Ancient ethics are all the rage these days. Books and programs abound that will guide the seeker in cultivating Stoic disciplines or applying Peripatetic codes. Ovid can help you move on after a breakup. Pliny can advise you about managing your wealth. Cicero will improve your humor or electability, while Plutarch will sharpen your leadership skills. Horace will help you find contentment, and Galen will offer you the benefits of ancient medicine. Princeton University Press began issuing selections of Greek and Latin texts in new translations in 2012; the pace of publication has recently quickened. Top classicists such as James Romm and Stephen Harrison will serve as your guides. Most of the thirty-one books the press has released so far are therapeutic in purpose, although some—How to Stop a Conspiracy or How to Run a Country—could help you help others, or perhaps even save liberal democracy.
Unlike the titles in the Princeton series, many of today’s Stoic initiation books offer not only timely advice but also a new way to live. One prolific author, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci, describes his journey to Stoicism as happening “not by way of Damascus” or through the study of classics but as result of his long search for “more coherent ways to understand the world (through science) and better choices for living my life (through philosophy).” Having been turned away from his Catholicism by Bertrand Russell, Pigliucci found in Stoicism a “metaphysics with a spiritual dimension” that is “eminently practical”—a “dynamic combination of reflecting on theoretical precepts, reading inspirational texts, and engaging in meditation, mindfulness, and other spiritual exercises.”11xMassimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living (London, England: Rider Books, 2017), 2–6.
Provided with a diverse menu of Western and other ethical traditions and accepting the common assumption that human progress will extend indefinitely, why are so many people now returning to ancient sources, even if they can be harmonized with the late modern world as “rational” and “compatible with science”? Part of the answer lies in the thinness of ethical life in the twenty-first century, reduced as so much of it is to calculations of utility and the maximization of individual happiness. Aristotle and the writer of Proverbs were among the first to notice that the enabling moral quality of courage requires hope. Why risk anything if we have no faith that we are headed somewhere worth going to? Reflecting on that theme in his 2000 book The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope, literary scholar Andrew Delbanco describes the gradual diminution of a nation’s cultural resources:
In the first phase of our [American] civilization, hope was chiefly expressed through a Christian story that gave meaning to suffering and pleasure alike and promised deliverance from death. This story held the imagination largely without challenge for two hundred years. In the second phase, as Christianity came under pressure from Enlightenment rationality, the promise of self-realization was transformed into the idea of citizenship in a sacred union…. Finally, in the third phase—our own—the idea of transcendence has detached itself from any coherent symbology. It continues to be pursued through New Age spirituality, apocalyptic environmentalism, and the “multicultural” search for ancestral roots; but our most conspicuous symbols…are the logos of corporate advertising. Though vivid and ubiquitous, such symbols will never deliver the indispensable feeling that the world does not end at the borders of the self.22xAndrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4–5.
In the twentieth century, the self came to define the goals of nearly all aspects of life: Our careers had to be fulfilling, our marriages had to bring happiness, our religious experiences had to be part of our self-improvement projects, our children became our friends, our communities and our service to them had to give us satisfaction, and our causes often became expressions of our ever-changing identitarian commitments. Yet what Robert Bellah called “expressive individualism,” Charles Taylor named the “authentic self,” and Alasdair MacIntyre labeled “emotivism” has not proved satisfactory.33xRobert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1985); Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1981). We are left longing for a more substantial ethical foundation, if not for ourselves, then for our children, whose largely skills-based education leaves them ill equipped to handle lives increasingly lived online, where anger, shaming, posturing, envy, and pornography reduce the human to the most instrumental, transactional, and consumerist terms.
Formation in Antiquity
The histories and literatures of antiquity can help us address some of our contemporary ethical deficit disorder. But even if we find contemporary sources of ethical formation sorely wanting, or even largely replaced by therapeutic and psychologistic nostrums of “grit” and “resilience,” we should beware of imposing our own understandings on the ancients who could help us. Formation in antiquity was grounded in cultural and historical realities that are a world apart from late modern ones.
To begin with, the ancient models, Greek and Roman, at least, emerged from worlds marked by vast social differences that included staggering wealth disparities. Enslaved persons accounted for perhaps 10 percent of the population in the Roman world; according to historian Kyle Harper, in Rome, “a strong component of slave-based agricultural production” added to “extensive levels of household slavery.”44xKyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275–425 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 61. Literacy in the ancient world was rare, perhaps not exceeding 20 percent for males, though, as we will see, this did not stunt all moral and civic formation for non-elite Greeks and Romans.
