Introduction
Orality and Note-Taking
Theodor Mommsen never completed his History of Rome. The first three volumes were published between 1854 and 1856, but Mommsen never published an account of imperial history up to the empire’s decline. Though the scholarly world waited impatiently for the appearance of the volume IV that Mommsen continued to promise, he felt he had a problem with inscriptions and with sources in general and devoted himself to the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. He also disliked the scandals and sexual anecdotes of what he considered a degenerate age; Mommsen lost his emotional commitment to write about this period. However, teaching imperial history radically differed from completing and publishing the history of the empire. Mommsen lectured on Roman history at the University of Berlin for a quarter-century. Half of the lectures dealt with late antiquity, and he declared that if he could live his life over, he would concentrate on that age.
His students also copied down his lectures. Though the drafts of Mommsen’s lectures are not extant, in 1980 the German historian Alexander Demandt discovered a complete transcript of his lectures covering imperial history up to late antiquity in a secondhand Nuremberg bookshop. Part I consisted of three notebooks transcribed by his student Paul Hensel, who later became a professor of philosophy at Erlangen. Paul also took notes down for parts II and III, while the last two volumes (existing in book form) were copied over in a different hand—that of Paul’s father, Sebastian—and contained cartoon drawings of father and son.1 Both Paul and Sebastian attended the lectures from eight to nine in the morning. After a course of lectures, they both wrote to Mommsen to express their admiration for his magnificent teaching and to ask if he could reserve them seats right in the front. They declared that Mommsen reconstructed a lost world, bringing to life for them the events of the age of the emperors. Never in their student careers had they ever heard or experienced something so powerful. Using the notes of the two Hensels, Demandt effectively published Mommsen’s History of the Empire.
Just as Demandt did for Mommsen, we can try to study the notes from students of ancient philosophy. Some philosophers in antiquity chose not to write down and publish many of their lectures but delivered their words only for the benefit of their students, who wrote them down. We will see that Aristotle produced works for publication written in a good prose style, but except for some fragments, these did not come down to us. Many of his treatises were instead transmitted as records taken down by students; their mistakes and repetitions point to live speech. Some scholars have contended that these works do not transmit Aristotle’s actual words, but we can call them the “raw Aristotle,” as with Mommsen’s lectures.2
Aristotle, in those texts that reproduce his actual lectures, referred not to readers but to listeners who were present. The title of this book, Listening to the Philosophers: Notes on Notes, shows the implicit connection between orality and note-taking. It also refers to an essay of Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures, which was dedicated to a young man who was starting to study philosophy.3That essay’s main theme was proper behavior in the lecture room, where some students did not have a true appreciation of their teacher’s message. We will see that some of the students we will encounter in this book were also indifferent to their teachers’ words and were deaf to philosophy. Yet others—for example, Arrian—listened with fervor and reported what they heard.
From the first century BCE to the sixth century CE, notes written by students who recorded lectures of their teachers of philosophy are preserved on papyri and in various kinds of manuscripts. They provide information on the curriculum, the role and identity of teachers and students, their relationship, and the formation and use of books. All of these are subjects that have been explored only very cursorily; in this book I will analyze these issues in detail and shed light on ancient classes of philosophy in order to clarify the ways in which notes and notetakers functioned. The extant students’ notes that I study in the following parts come from antiquity. They are notes taken down by Philodemus of Gadara from the lectures of his teacher Zeno in the first century BCE, notes of Arrian recording the Discourses of Epictetus in the second century CE, and notes of students of Didymus the Blind in the fourth and Olympiodorus in the sixth century. Working back from these notes, it is possible to understand the methods and practices of what was originally an orally conducted education, and in particular an education in philosophy.
