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| Ayers Bagley University of Minnesota |
CHIRON THE EDUCATOR |
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Introduction |
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Sagittarius
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The appearance of the first educator celebrated
in western civilization has been preserved since classical antiquity in the most durable
of media: in glazed ceramics and in an astronomic constellation. On a clear night his
figure can be seen in that tracery of stars called Centaurus, although he is often
identified with Sagittarius, Latin for "of an arrow," but understood as
"the archer."1 He is also represented
in paintings on ancient vases, some dating to the seventh century B.C. The image is
odd; for some viewers, possibly outrageous. To quote an ancient reaction from the Anthologia
Palatina : ". . . a horse belches out a man, and a man farts out a horse."2
He is a centaur. His name was not originally Sagittarius, and he was not Roman by birth.
Who was he? What explains his centaur form? And what significance has he in the history of
education? To pursue this last question into the early modern era takes inquiry into
territory where thought about education swirls with ethical and political metaphors, where
practical concerns of governance are oppressive, and where the emblematic
centaur-as-educator carries diverse and sometimes contradictory meanings. |
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Background |
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Greeks and Romans knew the celestial bowman as
Chiron, wisest of the centaurs.3 "The most
famous of the centaurs, son of Cronus, renowned for wisdom and skill in medicine,"
runs the entry for "Chiron" in Webster's unabridged (1916), ". . .
instructor of Achilles, Asclepius, and other heroes. . . After his death he was placed
among the stars." A more detailed entry appears in the Dictionary of Syr Thomas
Eliot (1538): "Chiron, nis, the name of a man, whom poetes doo fayne to be the
one halfe of a man, the other halfe lyke a hors: who fyrst dyd fynde the vertues of
herbes, and taughte Aesculapius phisike, and Apollo to harpe, and Astronomy to Hercules,
and was master to Achylles, and excelled all other men of his tyme in vertue and
iustyce." |
Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons crest |
Eliot's version of Chiron is in the
rationalizing tradition of Euhemerous (3rd c. B.C.), in which myth is interpreted as
history transformed by imagination.4 Accordingly,
Chiron was a man; his peculiar biform was the product of fanciful invention.5
The problem is thus explained away. Consistent with Euhemeran method would be the
postulation of an original veterinary Chiron, an idea understandably attractive to the
Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (London), which includes a Chiron-centaur in its
armorial crest. Supportive of the veterinarian hypothesis are the testimonies of Suidas
(10th c. A.D.), Isidore of Seville (7th c. A.D.), and Latin manuscripts of the fifth and
fourth centuries A. D. said to derive ultimately from a Greek text by Chiron himself.6 |
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The chief virtue of the veterinarian
hypothesis-discounting whatever persuasive power accrues to a banal assumption is its
plausible explanation of Chiron's equinity. That is, Chiron centaur is the result of a
trope likening the author to his subject. (Formulated popularly, we would have something
like this: "He must be part horse himself to understand horses so well.") The
veterinary hypothesis, however, finds little more in its favor. Sustaining it is
frustrated by the long hiatus in historical testimony. Explicit reference to Chiron in
veterinary terms has been tracked only to the fourth century A.D., although poetic
allusion to the theme dates to the first century A.D.7
The oldest sources--Homer, Hesiod, Pindar--relate Chiron's medical knowledge to mankind,
not to animal care.8 In those sources, Chiron's
role as teacher is emphasized, particularly in connection with the teaching of surgical
skill and herbal lore to Aesculapius and Achilles. Later writers added to the list of his
students.9 Some modern interpreters have
conjectured that Chiron was the director of a medical academy.10 |
7th c. Vase |
The earliest extant depictions of Chiron date
from at least a century after the Iliad had begun to take form. Ceramic vessels
of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. bear representations of Chiron as a centaur; his
human half is appareled soberly, his bearing erect, dignified, his grooming impeccable.