Early formation in this world occurred primarily in the household; literate and numerate education for a public career drew from a classical canon aimed at humanitas or paideia; education from the most rudimentary forms to the highest levels of the ethical schools aimed to shape the body and the soul—the “whole person,” in our parlance—for full participation in the life of one’s household, religion, and political community. Recall that Socrates was tried and martyred for corrupting the young. Institutions and their leaders were eager to pass on “their social and intellectual nature…by exercising the qualities through which they created it,”55xWerner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet, vol. 1: Archaic Greece, The Mind of Athens (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1965), xiii. the philosopher Werner Jaeger aptly noted, and aligning those institutions and messages, despite philosophical differences, was a preoccupation across the socioeconomic spectrum, as recently uncovered evidence of popular Roman morality shows.
Aristotle and his predecessors, Socrates and Plato, are typically considered to have led the way in theorizing ethical formation. Aristotle’s theory of virtue—that excellence can be found at the mean between two extremes, which one reaches by habitually choosing the right action for the right reasons at the right time with the right emotions—serves as a paradigm from or against which most other theories either derive or react. Indeed, Aristotle’s theory derives not only from his heroic teacher and mentor, Plato, as is commonly recognized, but also from an antecedent culture that has been too little appreciated.
Aristotle spent some twenty years of his life, starting at age seventeen, under Plato’s tutelage. Familiarity with Plato’s dialogues was a price of entry to the Lyceum or to Peripatos, as Aristotle’s own school was known. (Its adherents were called Peripatetics.) And though Aristotle rarely referred directly to them, he certainly addressed the topics and questions raised in the Dialogues. “The men who introduced the Ideas are friends of mine,” he said in the Nicomachean Ethics (1.6.1), and elsewhere he observed that Plato had “proved it clearly…by his own way of living and his methods of reasoning that man’s goodness and happiness come together.”66xThe translations in this sentence are from Carlo Natali and D.S. Hutchinson, Aristotle: His Life and School (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 21. The second quotation is from Elegiacs to Eudemus; the referent is Plato as argued conclusively in R. Renehan, “Aristotle’s Elegiacs to Eudemus (Fr. 673 Rose 3 = Olymp. in Pl. ‘Gorg.’ Comm. p. 214. 25 Ff. Westerink),” Illinois Classical Studies 16, no. 1/2 (1991): 259–60.
Following in the tradition of apprenticing himself to a famous philosopher, Plato’s star pupil would have known his teacher’s conduct very well, as indeed Plato would have known Socrates’s way of life or the apostles knew Jesus’s. This ancient pedagogy is characteristic of oral cultures in which, as Philip Rieff observed, “knowledge is personal, inward, and best conveyed in conversation—the most civilized art of transaction—between persons and, not least in schools, across generations.”77xPhilip Rieff, The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings, ed. Jonathan B. Imber (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 371. Certain kinds of content and learning exercises can be effectively delivered through technology, i.e., means that do not require human-to-human interaction. But character certainly cannot be formed entirely through technology, though certain aspects of moral knowledge, stories, and authoritative quotations might be available via such media. Formally called maieutic, this form of pedagogy derives its name and meaning from the Greek word for “midwife” or “bringing forth.” It aims at bringing another into being. In the dialogue with fellow philosophers in Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates said of his pupils, “I watch over the labor of their souls, not their bodies.”88xPlato, Theaetetus, ed. Bernard Williams and Myles Burnyeat, trans. M.J. Levett (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1992), 11–12 (150b), μαιεύεσθαι καὶ τῷ τὰς ψυχὰς αὐτῶν τικτούσας ἐπισκοπεῖν ἀλλὰ μὴ τὰ σώματα. For a discussion, see Fiona Leigh, “Platonic Dialogue, Maieutic Method and Critical Thinking,” Journal of Philosophy of Education 41, no. 3 (January 23, 2008): 309–23, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2007.00561.x.