First and foremost, this book is about education in philosophy. Secondarily, it concerns the formation of some philosophical texts, rather than philosophy per se. Here I am eminently interested in educational practices and in the oral and written methods followed in higher education, especially rhetoric and philosophy. Many aspects of ancient pedagogy, such as the role of oral delivery and the value of annotations in the course of classes, still remain obscure. Attention to these still-unexplored areas will enrich our knowledge not only of how classes were conducted but also of how lectures and commentaries were preserved. We will connect with the classroom through students’ written notes and not through theoretical pronouncements such as those of Quintilian or Plutarch. This will complement what we know from the occasional texts on education and narratives that are part of rhetorical texts and epistolary communications. We will familiarize ourselves with learning methods and students’ means of recording their teachers’ voices and producing their own books and commentaries.
Written texts in the ancient Greco-Roman world were never free from the constraints of orality. They were sometimes composed by an author, dictated to a scribe, and then read and commented on, mostly aloud.4The written and spoken worlds were closely intertwined, so that some philosophers who delivered lectures allowed listeners and students to record notes as Mommsen’s students did. Ancient educational practices are associated with the way in which much philosophy has come down to us. From the time of Plato, Aristotle, and even before, people rushed to lectures to hear the philosophers’ words, ask questions, and discuss. And not only philosophers: in the second century CE, audiences also attended the eminent doctor Galen’s lectures and scientific demonstrations en masse; there, listeners took written notes that they sometimes published under their own names. Galen resisted that trend and even tried to stop it, to no avail. In short, this habit of taking notes at public lectures was widespread and did much to promote knowledge of the subjects in question.
In late antique philosophical teaching in particular, writing by the philosophers who lectured in class was a last resort that could never fully replace the living, spoken word. Education was based on the spoken word and the interactions of teachers and students, both of whom engaged in clarifications and questions and answers. Most philosophical production consisted of oral discussions put into writing as preparation for further classes or notes when philosophers-in-training and students recorded their teachers’ words. Some texts that were initially written down were later read in class, producing commentaries and generating students’ notes.
And yet it is important to keep something in mind: for Socrates, Plato, and the Stoic Chrysippus, philosophical instruction mainly consisted of preparing students for argumentation and methods of thought. In later times, when written texts acquired a new importance and commentaries became the usual basis for teaching, freedom of instruction and lively discussions endured as methods to inculcate paideia. Besides clarifying obscure parts of classical and authoritative texts, personal training in the classroom continued to focus on individual growth and spiritual progress, so that exegesis brought benefit to the soul. In this period, teachers and students continued to engage in discussions; extant questions and answers based on ancient authoritative works and communicated by notes give us the flavor of teachings and transmit the voices of the classroom. We will see that dialogues present in commentaries were part of daily instruction. The teachers’ answers urged pupils to take full advantage of their words and of the texts on which they commented, also aiming to improve and change the students’ lives. Epictetus’s Discourses, which consisted of notes taken down during lectures, show vividly that young men’s interactions with their teacher were supposed to lead to fundamental spiritual progress. While the urgent, exhortative words of Epictetus’s teachings show a rare immediacy, it is more difficult to identify the personal voice of a philosopher through the commentaries of late antiquity that focused mainly on Plato and Aristotle.5
That said, it is fundamental to realize that education in the imperial period typically focused on a text, and reading and exegesis could also be highly technical. It is not equally clear in Epictetus whether this was also the case. His Discourses taken down by Arrian do not include discussions on texts; thus his theoretical teaching has not survived in transmission. It is possible that it was confined to afternoon classes that Arrian did not cover, but we also have to consider that the young Arrian of Nicomedia made some choices in how he portrayed the echo of the philosopher’s voice. Reliance on a text will be evident in part III of this book. Over time, texts had become difficult to understand as the language barrier became stronger. Young, apprenticed philosophers needed to know the authorities, especially Aristotle and Plato.
Notwithstanding, “to learn philosophy, even by reading and commenting upon texts, meant both to learn a way of life and to practice it.”6 Texts were supposed to produce some transformation in young men’s lives, and spiritual benefit had to derive from exegesis. The Stoics made a distinction between theoretical instruction and philosophy as the practice of virtues, logic, physics, and ethics. We know of the existence of manuals on spiritual exercises (askesis), but these are lost, and it is likely that these exercises were transmitted orally as part of teaching. Chrysippus addressed an attentive student who was carefully taking down his hypomnemata. He did not consider him ready for philosophy: “You also have to be ready to apply the teachings of philosophy to your way of life and live by them.”7 The eminent and pioneering French philosopher Pierre Hadot helpfully divided philosophy into three parts.8 The first two parts consisted of theoretical philosophy, but the third part, which did not exclude the other two, included a pedagogical dimension, the succession of steps needed to achieve mastery, and the various phases of paideia.