Chiron is not seen alone in vase paintings. He is typically shown accepting Achilles into
his tutelage.11 When he receives Achilles as an
infant from the hands of Peleus, father of the boy, Chiron's implied role is a combination
of foster father and master. That is the earlier tradition. When Chiron receives Achilles
as a lad of school age, introduced by Peleus, or by Thetis, mother of Achilles, or by both
parents, the scene connotes the first day of school, the occasion on which the family
commits its son to the schoolmaster for instruction. That is the newer iconography, an
innovation which suggests something of the degree to which the idea of schooling had
informed the Greek imagination by the end of the sixth century B.C. |
King Peleus presents Achilles to Chiron |
Already present in the older iconography is an
indication of a development in Greek culture. For when Peleus delivers the infant Achilles
to Chiron, the image is a graphic expression of the idea that it is fitting to consign the
education of a prince to an expert educator who has special knowledge to impart. In the
exemplum of Chiron and Achilles, the prince and future hero is removed from the family
setting, indeed from all kin, to obtain instruction from one who is not even a member of
the same race. Uppermost in the decision are considerations of the educator's knowledge,
skill, and qualities of character. By the fifth century B.C. in Athens, the noble centaur
had come to symbolize the ideal schoolmaster. |
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But why the centaur form? Explanation may follow
from the observation that Chiron imagery in vase painting was subordinated to the theme of
educating Achilles, warrior prince. This leads to the question of what kind of educator
would be ideal in the rearing of those who are to rule. It was from this point of view
that Nicolò Machiavelli sought to understand the biform Chiron, concluding that Chiron
was best interpreted as an idea. We are told in The Prince, Chapter XVIII (1532),
that rulers who would be illustrious must learn alternative means of achieving their ends.12 |
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| You must know that there are two ways of contesting, the one by law, the
other by force; the first method is proper to men, the second to beasts; but because the
first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second.
Therefore it is necessary for a prince to understand how to avail himself of the beast and
the man. This has been figuratively taught to princes by ancient writers, who describe how
Achilles and many other princes of old were given to the centaur Chiron to raise, who
brought them up in his discipline; which means solely that, as they had for a teacher one
who was half beast and half man, so it is necessary for a prince to know how to make use
of both natures, and that the one without the other is not durable. |
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For Machiavelli, it is clear, Chiron was not an
historical person; he was to be understood rather as a fiction useful in political
education. Visually, Chiron was a symbolic image, a figure whose distinctive physical
properties indicated a general concept. So, to the question: Why a centaur? Machiavelli's
answer was, in effect, that the centaur visually expressed relevant dualities in nature,
society, and education. |
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Machiavelli construed Chiron as the embodiment
of an essential, pragmatic principle. Effectiveness in maintaining power, not morality,
was his basic criterion. The centaur figure he found apt in representing the antinomies of
bestial vs. civil, force vs. reason. He could take for granted a conventional association
of horse imagery and the military education of princelings. In his cultural milieu, the
linkage must have seemed self-evident. |
Drawing of a ring stone |
Sixteenth-century Humanists shared Machiavelli's
assumption that effective secular rule must be vested in princes. Good rulership depends
on proper education, and education must begin in childhood. Later in life, when the prince
assumes his powers, advisers must serve him in a way analogous to that of an educator. The
education of the prince must aim to make him both wise and powerful, wise enough to govern
justly and mercifully, powerful enough to maintain order and defend against enemies of the
state. Erasmus expressed the idea through imagery: "Chiron taught his pupils to play
the lyre, but he taught them also the fierceness of centaurs."13
This renaissance conjugation departs from the sharp medieval division expressed, for
example, in Johann Engel's Astrolabium whose club-wielding centaur represents the
robust man of action in contrast to the various men who have a book, and are deemed
studious, learned, or wise.14 |
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Chiron the Educator in Alciato's
Consiliarii Principum |
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A darker vision of Chiron, probably influenced
by Machiavelli and in another way by John of Salisbury, appeared in Andreas Alciato's Emblematum
Liber, which in Latin and its modern language translations--French, Italian, Spanish,
German--was diffused throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.15
Alciato's Chiron first appeared illustrated in a Venetian edition (1546) of the Emblemata.16 A lonely figure in a wooded landscape, he stands or "rears" in the foreground.
