Late Antique and Byzantine Education According to the Slavonic Translations of Hagiographical Works

This paper examines the reception of the topic of Late Antique and Byzantine education in Slavonic translations of hagiographic texts. The educational topos is attested in a great number of saints’ lives. The data preserved in these texts show clearly the continuity between Antiquity and the Middle Ages in terms of organization of the educational process and the disciplines studied. The paper explores how the pagan elements of the educational system of Antiquity were adapted to the Christian context by the authors, translators, and copyists of hagiographic texts. The study focuses on the Slavonic translations of multiple saints’ lives such as the Life of St. Gregory of Agrigento (BHG 707), Life of John Damascene (BHG 884), Life of Andrew, the Holy Fool (BHG 115z), and more. Through the texts are outlined different techniques, used by the authors of the Greek originals to present the disciplines of the trivium and quadrivium. The Slavonic translations show interesting cases of both problematic understanding of some of the school subjects and various ways of adapting, transforming or interpreting some specific realia or terms related to the educational topos. The paper explores also how different ways of describing the disciplines of the trivium and quadrivium in the Late Antique and Byzantine hagiography (terminologically precise or descriptive and obscure) led to translators’ and copyists’ mistakes in the Slavonic translations. Because of that, sometimes the Slavonic copyists used various editing approaches to restore meaning to the text.