Paideia, ancient concept and modern reception

$%&'(&%)"*+,&(+-"./+,(0-"%+'"1/'(2+ 3(,(0-&/+ $%&"'()*+, $%&'(%)&*+%),"-+.(%),"+/"&0'"1,)22*3), 4()5*&*+% " $%%&"'()*#(+(, -./012"3( &01425"6 " $78"9/:;;"85:<"=3('*>"3(?'*@#'+3 AB$"'(C'(()D;'3'*,#('*#(**3#E 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by Springer Science +Business Media Dordrecht. This e-offprint is for personal use only and shall not be selfarchived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Int class trad (2013) 20:136–152 DOI 10.1007/s12138-013-0332-9 A RT I C L E Paideia: Ancient Concept and Modern Reception Jaś Elsner Published online: 23 October 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Paideia The literature on the Second Sophistic (uncomfortable as it has become with this terminology for Greek culture in the Roman imperial period) takes as axiomatic that paideia is its key element.1 Likewise, when a fine recent book on Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations takes Paideia Romana as its title, it assumes the significance of the term paideia to be selfevident—so much so that it requires no discursive definition at any point in the text.2 Again, in the discussion of late antique culture, the idea of paideia—as central to the shared interests, identities and communication of the class of men who ran the later empire—has been seen as key both to the nature of power and to the themes of elite artifacts.3 But the 1 Some examples in what I see as standard texts: B. Reardon, Courants littéraires Grecs des IIe et IIIe siècles après J.C., Paris, 1971, 3–11, 13; J.J. Flinterman, Power, Paideia and Pythagoreanism, Amsterdam, 1995, 29–51 and 95-7 for paideia as essential to Greek identity in the Roman era; M. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome, Princeton, 1995, xxi–xxiv (emphasizing rhetoric); S. Swain, Hellenism and Empire, Oxford, 1996, 414: ‘an age when possession of, or claim to, paideia (‘education’/’culture’) was how a man showed his integration into higher levels of society’; T. Schmitz, Bildung und Macht : zur sozialen und politischen Funktion der zweiten Sophistik in der griechischen Welt der Kaiserzeit, Munich, 1997, 97–159 (emphasizing competition, with Bildung as the key term for the translation of paideia); T. Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, Oxford, 2001, 90–130 (emphasizing identity); B. Borg (ed.), Paideia: The World of the Second Sophistic, Berlin, 2004, 7–9 (for paideia as a ‘sort of lingua franca’); T. Whitmarsh, The Second Sophistic, Oxford, 2005, 13–15; T. Whitmarsh (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, Cambridge, 2008, 7–9 for paideia as the cultural context in which the novel developed and as one of the principal themes within the Greek and Roman novels. 2 I. Gildenhard, Paideia Romana: Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, CCJ Suppl. 30, Cambridge, 2007. 3 On power, see P. Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity, Madison, WI, 1992, 35–70; for social structures, see E. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria, Berkeley, 2006, 2, 5–7; on the art of silverware, see R. Leader-Newby, Silver and Society in Late Antiquity, Aldershot, 2004, 123– 216; for social positioning, see L. van Hoof, ‘Performing Paideia: Greek Culture as an Instrument for Social Promotion in the Fourth Century AD’ CQ 63 (2013) 387–406; for religious practice (again with paideia as a simple given) see D. Schwartz, Paideia and Cult: Christian Initiation in Theodore of Mopsuestia, Washington DC, 2013, 3, 22-3, 29–30. In his reflections on Byzantium, paideia is a key category for A. Kaldellis, Hellenism in Byzantium: The Transformation of Greek Identity and the Reception of the Classical Tradition, Cambridge, 2007, e.g. 31-7, 56-8, 94, 119, 127-34, 144-51, 154, 15963, 186-7, 239, 311, 313-4, 321-5, 330, 343. J. Elsner (*) Corpus Christi College Oxford, Oxford OX1 4JF, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Elsner Department of Art History, University of Chicago, 5540 South Greenwood Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA Author's personal copy Paideia: Ancient Concept and Modern Reception 137 term has hardly been fully explored and its ancient meanings are not obvious. 4 Graham Anderson, for instance, writes of ‘a common bond of the cultural standards of paideia (culture)’ but comments on how difficult it is to define paideia.5 In part this difficulty is revealed by translations: the word means both the culture or civilization of its time (with a very wide technical range from literature to art, athletics, mythology and religious expertise) and it means the process of education by which a command of the culture and its tradition were acquired.6 Most discussions—and particularly those written after the 1980s—have focused on the educational process, curriculum and their institutions 7; but two stand out as foundational both for the depth of their attention to the content of paideia and the breadth of their influence.8 These are the great works of Werner Jaeger (1888–1961)—whose three volume series was entitled Paideia and constituted his supreme scholarly achievement—and of Henri Irenée Marrou (1904– 1977), whose history of education remains the landmark study in its field.9 I want to worry about these two works and their influence in framing our definition of paideia, effectively on historical grounds. Both are magisterial, commanding and impressive. But—I submit—both are hugely ideological and their ideologies (themselves 4 Rather wonderfully W. Aly in Pauly-Wissowa RE 18 (1942) 2585 offers only a 9 line entry that restricts the concept to the personification of Bildung in Pseudo-Cebes’ Tabula and in a couple of texts by Lucian. J. Christes in Brill’s New Pauly 10 (2007) 345-6 and D. Bremer in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie 7, Basel, 1989, 35-9 offer a bland summary of positions following the accounts of Jaeger and Marrou which I discuss here. The term does not appear in e.g. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (2012 edition); The Cambridge Dictionary of Classical Civilization (2006); The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies (2009). 5 G. Anderson, The Second Sophistic: A Greek Cultural Phenomenon in the Roman Empire, London, 1993, p. 8. 6 Clearly the difficulty was apparent to Werner Jaeger, Paideia: Die Formung des griechischen Menschen, 3 vols., Berlin, 1934-47 (= Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, 3 vols., Oxford, 1939-45). In vol. 1, he makes no attempt to offer a specific definition; but before the contents page of vol. 2 (p. vi) he has a paragraph without heading which explains how impossible the concept is: ‘a difficult thing to define… it refuses to be confined within an abstract formula… It is impossible to avoid bringing in modern expressions like civilization, culture, tradition, literature, or education. But none of these really covers what the Greeks meant by paideia. Each of them is confined to one aspect of it…’. Note that this paragraph appears only in the original English 1943 printing of vol. 2; it has vanished from the 1986 paperback reprint and does not appear in the German version of vol.2 of 1944. 7 For instance, A. Gwynn, Roman Education from Cicero to Quintilian, Oxford, 1926; S. Bonner, Education in Ancient Rome: From the Elder Cato to the Younger Pliny, London, 1977; R. Kaster, Guardians of Language: The Grammarian and Society in Late Antiquity, Berkeley, 1988; R. Cribiore, Writing, Teachers and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt, Atlanta, GA, 1996; T. Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and the Roman Worlds, Cambridge, 1998; Y.L. Too, Education in Greek and Roman Antiquity, Leiden, 2001 (with hardly any mention of paideia); R. Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, Princeton, 2001. 8 In his review of Jaeger’s Paideia, Henri Marrou wrote: ‘l’auteur a renoncé délibérément à une description concrete de l’éducation, des methods pédagogiques antiques: il se tient à un degré supérieure d’abstraction, de profondeur, at analyse les idées fondamentales qui sous-tendent cette education, son idéal’. See H. Marrou, ‘Le siècle de Platon: À propos d’un livre récent’, revue historique 196 (1946) 142-9, p. 143. 