His hair and beard are unruly. He points to his human head and his horsey haunches,
calling attention to his divided being. That he symbolizes more the beast than man, more
the natural than the cultural, is indicated not only by the unequal divisioning of the
body; animal spirits explain his posture, deficient civility his grooming, and the rustic
landscape bereft of architecture define his proper haunts. |
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The image of the lonely Chiron corresponds
minimally with Alciato's motto, "Consiliarii Principum" ("Counselors of
princes"), and accompanying verses.
Heroum genitos, & magnum fertur Achillem
In stabulis Chiron erudisse suis.
Semiferum doctorem & semivirum centaurum,
Assideat quisquis regibus, esse decet.
Est fera, dum violat socios, dum proterit hostes:
Estque homo, dum simulat se populo esse pium. |
| [Chiron is said to have educated great Achilles, and the offspring of
heroes in his stables. Whoever advises kings ought to be a teacher who is half-beast, and
a centaur who is half-man. He is a beast when he ravages his comrades and destroys his
enemies; he is a man when he represents himself as being devoted to the people. (Following
the translation provided in Daly, et al, 1985.)] |
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The isolation of Chiron suggests that attention
should center on the educator-adviser himself, not on the prince or heroes he is to
educate. This was not the image that flourished. Other considerations aside, it fell short
on three criteria. First, an isolated Chiron was insufficiently distinguishable from any
anonymous centaur. Second, and perhaps more problematic, the lonely centaur was too much
like the minotaur in the Emblematum Liber itself, that is, the minotaur that had
shed its taurine features in favor of the equine, approximating a centaur.17 Thirdly, the Venetian icon was underdeveloped relative to the text. Acceptable, perhaps,
as an expression of the duality motif, it neglects the narrative component of Alciato's
opening lines--"Chiron is said to have educated great Achilles and the offspring of
heroes in his stables"--thereby failing to visualize a key feature.18 |
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A later example of an isolated Chiron, found in
Zincgref's Emblematum Ethico-Politicorum, brings word and image into closer
alignment.19 Beneath the motto "Exercet
Utrumque" (He practices both), an ungarbed centaur standing in the foreground of a
broad landscape rests a club on his right shoulder and holds an open book in his left
hand; behind him are a body of water, a castle at its edge, high hills in the deepest
space. The text beneath includes a caption "Pour l'un & l'autre" (For the
one and the other) followed by verses in French and German:
Le liure d'vne main la massue de l'autre,
Cettecy est du corps, cestuilà de l'esprit,
Chiron par son exemple à son Achille apprit,
Que pour bien viure il faut exercer l'vn & l'autre. |
| [The book in one hand, the club in the other, This of the body, that of
the mind, Chiron by his own example taught Achilles, That to live well it was necessary to
exercise both (i.e., "the one and the other")] |
Mit Sinnen und Kräfften
Wir Lehren/dass du kennst bewehrt in deinen Geschäfften
Mit Sinnen und Kräfften.
Ein wolbewerther Mann mus diese mächtige Gaben
Verehlichet haben. |
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The German text interprets the French, noting
that he who would be fully successful in his endeavors must wed intellect with force. The
interpretation reasonably omits mention of Chiron and Achilles, recognizing that the
"teaching" offered by the emblem refers to imaginative modeling aided by the
motifs of horse/man, club/book. Chiron exemplifies duality in the icon; he exemplifies and
therefore teaches even though students are not present in the picture plane. In other
words, he illustrates a conceptual model for readers, but he is not visually a behavioral
model. Adult readers would understand that this icon is not an exhortation to shed clothes
and wander through fields carrying club and book. |
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The Zincgreff emblem presupposes an ethical
context; it concentrates on the individual and his conduct. Alciato's Chiron emblem
presupposes a political context, pointing to relations of authority, power, and influence.
