Abstract
I have chosen to illustrate the second degree through the papyri of Dioscorus of Aphrodite (6th century). These texts, found in a jar in 1905, paint the picture of a Dioscorus who was a teacher, if we take the trouble to examine the books in his library closely and piece together the jigsaw puzzle of its component parts, some of which are still unpublished. His lectures corresponded to those of the grammatikos, and had several aims.
(1) Teaching grammar through verbal morphology. The grammatikos is first and foremost the person who teaches grammar, insofar as it inculcates the rules of oral and written expression, which involves " first and foremost the declension of nominal forms and the conjugation of verbal forms " (Quintilian, I, 4, 22). The Dioscore jar yielded several grammatical papyri, all of them tables of contracted verbs, which posed problems for young pupils.
(2) The teaching of lexis, illustrated by the Greek-Coptic glossary also found in the jar. As its date of completion, after 567-568, must have been close to that of the conjugation tables, it could have been another tool Dioscorus made available to his pupils to develop their mastery of Greek - and not only the Greek of the spoken language, that of everyday life, but also literary Greek and especially poetic Greek, given the words typical of epic and comedy found there.
(3) Literary and philological lectures. Unlike the first section, the actual grammatical readings, based on ad hoc material and the study of authors, could be done directly on copies of their works - which makes this activity difficult to detect. Dioscorus' library included three codices containing works by the great Greek poets : one of Homer'sIliad, a second of comedies by Menander and a third of ancient comedies (Eupolis and perhaps Aristophanes). Epic, comedy : these are the two major poetic genres that form the basis of a Greek's literary culture at the time, and therefore of the grammatikos ' teaching . But what leads us to believe that these books were used in a scholastic activity is, first of all, the presence of a book of minor Scholies alongside the Iliad, clarifying the many linguistic or historical difficulties that make the Homeric poems almost inaccessible to a Greek of imperial or Byzantine times ; but above all the fact that the text of theIliad and the Scholies has been, depending on the case, abundantly corrected, completed and provided with accents and punctuation, typical of the use of a classical author for scholastic purposes.