9 Jaeger, 1934-47 = Jaeger, 1939-45; H. Marrou, Histoire de l'éducation dans l'antiquité, Paris, 1948 = A History of Education in Antiquity, London, 1956. Oddly, with two exceptions, I have found hardly any attempt to compare the enterprises of Jaeger and Marrou. But see P. Demont, ‘H. I. Marrou et “les deux colonnes du temple”: Isocrate et Platon’ in J-M. Pailler and P. Payen (eds.), Que reste-t-il de l'éducation classique: Relire le Marrou, Histoire de l'éducation dans l'antiquité, Toulouse, 2004, 109–118, esp. 110-6, and S. Rey, L’histoire ancienne à l’école française de Rome (1873–1940, Rome, 2012, 381-6 for an acute contrast. In his memoirs, where he speaks affectionately of Marrou, Pierre Vidal-Naquet remarks that Jaeger’s Paideia was ‘un livre cher à Marrou’, see P. Vidal-Naquet, Mémoires: La brisure et l’attente 1930–1955, Paris, 1995, 266. Author's personal copy 138 J. Elsner far from simple or straightforward) are rooted in the complex time and context of their production. While their ideological freighting, and indeed disagreement, is a fact of profound interest (and not only for the history of Classical studies in the twentieth century), my case is that the contemporaneity of their interpretative approaches in the times of their writing makes both books fundamentally flawed when taken summarily as definitions of a cultural phenomenon in the ancient world. Like all the best works in Classics, they are ancestralizing and deeply learned fronts for modern problems. That is their strength, but it is also their weakness when it comes to any empirical or, dare one say it, positivist assessment of how far they may reveal an ancient reality. Let us begin with a few dates. Jaeger published the first volume of Paideia (on which he had been working for over a decade) in Berlin in 1934 (the preface is dated October 1933). That is a stark date. The book is the fruit of a great Weimar scholarly enterprise, but it saw the light under the new regime, the Third Reich (which some have thought—perhaps unfairly—to have paralleled aspects of Jaeger’s project of the ‘Third Humanism’). 10 The second and third volumes, completed by 1943 in their author’s American exile (from 1936 initially in Chicago and then from 1939 at Harvard), were first published in an English translation by Gilbert Highet from the manuscript, and only later in German. While the first volume is a pre-Nazi paean to the culture of Bildung in the German university system—written by the holder of its most prestigious chair of Altertumswissenschaft in the Prussian capital, Berlin—and indeed a post World War 1 attempt to re-galvanize Bildung for a new generation, the two subsequent volumes essentially represent an apology for a lost world by an émigré forced out of Germany to save his Jewish wife and child. Whatever we may think of their content, the context cannot be separated from very fundamental ideological complexity. Marrou’s book was published in its French original in 1948, not at the outset of the catastrophe of Europe, nor during its long anguish of the Second World War, but in retrospect. Again, as I shall suggest, its historical moves and underlying argument are fraught and overdetermined by ideological motives designed to be at once purifying and redemptive. Jaeger’s Paideia Jaeger’s Paideia is a celebration of the place of the Greeks in the history of education (vol. 1, xiii), of ‘their culture, their paideia’ (vol. 1, xvi). In particular, ‘the unique 10 See J. Irmscher, ‘Die klassische Altertumswissenschaft in der faschistischen Wissenschaftspolitik’ in H. Gericke (ed.) Altertumswissenschaft und ideologischer Klassenkampf, Halle, 1980, 75–97, esp. 79; J. Irmscher ‘Werner Jaeger zum 100. Geburtstag’ Sitzungsberichte der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin 6 (1990) 3–7, esp. 4; W. Calder III, ‘Werner Jaeger’ in W. Briggs and W. Calder III (eds.) Classical Scholarship: A Biographical Encyclopaedia, New York, 1990, 211–226, esp. 220: ‘a correlative in educational policy to the Third Reich’s theoretical vision of the state’; also M. Chambers, ‘The Historian as Educator: Jaeger on Thucydides’ in W. Calder III (ed.), Werner Jaeger Reconsidered, Illinois Classical Studies Suppl. 3, Urbana-Champaign, 1992, 25–35, esp. 32-4 on Perikles as Führer in Paideia vol. 1; B. Näf, ‘Werner Jaegers Paideia: Entstehung, kulturpolitische Absichten und Rezeption’ ibid 125-46, esp. 126; D. White, ‘Werner Jaeger’s “Third Humanism” and the Crisis of Conservative Cultural Politics in Weimar Germany’ ibid. 267-88, esp. 269 and 283-8; Christes, 2007, 346; K. Fleming, ‘Heidegger, Jaeger, Plato: The Politics of Humanism’ IJCT 19 (2012) 82–106, esp. 83-6. Less aggressive in their assessment of Jaeger are A. Momigliano, Studies in Ancient Historiography, London, 1966, 252-3 and A-S Goeing and D. Barker, ‘Werner Jaeger and Robert Ulrich: Two Émigré Scholars on Educational Theory’ in A. FairSchulz and M. Kessler (eds) German Scholars in Exile, Lanham MD, 2011, 1–19, esp. 4–6. Author's personal copy Paideia: Ancient Concept and Modern Reception 139 position of Hellenism in the history of education’ can be identified in the Platonic model for education as ‘moulding character’ (italics in the original, vol. 1, xxii).11 All this is obviously a carefully worked-out reformulation of the great model of Bildung that drove the Prussian university system from the nineteenth century. It seeks to ground Bildung ancestrally in the privileged context of Altertumswissenschaft while at the same time making a grand claim for the ancient world as the basis and model for modern cultural formation. Plato had been key to earlier versions of Bildung in Germany,12 but arguably Jaeger’s is the most explicit and profound attempt to establish the discourse of education in Platonic thought. Jaeger himself occupied a prime place in that system. A student of Wilamowitz, he had come to succeed the master in Berlin, and his deep sense of debt to the Berlin school would be marked by a celebratory historiographic essay published in 1960, on ‘Classical Philology at the University of Berlin 1870–1945’, which is understated in its discussion of the Nazi period but firmly places his own American work as within the production of the Berlin school (‘a piece of Berlin and its classical philology, carried on during these fateful years in new surroundings’).13 Jaeger’s translation of paideia is Bildung: ‘The German word Bildung clearly indicates the essence of education in the Greek, the Platonic sense’ (vol. 1, xxiii).14 An alternative he offers is the Latin translation humanitas, attributed to Varro and Cicero by Aulus Gellius in the Noctes Atticae at 13.17: that is, in English, Humanism (vol. 1, xxiii). Effectively, Jaeger’s Paideia in its Weimar conceptualization, was the definitive statement of the Greekness of the German soul, the full intellectual justification of an inseparable affinity that had been evoked by the writings of Winckelmann and institutionally established through the central role played by Classics in the Prussian education system created by von Humboldt.15 By the late imperial period and through the Weimar 11 On the debt owed by Jaeger’s Platonism to his exposure to the neo-Kantian philosophy of Cohen and Natorp at Marburg in his first semester in University (before he moved to Berlin), see W. Jaeger, ‘Introduction to Scripta Minora’ in Five Essays, Montreal, 1966, 25–44, esp. 29 with discussion by A. Follak, Der “Aufblick zur Idee”: Eine vergleichende Studie zur Platonischen Pädagogik bei Friedrich Schleiermacher, Paul Natorp und Werner Jaeger, Göttingen, 2005, 116-50. For the striking absence of any politics in Jaeger’s account of Plato, see C. Kahn, ‘Werner Jaeger’s Portrayal of Plato’ in Calder (1992) 69– 81, esp. 80-1. 12 On the importance of Plato to the early theoretics of Bildung, see T. Ziolkowski, ‘August Böckh und die Sonettenschlächt bei Eichstädt’ Antike und Abendland 41 (1995) 161-73, esp. 162 and 164-5; M. Riedel, ‘Die Erfindung des Philologen: Friedrich August Wolf und Friedrich Nietzsche’ Antike und Abendland 42 (1996) 119-36, esp. 120-1. 13 W. Jaeger, ‘Classical Philology at the University of Berlin 1870–1945’ in Jaeger, 1966, 45–74; 73-4 is on the Nazi era; 74 on his continuation of Berlin in exile. 14 As Charles Kahn puts it: ‘Jaeger is really concerned with Plato’s ethics and politics only as a theory of culture as Bildung, that is as paideia.’—see Kahn (1992) 71. 15 For some general accounts, see e.g. E. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany, Cambridge, 1935 (mainly on literary culture); S. Marchand, Down From Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970, Princeton, 1996 (on archaeology), esp. 26–35. On Bildung as ‘self-cultivation’, see W. Bruford, The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation, Cambridge, 1975 and R. Vierhaus, ‘Bildung’, in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 1, Stuttgart, 1972. For Bildung, Winckelmann and the ‘Greek landscape of the German soul’, see C. Güthenke, Placing Modern Greece: The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism 1770–1840, Oxford, 2008, 12–13, 27-9; also I. Gildenhard, ‘Philologia Perennis? Classical Scholarship and Functional Differentiation’ in I. Gildenhard and M. Ruehl (eds.), Out of Arcadia: Classics and Politis in Germany in the Age of Burckhardt, Nietzsche and Wilamowitz, BICS suppl. 79 , London, 2003, 161–203, esp 180-2 on Bildung and 169-72, 187 on the salvific evangelism of Jaeger’s enterprise even before 1933 as ‘philology turns into theology’. Author's personal copy 140 J. Elsner years, after the crisis of the first World War, culture and Bildung had been perceived as threatened and in need of revival.16 Whereas Greekness and Greek culture (as both philology and archaeology) had long been central to German education, what Jaeger sought to do was systematically to lay out and make explicit this Bildung, of which his own formation in Berlin was a paradigmatic example, as a Greek-inflected Formung (to use his own word in the German subtitle)17 that could inspire the moulding of contemporary youth. One may surmise that in its 1920s inception, the politics of Jaeger’s project was about finding, within Altertumswissenschaft, the essential roots for regenerating humanism after the disaster of World War 1.18 In aid of this, he constantly emphasizes ‘education’ (the main text’s first word at p. 1 of vol. 1) and especially asks ‘what type of education leads to arete’ (vol. 1, 283, but also 1–12). Arete, translated in the preface to vol. 2 as ‘moral standard’ (vol. 2, xii) is ‘the central ideal of all Greek culture’ (vol. 1, 13), and it encapsulates the morally improving aspect of Jaeger’s model: Paideia is Bildung, that cultural formation in humanism and civilizing values that educates the citizen by moulding him or her in the beneficence of ancient Greek tradition. It was the emphasis on arête and the claim for a high ground for humanism that would be so influential in the early thirties, notably for example on Martin Heidegger.19 As Jaeger would write in the 1960s: ‘All my work during those years was conducted by what my generation was striving for, by the quest for a new humanism that would restore their true significance to school, university and all education by helping to understand their beginnings. The inclusion of humanism within the forms of the historically orientated study of antiquity was the final step in the process of transforming what had once been a humanistic study of the classics. That this humanism was rooted in the structure of Greek thought itself was demonstrated in my Paideia’. 20 16 See F. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins 1890–1933, Cambridge, Mass., 1969, esp. 83–127 on concepts and attitudes (with p. 93 on the Platonic model) and 253–434 on aspects of resistance to perceived ‘cultural decline’. 17 See Marrou (1946) 143 and Chambers (1992) 27. The English translation by Gilbert Highet consistently underplays the issue of Bildung: see esp. the brief but acute discussion by B. Karlsson in H-Net Reviews (2001) at http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=4956. 18 For accounts of Jaeger’s humanism in the context of Weimar cultural politics, see White (1992), M. Landfester, ‘Die Naumburger Tagung “Das Problem des Klassischen und die Antike (1930). Der Klassikbegriff Werner Jaegers: Seine Vorassestzung und seine Wirkung’ in H. Flashar (ed.) Altertumwissenschaft in den 20er Jahren, Stuttgart, 1995, 11–41 and R. Mehring, ‘Humanismus als “Politicum”. Werner Jaegers Problemgeschichte der griechischen “Paideia”’, Antike und Abendland 45 (1999) 111-28, esp. 112-8. For trenchant discussions of how close volume 1 of Paideia comes to accommodating dominant ideology in 1934, see W. Calder III, ‘Werner Jaeger and Richard Harder: An Erklärung’ Quaderni di Studia 17 (1983) 99–113, esp. 105–113 and Fleming (2012) 102. Two very important contemporary critiques of the first volume are B. Snell, ‘Besprechung von W. Jaegers Paideia’ (1935) in Gesammelte Schriften, Göttingen, 1966, 32–54, esp. 33-6 on Bildung and humanism, and 51-4 on the dangers of the politicization of Jaeger’s ‘Third Humanism’, and R. Pfeiffer, ‘Werner Jaeger, Paideia’ Deutsche Literaturzeitung 56 (1935) 2126-34, 2169-78, 2213-19, which wonders about the leitmotif of the commitment to arête in Jaeger’s Bildungsgeschichte at 2128-9 and the excessive optimism of Jaeger’s humanism at 2215. 19 See esp. F. Edler, ‘Heidegger and Werner Jaeger on the Eve of 1933: A Possible Rapprochement?’ Research in Phenomenology 27 (1997) 122-49, esp. 122-25 and 139-44; I. Thomson, ‘Heidegger on Ontological Education, or: How We Became What We Are’ Inquiry 44 (2001) 243-68, esp. 252-3; Fleming (2012) 98–102. 20 In Jaeger, 1966, 70-1 (cf also 41-2). Author's personal copy Paideia: Ancient Concept and Modern Reception 141 However, it must be said that there is a tendency (at the very least unsettling to the modern reader) in the politics of the first edition of volume 1, published in 1934, to accommodate an essentially Weimar portrait of Bildung to some aspects of the outlook of the new regime. This is somewhat (but not wholly) toned down in the second edition of 1936, the one translated by Gilbert Highet into English, which was produced when its author had chosen exile and which purges some aspects of the Nazi-friendly formulations of the first edition.21 We have an extremely acute guide to the ideological nuances of the text of Jaeger’s first edition—especially when it strays towards National Socialist sentiments—in the rich annotations to the copy belonging to Jaeger’s fellow student from Berlin, later professor of Greek at Halle and then a Jewish exile in California, Paul Friedländer; and those annotations have been published.22 For example—among the passages highlighted by Friedländer and altered by Jaeger in the 1936 version—one might cite his downplay of racial kinship between the Greeks and us (i.e. Germans) in the shift from ‘rasseverwandt’ (vol.1, 1934, p. 36) to ‘wesensverwandt’ (vol. 1, 1936, p. 36). Worse still is this sentence from the last pages of the book which form a peroration to the entire text and which Jaeger cut entirely from the second edition: It will have to be the goal of leaders of the modern state to find a new path between the democratically underpinned leadership of Pericles and the militarily-backed autocracy of Dionysius.23 Friedländer’s comment was simply: ‘Tell it Hitler! Ecco!’.24 A fundamental flaw in Jaeger’s reception has been to treat the three volumes of his project as being a single enterprise—it should be obvious that deracination from the heart of Altertumswissenschaft and exile would have had a fundamental impact on a project so absolutely German. Moreover, the National Socialist era and its crimes compromised the promise of cultural moulding in the German educational tradition, so that clearly arete as a moral value had utterly failed in precisely the Bildung that Jaeger had himself received and purveyed in the pre-Nazi years in Berlin. The reductio ad absurdum of German Bildung was the death camps; but these—and their full horror could hardly be imagined in Harvard in 1943—had been presaged by a clear string of crimes and persecutions. In his work of the late 1930s and early 40s, Jaeger’s Paideia metamorphosed into a nostalgia for what was lost, an apology for the Hellenic past whose excellence had failed in the very project of education, and above all became a defense of his beloved Plato (the subject of vol. 2)25 21 See W. Calder III and M. Braun, ‘“Tell it Hitler! Ecco!” Paul Friedländer on Werner Jaeger’s Paideia’ Quaderni di Studia 43 (1996) 211-48, esp. 214, n. 15. 22 See Calder and Braun (1996). One point, not made explicitly by Friedländer nor drawn out by Calder and Braun, is how many of what Friedländer (probably making his notes in the 40s) took as Nazi-inflected comments on such issues as race (of which many survived into the second edition) occupy places at the openings or climactic conclusions of sections of Jaeger’s argument. For instance, Calder and Braun (1996) nos. 4, 5 and 6 appear in the introductory first chapter; no. 12 at the end of the first chapter; no. 21 at the end of the third chapter; no. 93 from just before the end of vol. 1. 