This book argues that the notes students made when listening to their masters’ lectures communicate powerfully the notions of teaching and learning that we would otherwise only know cursorily. Notes recorded in class give us the possibility of listening to students’ and teachers’ actual voices and allow us to study contextual elements familiar to us from our own school days.9 We have all taken notes in the past, and we continue to do so in our own idiosyncratic ways. When notes are drawn from an ephemeral source, such as a lecture or a meeting, they often remain the sole testimony of that event; this is why they are precious. We shall see that this was a common characteristic of ancient notebooks, which derived not from any fixed text but from lectures, which could change course at any time and vanish. Far from being disappointing pieces of literature, these notes instead allow us glimpses of texts that were not yet edited, of writing habits, and of routines of everyday life. They are particularly valuable, moreover, because without them we would not know of important cultural practices.
First, a word of caution regarding concepts like the continuity of human experience, that is, attempts to recognize aspects of ourselves and our world in those who inhabited it so long ago.10 Among historic customs, practices, and behaviors that may confound us, we can recognize much that remains familiar. The seduction of recognition must be resisted to a degree, and likewise we must challenge the assumption that writing in all forms, then and now, is fundamentally similar. And yet, for centuries students have taken notes in class using various writing implements and materials, and for centuries readers have hovered over books, giving their full attention to texts by marking them in some way. We now use asterisks and scribble observations (complete or incomplete) in the margins, establishing a personal rapport with—and sometimes defiling—something written. By mingling ourselves with a text and its author, we are choosing not to read passively. We are intrigued by the annotated books of famous figures, as if we could capture their souls through their meticulously handwritten notes. Michel Foucault believed that copybooks of notes were very personal and could give almost psychoanalytic insights.11 Notes on ancient materials like papyri or ostraca are unique because they reveal the idiosyncrasies of those who wrote them, and yet each kind of note-taking has an attractive, personal flavor that does not equally emerge from finished texts. Writing in 2012, Mark O’Connell noticed an increased degree of contemporary interest in marginalia, stemming from nostalgia for tangible books; this resulted from the rise of e-books, which cannot easily be annotated.12 Today, notes might consist of ink on paper or various electronic alternatives and might be placed in the margins of books, in notebooks, or on random pieces of paper.
Further, we generally consider ancient texts in the complete or fragmentary forms in which they were transmitted, but other types of texts such as drafts, alternate versions, and notes have also emerged from the Greek and Roman worlds. Genetic criticism, a fascinating theoretical discipline begun in France in 1979, can help us think about such texts.13 Its adherents view literary and subliterary works not as static and negligible pieces of writing but as part of a writing process that starts at the moment a work is conceived.14 Papyrologists inspect drafts, corrections, and different versions in hopes of understanding a writer’s point of departure. The origin of a book in the author’s mind is in itself unreachable, but the process of reconstruction in stages imbues the book itself with new meaning. When writing takes place, it may initially appear in different forms, such as notes or drafts, which may result in different versions of a text.
It is reasonable to suppose that people usually used notes in their writing endeavors in antiquity, just as in modern times. One of the basic differences between ancient and modern annotators is how they store information. While reading neurologist Oliver Sacks’s memoir, On the Move: A Life,15I was struck by the author’s note-taking habits. He recorded information obsessively and produced multiple books of notes that helped him in the composition of his volumes, derived from reading or personal reflections. Once he suddenly jumped out of the water during his daily swim around New York’s City Island to record a thought, and then he continued to swim. Taking down a large number of usable annotations requires an agile mind. As he grew older, Sacks started to trust his memory to a lesser extent and made use of a stenographer to keep a record of his thoughts.
