Plus cultor quam ipsa per se bonitas soli: The Care of Nature in Rhetorical Education

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Classics

First Advisor

Lenski, Noel

Abstract

This study examines images of raw materials and handicraft, plants and agriculture, and animal husbandry in educational texts from Quintilian, Ps.-Plutarch, and other Greek and Roman authors of the first through third centuries CE. Findings from this project confront the tendencies of current scholarship to overlook the philosophical ambitions of rhetorical authors and to view postclassical discourse about education as a repackaging of precepts and proposals original to earlier periods. The study argues that metaphors and figurative language reveal key strategies by which rhetorical theorists of education construct their relationship to prior theories of child development and motivate their own pedagogic projects.

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