23 Es wird das Ziel des modernen Führerstaats sein mussen, diesen neuen Weg zu finden der zwischen der demokratisch unterbauten Führerstellung des Perikles und der rein militärisch gestützten Alleinherrschaft des Dionysios hindurchführt: Vol. 1, 1934, 511. 24 Calder and Braun (1996) 235. On the complexities and inconsistencies of the programme of Paideia between 1934 and 1947 (when the last volume came out in German) see Mehring (1999) 118-25. 25 Author's personal copy 142 J. Elsner against the obvious critique of totalitarian tendencies, which it was to turn out Karl Popper was writing at precisely the same time (in English exile, surely unbeknownst to Jaeger) and would shortly be published in his Open Society and its Enemies in 1945.26 While volume 1 of Paideia, covering Homer to the fifth century was always intended to set the stage for the triumph of Plato in vols. 2 and 3 (Plato until the Republic is the only theme of vol. 2 and late Plato occupies just under a third of vol.3), that triumph was inevitably transformed in its exilic inflection from what it may have been in the original plan. The issues are rather different in the English and German versions, and I will deal initially with the English one, which was published first. The preface to vol. 2 (in fact presented as the preface to both the later volumes) treads a delicate tightrope.27 Jaeger presents a ‘Greece, which, after losing everything that is of this world—state, power, liberty, and civic life in the classical sense of the word—was still able to say with its last great poet, Menander: “The possession which no one can take away from man is paideia”… “Paideia is a haven for all mankind”’ (vol. 2, ix). Is this historically situated as an objective description of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War and the onset of the fourth century, or is it the desperate wish of presentism dressed up in historical garb—the exile surveying the wreckage of Europe and the collapse of humanism in its darkest hour of hopelessness, in 1943? When Jaeger writes in the present tense in the following paragraph, ‘through the increasing gloom of political disaster, there now appear, as if called into existence by the needs of the age, the great geniuses of education…’ (vol. 2, ix), are we meant to think that this is a purely historical statement about the advent of Plato, or an aspiration for Classics as humanism to restore the broken world of the present—perhaps an aspiration for that world to turn (back) to humanism? The preface veers between the ‘supra-temporal’ and an insistence on ‘historical background’, but finds itself committed—despite the call to a situated historicism—to ‘the history of humanism down to the present day’ (x). Notably Jaeger admits to abandoning ‘my original intention to carry my second volume down to the period when Greek culture achieved world domination’ (vol. 2, xi).28 Is this because the very idea of ‘world domination’ was abhorrent in the early 1940s, if you were a refugee 26 K. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, vol. 1 The Spell of Plato, London 1945 (text completed in 1943). This is not the place for an extended account of Jaeger’s Plato. Kahn, 1992, 17 rightly points out a number of weaknesses—notably Jaeger’s unitary rather than developmental view of Plato’s corpus (something already noted by Marrou (1946) 147: ‘Jaeger souligne l’unité profonde de tout Platon’): a view teleologically grounded in the need for a solid foundation for Bildung. It is clear that one would need a great many words of apologetic to get around the totalitarian tendencies (or at least the openness to totalitarian appropriation) of Plato’s major political works, especially in the refugee moment of the 1940s, but Jaeger certainly supplies them. He insists that ‘The Republic has nothing to do with… race’ (vol. 2, 199—his italics and obviously a Third-Reich related comment) and is of course able to blow the trumpet of educational equality for women (vol. 2, 252-6). He resolutely refuses any glimpse into or parallel with modernity is his discussion of philosopher kings and their potential corruption (vol. 2, 258-78, esp. 268). He is deeply moved by Plato’s ‘complete and utter trust’ in Philosophy, commenting and personifying ‘nowadays she is lonely and deserted…’ (vol. 2, 262)—a comment on contemporary Germany? Again, he avoids any reference to modernity in his discussion of Plato’s views of the relative merits of tyranny, timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and anarchy (vol. 2, 325-42). 27 Note this is not present in the German edition. 28 Cf. vol. 1, vii: ‘the transformation of Greek civilization into a world empire’. Author's personal copy Paideia: Ancient Concept and Modern Reception 143 from the Thousand Year Reich in its moment of supreme extension?29 There is hardly, we may note, any specific reference to the war in vols. 2 or 3, except when Jaeger thanks his translator for accomplishing the work, ‘although occupied with more urgent duties in war service’ (vol. 2, xv). In vols. 2 and 3 of the German version—respectively published in 1944 (a curious year for the work of an American exile to appear in the house of De Gruyter) and 1947—the cake is cut quite differently. Vol. 2 opens in the same way as in the English, with a brief summary chapter on the fourth century—dealing with the ‘catastrophe’ (katastrophe) of the fall of Athens (English vol. 2, 3 and German vol.2, 2), as well as the need for ethical and religious renewal (English vol. 2, 3–4 and German vol.2, 2). How this message resonated in relation to the radically antithetical politics of Jaeger’s different prospective readerships (the Anglophone allies in 1943 and the Germany of 1944) is impossible to imagine, and it would be frankly weird if Jaeger had no sense of the complexity. The mood music shifts to the positive as he moves to a narrative of the speed of recovery (English vol. 2, 4 and German vol.2, 2), but—for all its Platonic glory—the fourth century is cast in ‘the tragic shadow of collapse’ as well as ‘the radiance of a providential wisdom’ in the last sentence of the chapter (English vol. 2, 12 and German vol. 2, 10). Then the German shifts significantly from the English. Instead of proceeding with the English version’s chapter 2 (on the memory of Socrates), which becomes chapter 3 of the German edition, Jaeger inserts the first chapter of the English third volume, ‘Greek medicine as paideia’. The effect of this is to end the second volume in German with the first of Jaeger’s two chapters on the Republic, and so to move the second chapter on the Republic, discussing the Guardians (die Paideia der Herrscher) from being the last culminating section of vol. 2 (in the English version) to being the opening chapter of the third German volume of 1947. This leaves the last chapter of vol. 2 in the version published for the consumption of the subjects of the Third Reich with some truly terrible sections, that worryingly come close to a eugenic Nazi point of view. For instance, the section entitled Rassenauslese und Erziehung der Besten (‘Breeding and Education of the Elite’ in Highet’s translation, (English vol. 2, 246-51; German vol. 2, 324-30) has some appalling passages about eugenic breeding (English vol. 2, 247 and German vol. 2, 325) and surrendering ‘all personal interests to those of the state’ (English vol. 2, 248; German vol. 2, 326), justified by the claim that ‘both the racial selection, which [Plato] recommended and the education for which it was to prepare, were devoted to the service of that ideal’ (English vol. 2, 251; German vol. 2, 330). Such passages are most disturbing if one tries to work out where Jaeger’s political and ethical affiliations really lay, and who his ideal ruler was meant to be. He may himself have been impossibly confused. 30 But one upshot of the different structure of the German 29 My reading of these passages may be accused of allegorism, and the same can be said of my account of Marrou below. But it is worth noting the absence of a fully credible historical referent in antiquity for the account of the ‘increasing gloom’ and the tendency—in both Jaeger and Marrou—to read the ancient past as a cipher for questions of education and culture in the present (that is, the strategy of allegorism is already implicit in their texts). 