Oliver Sacks is certainly not the only modern author to use notes as a memory aid and to compose books. Many scholars still do so, penciling their books so heavily that they produce miniature commentaries. When I purchased a Teubner edition of Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s Opuscula online, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the front page bore the name of its previous owner, a renowned classics scholar, still living, who had heavily annotated the text. His notes filled expanses of blank space in the book, written in the margins horizontally or vertically, and like an ancient catena surrounded sections of text concerning certain writers such as Demosthenes, who was an object of great attention. Some of these notes contained references to other authors or made grammatical and syntactical points; others commented on a passage, while still others posed questions. We will examine ancient marginalia in part III. We will also see that ancient authors such as Galen and Augustine filled their margins with notes whose interpretation sometimes caused problems.
The topic of note-taking in antiquity encompasses a large quantity of materials. No comprehensive study of this subject for the Greek and Roman worlds has previously been undertaken. With some exceptions (especially that of Quintilian), I focus on Greek writers.16 Roman writers were more prone to disclosing the articulations of their work, and this is a subject that has already attracted attention.17 However, Greek writers also deserve to be taken into account, despite their tendency to be less generous with this information. For pragmatic reasons and to focus on the clearest examples, I have limited myself to select cases. For example, I will not include the second part of Libanius’s Autobiography (Or. 1), which lacks unity and a guiding theme and takes the form of an ensemble of rambling notes in roughly chronological order.
Furthermore, the process of categorizing instances of note-taking into groups—such as notes that informed literary works and annotations that responded to traveling, reading, listening, or thinking—is also somewhat arbitrary, because these categories often overlap. I will not include in this work ancient doxography, a formal genre identified by modern scholarship that comprises descriptions of tenets and ancient philosophers’ views. Originally, some doxographical texts were derived from notes that philosophers and would-be philosophers jotted down, but most doxographical literature depended on older doxographical literature. Diogenes Laertius cited many of the sources.18 In areas other than antiquity, more attention is devoted nowadays to the practice of note-taking versus a finished work. A recent case concerns the sixteen thousand pages of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks with doodles in the margins. They had been examined before but not with the same depth. This investigation has since revealed the connection between his painting and scientific endeavors.19
This book is divided into three parts, which are in turn subdivided. Part I: Ancient Annotations in Context comprises four chapters. Chapter 1, “Notes and Notetakers,” explores the general use of notes in antiquity and introduces the subject, devoting initial attention to the value of note-taking as an informational tool and as a writing method. It is valuable for this study, even though the evidence is sometimes anecdotal. This topic is not well known, and finding mentions of authors’ general use of notes requires a special alertness because authors rarely alluded to their working practices. Lucian and Plutarch are almost alone among Greek writers in explicitly stating that they gathered notes before engaging in writing endeavors, but their testimony suggests that ancient philosophers used this method, probably often.20
We also do not know exactly what the students, who are the protagonists of the rest of the book, did with their notes and whether these helped and encouraged them to produce their own texts, as Libanius’s speeches gave birth to students’ declamations.21 It is a reasonable guess that those who had the ambition to become philosophers often did so. The aspiring philosopher who left the class of Epictetus thinking that he was ready to become a full educator must have used his notes from the lectures to produce new works. Some information about using notes taken in school to create further compositions comes in the chapters of part I, starting with chapter 2, “Taking Notes in Class.” Notes were widely used in rhetoric for composing both declamations and speeches. Orators, moreover, brought notes into court and when they delivered epideixeis.
Chapter 3 covers “Students’ Annotations in Philosophy.” It illuminates the performances of some philosophers and philosophers-in-training who took advantage of notes. I will devote special attention to the school of Aristotle, since some of his works can be regarded as students’ lecture notes. After that, I look at the evidence concerning other schools of philosophy. There is, however, an essential difference between the pedagogical evidence considered in part I and the rest of the book. The first part considers notes as they are revealed by the literary sources and as they inform the practice, without including an examination of actual texts that in fact are not extant. The rest of the book covers some philosophical texts that are transmitted and directly show the importance of notes in teaching and learning.
