Aelius Theon: Progymnasmata (review)

Progymnasmata, handbooks of preliminary exercises in composition, are important sources for understanding Greek and Roman education and rhetoric and equally important in that the exercises they describe, including narrative, fable, chria, encomium, ekphrasis, synkrisis, prosopopoeia, and others, provided topics for literary genres in prose and poetry. Of the four surviving Greek treatises on progymnasmata, by or attributed to Theon, Hermogenes, Aphthonius, and Nicolaus, Pseudo-Hermogenes and Aphthonius were the most influential. There are good editions of them by Hugo Rabe and of Nicolaus by Joseph Felton, all in the Teubner series. Theon's work is the earliest treatment and in some ways the most interesting, for it shows the system of rhetorical education in a developing stage and, since it is addressed to teachers rather than to students, it has much to say about pedagogical method. It has, however, been available only in reprints of Leonard Spengel's Rhetores Graeci(II 59-130), originally published in 1854, and in copies of a dissertation by James R. Butts (Claremont Graduate School, 1986). The new Budé Theon, with its lengthy introduction, French translation, and extensive learned notes, at last makes the work accessible to scholars in its full form.

The Greek manuscripts of Theon's treatise break off abruptly in the discussion of the exercise for and against a law and lack chapters at the end where Theon discussed reading aloud, listening, paraphrase, elaboration, and contradiction. In addition, the original order of chapters was altered by some editor in late antiquity to conform better to what is found in Pseudo-Hermogenes and Aphthonius. Forty years ago Italo Lana projected a new edition, restoring the original sequence, and published a valuable study of the Greek textual tradition (Turin 1959), but he never completed the edition. The probable reason is that about that time the existence of a full translation of the work into classical Armenian had come to be known from two manuscripts in the State Library in Erivan, Armenia. Butts was aware of the existence of the Armenian translation but had no direct access to the contents.

The Armenian translation was made from a Greek text before the rearrangement of the chapters and before the loss of the concluding pedagogical chapters. Patillon, in collaboration with Bolognesi, has reconstructed the Greek text on which the translation was based. It was so literal as to be almost incomprehensible in itself, but by comparison with the Greek in the large part of the work where both survive it has proved possible to reconstruct the Greek original with some probability. Patillon makes much use of this reconstruction throughout his text and apparatus and prints the Armenian text of the otherwise lost chapters, with French translation but without the Greek reconstruction.

On the basis of a notice in the SoudaTheon is probably to be identified with Aelius Theon of Alexandria. There is reference in a newly discovered part of the text (Patillon, p. 106) to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which gives us a date after the first century B.C., and a possible reference to Theon in Quintilian (9.3.76), suggesting Theon may have been writing in the first century after Christ. The name Aelius might indicate a Hadrianic date but probably came into use in Egypt after the prefecture of Aelius Gallus in the Augustan period. In any event, the work is clearly the earliest of the four major progymnasmatic treatises and has similarities to the Latin discussions of the exercises by Quintilian (1.9) and in Suetonius' De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus.

Although there is much that deserves attention in the introduction and notes of this edition, readers will perhaps most want to know about passages where new readings in the Greek make a difference to the meaning and interpretation of passages, and also about the contents of the chapters that survive only in Armenian, here published for the first time. References are to page and line...