Chiron's authority and power over the prince in his youth is equated with counselors'
influence on him during his reign; they then exercise the power and authority he delegates
to them. The Venetian icon used for Alciato's Chiron, lacking imagery of interpersonal
relations, was superseded. |
Emblematum Liber
1549 |
In the Alciato icon of Chiron that became
standard, the centaur-educator is shown "teaching" in a sense associated with
classrooms; he listens to recitations, ready to make corrections punctuated with birching.
(Body strikers were conventional attributes of sixteenth-century schoolmasters.) This
delineation of Chiron as an instructor informed the image initiated in the Italian (1549)
and Spanish (1549) language editions published by Rouillé and Bonhomme.20
More specifically, it is Chiron the powerful disciplinarian of verbal learning who stands
before the eye; evidence of his role as physical educator is left to the allusive power of
the bow on the ground at his feet. |
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The iconographic pattern established in the Lyon
editions was adopted by other publishers, passing from Lyon to Paris, Antwerp, and
Frankfurt. It is also seen in the hefty Padua editions of 1621 and 1661, which carry
lengthy glosses.21 Minor variations differentiate
the Lyon editions from the others. In the Lyon editions the scourge is raised high, poised
to strike; in the images from Antwerp and Padua it is held low, the threat of application
less imminent.22 Other differences are also
obvious: in the Lyon editions, three boys, located quite apart from Achilles, sit on the
ground, holding open books; in the Antwerp and Padua editions only two boys accompany
Achilles, standing in line behind him. A flight of birds crossing the sky in the Lyon
editions is absent from the others. It is not clear whether these differences are of
symbolic import. |
Los condegeros de los principes
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The teaching Chiron figure established in the
Lyon editions fixes attention on the foundational role of Chiron as educator rather than
on his later service as counselor. Although the text itself conflates the roles of
educator and court counselor, the image suggests the disciplinarian rather than the
counselor or adviser, given the scourge with which Chiron threatens his charge. The boy
under instruction presumably represents Achilles. If the intent here was to offer a visual
summary of his tutelage and thereby express a norm of princely education during childhood,
commentary would be in order. For the motif of scourge and the image of the teacher as
disciplinarian owe more to the harsh Orbilian mode of which Horace complained and to
medieval conventions than to classical Greek antiquity or to Renaissance educational
theory influenced by Quintilian's Institutes of Oratory. Menacing teachers
wielding body strikers belonged mainly to depictions of classrooms whose youthful members
were intended for other than princely careers. Mortification of the flesh was, of course,
a theme familiar to clerical asceticism.23 |
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Looking now to spatial setting, the Lyon icon
ignores Alciato's reference to Chiron's stables. The instructor and his students are not
located in a classroom of any kind; instead, they occupy the foreground of a forlorn
landscape where the background suggests remains of a ruined kingdom. The barren setting,
the crumbling, neglected architecture, the threatening, punitive atmosphere--none of this
reflects the ancient iconography of Chiron and Achilles as it was expressed in vase
paintings or other media. No less alien to Greek and Roman depictions of the ancient
educator is the somewhat wild-looking Chiron of the Venice edition. In short, the
iconographies created for Alciato's Chiron emblem comply with no ancient canon. Imagery of
wild centaurs was a legacy from antiquity. Wild centaurs frequently are found carved into
the fabric of Romanesque churches, but not in acts of teaching anyone to read.24
The teaching scene represented in the Lyon emblem of Chiron appears to be the product of
an early modern imagination, although some degree of textual support for the image might
be found in Ovid's Art of Love, where we read that "the boy Achilles . . .
cowered . . . before an aged man [Chiron]. Those hands that Hector was to feel, he held
out to the lash obediently, when his master bade" (Artis Amatoriae I,10-16).