Chapter 4 examines a specialized use of annotations (notae) by stenographers, who became especially popular in the late antique Greek world. While stenographers began operating in the Roman world in the time of the Republic, in the Greek world it was only later in the period that people used them to take down dictated letters and treatises and to record sermons. An evaluation of stenographers’ work is important on its own merits but also in light of what follows in the book. In two of the educational texts that I consider, those of the second-century philosopher Epictetus and the fourth-century Christian philosopher Didymus the Blind, a central question that needs to be answered is whether it was students or stenographers who recorded these lectures.
Part II: The Voice of Epictetus is devoted to the notes that Arrian took while his teacher, the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, lectured at his school in Nicopolis, in Epirus. It is divided into two chapters: “Epictetus as an Educator and a Man” and “Epictetus and the World of Culture.” It discusses the transmission and origin of the text that tradition attributed to the historian of Alexander, Arrian, when he was young and attending Epictetus’s school. The question of whether Arrian had recorded the text himself by using stenography or with the help of stenographers, or entirely redid and composed the text in the manner of what Xenophon had done for Socrates, has been debated for a very long time without a satisfactory solution. I argue, however, that an answer to the dilemma exists, namely that stenographers were not involved in recording Epictetus’s lectures, because the resulting text would look entirely different if they had been. As tradition has upheld, the text consisted of notes that Arrian had jotted down, although with some cuts. The text of the Discourses contains identifiable features that indicate it consists of notes that Arrian jotted down. Arrian recorded the lectures without excessive discomfort because the philosopher did not maintain a fast pace; he also employed various methods, one of which was abbreviations. The papyri show that abbreviations appear not only in documents but also in literary texts.
In part II my interest does not lie in specifically highlighting Epictetus’s philosophy, although it will occasionally be necessary to mention some Stoic principles, particularly when referring to the school curriculum. Instead, I examine how Epictetus’s school functioned, what kind of teacher he was, and how he tried to inculcate principles in his students that would persist beyond the classroom and highlight a way of life for them. In chapter 6 of part II, I describe how the school of Epictetus offers many angles of observation that have never been studied before, including his attitude toward the contemporaneous cultural world. Arrian’s notes are unique insofar as they illuminate the philosopher’s classes and his use of rhetoric, literature, myth, and the theater. Although he was polemical with regard to rhetoric and the Second Sophistic, Epictetus adopted some rhetorical features and approaches in his dialogues. The notes, which probably were never edited in antiquity, also reveal the nuances of Epictetus’s often-harsh relationships with his students. The exacting “therapy” that Epictetus practiced was not forgiving toward young men who were still yoked to the type of mechanical education they had previously received and who seemingly made no effort to reach a true understanding of books and of themselves.
Part III: Recording Lectures of Philosophers has a composite nature and is divided into four chapters. After an introduction on ancient commentaries (chapter 7), this part looks at texts that were transmitted and recorded by students in the form of notes.
In chapter 8 I examine the text On Frank Criticism, which contains notes that Philodemus of Gadara took during the first-century BCE lectures of Zeno of Sidon in Athens. The papyrus roll, though lacunose, gives a powerful view of educational methods, including punishments and the psychagogue’s method of exhortation. Teachers and students applied frank criticism to correct others; parrhesia was a duty that, in theory, did not involve jealousy or competition and was an expression of friendship. A new examination of more fragments of the text shows that this practice was quite troublesome.
In chapter 9 I take into account the fourth-century school of Didymus the Blind in Alexandria, in particular two commentaries consisting of notes taken down during his lectures and containing questions and answers. Didymus was not simply a grammarian, as has recently been claimed, but rather an educator who needed to cater to young men of various educational backgrounds and levels. In this case, too, I argue that stenographers were not involved; rather, a student (or students) of Didymus recorded his classes, in the process introducing mistakes and leaving spaces between words, a practice common in school settings.