30 Could he have conceivably imagined that the passage on the corruption of the philosopher through bad education (i.e. the sophists) might be read as some kind of veiled critique of the regime in the Germany of 1944? Author's personal copy 144 J. Elsner publication is that vol. 3 is significantly more Platonic than the English version, since the whole climactic chapter on the Republic as the ‘Paideia of the Rulers’—subtitled in English but not in German as ‘The Divine Model’—now serves as the opening of the third vol., published in the post war ruin of Germany in 1947. The last two volumes of Paideia read as a strange apologetic, especially given the completely contradictory political climates in which volume 2 was published and meant to resonate. They attempt—in the face of a contemporary politics that makes the enterprise most peculiar—to justify a model of Bildung as moral education, established in the first volume and rendered totally redundant by the events after 1933, including Jaeger’s own forced exile. In many ways, the intellectual justification of the deep roots of Bildung in Altertumswissenschaft is a self-justification of Jaeger’s own education and career. But his failure even to confront the blatant ridicule to which the Nazi state had confined his high-minded model of paideia indicates how hopeless the project had become and why it has had relatively little impact in later scholarship. To put it bluntly, the greatness of Jaeger’s Paideia (in conception and in its realization of volume 1 as the introduction to the project) was to provide an ancient theoretics for the Prussian educational model of humanism. The election of Hitler in 1933—and the unveiling over subsequent years of what a Nazi government could mean in moral terms—was itself proof (at precisely the moment when the first volume was completed) that the elitism of the Humboldtian university was no moral protection against anything and that, for all the high rhetoric of arete, it led to no ethical rise in humane values. At stake were all the foundations of humanism—the cause to which Jaeger’s own personal project was most committed. 31 The real failure of the last two volumes of Paideia was their author’s inability to review his project from first principles or to indeed to address the question of humanism itself, let alone the Berlin model of Altertumswissenschaft as Bildung, in the cruel light of his own experience of what (despite the best efforts of German humanism) his country had become. Jaeger is far from unique in that failure, although his continuing desire to make an impact in both Nazi Germany and in exile is peculiarly demeaning in retrospect. It is my view that the entire surviving academy after the Nazis (both those who stayed and those who left, those who acquiesced or collaborated and those who resisted) failed their own heritage of Bildung and their own descendants by simply continuing the humanist project in all its profound learning, as if the National Socialist era were just an aberration and as if its exceptional crimes had not invalidated the very moral basis of Bildung as a formation that would inculcate humane values, as an education in arete to use Jaeger’s terminology (of which Heidegger so approved).32 Too many of the educated elite in Germany (and certainly the generally conservative 31 For a defense of humanism, defined as humanitas and paideia, written by a German Jewish exile to America in 1940, see E. Panofsky, ‘Art History as a Humanistic Discipline’ in Meaning in the Visual Arts, New York, 1955, 1–25, esp. 1–2. 32 Cf. J. Elsner, ‘Objects and History’ in P. Miller (ed.), in P. Miller (ed.) Cultural Histories of the Material World, Ann Arbor, 2013, 165–171, esp. 168-70. For Heidegger on Jaeger’s arête, see his personal letter to Jaeger of December 1932 in Edler (1997) 123-5. Author's personal copy Paideia: Ancient Concept and Modern Reception 145 Classicists) despised and hardly took seriously the uneducated thugs who comprised the Nazi party, with the result that—wrongly and tragically—they too easily imagined that Bildung was not poisoned by the crimes committed by the German state. Posterity has responded harshly to Jaeger’s legacy, 33 but I think it is above all tragic. The self-appointed prophet of an educational system whose Greek underpinnings he was uncovering, Jaeger found himself lost in a foreign country, mumbling on—with spectacular erudition—about an irrelevant and discredited system as the world he knew collapsed in his absence. The Berlin and the Berlin school, which he considered his American work to continue, simply did not exist by 1945 and would never again be recovered. The paideia, which his Paideia sought to underpin, was rendered out of date and invalid in the very year of the publication of his first volume. My concern here, however, is not with Jaeger but with the concept of paideia. 34 One point needs to be emphasized before we turn to Marrou. Despite his attempt in his weak last book of 1961, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, to turn his subject towards the Church Fathers, 35 Jaeger’s principal work on the theme is utterly committed to an archaic and classical model of the Greek ideal—a model that completely emulates the Humboldtian paradigm. His Greece, his paideia, is a very German identification with a preHellenistic world. Marrou’s History of Education in Antiquity By contrast with Jaeger, the German philhellene and Hellenist, the bulk of Marrou’s work was on the Roman (and especially the early Christian) end of the Classical tradition. Both scholars in fact went late—Jaeger’s great patristic project was the critical edition of the works of Gregory of Nyssa, Marrou’s the history of the western Church and especially the study of St Augustine. Even in their early Christian projects, each was principally identified respectively with the Greek and Latin sides of antiquity. But where Jaeger—though personally a believer, it appears—was a secular Classicist from the centre of Altertumswissenschaft, whose project was humanism, 36 Marrou was a deeply committed and politicized Catholic intellectual from his early years, closely associated from the 1930s with the left-wing Catholic movement around the journal L’Ésprit.37 Demobilised from the defeated French army 33 Notably, Calder (1990) and the various works in Calder (1992); also but with more nuance Mehring (1999). 34 That said, the heroic account of Jaeger, which is still occasionally found, certainly needs significant nuance. See e.g. W. Schadewaldt, Gedenkrede auf Werner Jaeger 1888–1961, Berlin, 1963 and M. Meiss and T. Optendrenk (eds.), Werner Jaeger, Nettetal, 2009, for unalloyed hagiographies. 35 W. Jaeger, Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, Cambridge, Mass. 1961. 36 On Jaeger’s faith, and his background as a Protestant brought up in an overwhelmingly Catholic part of Germany, see P. Keyser, ‘Werner Jaeger’s Early Chritianity and Greek Paideia’ in Calder (1992) 83–105. 37 See P. Riché, Henri Irénée Marrou, historien engagé, Paris, 2003, 24–33, 40–59. One does have to register a concern about a book of history that can date the declaration of the Second World War to September 1940—see p. 63. On Marrou and Catholicism, see also C. Pietri, ‘Henri Marrou: Un chrétien et l’histoire’ Les quatres fleuves 8 (1978) 118-28 and the relevant essays in Y-M Hilaire, De Renan à Marrou : l’histoire du christianisme et les progrès de la méthode historique, 1863–1968, Villeneuve d’Ascq, 1999. Author's personal copy 146 J. Elsner in September 1940, Marrou was appointed maître de conférances at Lyons in October 1941, 38 and spent the War years under the Vichy regime researching his history of education. 39 At this period, although the evidence is understandably murky, he appears to have been active in the Resistance.40 The context of his writing—during the war and immediately after, anti-German and confessionally Roman-Catholic—is essential to grasping the fundamental project underlying Marrou’s great book of 1948. One aspect of an interest in the theme of ancient education before the liberation of France, was the emphasis on policies of educational reform in the Vichy regime’s collaborationist programme of moral revival, led by the famous Classical scholar, Jérôme Carcopino, who served as Education Minister in the Pétain government from 1941–42 before becoming director of the École normale supérieur from 1942 to the liberation of France.41 The issues here are complex, since Marrou was clearly engaged with the process, left several writings on education in general from the early 40s, 42 and—although an opponent of the regime—appears to have had cordial relations with Carcopino, 43 who was arrested as a collaborator immediately after the war, but later exonerated as a secret friend of the Resistance despite his service to the Vichy government. 