education, Greek
education, Greek1. Early Period
Greek ideas of education (paideia), whether theoretical or practical, encompassed upbringing and cultural training in the widest sense, not merely schooling and formal education. The poets were regarded as the educators of their society, particularly in the Archaic period, but also well into the classical, when Plato could attack Homer's status as educator of Greece (e.g. Respublica 606e, and generally, bks. 2, 3, 10; cf. Xenophon Symposium 4. 6 for the conventional view). Much education would have taken place in an aristocratic milieu informally through institutions like the symposium (as in the poetry of Theognis) or festivals (cf. the children reciting Solon's poetry at the Apaturia, Plato Timaeus 21b), backed up by the old assumption that the aristocracy possessed inherited, not instructed, excellence....[The entire page is 3720 words long]
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