Chapter 10 concerns records of philosophical lectures delivered in the sixth century. In particular, a course on Plato’s First Alcibiades creates many questions, as the philosopher Olympiodorus allowed students to take down apo phones, from his own voice. Why did Olympiodorus, and philosophers like him, allow these lectures to circulate, in an apparent show of generosity? Are some of the mistakes and imprecisions necessarily the fault of students, or could they derive from Olympiodorus’s own carelessness? Is the resulting text the work of a single student who recorded the voice of the philosopher, as scholars have claimed, or of many in collaboration? I argue that the reality that several students took down the philosopher’s words is one of the reasons for the supposed “generosity” of Olympiodorus and explains why he preferred not to intrude. In the margins of the text of the commentary, many students’ drawings and further notes are preserved, many of which are interesting and have never before been studied.
Listening to the Philosophers reveals why it is imperative to understand the fundamental question of what makes a book. Drafts of later published texts, incomplete works, and texts with annotations by students recording the spoken words of their teachers are all examples of what can be called “books.” Thus the examples that follow will uncover how notes are not only objects of pedantic scholarly attention but also objects that illuminate cultural and educational routines in antiquity. They preserve works of great value that have come to us not as fixed texts but as texts in evolution and as more spontaneous pieces of writing, providing a uniquely vivid glimpse into daily life and the classes of ancient philosophers. It is captivating to explore texts that plunge us into ancient culture and to hear the voices of eminent ancient educators, especially when notes capture it all with authenticity.
1. Cf. in part III the marginalia in the notes taken from Olympiodorus’s lecture.
2. See the introduction of Beresford 2020, xi–xv at xiv.
3. De recta ratione audiendi, Peri akouein. Mor. 37–48.
4. The sophist Libanius, for example, always wrote his speeches by hand and had to employ a scribe only when his arthritis became unmanageable. Or. 1.232 shows that he always penned his texts until his old age; cf. also Or. 3.5.
5. Thus, for example, to recognize the efforts of Olympiodorus to guide and inspire the future conduct of his wards is not easy. See part III.
6. P. Hadot 1995; 2002, 146–57 at 153. See also P. Hadot 1990, 496–98. Bénatouïl (2009), who maintains that his own approach is not theoretical or pedagogic but an application of doctrine to a life, does not mention Hadot but basically draws from him. Cooper (2012), who gave a major reinterpretation of ancient philosophy, also supported the view that philosophy was teaching how to live and explored this concept in Socrates and later thinkers. He disagreed with Hadot (pp. 11–14) on some points, especially about the existence and interpretation of spiritual exercises. The three topoi of Epictetus that I cite at the beginning of part II were the basis for a philosophy that was not theoretical and “philosophical” but taught how to live.
7. Stobaeus 2.7.11. Johannes Stobaeus, who lived perhaps in the early fifth century CE, was a compiler of extracts from Greek authors.
8. See P. Hadot 1979.
9. Sellars (2021, 20) considers the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius an ensemble of thoughts and quotations redacted in a notebook without order. Systematic note-taking was very popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and later started to fade. Notes have continued to exist but are drawn more sporadically.
10. Schoeler 2010, 1. See also Bagnall 2011, 1–5. There is a contemporary critique of presentism.
11. Blair 2004.
12. O’Connell 2012.
13. The main journal of the movement is Genesis. Literature in English is scarce; the best general book is Bryant 2002. See also Deppman et al. 2004. Cf. Cribiore 2019.
14. Genetic critics explore rare book and manuscript libraries and search for autograph manuscripts. So, for example, in order to study certain great nineteenth-century French writers, some scholars have composed genetic dossiers into which they have fitted every kind of writing by the author in question, including letters and notes.
15. Sacks 2015.
16. The translations of texts are my own unless otherwise specified.
17. Cf. Gurd 2012.
18. On doxography, see, e.g., Runia 2016.
19. Fiorani 2020.
20. Unfortunately, we have only one side of the equation because precise correspondence between a text and the notes that contributed to it is not at our disposal.
21. Cf. Or. 3.16.