44 In the immediate post-war years, when Marrou completed his writing and published A History of Education in Antiquity, the larger intellectual agenda in France turned especially on a variety of claims to humanism from Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist agenda in his book of 1946, l’Existentialisme est un humanism, to a series of Marxist, Socialist and Catholic appropriations (especially from the Christian left).45 Thus, in both the Vichy and post-war French contexts, a history of education as humanism in antiquity was not only well motivated as a contemporary theme but had a significant current politics, in addition to its specific engagement with Jaeger’s model of paideia. 38 See Riché (2003) 61, with an account of 1941-45 at pp. 63–84. On the context of France in the Vichy years, see R. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order 1940–1944, New York, 1972; H. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944, Cambridge Mass., 1991; J. Jackson, France: The Dark Years 1940–1944, Oxford, 2001; D. Lackerstein, Natural Regeneration in Vichy France, Farnham, 2012. 39 See Riché (2003) 76 and D. Julia, ‘Passé/present: L’histoire de l’éducation dans l’antiquité ou la lecture d’un témoin du XXe siècle’ in Pailler and Payen (2004) 21–31, esp. 21. 40 See Riché (2003) 76–80; J.M, Mayeur, ‘Introduction’ to H.I. Marrou, Crise de notre temps et refléxion chrétienne (de 1930 à 1975), Paris, 1978, 9–29 esp. 19–21; J. M Domenech and J-M. Soutou, ‘Témoinages’ ibid 189-94, with some of Marrou’s own writings from the period of the War, ibid 117-58; also ‘Deuxieme table-ronde: Les guerres et la guerre d’Algérie’ in Y.-M. Hilaire (ed.), De Renan à Marrou, Villeneuve d’Ascq, 1999, 225-36. 41 See Lackerstein (2012) 177–206. Specifically on Carcopino, see P. Grimal, C. Carcopino and R. Ourliac, Jérôme Carcopino. Un historien au service de l’humanisme, Paris, 1981, 93–134 (apologetic); C. Singer, Vichy, l’université et les juifs, Paris, 1992, 93–100, 103-5, 118-22, 259-60 (pretty stringent); and esp. S. Corcy-Debray, Jérôme Carcopino, un historien à Vichy, Paris, 2001 (quite balanced), esp. 337-96 on education reform. Carcopino’s own (apologetic) account—at length—is J. Carcopino, Souvenirs de sept ans 1937–1944, Paris, 1953, esp. 402-30 on educational reform. 42 See H. Marrou, ‘Responsibilité de l’intellectuel dans le temps présent’ (1943 and 1944) in Marrou (1978) 201-51 and H. Marrou, ‘l’histoire et l’éducation’ (1943) in Riché (2003) 361-8. 43 See J-M Soutou in Hilaire (1999) 209-10; also Marrou’s own eulogy of Carcopino, ‘Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Jérôme Carcopino’, CRAI 116 (1972) 204-220, esp. 208-10 on the War years. 44 See Corcy-Debray (2001) 249-98 on Carcopino’s disgrace and restitution. 45 See the excellent discussion of E. Baring, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968, Cambridge, 2011, 21–47, 57–67. Author's personal copy Paideia: Ancient Concept and Modern Reception 147 Like Jaeger, Marrou came to the study of paideia early, before the Second World War. His thèse complementaire pour le doctorat ès-lettres of 1937, an account of the mousikos aner—the cultured man—as represented in Roman funerary art, was published in 1938.46 The focus on Rome and on early Christianity, 47 and the instinct towards symbolic and philosophical interpretation of the material (under the influence of the works of Franz Cumont), offered a very different genesis for Marrou’s interest in paideia from GreekGerman focus of Jaeger. The structure of A History of Education in Antiquity is overtly in opposition to Jaeger. Where the latter, in 3 volumes, hardly gets beyond the middle of the fourth century BC, Marrou devotes on Part 1 (pp. 3–91) to archaic and classical Greece, effectively setting it up as the prologue to his main story. For Marrou, ‘the very heart of our subject’ (95, repeated at 96) is ‘the civilization of the “Paideia” (the title of the first chapter of Part 2), constructed out of antique roots by the Hellenistic world and transmitted thence to Rome and to Christianity: ‘It was only in the generation following Aristotle and Alexander the Great that education assumed its classical and definitive form… When we say classical education we really mean “Hellenistic education”. This became the education of the whole Greek world’ (95). The difference from Jaeger—marked as a divergence of interpretation and not of implicit cultural politics—is stated clearly by Marrou in the last paragraph of his review of Paideia where he claims in explicit disagreement with Jaeger that ‘the acme of ancient paideia and the apogee of the art of modeling the interior form of human personhood’ lies in the Hellenistic period, taken to extend to the end of the Roman empire.48 The shift of emphasis from Jaeger’s model, as established in the first volume of Paideia in 1934, is huge. For Marrou effectively rejects the centrality of that part of the Greek heritage most identified with Germany, and in doing so presents his theme with a political charge (potent in the years of research and writing, 1943–48) that ought to be obvious to commentators but has hardly been noticed. 49 Like a great number of other post-War humanist projects, Marrou shifts the essence and origin of European culture from Greece and Germany (that is, the German identification with Greece) to a wider cosmopolitan world,50 arguably anticipating some of the thinking that went into the Common Market in 46 H. Marrou, MOYCIKOC ANHP. Etude sur les scènes de la vie intellectuelle figurant sur les monuments funéraires romains, Grenoble, 1938, republished with an afterword in Rome, 1964, esp. 209-30 on ‘l’homme cultivé’. 47 Marrou (1938) 269-87. 48 Marrou (1946) 149. 49 Many have remarked on Marrou’s shift away from Greece—e.g. P. Payen, ‘Une education sans histoire? H.I. Marrou et l’historiographie Grecque’ in Pailler and Payen (2004) 95–108; Demart (2004) 109–119, esp. 109-10—but have not seen this as ideologically determined by the need to save European culture from the disaster inflicted on humanism by the Nazi regime’s mockery of all the values of Bildung. The complaints about Marrou’s minimalist account of pederasty (e.g. C. Avlami and C. Orfours, ‘Le concept d’éducation dans L’histoire de l’éducation dans l’antiquité’ ibid 67–78, esp. 71-4 and A. Ballabriga, ‘La pédérastie dans L’histoire de l’éducation dans l’antiquité’ ibid 79–86) fail to grasp that homosexuality had to be underplayed in any deeply Roman Catholic account, and especially when the agenda was the cultural revival of Europe from all forms of decadence. 50 On the move of the origins of the idea of ‘fine arts’ in the work of Paul Oskar Kristeller from Ancient Greece or Modern Germany to Enlightenment France (1951), see J. Elsner, ‘Myth and Chronicle: A Response to the Values of Art’ Arethusa 43 (2010) 289–308, esp. 298–300; on the move of the origins and essence of Gothic from any German claims (current before 1945) to unanimous agreement on France in the works of Erwin Panofsky, Paul Frankl, Otto von Simson (all refugee scholars) and Hans Sedlmayr (a rehabilitated Nazi) in the 1940s and 50s, see J. Elsner, ‘A Golden Age of Gothic’ in Z. Opacic and A. Timmermann (eds.), Architecture, Liturgy and Identity: Liber Amicorum Paul Crossley, Turnhout, 2011, 7–15 Author's personal copy 148 J. Elsner the 1950s. His paean to the Hellenistic wise man as cosmopolitês, ‘a citizen of the world’ and the ideal of the ‘human person, who liberated from the corporate conditioning and totalitarian pressure of city life, now becomes conscious of himself, of his capacities and needs and rights’ (98) reads like a humanist paradigm in contradiction to the restrictions of Vichy in the early 1940s. Following Jaeger (not annotating him), Marrou claims that ‘Paideia is … no longer the technique by which the child… is equipped and made ready early in life for the job of becoming a man’ (98) but ‘comes to signify “culture”—not … in the sense of something active and preparational like education, but in the sense that the word has for us today—of something perfected’ (99). And he follows Jaeger in citing Gellius citing Varro and Cicero that the translation of paideia into Latin is humanitas (99). Indeed, in the conclusion to Part 2, Marrou reiterates that ‘the old word humanism, however overworked it has been’ remains the best definition of ‘the essence of education’ (218), which he characterizes by an emphasis on the ‘whole man, body and soul, sense and reason, character and mind’ (219-21, 22), modulated by ‘essentially moral training’ (221), rooted in literary culture (213-4) and in tradition (224). But then he resists the thrust of Jaeger’s Bildung: ‘I must repeat that in French51 this word52 “culture” has a pronounced personalist tinge; in accordance with the spirit of the French language it means the direct opposite of any collective idea of civilization: French culture is not by any means the same as German Kultur.’ (99). Here the explicit differentiation from the Jaeger model, from the German identification of humanism with Greek culture, could hardly be more explicit. At the heart of Marrou’s paradigm is an anti-collectivist and anti-totalitarian (a French as opposed to German) personal development which he rapidly cashes out by means of reference to Hellenistic philosophers and late-antique intellectuals, including the Church Fathers (100). He then proceeds to a claim for the ‘religion of culture’ presented as the perfection of the mousikos anêr, ‘“a man of the Muses”—i.e. a man sanctified and saved by those goddesses’: ‘Paideia—a thing divine—a heavenly game, a nobility of soul, was invested with a kind of sacred radiance that gave it a special dignity of a genuinely religious kind’ (101). This is a hugely complex move. On the one hand, it radically shifts paideia, as the supreme ideal of education, from the German model of Bildung, for which Jaeger’s project was the apology. On the other, it not only attempts to save the themes of ‘humanism’, ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’—all already central to Jaeger—but it elevates them to a salvific and purificatory pinnacle. The last sentence of the first chapter of Part 2 clinches the point: In the deep confusion caused by the sudden collapse of ancient beliefs, it was the one true unshakable value to which the mind of man could cling; and Hellenistic culture, thus erected into an absolute, eventually became for many the equivalent of a religion’. (101). Here, finally, scripted as if it were an historical claim about the ancient past, is Marrou’s commentary on the immediate past. The ‘deep confusion’ and the ‘sudden collapse of ancient beliefs’ have no viable historical referent in antiquity—certainly 51 52 I remove the English translator’s addition ‘as in English’ (not in the original). The English translation has the misprint ‘world’ here, but the original is mot. Author's personal copy Paideia: Ancient Concept and Modern Reception 149 not in Classical or Hellenistic times. They describe literally and acutely the damage done by the Third Reich to the cultural system of European humanism which Germany itself had done so much to create, and they pinpoint (in a French context) the terrible effects of capitulation, collusion and collaboration to which the Vichy regime had committed Marrou’s own land of France. Paideia emerges as the ‘one true unshakable value’—a redemptive, salvific, overtly religious absolute which alone can save European humanism in the classical tradition of Hellenistic culture. In the conclusion to Part 2, Marrou returns to the same theme. He writes: Free, utterly free, faced by the crumbling walls of his city and abandoned by his gods, faced with a world with no end to it and an empty heaven, Hellenistic man looked vainly for something to belong to, some star to guide his life—and his only solution was to turn in upon himself and look there for the principle of all his actions… (226) This is not a discussion of the fifth century or the fourth but of the existentialist crisis of Europe in 1945, and it very clearly presages the existentialist ascendancy of the French academy in the following decades. Marrou worries that such a turn inwards is ‘narrowing’ and ‘dangerous’. He claims that ‘classical education provides the materia prima for a higher human type than had hitherto been known’ (226) but that this was rarely the case in the Hellenistic world. ‘Classical humanism was able to lead to—and did in fact lead to—a higher kind of greatness by putting itself in the service of a higher kind of cause, to which the human person was willing to consecrate himself and thus find fulfillment in self-transcendence… first at the service of the state, the state of Rome… and then later, when the empire became Christian, it put itself at the service of God’ (226). Again the moves are complex. The story is presented as historical and the history is that of the triumphant rise of the Catholic Church as the apogee of all that is good in antiquity. But it is also an allegory for the present—that is, humanism and culture in the service of ‘a higher kind of cause’ by people consecrated to this vocation will be the only means for redeeming the shattered present of crumbling walls and an empty heaven. In terms of ideological poetics, Marrou outclasses even Werner Jaeger. Some Final Thoughts Let us stand back from these specific discussions of the 1940s and return to the problem with which I began. Paideia is a given in the study of antiquity—a key cultural assumption for ancient literature, history and the social relations of the elite as well as those that aspired to join the elite, both in the Roman empire and in the late antique world. Yet no substantive definitions have been supplied—nor has the concept (as opposed to the mechanisms and technologies of its delivery) been explained—since the seminal works of Jaeger and Marrou. These, I submit, are utterly fascinating in their intricate negotiation of ancestral idealism with the many difficult realities of contemporary history and its disastrous betrayal of anything that humanism could mean in the years between 1933 and 1945. They are both redemptive and deeply apologetic accounts. Jaeger in 1934 is attempting to revive a cultural world by retrieving its ancient roots after the crisis of the first World War and the end of Germany’s imperial moment, and during the interminable economic and political Author's personal copy 150 J. Elsner crises of the Weimar Republic; it may be there is an element of bidding for the cultural high ground within the emergent politics of the new regime.53 His apologetics in the second and third volumes are for a system of Bildung slaughtered by its own progeny even as he wrote its defense and antique justification. Marrou’s book is a redemptive recalibration of humanism away from German Kultur to French culture and to the Roman church in the aftermath of the cataclysm of Europe. Neither (despite the deep learning of both authors) can be taken as a philologically or historically impartial account, or in that sense as a fair—let alone objective—presentation of the topic on which both have had so much influence. Interestingly, the avoidance of a general or substantive and definitional discussion of paideia and the replacement of such an approach with more narrowly instrumentalist arguments, may be traced to the work of another great émigré scholar, the German Classicist Rudolf Pfeiffer (1889–1979), whose age, Classical education and personal friendship with Wilamowitz puts him close to Jaeger (as well as the fact that he went into exile in part on account of a Jewish wife) but whose Roman Catholicism and scholarly alignment with issues of Hellenistic culture and reception marks him as much closer to Marrou.54 Pfeiffer’s great project on the history of Classical scholarship, begun during his Oxford sojourn of 1937–51 and published in 1968, 55 which might in principle have been a history of elite paideia, systematically avoids general claims and focuses on specific scholarly takes and critical interests.56 Pfeiffer’s own long commitment to humanism—diffracted through a post-Classical and ultimately Christian lens—is very like Marrou’s although without the French existentialist tinge of Marrou’s own formation and without the grandeur that Marrou’s model of education as ‘something perfected’ (p. 99) shares with Jaeger.57 It too is heavily inflected, through to the 1960s, with reflections redolent of the war. Consider the one passage that explicitly discusses paideia in the History of Classical Scholarship: 53 This is Calder’s point in Calder (1983) 105–113—see also Fleming (2012) 86 and 102—and in my view it has some traction. But Fleming is too extreme when she speaks of ‘Werner Jaeger’s Nazism’ (102), although it is hard to disagree with her comments on his ‘academic opportunism’ or his ‘willingness to adapt his humanism to the aims of the new regime’ (102). Initial gestures of accommodation, even collusion, are not in themselves statements of conviction (especially when later retracted on second thoughts)—but they remain deeply uncomfortable especially in one who seeks the ethical and cultural high ground. Something similar, in terms of a hint of accommodating a newly ascendant politics not wholly compatible with the author’s prime or previous positions, may be observable in Erwin Panofsky’s great essay on art and description of 1932: see J. Elsner and K. Lorenz, ‘The Genesis of Iconology’ Critical Inquiry 38 (2012), 483–512, esp. 510-12. 