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Title: Old Greek Education

Author: J. P. Mahaffy

Release date: April 11, 2021 [eBook #65058]

Language: English

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OLD GREEK EDUCATION

by

J. P. MAHAFFY, M.A.

Fell. and Tutor, Trin. Coll., Dub.
Knight of the Order of the Saviour
Author of “Social Life in Greece” “A History of Greek Literature”
“A Primer of Greek Antiquities” etc.






New York
Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square
1882




  TO

  THE GREEK NATION

  STILL, AS OF OLD, THE PIONEER OF EDUCATION

  IN EASTERN EUROPE

  +I Dedicate+

  THIS LITTLE BOOK

  IN MEMORY OF THE YEAR 1881




  PREFATORY NOTE.


Readers unfamiliar with Greek will find the equivalent of the Greek
words cited in the nearest word printed in italics.

The scope of this book precludes me from acknowledging individually
my many obligations to other authors, both for curious facts and for
learned references.




  CONTENTS.


CHAPTER                                                     PAGE

       INTRODUCTION                                            1

    I. Infancy                                                 7

   II. Earlier Childhood                                      14

  III. School Days--The Physical Side                         21

   IV. School Days--The Musical Side--The Schoolmaster        32

    V. The Musical Side--Schools and their Appointments       42

   VI. The Subjects and Method of Education--Drawing and
          Music                                               57

  VII. The Last Stage of Education--Military Training of the
          Ephebi                                              69

 VIII. Higher Education--The Sophists and Socrates            78

   IX. The Rhetors--Isocrates                                 91

    X. The Greek Theorists on Education--Plato and Aristotle  99

   XI. The Growth of Systematic Higher Education--University
          Life at Athens                                     116

       INDEX                                                 141




  GREEK EDUCATION.




  INTRODUCTION.


§ 1. We hear it often repeated that human nature is the same at all
times and in all places; and this is urged at times and places where
it is so manifestly false that we feel disposed peremptorily to deny
it when paraded to us as a general truth. The fact is that only in its
lower activities does human nature show any remarkable uniformity; so
far as men are mere animals, they have strong resemblances, and in
savages even their minds seem to originate the same fancies in various
ages and climes. But when we come to higher developments, to the
spiritual element in individuals, to the social and political relations
of civilized men, the pretended truism gives way more and more to the
opposite truth, that mankind varies at all times and in all places. As
no two individuals, when carefully examined, are exactly alike, so no
two societies of men are even nearly alike; and at the present time
there is probably no more fertile cause of political and legislative
blundering than the assumption that the constitution successfully
worked out by one people can be transferred by the force of a mere
decree to its neighbors. All the recent experiments in state-reform
have been based on this assumption, as if the transferrence of a
House of Commons in any real sense were not as impossible as the
transferrence of Eton and of Oxford to some foreign society.

Although, therefore, we cannot deny that past history contains many
fruitful lessons for the bettering of our own time, it is not unlikely
that the tendency of the present widely informed but hasty age is to
exaggerate the likenesses of various epochs, and to overrate the force
of analogy in social and political reasoning. Historical parallels
are generally striking only up to a certain point; a deeper knowledge
discloses elements of contrast, wide differences of motive, great
variations in human feeling.

§ 2. But as we go back to simpler states of life, or earlier stages
of development, the argument from analogy becomes stronger, and the
lessons we may derive from history, though less striking, are more
trustworthy. This is peculiarly the case with the problem of education
as handled by civilized nations in various ages. The material to
be worked upon is that simpler and fresher human nature, in which
varieties are due only to heredity, and not yet to the numerous
artificial stimulants and restraints which every society of mature
men invents for itself. The games and sports of children, all over
the world, are as uniform as the weapons and designs of savages. The
delights and disappointments of education have also remained the same,
at least in many respects. The conflict of theoretical and practical
educators, and the failure of splendid schemes for the reform of
society by a systematic training of youth, mark every over-ripe
civilization. Here, then, if anywhere, we may gain a distinct advantage
by contemplating the problems, which we ourselves are solving, under
discussion in a remote society. The more important and permanent
elements will stand out clearer when freed from the interests and
prejudices of our own day, and from the necessities of our own
situation; and thus we may be taught to regain freedom of judgment
and escape from the iron despotism of a traditional system. For if it
be the case that in no department of our life are we more thoroughly
enslaved than on the question of education, if it be true that we are
obliged here to submit our children to the ignorance and prejudice
of nurses, governesses, priests, pedants--all following more or less
stupid traditions, and all coerced by shackles which they want either
the knowledge or the power to break--then any inquiry which may lead us
to consider freely and calmly what is right and what is not right, what
is possible and what is not possible, in education cannot but have real
value, apart from purely historical or learned considerations.