The most famous ancient work on formation, Aristotle’s second treatise on ethics, received its name (at some point) from that of the philosopher’s son, Nicomachus, who was still young when Aristotle died. Like his works on the natural world, metaphysics, politics, and literary theory, Aristotle’s work on ethics was the fruit of a philosophical way of life. Schole, or leisure, was the essential component. Those hours of the day free of work or other preoccupations, schole demonstrated the “meaning we wish to give our lives” and “what sort of person we are,” as Aristotle’s recent biographer Carlo Natali puts it,99xNatali and Hutchinson, Aristotle, 66. or “freedom from … life’s necessities,…from worries and cares,” in Hannah Arendt’s formulation.1010xHannah Arendt, Danielle S. Allen, and Margaret Canovan, The Human Condition, second edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 14n10. Aristotle’s idea of flourishing derived from examining the observations and expert opinions he had gathered and expounded about the nature of the good life. In no small way, Aristotle chose this life for himself. But the life of theoria was at least equally social: an expression of his noble family line—especially his mother’s—that was enjoyed among friends and advanced students, passed down to his intellectual descendants as to family.
The more decisive formative influence was Greek culture itself. Greek intellectual and cultural achievements, not least in ethics and politics, were, as the historian Victor Davis Hanson argues in his pathbreaking book The Other Greeks, “the logical fruit of the groundwork of agrarians, Greek farmers who are now all but lost to the European historical record.”1111xVictor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 406. First published 1995.
The small farms that sprawled across the Hellenic countryside produced olives, cereals, livestock, figs, vines, and fruit. With a certain measure of neighborliness and collaboration, the ethos and practices of these households enabled them to become self-supporting and crisis resistant, qualities that also contributed to the foundations of a polis, a community that centered on a shared civic, political, and commercial life. The military defense of the polis was provided by the same farmers, the famous heavily armed “hoplites” who preferred decisive engagements via frontal assaults. Each town had a polity that was relatively broad-based (if not a pure democracy, as in Athens), and attempted to represent the economic interests of most landowner-citizens with a system of laws. Those with power were typically landowners, who profited from the labor of enslaved people, typically (if any) one or two per household, as well as that of wives, sisters, and other female relatives, and children. Each of these dependents, in turn, benefited from the householder’s political membership and military service. The Greek city-states could be surrounded by networks of town-and-countryside communities that led to “the emergence of a new sort of person for whom work was not merely a means of subsistence or profit but an ennobling way of life, a crucible of moral excellence in which pragmatism, moderation, and a search for proportion were the fundamental values,”1212xIbid., 3. not least because life’s circumstances, like human nature itself, could be tragic and unpredictable.
Such a way of life required independence and self-sufficiency within an institutional and cultural context of interdependence and mutual interest. The formation of children and of civic leaders necessarily reflected these realities. “Education is not a practice which concerns the individual alone: it is essentially a function of the community,” wrote Werner Jaeger. “The character of the community is expressed in the individuals who compose it,” and “the community is the source of all behavior,” to such an extent that, according to Jaeger’s deeply learned account, “the Greek mind owes its superior strength to the fact that it was deeply rooted in the life of the community.” Greek education, like its ancient successors, reflected the inescapable belief that human beings are essentially “of the polis” (political), and the goal of that education was to create a “supra-personal life” in the “image of the community” rather than “a perfect independent personality.” As such, education began not with the individual but with humanitas, the ideal of genuine human natures.1313xJaeger, Paideia, xiii–xiv, xxv–xxvi.
It was this standard of humanitas that the intellectuals and artists who emerged from the Greek poleis strove to understand, achieve, and uphold. Such a seed would have failed to flower into the cultural achievements in the arts, literature, philosophy, science, and law had it not been, Hanson argues, for the middle-class farmers who “provided the capital, the security, the freedom, the entire backdrop for a curious few [intellectuals] to enhance, to question, to nuance, and to transform their own fundamentally sound agrarian political, social, and military thinking.”1414xHanson, The Other Greeks, 406.
To interpret the Greek ethicists without accounting for this background is to disembed the philosophical from the practical and run the risk of distorting the meaning of the good life. The paradigmatic experience of the Greek middle class pointed to the importance of industriousness in service to and full participation in the life of the polis. The introduction of private property, the innovation needed to enhance it, the ability to pass it on as an inheritance, and a commitment to supporting the common good heightened the need to form the kinds of people whose hard work could instill industriousness as perhaps the paramount virtue. This way of life required a certain kind of person.
