Church, Religion, and Morality

Pre-Christian education in the ancient world was remarkably secular. Imbibing religious beliefs was not part of formal education in the archaic, classical, or Hellenistic periods and beyond in the longue duree. Traditional Greek and Roman pedagogy was not concerned with teaching students about the gods; rather, the curriculum for non-adult males was much more centered on practical matters. In ancient Greece, reading, writing, and musicianship were at the core of an education. Adults further pursued their education from Sophists and from philosophers such as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. In the Roman world, once more, the education of a boy centered on practicalities, such as memorizing the Twelve Tables, and oratory. Religious instruction, for want of a better phrase, did not occur. In both Greece and Rome, knowledge about the gods came through imbibing literature and hence (in Greece) raised the ire of Plato. Homer and other poets according to Plato presented the gods in ways that were sometimes negative. Clement of Alexandria, the Christian apologist, took up Plato's themes in the second century CE. Education as a term is sometimes used extremely widely by modern scholars, who write for example of Spartan education in the training regime of the agoge, which was purely physical and did not have any pedagogical content, unless learning to sing the war hymns of the seventh-century BCE poet Tyrtaeus counts. In discussing pedagogy, this chapter takes as its definition a formal process of education and instruction involving literacy.