§ 3. In fact, the main object of this book is to interest men who are
not classical scholars, and who are not professional educators, in the
theory of education as treated by that people which is known to have
done more than any other in fitting its members for the higher ends and
enjoyments of life. The Greeks were far behind us in the mechanical
aids to human progress; they understood not the use of electricity, or
of steam, or of gunpowder, or of printing. But, in spite of this, the
Greek public was far better educated than we are--nay, to some extent,
because of this it was better educated. For Greek life afforded proper
leisure for thorough intellectual training, and this includes first
of all such political training as is strange to almost the whole of
Europe; secondly, moral training of so high a kind as to rival at times
the light of revelation; thirdly, social training to something higher
than music and feasting by way of recreation; and, fourthly, artistic
training, which, while it did not condescend to bad imitations of
great artists, taught the public to understand and to love true and
noble ideals.

Why must these great ends of education be obscured or lost by the
modern wonders of discovery, which should make them more easy of
attainment and wider in circulation? Were the Greeks better off in
education than we are, and, if so, why were they better off? or is all
this alleged Greek superiority an idle dream of the pedants, with no
solid basis in facts? If it is real, can we not discover the secret of
their superiority, and use it with far wider and deeper effect in our
Christian society? or is human nature of narrow and fixed capacity, and
does the addition of wide ranges of positive science and of various
tongues mar irrevocably the cultivation of the pure reason and of
the æsthetic faculty? These are the problems which will occupy the
following pages, not in their abstract form; they will be considered
in close relation to the success or failure of the old Greeks in
discussing and solving them.

§ 4. There have been only two earlier nations and one later which could
compete with the Greeks in their treatment of this perpetual problem
in human progress. We have first the Egyptian nation, which by its
thorough and widely diffused culture attained a duration of national
prosperity and happiness perhaps never since equalled. Isolated from
other civilized races by geographical position, by language, and in
consequence by social institutions, the Egyptians prosecuted internal
development more assiduously than is the wont of mere conquering
races. The few foreign possessions acquired by the Egyptians were
never assimilated, and the civilization of the Nile remained isolated
and unique. We have reason to know that this refined social life,
which is perpetuated in pictures on the monuments of the land--this
large and various literature, of which so many fragments have been
recovered in our century--was not created without a diffused and
systematic education. In Plato’s “Laws,”[1] the training of their
young children in elementary science is described as far superior to
anything in Greece. But, unfortunately, the materials for any estimate
of Egyptian education, in its process, are wanting. We can see plainly
its great national effects; we have even some details as to the special
training in separate institutions of a learned and literary class;
but nothing more has yet been recovered. If we knew the various steps
by which Moses became “learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians,”
an interesting field of comparison would be opened to us; and here,
no doubt, we should find some of our own difficulties discussed and
perhaps solved by early sages, still more by an enlightened public
opinion, showing itself in the establishment of sound traditions.
And, no doubt, from the dense population, the subdivision of property
and of labor, and the absence of a great territorial aristocracy, the
education of the Egyptians must have corresponded to our middle-class
and primary systems, together with special institutions for the higher
training of the professions and of the literary caste.

§ 5. If we could command our material, we might seek elsewhere for
analogies to the education of our nobility and higher gentry. We know
through Greek and Roman sources, as well as through the heroic poetry
of the “Shahnameh,” that the Aryan nobles who became, under Cyrus,
the rulers of Western Asia, were in character, as they were in blood,
allied to the Germanic chiefs and Norse Vikings, with their love of
daring adventure, their chivalry, and their intense loyalty to their
appointed sovereign. In these qualities they were strangely opposed to
the democratic Greeks, on whom they looked with contempt, while they
were appreciated in return only by a few such men as Herodotus and
Xenophon. Indeed, such devotion to their sovereign as made them leap
overboard to lighten his ship in a storm was confounded by the Greeks
with slavish submission, Oriental prostrations, and other signs of
humiliation. Nevertheless, the men whom the Greeks long dared not look
in the face--the conquerors of half the known world, the successful
rivals of the Romans for the dominion of the East--faced death under
Xerxes and the last Darius with other feelings than those of slavish
submission. Herodotus, in his interesting and sympathetic account of
them, says their children’s education consisted of three things--to
ride, to shoot, and to tell the truth. If he had added a chivalrous
loyalty to their kings like that of the French nobles in the last
century, he would have completed the picture, and sketched a training
which many an English gentleman considers little short of perfection.

