The man who has never been flogged has never been taught.

Attributed to the Athenian comic playwright Menander, the saying reflects an ancient, harshly disciplinary view of education: learning is imagined as something impressed on the body through punishment rather than cultivated through persuasion or curiosity. Read more broadly, it can be taken as a claim that correction—sometimes painful—is necessary for moral or practical formation, and that a life without rebuke produces an untrained character. At the same time, the line also exposes the normalization of violence in certain historical pedagogies, inviting modern readers to question whether “teaching” achieved through fear truly forms wisdom or merely obedience.