Education, history of philosophy of

3. Hellenistic and Roman education

The conquests of Alexander the Great brought an end to any hope that the fulfilment of human nature could be achieved through the educational and political efforts of an autonomous polis or city-state. Philosophy of education thereby lost its connection to public life in the Hellenistic Age, and what remained of it in Stoicism was the doctrine that an understanding of divine reason allows one to be happy, good and free of the tyranny of unnecessary desires, by enabling one to accept the inevitability of lacking what one does not have and cannot possess. The Stoics took divine reason to be manifested in the order of nature, and Chrysippus and others apparently held that an adequate understanding of nature is best attained through a study of logic and physics (see Stoicism §3).

Rome had no need for a philosophy withdrawn from public life, and when the Emperor Vespasian granted the first public subsidy for higher learning in the first century, it went to the school of rhetoric operated by Quintilian. His work, the Institutio Oratoria (The Training of the Orator), is both a textbook of rhetoric and a treatise on the principles of education, and it exercised a powerful influence on Western educational ideals well into the nineteenth century. Quintilian took the highest aim of education to be the formation of a perfect orator, a person made both eloquent and good through exercises in composition and declamation, and a broad study of the liberal arts and rhetorical theory.