Commentary on Chiron and Achilles in the Padua editions of Alciato cites Ovid's Fasti
and Metamorphoses, but neglects the pertinent descriptive passage from the Art
of Love. |
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Modern Language Translations of
Alciato's Consiliarii Principum |
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Uncertainty about Alciato's intention in the
Chiron emblem, or disagreement with it, is detectable in sixteenth-century translations of
the original Latin text into French, Italian, Spanish, and German. All agree that the
Centaur is Chiron and that Achilles was his most important student. The Spanish and German
translations, like the Latin original, refer to the other boys as sons of heroes; the
French, as princes; the Italian ignores them. The Italian differs also in characterizing
Chiron as frightful and ugly ("horrido e brutto"). |
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Comparing other verses across translations, one
commonality and some important differences emerge in the delineation of the
teacher/adviser. The Latin dictates that the teacher/adviser ought to be half-beast and
half-man, and explains that "He is a beast when he ravages his comrades and destroys
his enemies; he is a man when he represents himself as being pious or devoted to the
people." The expression "represents himself" ("simulat") carries
a sense of dissembling in this context. The translations agree on this point. The French
offers "semblant," which might be rendered as "feigning"; the Italian,
"mostra" as "show" or "display"; the Spanish,
"paracer," as "appear"; the German, "sich stelt," as
"represents himself" or "acts." |
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The texts disagree on conduct to be approved and
disapproved. The Latin and the French apparently assume the inevitability of the
teacher-adviser hurting both friends and enemies and of his having no more than
hypocritical concern for the public good. Although this outlook might be understood as
Machiavellianism at its cynical extreme, such individualistic sentiments were not new.
"And therefore at the king's court, O my brother, it's each man for himself and not
for other," says Arcita (i.e., "archer" or "bowman") in Chaucer's
Knight's tale.25 A contrasting perspective is
conveyed by the Italian verse, which reads: "Thus more than one can rightly be called
a centaur when he instructs him who reigns to do evil. He is a beast in effect although he
displays an appearance of goodness." Implying disapproval of evil instruction and
hypocrisy, the Italian rendition yet begs the question of whether the prince does evil
when he uses force instead of law. |
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The German and Spanish versions take a turn
different from the others. They focus on the question of survival at court. The German is
concerned about success "in the court of great lords," and recommends abandoning
friends, trampling enemies, but acting friendly to everyone. The Spanish is most
ambiguous: for one who would "live with a king, he should be like Chiron: fierce in
conquering and punishing the vile, and otherwise firm in purpose if he wishes to appear
devoted." Seeping through these lines are assumptions profoundly pessimistic about
conditions at court. |
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Some contemporaries read the Latin, French, and
Italian verses as an attack on those who shaped the values and policies of princes.26
Here is Aneau's rendering of the French language edition of 1549 (sans icon):
Chiron Centor nourrit en ses estables
Tant Achilles, qu' autres Princes notables,
Monstrant celluy qui ha les Roys en main,
Demy sauluage [sic] estre, & demy humain.
Beste sauvage il est: les gens foullant,
Et homme il est monstrant humain semblant. |
| [Chiron centaur nourished in his quarters Achilles and other notable
princes, Showing that he who has kings in his charge, is half savage and half human.
Savage beast he is when he oppresses the people, And man he is when he shows a human
appearance.] |
Rather than indicting monarchs directly, the emblem blames political
injustice on the counsellors of kings. Aneau's gloss explains that counsellors employ
terms like "just war," "equity," and "the public good" even
as they are secretly devouring the substance of the people.27 Their fair sounding pretexts correspond to the human front presented by Chiron, which
appears to be human; their rapacious actions ("plus inhumains que bestes
sauuages") correspond to his bestial derrière.28 |
Achilles and Chiron |
Alciato's educator-counsellors of princes are
Sagittarians. They are destined by their stars to careers as the trustees of "the
wealth of monarchs and temple finances will be in their keeping: they will be kings under
kings, and ministers of state, and be charged with the guardianship of the people . . .
."29 The moral challenge to those born under
the sign of the Centaur results from conflict among their powerful drives. To maintain
themselves as human, they must not allow their base appetites to overcome integrity, Piero
Valeriano warns, lest they become indeed an "hommecheval" devoid of true wisdom.30
Aneau's gloss denounces the Sagittarians who have abandoned themselves to low impulse. The
much more elaborate glosses in the Latin editions of 1621 and 1661 (Padua) cite
Machiavelli, recalling his well known metaphor of the lion and the fox, used to
characterize the durable prince, who must be capable of both forceful action and clever
maneuver.31 |
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If the education of a durable prince must be
aimed at cultivating capabilities at words and deeds, persuasion and violence, lawfulness
and brute force, then the mature ruler is to be notably dual in mind and character.
