Recent decades have witnessed debate over the nature and extent of apprenticeship in the Classical Greek world, and that debate has taken us to some strange places. One finds it claimed, for instance, that apprenticeship simply did not exist in the Classical period; while apprentices are amply attested in, say, Roman Egypt, the lack of comparable documentation from the Greek world reflects a fundamental difference in the system of training workers—or so the reasoning goes.Footnote ¹ Others have thought to find a smoking gun in the fourth-century letter of Lesis, a worker (presumed to be a child) at a forge in Athens, who writes to his mother and describes the abusive conditions of his work.Footnote ² This letter allegedly provides hard evidence of a free apprentice; and not only that, it represents essentially ‘the only real testimonium’ to the institution of apprenticeship in Classical Athens.Footnote ³ In truth, this is wrong on both scores: there are several traces of apprenticeship in the Classical period, but it is anyone's guess whether the letter of Lesis is among them.Footnote ⁴ Over the last few years, the careful scholarship of Eleni Hasaki has put the study of Greek craft apprenticeship on a considerably firmer basis.Footnote ⁵ However, even in Hasaki's telling, the evidence permits ‘only a very vague picture about apprenticeship’ ([n. 2], 139). Variants of this sentiment are ubiquitous in scholarship.

Looming over these discussions is an evidentiary problem of an entirely different sort. At least forty-three apprenticeship documents survive on papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt (one from the Hellenistic period, the rest dating to the Roman era), allowing for a detailed glimpse at a formal system of ancient apprenticeship.Footnote ⁶ A few of these documents are no more than registrations submitted to public officials for tax purposes, declaring one's intent to apprentice a child or slave (Forselv [n. 6], 117). Most represent actual agreements between two parties, laying out the terms under which a teacher will take on an apprentice. Scholars conventionally refer to these documents as apprenticeship contracts, or didaskalikai. Comparable evidence does not survive from mainland Greece, and scholars who wish to discuss the nature of job training in the Classical period labour under the shadow of this imbalance of documentation. Many are left guessing whether the papyri offer any sort of rough approximation of job training practices in the Greek world. Thus Burford concedes that ‘the only surviving records of such agreements [come] from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt’. Nevertheless, she continues, ‘the conditions of apprenticeship cannot in the nature of things have varied much.’Footnote ⁷

But we need not rely on guesswork. Though this point is often overlooked, apprenticeship contracts similar to those from Egypt are firmly attested in Classical Athens.Footnote ⁸ No specimens survive, of course—papyri from mainland Greece almost never do—but Xenophon refers quite plainly to their existence (Eq. 2.2):

Similarities to the surviving apprenticeship contracts are numerous. The verb ἐκδίδωμι looks to be a technical term for apprenticeship; we may compare Xenophon's ἐπὶ τέχνην ἐκδῷ to the various forms of ἐκδίδωμι in the papyri.Footnote ⁹ Then there is the obvious formal similarity: in Xenophon, as in the papyri, written documents set forth the terms of the apprenticeship. These documents, Xenophon tells us, stipulate precisely what skills the apprentice must learn, a feature on full display in the papyri as well. A slave apprenticed to a shorthand writer, for example, must be able to ‘read and write all types of prose without error’ (ἐκ παντὸς λόγου πεζοῦ γράφοντος καὶ ἀναγεινώσ[κον]τος ἀμέμπτως) by the end of his apprenticeship (P.Oxy. 724, line 10). All of this is in service of acquiring proficiency in a particular trade, or technē, and here too one cannot help but notice similarities: Xenophon's ἐπὶ τέχνην is reminiscent of formulations in the papyri such as ὥστε μαθεῖν τὴν γερδιακὴν τέχνην, ‘in order to learn the weaving trade’ (P.Mich. III 170, lines 6–7). Even Xenophon's notion of conditional payment finds parallels in the papyri. Though many of the apprenticeship contracts provide the teacher with no compensation (other than guaranteed access to the apprentice's labour), this is not true in every case. One contract (P.Oxy. 724) stipulates a payment of 120 drachmas in three equal instalments, the final 40-drachma payment coming at the end of the apprenticeship (ἐπὶ τέλει τοῦ χρόνου, line 9). Another mandates a payment of 100 drachmas in two instalments: 50 drachmas up front, then the remainder after six months, presumably the end of the apprenticeship (BGU 1125). It seems reasonably clear that Xenophon is describing precisely such arrangements, well over a century before the earliest extant apprenticeship contract on papyrus (P.Heid. 226, 215–213 b.c.).