§ 6. The Romans are the only other ancient people who stand near enough
to us to suggest an inquiry into their education. And it may be said
that they combined the dignity of noble traditions with the practical
instincts of a successful trading people. Hence Roman education, if
carried on with system, ought of all others to correspond with that of
Englishmen, who should combine the same qualities in carrying out an
analogous policy, and in filling, to some extent, a similar position
in the world. But so closely was all Roman culture based on Greek
books and models that, although every people must develop individual
features of its own--and the Romans had plenty of them, as we may see
from Quintilian--any philosophical knowledge of Roman education must
depend upon a previous knowledge of the Greeks. In many respects the
Romans were a race more congenial to the English, and hence by us
more easily understood. In the coarser and stronger elements of human
character, in directness and love of truth, in a certain contempt of
æsthetics and of speculation, in a blunt assertion of the supremacy
of practical questions, in a want of sympathy, and often a stupid
ignorance and neglect of the character and requirements of subject
races, the Romans are the true forerunners of the English in history.
Burdened as we are with these defects of national character, the
products of the subtler and more genial, if less solid and truthful,
Hellenic race are particularly well worth our consideration. This has
been so thoroughly recognized by thoughtful men in our generation as to
require no further support by argument. It only remains that each of
our Hellenists should do his best, in some distinct line, to make the
life of the Greeks known to us with fairness and accuracy.


  FOOTNOTES:

[1] P. 819.




  CHAPTER I.

  INFANCY.


§ 7. We find in Homer, especially in the “Iliad,” indications of the
plainest kind that Greek babies were like the babies of modern Europe,
equally troublesome, equally delightful to their parents, equally
uninteresting to the rest of society. The famous scene in the sixth
book of the “Iliad,” when Hector’s infant, Astyanax, screams at the
sight of his father’s waving crest, and the hero lays his helmet on
the ground that he may laugh and weep over the child; the love and
tenderness of Andromache, and her pathetic laments in the twenty-second
book--are familiar to all. She foresees the hardships and unkindnesses
to her orphan boy, “who was wont upon his father’s knees to eat the
purest marrow and the rich fat of sheep; and when sleep came upon him,
and he ceased his childish play, he would lie in the arms of his nurse,
on a soft cushion, satisfied with every comfort.” So, again,[2] a
protecting goddess is compared to a mother keeping the flies from her
sleeping infant, and a pertinacious friend[3] to a little girl who,
running beside her mother, begs to be taken up, holding her dress and
delaying her, and with tearful eyes the child keeps looking up till
the mother denies her no longer. These are only stray references, and
yet they speak no less clearly than if we had asked for an express
answer to a direct inquiry. So we have the hesitation of the murderers
sent to make away with the infant Cypselus, who had been foretold to
portend danger to the Corinthian Herods of that day. The smile of the
baby unmans--or should we rather say unbrutes?--the first ruffian, and
so the task is passed on from man to man. This story in Herodotus[4]
is a sort of natural Greek parallel to the great Shakespearian scene,
where another child sways his intended torturer with an eloquence more
conscious and explicit, but not, perhaps, more powerful, than the
radiant smile of the Greek baby. Thus Euripides, the great master of
pathos, represents Iphigenia bringing her infant brother Orestes to
plead for her with that unconsciousness of sorrow which pierces us to
the heart more than the most affecting rhetoric. In modern art a little
child, playing about its dead mother, and waiting with contentment for
her awaking, is perhaps the most powerful appeal to human compassion
which we are able to conceive.

On the other hand, the troubles of infancy were then as now very
great. We do not, indeed, hear of croup or teething or measles or
whooping-cough. But these are occasional matters, and count as nothing
beside the inexorable tyranny of a sleepless baby. For then as now
mothers and nurses had a strong prejudice in favor of carrying about
restless children, and so soothing them to sleep. The unpractical
Plato requires that in his fabulous Republic two or three stout nurses
shall be in readiness to carry about each child, because children,
like game-cocks, gain spirit and endurance by this treatment! What
they really gain is a gigantic power of torturing their mothers.
Most children can readily be taught to sleep in a bed, or even in
an arm-chair; but an infant once accustomed to being carried about
will insist upon it; and so it came that Greek husbands were obliged
to relegate their wives to another sleeping-room, where the nightly
squalling of the furious infant might not disturb the master as well
as the mistress of the house. But the Greek gentleman was able to make
good his damaged rest by a mid-day siesta, and so required but little
sleep at night. The modern father in Northern Europe, with his whole
day’s work and waking, is therefore in a more disadvantageous position.

Of course, very fashionable people kept nurses, and it was the highest
tone at Athens to have a Spartan nurse for the infant, just as an
English nurse is sought out among foreign noblesse. We are told that
these women made the child hardier, that they used less swathing and
bandaging, and allowed free play for the limbs; and this, like all the
Spartan physical training, was approved of and admired by the rest of
the Greek public, though its imitation was never suggested save in the
unpractical speculations of Plato.