"Precarious" describes the position of those living close to the center of
power, shaping it in its youth, influencing it in its adulthood. "Perilous" describes the enterprise of those who must foster both the violent and the gentle in their
student's nature. Tutors who illeducate their charge jeopardize their own career while
endangering the future wellbeing of the state; counsellors who ill advise the prince risk
their heads along with the peace and prosperity of the people. |
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Machiavelli, full of Aesop, seeing vividly the
animal in man, described a steely vision of the political facts of life. Alciato and his
translators of the Chiron emblem, alerted readers to the ambiguities of court life and to
the reprehensible conduct of semicivilized ministers of the crown. Barthélemy Aneau and
subsequent commentators excoriated them. All this is much removed from the meanings
assigned to Chiron in texts and imagery surviving from Greek antiquity. Erasmus had
recalled the lyre in Chiron's curriculum. And Castiglione's Count Ludovico asked:
"Have you not read that music was among the first accomplishments which the worthy
old Chiron taught Achilles in tender youth . . .?"32 But John of Salisbury had reluctantly admitted reports of Chiron's music. Alciato and
those who prepared the icons for his text neglected it. There is no music in Alciato's
Chiron or his students. "He reads much . . . he hears no music," Caesar says of
the conspirator Cassius.33 And Lorenzo warns in The
Merchant of Venice : "The man that hath no music in himself . . . is fit for
treasons, stratagems, and spoils . . . Let no such man be trusted."34 |
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Philostratus's and Covarrubias's Gentle
Teacher |
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The immoralist, the brutal Chiron, purveyed by
the Emblemata was not the only one known to Alciato. He would have been
acquainted with the wise and gentle version of the ancient educator at least through
Stephanus Niger's (or Nigri's) translation of Philostratus' Icones (Milan, 1521).35
Alciato had composed a complimentary poem for this work.36 Philostratus (3rd c. A.D.) contrasts the warmly supportive teaching methods of Chiron with
the fierce career that distinguished the adult Achilles in Homer's epic. The youthful
Achilles, as Philostratus observes, "Cheiron still nourishes upon milk and marrow and
honey."37 When Achilles catches a hare or a
fawn, Cheiron expresses delight; he "stands with forelegs bent so as to be on a level
with the boy and offers him apples fair and fragrant from the fold of his garment . . .
and with his hand he offers him a honeycomb dripping with honey . . .." Philostratus
writes as though his subject were a painting come to life:
Now Chieron is painted in every respect like a centaur . . . That the
expression seen in the eye of Cheiron is gentle is the result of his justice and the
wisdom that he has acquired through justice, but the lyre also does its part, through
whose music he has become cultured; but now there is also something of cozening in his
look, no doubt because Cheiron knows that this soothes children and nurtures them better
than milk.
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Achilles' curriculum includes horseback riding. Cheiron is his steed;
the centaur "measures his gait to what the boy can endure, and turning around he
smiles at the boy when he laughs aloud with enjoyment . . .." |
Achilles hunting on Chiron |
Philostratus concludes the narrative with a
revelation of the teacher's thoughts during the riding lesson. At the very moment Chiron
smiles at the joyful Achilles, he thinks: " . . . you have been taught by me thus
gently the art of horsemanship. . . someday you shall ride on Xanthos and Balios; and you
shall take many cities and slay many men, you merely running and they trying to escape
you." How is this to be interpreted? Is the smile a deception, one of those
encouraging little frauds adults often work on children? Does it signify a paradox: the
gentle teacher preparing his student for a life of violence? |
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Paradoxes are tense, therefore unstable; the
urge to explanation is restless until the tension is relaxed or stabilized through
containment. Reviewing the account, Philostratus the artist can be seen at work, drawing a
contrast between a bucolic childhood education and a later adolescence that wreaks urban
destruction. Philostratus' characterization of Chiron attributes to him extraordinary
virtues: justice, wisdom, the culture of the muses. With this in mind, any tinge of
hypocrisy bleaches away and what might have appeared paradoxical now assumes more a sense
of irony, for Chiron's virtues lend to the soliloquy a motif of prescience, an intimation
of the inevitable, which is a feature of the tragic vision. Chiron's foreknowledge of
destiny is of a kind likely granted to a son of Cronus. |
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The gentle Chiron appears again in Covarrubias's
emblem, "Elementa Velint ut Discere," in his Emblemas Morales.38
Here the subject is the first principles of teaching children, the foundational elements
of human relations.
