QUOTATION AS BASIS FOR EDUCATION: EXPERIENCE OF "ANTHOLOGY" BY IOANNES STOBAEUS

The article discusses the educational choice of quotations by authoritative authors, proposed by an early Byzantine school teacher Ioannes Stobaeus, who lived in the 5th century AD, when the Western Roman Empire ceased to exist and the Eastern Empire was undergoing serious changes. It is shown how educational reading was formed in Late Antiquity, when the creation of a compendium of quotations became the basis for education and identity. Stobaeus grouped into a little more than two hundred chapters quotations and paraphrases from over five hundred ancient authors - poets and prose writers, authors of artistic, philosophical, historical, natural-philosophical, and other writings. By this, he created his own educational horizon for the culture that was still studied in the then schools and in the subsequent self-education. The authors reveal how the thematic distribution of authoritative, but not sacred, texts was teaching the Anthology reader the order of thought consistent with the logic on which, in Stobaeus' opinion, the whole world, human thoughts and behaviors were built. The Anthology sought to fulfill the mission of the educational guide on all possible issues that its student might ask. The encyclopedic educational circle embraced issues related to the understanding of the physical world and issues related to the inner, spiritual one. The reader's mind, which united these two principles, substantiated a peculiar “psychosomatics” of the pedagogical doctrine of the early Byzantine teacher and the author of one of the first anthologies in the history of European education.