Despite all of this, Xenophon's statement about apprenticeship may seem counter-intuitive in one respect. Equestrianism was a classic symbol of wealth and status in antiquity; employment in the trades was much the opposite. How is it, then, that Xenophon imagines horse-owners sending out their sons to learn a technē?

One might entertain the possibility that Xenophon means technē not in the sense of a paid occupation but rather as one of a number of ‘soft’ skills: rhetoric, music, statecraft, or the like. But this contradicts what we otherwise know about the education of Athenian children, who seem to have typically received ‘concurrent education in several subjects’.Footnote ¹⁰ Accordingly, we should not expect Athenian youths to set out from home ἐπὶ τέχνην short of undertaking an actual apprenticeship. I therefore see two different ways to resolve this conundrum. (1) Xenophon's τὸν παῖδα ὅταν ἐπὶ τέχνην ἐκδῷ refers to the apprenticeship of slaves, not of children. The extended meaning of παῖς as ‘slave’ is of course well attested, and occurs elsewhere in the writings of Xenophon (though not in his equestrian writings).Footnote ¹¹ This interpretation is also consistent with the evidence of the papyri, where both slaves and free children appear as apprentices. (2) Xenophon is using παῖς in its literal sense (‘child’), and this is less surprising than it may seem. By the late fifth century, Bugh argues, ‘more moderately well-to-do, as opposed to wealthy, Athenian families were expected to purchase and maintain a war-horse year-round.’Footnote ¹² It is quite possible that such families would occasionally send out their children to learn a trade. Comparison to the papyri may again prove instructive. The contracts from Roman Egypt reveal that ‘apprenticeship could attract children of a good family, not acquainted with craftsmanship’, as Christel Freu notes. ‘Although craftsmen's children were predominant in some branches, professional training was also attractive for middle-class children, and sons of veterans or of privileged town residents’ ([n. 5], 193–4). We cannot automatically assume similar circumstances held true in Athens, but I am aware of at least one piece of evidence to support the comparison. Lysistratus, an Athenian naval architect from the fourth century b.c., seems to have harboured a more than slight obsession with horses, naming several warships after horse- or cavalry-related subjects and even constructing specialized horse transport vessels for the navy.Footnote ¹³ Here we have an Athenian craftsman from what may be an equestrian family, roughly contemporaneous with the life of Xenophon.Footnote ¹⁴

In the end, we cannot be certain whether Xenophon is speaking of slaves or of free children, but the fundamental issue is clear enough: by the mid fourth century b.c. formal apprenticeships already existed in Athens. Written contracts specified the terms of these apprenticeships, and seem to have been broadly similar to the didaskalikai recorded on papyrus in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. To be sure, not all job training occurred within the constraints of these contractual arrangements. Many workers doubtless picked up skills on the job without undertaking an intentional apprenticeship programme; others learned directly from family members, taking up an ancestral trade, or patroia technē. But none of this gives any reason to doubt the prevalence of a third form of job training: formal apprenticeship. It is worth recalling a passage of that great wielder of craft analogy, Plato. Writing not long before Xenophon, the philosopher conjures the image of a potter who either instructs his own sons in the family trade or—in what now looks like a clear reference to apprenticeship—passes on his skill to ‘whomsoever else he might teach’.Footnote ¹⁵