of Classics at Columbia University. She is the author of Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt.

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