Abstract
(4) Mathematics. The training students receive also extends to the world of numbers (in the form of basic operations). The tables of metrological conversions written by Dioscore (P.Lond. V 1718) could be linked to this type of training.
(5) Introduction to rhetoric : theory and practice. The years of training with the grammatikos ended with an introduction to rhetoric, which is the subject of the last cycle, that of the sophist. In Dioscorus' jar, we found a leaflet containing a Life of Isocrates and some rhetorical notions, which he had compiled himself. These purely theoretical rudiments were supplemented by practical exercises, namely progymnasmata. Among the poems left by Dioscorus, there is a number of these exercises, including eulogies and, above all, ethopoeias (in which a given character speaks in a given situation according to his or her character).
(6) Putting rhetoric into practice : composing documents. The need to know how to compose letters must often have given the teaching of grammatikos a practical twist, which explains why we find so many sketches of letters in papyri considered to be school documents. It is possible that Dioscorus taught his pupils from another papyrus : a scroll containing an anthology that Dioscorus composed by copying four documents (P.Cair.Masp. III 67295) : a complaint and three letters intended as models.
The interest of this dossier lies in the light it sheds on the objectives of teaching at the time. One might think that the standards adopted by teachers were those of a bygone age, that schools were fixated on a sclerotic heritage (Homer, Menander). However, grammatikos readings are in tune with the demands of today's society. It was practical, in the sense that it sought to inculcate the most pragmatic mastery of the language and an introduction to the world of numbers possible. But literary education was also aimed at efficiency, in this case the acquisition of an expression that satisfied the conception of what it meant to say and write well, an expression that submitted to the rules of all-powerful rhetoric codified by the textbooks and whose models were sought in old authors such as Homer and Menander. The preparatory exercises proposed by the textbooks and taken up by teachers are not intended to lock students into a rhetorical scholasticism, but on the contrary to arm them for the various enunciation situations they will have to face later on. This, among other things, is the aim of ethopoeia, but more broadly of the great works studied at school, and specifically the authors found in Dioscorus' library. It's no exaggeration to say that, in the hands of the masters, the latter in a way become rhetorical manuals. They are less about the emotion or pleasure of reading than a set of techniques to be applied, models to be reproduced. The expression " schooling of culture " takes on its full meaning here.