The Habit of Virtue
Although industriousness does not appear on Aristotle’s list of twelve or so virtues in books 3 and 4 of the Nicomachean Ethics, most, if not all, of the virtues can be read as compatible with this ideal, notably the two related to one’s wealth, liberality and munificence, both of which are aimed at avoiding wastefulness and stinginess, the better to benefit one’s fellow citizens.
Courage, for example, is best demonstrated not in premeditated actions based on reasoned calculation but, rather, in unforeseen circumstances. Temperance concerns one’s relationship to pleasure and pain, especially in regard to things that are conducive to “health or vigor,” which have a functional cast to them, and, when pursued in order to acquire other pleasant things, should not be ignoble or prodigal. Aristotle focuses the virtues concerned with honor—magnanimity and ambition—on a proper evaluation of oneself and one’s relation to others, both what one is due and what is noble to aspire to. Neither vanity nor groveling humility is acceptable. So, also, one should be appropriately angry, truthful, adequately social, and modest with respect to shame. The intellectual virtues were equally at home in the Lyceum or on the farm or battlefield, and phronesis—practical wisdom—concerns both the management of one’s household (oikonomia), based on one’s own interests as learned through experience and the management of the political community.
Thus, Aristotle’s taxonomy is both practical and theoretical. It steers a middling course likely neither to cause one to damage oneself nor to antagonize others. Much in line with the tradition of the Greek farmers whom he knew well, the Athenian leader Solon defined eudaimonia, Aristotle says, as living temperately with modest means.1515xAristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book 10, ch. 8, section 13, G.P. Goold, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). In the same vein, several centuries later Plutarch holds out the ideal of mixing the practical and the contemplative as the paradigm for education.1616xPlutarch, Moralia I: The Education of Children, chapter 8, Jeffrey Henderson, ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927).
Indeed, Aristotle’s ethical course was oriented toward eudaimonia, human flourishing—a soul activity in accordance with complete virtue, living well and acting well—in ways that require sufficient resources, but the completeness of one’s virtue and the result of one’s efforts to do well could be fully known only after one’s death. Often glossed today as happiness, eudaimonia is discussed by Socrates, who, according to a passage in Plato’s Euthydemus, argued that all human beings wish to do well.1717xPlato, Euthydemus, lines 278e2–279a1, in Platonis Opera, John Burnet, ed. (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1903). Eudaimonia, then, is “a name for our real interest and what all human action intends to pursue or achieve.”1818xNicholas D. Smith, Socrates on Self-Improvement: Knowledge, Virtue, and Happiness (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 39. First published 2021. Plato himself stands in marked contrast, assuming that philosophy alone “is able to advance integrative unity both in the individual and the state and to the achievement of the ideal…. Popular or political virtue…is unstable and unreliable.”1919xLloyd P. Gerson, Plato’s Moral Realism (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 226. For Plato, virtue exerts a “transformative power” on our understanding of happiness and on the whole self, philosopher Julia Annas argues, because it is “deeply rooted,” not merely a practical habit.2020xJulia Annas, Platonic Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 49–50.
Whether the practice of virtue was deeply rooted, habitual, or something else, the agrarian backdrop also reminds us that ancient ethics was a bios, a way of life. The major ethical schools bear this out. Stoicism aimed at human flourishing but attempted to accommodate the reality that virtuous action did not always lead to achievement of one’s goal. Circumstances could often be outside one’s control; those external goods that Aristotle saw as necessary could deprive one of virtue, such that one could be at the mercy of fate unless one could adapt emotionally to achieve a state of tranquility regardless of external factors. Pythagoreanism required five years of probation and adoption of a rigorous lifestyle of common property, unconditional loyalty, and dietary restrictions. Epicureanism, too, involved living in community, and the members of such a community pursued eudaimonia—understood as achieving the greatest good, pleasure, and avoiding evil, pain—to arrive at a divinely blissful state. Halfhearted efforts would not have fit.
Among such ethical schools, moral odysseys were not unknown. Consider Flavius Josephus, who tells in his Vita that he experimented with three of the major Jewish schools (Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes); or Augustine, who journeyed from Manicheanism to Christian orthodoxy with guidance from Ambrose, much to the delight of his mother, Monica; or Gregory the Great (d. 604 AD), whose modal shifts took him from the vita activa to the vita contemplativa to the “mixed life.”
