Dialogue et enseignement — Introduction

The beginnings of the dialogue as genre in the 4th a. C., understood as an autonomous literary work rather than a single dialogical sequence, bear the mark of a very particular teacher, Socrates, and the wide diffusion of the logoi sokratikoi. Together with this this revered yet subversive teaching figure, other experiments in the relationship between teacher and pupil are developed, such as the conversation between a father and his son, or the lesson of a sophist, all of which share a style of writing defined as a teaching practice, an exchange of questions and answers. In Greece as in Rome, the practice of dialogue makes it possible to question the teaching situation, addressing both the content and the method of acquiring knowledge. The articles in this dossier shed light on the ancient practices of dialogue and teaching, the articulation of a form marked by orality and its written transcriptions, the strength of a model of pedagogical writing in works as diverse as the speeches of Isocrates, Latin comedy, Horatian epistles, Greek epigrams, textbooks and grammars, Ciceronian dialogues and Varron’s technical treatises, which found a modern application in Fontenelle’s practice of scientific dialogue.