The Progym at Cottage Press

In ancient Athens, every freeborn citizen had the privilege of active participation in civic life—in government, law, marketplace. To be effective, a citizen’s participation must be articulate and eloquent. Greek fathers paid tutors to train their sons for this; thus was born the formal study of rhetoric. To prepare their students for formal rhetorical training, these rhetors began to develop the progymnasmata, literally, “exercises before.” 

Evidence for this pedagogy dates back to the time of Alexander the Great, but the first surviving record of its contents is attributed to a first-century Greek rhetor named Aelius Theon, who outlined a graduated series of 10 exercises, beginning with the simple retelling of a narrative account and progressing to the composing of arguments for or against a proposed law. Classics scholar George Kennedy notes that these “progymnastic exercises … [used] a highly structured, approved way of narrating, amplifying, describing, praising, criticizing, comparing, proving, and refuting something. Their skills could then be combined in different ways to compose a speech.”[1] The exercises taken together are referred to as the Progymnasmata (plural), or Progym for short; each individual exercise is a progymnasma (singular).

Not only the structure, but also the subjects for Progym exercises in ancient practice were narrowly prescribed; “free composition was not a feature.” Though other rhetors besides Theon set forth their own versions varying in name, content, number, and order, the general Progym pedagogy remained in almost constant use for training in composition and oratory throughout Christendom into modernity. Like many traditional teaching methods, the Progym was scrapped in the modern progressive education of the late 19th century, but the classical education recovery of the late 20th century has recommissioned it for today’s student.  

[1] George Kennedy, Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 26-27. 

Pedagogy & Practice

Classic literary works serve as both models and content for student compositions throughout all levels.

The Progym in Our Language Arts Curriculum

Here at Cottage Press, we have adopted the particular Progym exercises of Aphthonius, a teacher from the fourth century after Christ. We have arranged them into a comprehensive language arts curriculum with levels appropriate for students from around fourth grade through high school. Classic literary works serve as both models and content for student compositions throughout all levels.

In the earliest exercises, students retell enduring stories of the past. As students mature and gain skill, they examine proverbs and anecdotes for their wisdom and wit and examine stories for their verity and validity. Students consider particular acts, both evil and good, and their due reward. They examine and compare lives of notable people, both noble and base. They write speeches from the perspective of a particular person, famous or infamous, and they vividly describe a person or a place or a time period. Finally, they examine the virtue of general propositions and evaluate laws embodying those propositions. Throughout the exercises of the Progym, students write about ideas that matter, that incline his or her affections to those things that are true, good, and beautiful.[1]

Fable Exercise

The foundational exercises of the Progym are based on retelling, or as it has come to be known in classical and Charlotte Mason circles, narration. In the Fable exercise, students retell a brief fictional story that illustrates a moral point. In Cottage Press Fable & Song, students work with Aesop’s fables and the parables of Jesus. In addition to straightforward oral and written retellings, they also learn to amplify the fable with dialogue and description, and eventually to retell the fable with a new setting and/or new characters. 

Narrative Exercise

Progym Narrative teaches students to retell successively longer and more complex accounts, both fictional and non-fictional, drawn from a treasure-trove of classic stories and poems all students need to know. Our Bards & Poets students continue to practice straightforward retelling and amplification with dialogue and description, and add to their composition and comprehension skills by learning to paraphrase, summarize, and rewrite from a particular perspective and/or with a different chronology. They also learn to carefully observe using questions considering person, action, time, place, manner, and cause—more popularly known as the Reporter’s Questions: “Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?” We encourage younger students to dwell long in this exercise, since it provides a deep and wide foundation for all of their future composition, to say nothing of the long-term benefits for their academic, vocational, and personal lives that accrue from the ability to attend closely to a source and reproduce it in their own eloquent voice. 

Proverb and Anecdote Exercises

Progym Proverb (also known as maxim) and Progym Anecdote (also known as chreia) are twin exercises in which our Poetics & Progym I students learn to follow a specific format of topics from which to examine a saying or an action for its wisdom or its wit. The topics are arranged from general to specific, teaching the student to think in a careful and orderly way about what was actually said or done and why. They compare it to other situations and stories, and note what authorities such as Scripture and wise people of the past have said about the general topic. These exercises provide a perfect springboard for learning and practicing the basic persuasive academic essay. The accompanying literature for the year is Homer’s Odyssey, along with a number of poems and literary selections related to its themes of duty, recollection, and friendship; these provide students with content for their compositions.

Confirmation and Refutation Exercises

Another set of twins, progym Confirmation and progym Refutation give students in Poetics & Progym II beginning practice in looking at a situation or an issue from opposing viewpoints. Since they are concurrently reading the Aeneid, students work with the stories that inform Virgil’s epic, both confirming and refuting according to clarity, credibility, plausibility, possibility, propriety, and profitability. The compositions students write with this exercise can stand on their own as evaluative essays. In addition, the skills learned here will be incorporated into the proofs of the academic argumentative essay which is based on the Classical Argument format. 

Common-place Exercise

Also included in Poetics & Progym II, Progym Common-place condemns a certain type of wrongdoer following a format of specific topics. Students consider the crime in light of its opposite virtue, investigate possible motives and past life choices that would lead to such vice, and recommend fitting remedies or penalties. The Common-place exercise can also be composed to extol a certain type of benefactor using the same set of topics. Poetics & Progym II students use these exercises to investigate a particular character quality of Aeneas. 

Encomium, Invective, and Comparison Exercises

Finally, our Poetics & Progym II students round out their advancing composition skills using the triplets: Progym Encomium (or Praise), Invective (or Vituperation), and Comparison. These three exercises are designed to examine a particular person or character by following a specific set of topics related to his or her origins, upbringing, and deeds. Students work with characters from the Aeneid and the authors Virgil and Homer. They also learn to adapt the exercise to things instead of people by comparing several ancient epics. In the capstone research paper about Shakespeare’s Macbeth for Poetics & Progym II, students use these skills acquired in these three exercises to research, evaluate sources, and write an annotated bibliography as well.

Speech-in-Character and Description Exercises

Progym Speech-in-Character and Progym Description are sometimes considered the “creative writing” strand of the Progym, although both are needed also in academic, vocational, and personal writing as well, and other Progym are certainly needed for creative endeavors. These exercises are introduced in Poetics & Progym III, where students write compositions based on their reading in the accompanying Divine Comedy of Dante.

Thesis and Law Exercises

Progym Thesis logically investigates a debatable proposition, first without regard to any particular circumstances, and then, sometimes, applying the reasoning to a given situation. The classic example of this is first to consider “Should One Marry?” and then advance to “Should Aeneas Marry Dido?” Progym Law requires students to propose a new law, or to defend or attack an existing law. Our Poetics & Progym III students apply this exercise to themes from Dante’s Divine Comedy, as well as to the tradition of Great Books and the classical canon itself in the capstone research project and essay on Dante and his Comedy.