54 On Pfeiffer, see H. Lloyd Jones, Blood for the Ghosts, London, 1982, 261-70 and C. Kaesser, ‘Rudolf Pfeiffer. A Catholic Classicist in the Age of Protestant Altertumswissenschaft’ online at http:// www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDcQFjAB&url=http%3A% 2F%2Fwww.princeton.edu%2F~pswpc%2Fpdfs%2Fkaesser%2F090906.pdf&ei=-qeoUequI9D70gXghY BA&usg=AFQjCNF7enAqMuJbeJ3Pnb_1huS8-qRm3w&bvm=bv.47244034,d.d2k 55 R. Pfeiffer, History of Classical Scholarship. From the Beginnings to the End of the Hellenistic Age, Oxford, 1968. 56 Jaeger’s Paideia receives sparing reference but see e.g. Pfeiffer (1968) 17, n.2 and 48, n.2; Marrou’s History of Education, by contrast, is frequently enough cited to make the list of works abbreviated at the front. On one occasion, Pfeiffer agrees with Jaeger against Marrou (on Isocrates) at p. 49, n.6. 57 See e.g. R. Pfeiffer, ‘Von den geschichtlichen Begegnungen der kritischen Philologie mit dem Humanismus. Eine Skizze’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 28 (1938) 191–209, repr. in Ausgewählte Schriften, Munich, 1960, 159-74, esp. 162-7 for Christian-inflected humanism. Author's personal copy Paideia: Ancient Concept and Modern Reception 151 The paideia of Alexandria, with the qualification enkuklikos, was thus not identical with the lofty ideal of Greek culture in Thucydides and Isocrates, but meant hardly more than ‘general education’, a syllabus of various subjects… From Alexandria, the exiled and penniless grammatikoi spread their techne over the islands and the cities and stimulated intellectual life… (p. 253). That last sentence about ‘exiled and penniless’ scholars seems much less a factual statement located in antiquity than a post-war self-portrait of the refugees from Nazi Germany. These exiles bring a touch of intellectual life to dark times and places, always conscious of their secondariness, no longer purveying lofty ideals, 58 while paideia itself is reduced to little more than a ‘syllabus of various subjects’, shorn of the high claims with which both Jaeger and Marrou had endowed it. The picture—whether of antiquity or of contemporary modernity—is bleak. What does this entail? First, I am not at all sure that even now we really know what paideia meant in antiquity or, rather, at different times in a changing antiquity. There is a unitary, holistic and arguably monolithic idealism at constant play in both Jaeger and Marrou, which remains the case whenever paideia is invoked by modern scholarship as an explanation of cultural background, which is its most common function in its current use. That strategic and rhetorical employment of the concept as a deus ex machina to justify a broader set of generalizations and historical, sociological or institutional claims about antiquity, is worrying because it functions (as indeed the concept was meant to function in both Jaeger and Marrou) as an unquestioned good and as a canonical justification for whatever claim is being made. Effectively the concept of paideia has no defined propositional meaning in its usual usage save as the ideal goal of an educational process and the description of that process as a good in itself: this is precisely the continuing legacy of the approaches of both Jaeger and Marrou, and a result of the power of their accounts, despite the profound differences between them about what the ideal might be. Clearly the ancient meanings of paideia need revisiting. But to make a new study and to know the term again, now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, is no less an ideologically fraught process than the project of the 30s and 40s of the last century. Antiquity does not exist in its pastness except in the image and reflection of the present, as the contemporary world studies and rethinks it. But certainly some of the strongly held assumptions of the communis opinio (for instance, that culture is the same as education, that its pursuit is an obvious good in its own right, that its acquisition and possession were at the centre of elite social-relations in the Roman empire and late antiquity) look at least as much like reflections of German nineteenthcentury attitudes as they do of what the ancient world was really like. Even Marrou, in redefining paideia as not-Bildung, was effectively in debt to this Jaegerian model. The ideal of paideia in both authors (and also in Pfeiffer) stands against a sense of contemporary cultural collapse and it marries itself to the myth of Greek cultural 58 Exilic scholarship is strikingly complex in the different tones in which it speaks of its subjects—from the heroic (largely maintained by Jaeger) to the modest (as in Pfeiffer). This may have something to do with different levels of personal experience, professional success and economic hardship among the émigrés in their exile. For reflections on this in the case of the German Jewish Classical archaeologist, Karl LehmannHartleben, see N. Bryson, ‘Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum’ in S. Goldhill and R. Osborne (eds.), Art and Text in Ancient Greek Culture, Cambridge 1994, 255-83, esp. 274-83. Author's personal copy 152 J. Elsner identity as surviving through paideia following the collapse of Greek political influence and self-determination after the fifth century BC. Just as Jaeger imagined himself continuing the Berlin school of Wilamowitz at Harvard, in parallel perhaps with Pfeiffer’s fantasy of Greeks purveying the ‘techne… that stimulated intellectual life’ in the islands and ultimately in Rome, so—one may ask—is the ubiquitous presence of paideia, and the avoidance of an interrogation of its substance in modernity, a form of contemporary response to the perceived collapse of our own systems of cultural and educational values? And does this help explain the recent surge of interest in the ‘Second Sophistic’ as an oblique commentary on our own times? At issue, I submit, is the key question of the object of our studies. Most of the time, as Classicists, we persuade ourselves (as both Jaeger and Marrou surely often did) that we are throwing light on the past, that our experience is part of a progressive clarification of the realities of antiquity through learning, scholarship and judicious argument that offers a better grasp or a clearer picture of some aspect of the ancient world than was available before, even though (since so many things are lost and so much of what survives is in fragments) that picture is always and inevitably partial. This view—magnificently idealist and a superb driver for the intensification of further research—is nonetheless flawed. From hindsight we can see that so much of the light cast on paideia, for example, by both Jaeger and Marrou, was nothing but a personal and to some extent collective response in specific circumstances to contemporary history. It is profoundly and undoubtedly the voicing of modern ideology cast as ancient history, dressed up in and to some extent defended by the ‘street-cred’ of commanding the cultural canon. I have no idea what is the correct resolution or balance within the academic enterprise between the myth of an ancient reality and the expression of current ideology—nor even if a single correct approach could possibly exist. But I do think that we need to be much clearer and more selfconscious about our contemporary drives, their strengths and their inevitable fallibilities. Acknowledgments I am grateful to Milette Gaifman, Constanze Güthenke, Stephen Harrison, John Ma, Sebastian Matzner, Jim Porter and David Tracy for their discussion. This paper was read to the lunchtime seminar of the Centre for Greek and Roman Antiquity at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and I thank its members for their participation and suggestions. At IJCT, my thanks are due especially to Dan Orrells for his editor’s comments, to Carolien van der Gaag on the editorial front, and to the Journal’s two anonymous readers for some acute suggestions.