Deue el maestro ser muy amoroso,
Para que el niño no le cobre miedo,
Y deprenda, con gusto y con reposo,
Sin darle un papirote con el dedo:
En especial si es noble y generoso,
No se le muestre asperoniazedo,
Antes le de la alorça, y la rosquilla,
Quando leer le mande en la cartilla. |
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Mural |
The schoolmaster is advised to begin with love,
not fear; let the first taste of book learning be sweet, not bitter. Like Philostratus,
Covarrubias would have teachers use honey to attract children to learning. He draws his
motto from Horace's Sermones, Satires 1.1, where the poet speaks approvingly of
teachers who "cajole little boys by awarding them cookies, Coaxing them on to the
point where they want to learn more of their letters . . ." [ut pueris olim
dant crustula blandi doctores, elementa velint ut discere prima].39 |
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None of Philostratus's portrait of Chiron and
Achilles was adopted by Alciato. In his Chiron emblem the distinguished jurist looked
rather to the subject of governance, drawing partly on Machiavelli, as Claude Minois
noted, and on a tradition still less favorably disposed to Chiron. |
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The Brutal Chiron of the Achilleid and
Polycraticus |
The Chiron and Achilles of Chartres Cathedral |
Precedence for a negative view of Chiron as
educator can be found in the Polycraticus (1159), John of Salisbury's great work on
rulership.40 John, it seems, had read the Achilleid
of Statius (lst c. A.D.) and was impressed by Achilles' speech recounting Chiron's
curriculum.41 It is a speech full of blood,
killing, and descriptions of endurance testing. No previous version of Chiron yields such
a violent picture. The Chiron and Achilles of Chartres Cathedral is in that tradition.42
On a column capital just inside the Royal Portal, a ferocious centaur, armed with bow and
arrow, gallops in place, riding Achilles on his back while the boy appears to strangle a
large fowl. The sculpture may have been carved while John was a student at the Cathedral
school between 1137 and 1140. Otherwise, he certainly would have seen it when he returned
as Archbishop in 1176. |
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John's assumption that centaurs, chimeras, and
other fabulous creatures were the inventions of poets did not prevent him from finding
homiletic potential in the theme of Chiron's education of Achilles. The boy, he relates,
was "taken into the forest and amid the slaughter of wild beasts, becoming inured to
killing and to eating disgusting food, he lost his awe of nature and fear of death."