Schools of Thought
These ethical schools can be viewed as the end of formation, a summit achieved by only a handful of those who began learning their letters around age seven. The adherents to these ways of life were mostly the wealthy and mostly men, with some notable exceptions. Like other schools, Aristotle’s Peripatos depended on a foundation to provide it with the resources it needed to support research, buildings, and libraries. “The philosophical life is not for everyone,” Charles Taylor observes, “but at the same time it amounts to the fullest realization of the nature which all human beings share.”2121xCharles Taylor, “What Was the Axial Revolution?,” in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 37.
Back down in the foothills of learning, throughout most of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, the children of sufficiently well-off citizens (mostly boys, but sometimes girls) were provided with a pedagogue who served as chauffeur, educational recruiter, protector, tutor, character mentor, and troubleshooter—something like an au pair. His educational efforts would be complemented by those of a grammarian or private tutor, usually a man, who would teach the children to read and write characters in Latin, Greek, and sometimes a local language such as Hebrew, to memorize vocabulary, and to work with passages from Homer, Euripides, Virgil, Hesiod, Isocrates, and Menander, among others. On papyrus, students wrote out grammatical exercises, morphological tables, parts of speech, verb conjugations and noun declensions, the origins of words, case usage, and experiments with style in syllabic length, accent usage, and tone. Grammar was important for understanding literary texts and speaking, as well as for writing that should conform to standards of reason, antiquity, authority, and usage, according to the historian Teresa Morgan.2222xTeresa Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, Cambridge Classical Studies (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 172–73, discussion of Quintilian.
Those who kept climbing—almost always boys aged fourteen or fifteen—learned rhetoric as a way of preparing for competitive professions and public careers. According to Libanius, the pupils first learned theory, progressed in the second year to prose works, then moved on to “preliminary exercises,” followed by two years of composition practice, and may then have assisted with instruction of their juniors.2323xSee Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, 2nd printing, 1st pbk. printing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 56. Those who wanted a life of philosophy—a Peripatetic, Platonist, a Pythagorean, an Epicurean, or, later, a monk—would continue in that “school” of thought.
The famed midcentury education historian of antiquity Henri-Irénée Marrou argued that “la formation du caractère” was the essence of ancient education. Contemporary scholars have agreed. “All the elements of enkyklios paideia [general education] have a part to play in developing virtue,” Teresa Morgan writes, not least in fostering, as historian Rafaella Cribiore has argued, an “admiration of the past” that would lead one to aspire “to model oneself on one’s predecessors.”2424xHenri-Irénée Marrou, Histoire de l’éducation dans l’antiquité (Paris, France: Éditions du Seuil, 1948), 55, cf. 328–329; Morgan, Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds, 228; Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind, 8.
Practical Wisdom and Those Who Sought It
The general populace did not lack moral knowledge or practices, as ethical writings on papyrus, pottery, and literary fragments attest.2525xHere I draw extensively on Teresa Morgan, Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Indeed, ordinary people appear to have had a great interest in morality. They received, recorded, read, and transmitted their ethics in proverbs, fables, moralistic quotations (gnomic sayings), and exemplars. They do not appear to have had precepts culled from Aristotle, the Stoics, or the Cynics rattling around in their heads. They had little interest in eudaimonia (flourishing) or hedonê (pleasure) as such. Conflict, human frailty, inequality, and fear were taken to be life’s normal terms for the middling and lower orders. So friendship, solidarity, generosity, cleverness, and careful trust were common concerns. Intelligence was regarded with ambivalence, though it was preferred to foolishness as promoting better social relations. Justice was an ever present aspiration, as was social unity, self-control, and the imitation of exemplars. Avoiding poverty was recommended, but wealth could be tricky and was recognized to take forms other than money, especially having friends. Phronesis (practical wisdom) often appears in this literature, but it was typically related to survival rather than being virtuous, powerful, wealthy, or fortunate.
