This ambitious book endeavors to consider Greek and Roman education from a fresh perspective. It is based partly on literary sources -- particularly Quintilian, Plutarch, Ps.-Plutarch, and occasionally Philo of Alexandria -- and provides close and often insightful readings of them. The author also shows a good grasp of material from a variety of other ancient writers and takes into account a wide range of secondary sources, including some studies on contemporary education. The novelty of this work is that it tries to reconcile the literary evidence with the educational material in the papyri of Greco-Roman in an attempt to provide a more concrete and less idealized picture of ancient education. This effort, however, is often unsuccessful for several reasons, but particularly because of the extreme conclusions that Morgan draws from the incomplete data that she considers. The value of this study derives mostly from being "a necessary corrective to the triumphalist view of literate education which is all too easy to acquire from the sources."

This book is a study of the evidence for elementary education found in papyri in comparison with what is found in literary sources, especially in descriptions of teaching reading and writing by uintilian, Plutarch, and his alter ego, Pseudo-Plutarch. Although H.I. Marrou (A HIstory of Education in Antiquity [New York 1956]) and others have cited exercises on papyri, much of the information is scattered and difficult for the nonspecialist, and Morgan performs a valuable service in reviewing it systematically....