John interprets this to mean that "those who have such inclinations and desires are
half-beast. They have shed the desirable element, their humanity, and in the sphere of
conduct have made themselves like unto monsters." John then adapts the moral to his
polemic against the blood sports of kings and courtiers. "To this day," he
avers, "hunters smack of the Centaurs' training. Rarely is one found to be modest or
dignified, rarely self-controlled, and in my opinion never temperate. They were indeed
imbued with these characteristics in the home of Chiron." |
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Although John was aware that animal slaughter
did not mark the limits of Achilles' education, he had trouble reconciling music
instruction in the curriculum. Somewhat reticently he reports: "In the cave of the
Centaur Chiron, if entire credence is to be given the Greeks, Achilles was taught to play
the lyre and cithera." This gentle phase of the curriculum Statius had allowed Chiron
and note of it occurs in Achilles' speech. But Achilles is given to dwell on violence; he
minimizes all else in his education. "I should have expected more from a pupil of
Chiron," chides Antilochus in Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead.43
Perhaps Statius was playing to the Roman taste for bloody sports. |
Herculaneum |
Neoclassic imagery of Chiron has also tended to
emphasize the themes of hunting and weaponry in Achilles' education.44
Curiously, it is the music master Chiron, not the savage trainer, who has come down to us
in the visual arts of the Roman world. We see him in the massively equine Chiron of
Herculaneum (65-79 A.D.); we see him again on the Capitoline Tensa, and yet again in
carvings on gemstones.45 Chances are that the
scene is based on a Greek prototype.46 In any
case, the feeling tone is consonant with Hellenistic terra cottas representing old
pedagogues and their pupils.47 |
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Chiron's Origins Revisited |
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The ancient association of horse and education
expressed in the Chiron image can sustain a level of interpretation beyond the proposals
of demythologizers, who espied corporeal beings behind myths, and of moralists, who sought
lessons in conduct. The broader interpretation offered by Sir Sydney Colvin places Chiron
in the perspective of the history of education and civilizational advance. Reaching beyond
explanations that would reduce Chiron's significance to man's domestication of the horse,
Colvin views him as a composite symbol standing for an array of human accomplishments and
connoting psycho-cultural progress:48
| The myth absorbed into itself the memories of human struggles. A weighty
accretion of significance ethical, political, and historical was added. Those memories are
accounts of achievements of generation after generation of primitive men, pioneers,
reclaimers, and founders of civilization. |
|
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Chiron understood in this way is a complex
metaphor emerging at the opening of a new era in the Greek experience, when poets
perceived a growth out of primitive rusticity. Chiron is an intermediary between stages of
development; he represents the best of the old wisdom and technology, passing on what is
most valuable to the next age. |
Chiron and Achilles |
Close to nature, Chiron as a metaphor of
emergent urban man, shelters not yet in architecture but in a cave on the slopes of Mount
Pelion. He is master of hunting (i.e., food-gathering) and medicine (i.e., healing), which
is to say, the survival technologies requisite to life in the wilderness. Imagery from the
sixth century B.C. corresponds to those motifs. On a vase in the British Museum, we see
Chiron with his hunting dog.49 The branch resting
on Chiron's shoulder and the small tree nearby may "symbolize the 'pharmaka' taken
from the sylvan garden of Pelion."50
According to the oldest written sources--Homer, Hesiod, Pindar--pharmacy is part of
Chiron's medical knowledge; so are surgery and incantations believed conducive to healing.
The latter presuppose musical skills.51 |
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The significance of Chiron is not exhausted in
terms of technological advance. He is practical reason and self-discipline dominant over
appetite; he controls the horse beneath his head and heart. It is in connection with the
discipline of self, of judgment over impulse, that Chiron is assigned the composition of a
work on ethical precepts, the so-called Maxims of Chiron which supposedly stated
the rudiments of moral philosophy essential to a social life that would transcend
barbarism. From this point of view, Chiron may be understood as a biological metaphor of
man's psycho-cultural development.52 |
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Chiron is a telling figure in the history of
educational thought and iconography. Inherited explanations of his iconography comprise a
legacy revealing as much about historical approaches to myth as about the iconology of the
unique educator. Twentieth-century interest in Chiron seems less lively among professional
educators than among certain other groups, e.g., a major pharmaceutical corporation called
Chiron, the German Archaeological Association, The Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons,
the History of Social and Behavioral Sciences Association.53
Iconographically, the interest is expressed in the form of insignia or logos, not in
imagery of iconic stature. |
Delacroix sketch of Chiron and Achilles |
An estimate of Chiron's contemporary
significance in the United States may be found in the Epilogue to John Updike's
allegorical novel, The Centaur:
| Zeus had loved his old friend, and lifted him up, and set him among the
stars as the constellation Sagittarius. Here, in the Zodiac, now above, now below the
horizon, he assists in the regulation of our destinies, though in this latter time few
living mortals cast their eyes respectfully toward Heaven, and fewer still sit as students
to the stars.54 |
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Notes & Bibliography |
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