Apartheid

therefore throws into high profile one particular, idealized, literary
form of a language of which many forms, spoken and written, were
familiar to all literates. This is the practice taken up by scholarly Latin
grammarians. . . As a result, a particular type of language, a normative
version of classic literary Attic or classic literary Latin, became the
standard not only of literary language but of educated spoken
language, too. 556
235
It becomes obvious that grammar school was an exercise in cultural and social
exclusion as much as anything else. It is important to point out that this is not mere snobbery,
it is not just upper-class pride. It is an instance of ethnicism, designed to reserve privilege for
an invading ethnic elite. Like Afrikaans in (twentieth and late nineteenth century) South
Africa and Hebrew in modern Israel, the Greek elites introduced to Egypt a language, which
was spoken or understood by few, and mastered by even fewer, as the a priori elite means of
communication. Attic Greek was a language or dialect known from written texts from the
region of Athens, texts which were at least two centuries old.
The aim of attikismos [atticism], stylistic and linguistic, was to
differentiate the leaders of Greek letters and speech from the broad
mass of Greek speakers in order to signal clearly that they had
command of the best sort of Greek. It was the expression of a certain
sort of consciousness, a distinction to do with the maintenance of
cultural superiority. 557
Another central subject at the elite schools of Graeco-Roman Egypt was rhetoric.
Although, throughout ancient times, it was not exclusively seen the way it is usually perceived
today, as a means to the end of augmenting power, but sometimes also as an ‘ideal
encompassing truth, beauty, persuasion and power’, it was nevertheless another important
weapon used by the apartheid elites in order to defend, consolidate and extend power. The
idea was of course to keep possession of power within a rigidly limited number of groups and
individuals.
[S]omething which all educated Greeks and Romans would have
recognized…[was] the unique glamour of the art of persuasion. . .
[R]hetoric constitutes the moment of the pupil’s transition from
passive recipient of education to active user of it, a transition
which…was a vital marker of social status and power. 558
Egypt under Greek or Roman rule was never anything remotely akin to a democracy.
Unlike today’s leaders, the politicians and other state employees in Ptolemaic Egypt and in
Imperial Rome and its provinces were not primarily populists. They were not in politics for
votes, but for control, wealth, and manipulation. One of the main surviving sources of
educational texts from the Roman period is Quintilian’s Institutio Oratorio.
The vocation of Quintilian’s orator is above all to rule, and his rule is
described in absolutist terms. This is no negotiation among equals, no
wooing of the crowd. The orator controls his people, both physically
and mentally. Describing the relationship of the orator with the crowd
Quintilian tellingly invokes Virgil’s description of a statesman
556 Morgan 1998: 160-162
557 Swain 1996: 21
558 Ibid: 197f. A single situation, according to Morgan, where being untruthful was accepted according to the
rhetoric curriculum at the time, was if a lie was ‘required for reasons of state’, ibid: 227. Moreover: ‘The orator
will always have the interests of state at heart.’ Ibid: 231