Achille e Scamandro vanno a scuola: un’etopea ‘ritrovata’ (Proclo ad Plat. Tim. 19d-e)

In an interesting passage of his Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus, Proclus uses as an example a Homeric speech-in-character (“what words Achilles might say if caught in the river”), which also occurs in the work of the Latin rhetorician Emporius. The coincidence between Proclus and Emporius clearly shows that there was a contiguity between the Greek and the Latin tradition concerning the progymnasmata and, more generally, that the ‘preliminary exercises’ were an important educational step, which played a significant role in creating the mindset of the Imperial elite, across a broad chronological span.