Popular moral texts cited several authorities and often invoked the gods: “Modesty [the divinized virtue] taught the most just men to neglect their personal affairs while desiring the best for public affairs,” reads one such text. “Temples should be built and altars consecrated to her as the mother of all good counsel, the guardian of solemn duties, the teacher of innocence.” Nature, the givenness of things, is another such authority: “It was in his Roman blood to keep the faith…” and “You were born to be an ass; don’t try to impersonate a lion” were two such adages. And there was Cicero’s “Birds of a feather flock together.” The common sense provided a kind of authority, too, perhaps leading one to believe that “there’s truth in wine” (as we know). Social institutions could be authoritative. One work begins by invoking the second Roman emperor Tiberius as both a representative of the gods and the embodiment of the Roman state: “You who have been placed in charge of land and sea by the collective will of the gods and men, who are the surest salvation of our fatherland, by whose celestial providence the virtues of which I shall speak are most graciously fostered and the vices most severely punished.” Then there were ancient myths and regional customs: “A ‘Boeotian riddle’…is anything unintelligible,” it was said; Heracles symbolized strength, Penelope faithfulness, Kronos “foolish old age,” the Sphinx unintelligibility, and Alcestis conjugal affection.2626xQuotations taken from Morgan, on gods, 208; on nature, 211, 212; common sense, 213; social institutions, 215; myths, 216–217. Poets offered a wellspring of moral resources. Euripides, Menander, Hesiod, and Homer were favorites in Greek; in Latin, Virgil, Terence, and Publilius Syrus were commonly invoked in popular morality.
An Ambient Formation
Ancient character formation, in short, involved much more than a single institution. Attempting to disabuse his readers of their (and our) typical modern Western assumptions, Henri-Irénée Marrou wrote, “We have made the school the decisive factor in education; for the Greeks the decisive factor was the surroundings in which the child grew up—the family, with its servants and friends.”2727xHenri-Irénée Marrou, A History of Education in Antiquity, trans. George Lamb (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982), 221. First published 1948. The same could be said of the Romans. Indeed, based on wider ranging types of evidence and another half century of research, Marrou was more correct than he could have demonstrated.
The family was decisive. The nuclear family of father, mother, and siblings was stable throughout antiquity, possibly extended with grandparents (especially a widowed grandmother) and, in elite households, slaves. Conventional accounts of parental indifference and coldness in antiquity have been overdrawn, although power within the family clearly flowed from the father, the kyrios or paterfamilias, who was responsible for income and property as well as the care of all members, typically including kin. Household management became the wife’s responsibility, and young girls, who sometimes received at least a primary education, were trained in the oversight of slaves, expenditures, and textile production, especially of wool, this latter effort eventually yielding a homespun wedding dress, the symbolic culmination of preparation for marriage, around age twelve.
Among nonelite families, children prepared for adulthood by learning to work. Unskilled duties on a farm were taken on by children, and as labor became more specialized in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, young people would learn to produce goods, keep a shop, or perform a trade, often training with a craftsman outside the family. This training would typically begin before age fourteen and could last from a few months to as many as six years.
Households were embedded in a social and political context. Girls ventured from home far less than boys, who might spend as many as seven hours a day away from the house. Engagement with the community was expected, sometimes in the gymnasium, in the form of participation in sports, military training, and social relationships. “The heart of the establishment of the Greek polis was collective action,” historian Ray Laurence has written. So in middle to late childhood, boys throughout Greek and Roman communities participated in clubs (the Ephebia, Vereia, or Collegium iuvenum) “as part of the training to become a citizen” and to move the individual “into a wider social and civic world…and a sense of belonging to a city.” Young people’s membership on city councils was possible; for example, six-year-old Numerius Popidius Celsinus became a Pompeii councilor, and one-fifth of the members of a third-century AD Italian town, it was said, “wore the childhood toga.” Whatever the form taken by young boys’ municipal service, it might well have been preparation for election to a magistracy as early as age seventeen.2828xRay Laurence, “Community,” in A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in Antiquity, ed. Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence, vol. 1 (London, England: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 34, 38.
Geography and the built environment mattered, of course, not least the house where a child lived, where moral and social norms were formed. A house itself facilitated public engagement, especially for wealthy families. Most homes didn’t have bathrooms, for example, so bathing itself was a social exercise. Greek houses typically had high, windowless walls that closed them off from the public, but also often had courtyards for “chores, storage, and the household cult,” as the historian Louise Revell’s synthesis of the archaeological and textual evidence has shown. The archetypal Roman atrium house, Revell notes, “was organized on a visual axis from the street into the depths of the house…that gave it a physical permeability that echoed the intermingling of public and private space” within the home itself. Visible from the street, the atrium was used to entertain social and political friends. “These quasi-public spaces were opulently decorated with mosaics, wall paintings, and statues,” thus surrounding children in their formative years with the symbols and rituals of an active public life.2929xLouise Revell, “Geography and the Environment,” in A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in Antiquity, ed. Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence, vol. 1 (London, England: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 62, 64.
