Foreword

Raffaella Cribiore’s accidental death while this book was in press deprived her of the chance to put the final touches on the book as edited, and I have had to try to discern how she would have responded to the queries that are an inevitable part of editing or given the text a final revision before typesetting. I ask the reader’s understanding on her behalf and mine. Her distinctive voice throughout remains unmistakable, as it was throughout her scholarly work. When she came to graduate study at Columbia University, after an interruption in her education as the result of a move to New York and years of raising her family, it was with a first-rate training in the classical languages at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan and the beginnings of a knowledge of papyrology from her work with the great scholar Orsolina Montevecchi.

Her passion for studying ancient education was there from the outset, and it defined her entire scholarly career. Her revised dissertation (Writing, Teachers, and Students in Graeco-Roman Egypt) was published three years after she received the doctorate in 1993 and quickly achieved classic status. (She was proud of the large number of copies stolen from libraries!) It was a revolutionary achievement, the first study of school texts based on an investigation of the materials of these texts and their handwriting. She showed in it the attention to practical detail that marks all of her work, but also an ability to enter sympathetically into the world she studied; she could envisage the students’ hands as they moved with the pen across the surface of a papyrus or potsherd. At the same time, she understood that this down-to-earth approach needed a broader context in the theory and practice of ancient education. There followed over the next twenty years four more single-author books, beginning with Gymnastics of the Mind, which won the Goodwin Award for 2004, and continuing with three books on Libanius. There was also a joint volume of ours collecting and studying Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt. She had an acute eye in looking at handwriting; I learned much from working with her even if I could never achieve the same level of insight.

Listening to the Philosophers: Notes on Notes is the logical continuation of these investigations, moving from the focus on rhetoric that occupied her attention for many years to look at philosophy and philosophers; advancing in wisdom, Epictetus would doubtless say. The reader familiar with her earlier work will perceive the imaginative ability to see what is really going on in a text, particularly at the boundary between document and literature; for this is where student notes belong, just as the school papyri fall into a zone between documentary and literary papyrology. It is not to be her last book: a volume of school texts in Coptic, preserved on ostraca in the Columbia University collection and coedited with Jennifer Cromwell, is currently under review. With it she returns to the raw materials that sparked her interest thirty-five years ago as a graduate student, the original products of teaching and learning.

One further result of her insistence on understanding concretely the situations in which students learned is also still to appear. Her death occurred just before a colloquium at the Fondation Hardt of which she was the co-organizer with Daniel Anderson, devoted to the spaces of education. Her contribution to the resulting volume, which her co-organizer will edit, looks at three physical contexts for late antique education that still exist, all of which she knew firsthand: Apollonia in the Cyrenaica, Kom el-Dikka at Alexandria, and the school at Amheida, ancient Trimithis, in Egypt’s Dakhla Oasis. She was a member of the excavation team there, enjoying, perhaps unpredictably, the inelegant life of a member of an excavation team in the desert. Her range of engagement with ancient education was unique and irreplaceable.

—Roger Bagnall, New York University, September 2023