Even though antiquity is known for its great cities, at least three quarters of the population in the Greco-Roman world lived in villages and the countryside, according to historian Greg Woolf, author of the monumental The Life and Death of Ancient Cities.3030xGreg Woolf, The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2020). A recent study by Roman history scholar Peter Thonemann of inscriptions found in a rural region of Roman Asia Minor reveals what was probably common but relatively unacknowledged in the literary or archaeological records: small communities with simple but vibrant civic structures “where every family is large, tight-knit, and honorable; where village communities stick together; where even the most disastrous breakdown of relations between men and gods can always be repaired, so long as the transgressor’s [kin] are willing to pull together to set things right.”3131xPeter Thonemann, The Lives of Ancient Villages: Rural Society in Roman Anatolia (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 355.
Religion’s importance, though often neglected in the literature on formation, can hardly be overstated. Drawing on evidence from Greek and Roman communities, the family historian Ville Vuolanto argues that the family was “very much a religious unit,” in which, he writes,
[l]earning domestic rituals was an important part of the socialization of children… [and] an important way of making social contacts: religious practices constituted the most important way in which children could be visible and interact in public life: ‘religion provided the main avenue for children into the life of the polis.’ Religious life tied children to their family traditions, to the values and ways of interaction in society, and to the mythic past of their communities, whether Greek polis or Christian ecclesia.3232xVille Vuolanto, “Faith and Religion,” in A Cultural History of Childhood and Family in Antiquity, ed. Mary Harlow and Ray Laurence, vol. 1 (London, England: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 150.
Focused formation in religious institutions was available, especially in Jewish synagogue schools. A late rabbinic text refers to 480 synagogues in Jerusalem alone before the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD, each with a primary school and an advanced school. Although the number may be inflated, archaeologist Lee Levine argues that “the assumption that many children learned in some sort of formal setting at this time should not be construed as far-fetched,” and that while perhaps not under the auspices of the rabbis yet, the schools seem to have been a responsibility of the synagogue community.3333xLee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 144.
But even if the formation offered to some children in the Greco-Roman world was not from a specific religious tradition, it invariably had religious characteristics: invoking and appropriating external moral authorities, inculcating rituals and social practices, instructing with rigorous knowledge, upholding heroes for emulation. As Robert Bellah observed, even Plato, “the man who rejected tradition (and can in no way be called a conservative), knew that humans cannot live without tradition. What he created was a new tradition (oxymoron though it is), one in which Socrates replaced Achilles, and his own dialogues replaced the epic and tragic poets.”3434xRobert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 391.
Improvising Formation
Chief among the many lessons we moderns can draw from moral formation in antiquity is the necessity of “thickening” both the breadth and depth of formation. The ancients knew, and likely could not have imagined otherwise, that formation required depth, drawing in every part of a person: mind, soul, and body. They also assumed that the crafting of young lives necessitated breadth, drawing on every institution available: civic, religious, political, educational, athletic, aesthetic, domestic.
A few late-modern Stoic authors aim at this depth, as we have seen, offering to their adherents daily readings, reflections, and exercises, which could offer the kind of odyssey that Plato, Josephus, Augustine, or Gregory may have recognized. So does the rapidly growing classical wing of primary and secondary education in the United States and the United Kingdom, often revering Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for the training of faculty and the development of students. In the absence of reliable ethical codes, medicine, law, business, and engineering are also experimenting with Aristotle. Salutary as such sporadic and one-off initiatives are, any formation efforts disembedded from an authoritative moral source to which one eventually submits oneself will be relatively weak.
As Robert Bellah observed in the mid-1980s, “With the weakening of the traditional forms of life that gave aesthetic and moral meaning to everyday living, Americans have been improvising alternatives more or less successfully…but the capacity of such experiences to provide more than a momentary counterweight to pressures of everyday life is minimal.”3535xRobert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 291–92. Rather than take this as reason to despair or surrender, though, we might take it as a challenge—first, to acknowledge the need for the kind of thickness of institutions and practices that supported moral formation in the antique world, and, second, to dedicate ourselves, in ways however large or small, to building institutions and fostering practices that inculcate habits of the heart essential to a strong moral character and suitable to our time. That spirit of relentless dedication to the inculcation of virtues might be the best lesson we take from the ancient world.