Whether they also approved of a diet of marrow and mutton suet, which
Homer, in the passage just cited, considers the luxury of princes, does
not appear. As Homer was the Greek Bible--an inspired book containing
perfect wisdom on all things, human and divine--there must have been
many orthodox parents who followed his prescription. But we hear no
approval or censure of such diet. Possibly marrow may have represented
our cod-liver oil in strengthening delicate infants. But as the
Homeric men fed far more exclusively on meat than their historical
successors, some vegetable substitute, such as olive oil, must have
been in use later on. Even within our memory mutton suet boiled in milk
was commonly recommended by physicians for the delicacy now treated
by cod-liver oil. The supposed strengthening of children by air and
exposure, or by early neglect of their comforts, was as fashionable
at Sparta as it is with many modern theorists, and it probably led in
both cases to the same result--the extinction of the weak and delicate.
These theorists parade the cases of survival of stout children--that
is, their exceptional soundness--as the effect of this harsh treatment,
and so satisfy themselves that experience confirms their views. Now
with the Spartans this was logical enough, for as they professed and
desired nothing but physical results, as they despised intellectual
qualities, and esteemed obedience to be the highest of moral ones, they
were perhaps justified in their proceeding. So thoroughly did they
advocate the production of healthy citizens for military purposes that
they were quite content that the sickly should die. In fact, in the
case of obviously weak and deformed infants, they did not hesitate to
expose them in the most brutal sense, not to cold and draughts, but to
the wild beasts in the mountains.

§ 8. This brings us to the first shocking contrast between the Greek
treatment of children and ours. We cannot really doubt, from the free
use of the idea in Greek tragedies, in the comedies of ordinary life,
and in theories of political economy, that the exposing of new-born
children was not only sanctioned by public feeling, but actually
practised throughout Greece. Various motives combined to justify or to
extenuate this practice. In the first place, the infant was regarded
as the property of its parents, indeed of its father, to an extent
inconceivable to most modern Christians. The State only, whose claim
overrode all other considerations, had a right, for public reasons,
to interfere with the dispositions of a father. Individual human life
had not attained what may be called the exaggerated value derived from
sundry superstitions, which remains even after those superstitions
have decayed. And, moreover, in many Greek states, the contempt for
commercial pursuits, and the want of outlet for practical energy,
made the supporting of large families cumbersome, or the subdivision
of patrimonies excessive. Hence the prudence or the selfishness of
parents did not hesitate to use an escape which modern civilization
condemns as not only criminal, but as horribly cruel. How little even
the noblest Greek theorists felt this objection appears from the fact
that Plato, the Attic Moses, sanctions infanticide[5] under certain
circumstances or in another form, in his ideal state. In the genteel
comedy it is often mentioned as a somewhat painful necessity, but
enjoined by prudence. Nowhere does the agony of the mother’s heart
reach us through their literature, save in one illustration used by
the Platonic Socrates, where he compares the anger of his pupils, when
first confuted out of their prejudices, to the fury of a young mother
deprived of her first infant. There is something horrible in the very
allusion, as if in after-life Attic mothers became hardened to this
treatment. We must suppose the exposing of female infants to have been
not uncommon until the just retribution of barrenness fell upon the
nation, and the population dwindled away by a strange atrophy.

§ 9. In the many family suits argued by the Attic orators, we do
not (I believe) find a case in which a large family of children is
concerned. Four appears a larger number than the average. Marriages
between relations as close as uncle and niece, and even half-brothers
and sisters, were not uncommon; but the researches of modern science
have removed the grounds for believing that this practice would tend
to diminish the race. It would certainly increase any _pre-existing_
tendency to hereditary disease; yet we do not hear of infantile
diseases any more than we hear of delicate infants. Plagues and
epidemics were common enough, but, as already observed, we do not hear
of measles, or whooping-cough, or scarlatina, or any of the other
constant persecutors of our nurseries.

As the learning of foreign languages was quite beneath the notions
of the Greek gentleman, who rather expected all barbarians to learn
_his_ language, the habit of employing foreign nurses, so useful and
even necessary to good modern education, was well-nigh unknown. It
would have been thought a great misfortune to any Hellenic child to
be brought up speaking Thracian or Egyptian. Accordingly, foreign
slave attendants, with their strange accent and rude manners, were not
allowed to take charge of children till they were able to go to school,
and had learned their mother tongue perfectly.

But the women’s apartments, in which children were kept for the first
few years, are closed so completely to us that we can but conjecture a
few things about the life and care of Greek babies. A few late epigrams
tell the grief of parents bereaved of their infants. Beyond this,
classical literature affords us no light. The backwardness in culture
of Greek women leads us to suspect that then, as now, Greek babies were
more often spoiled than is the case among the serious Northern nations.
The term “Spartan mother” is, however, still proverbial; and, no doubt,
in that exceptional State discipline was so universal and so highly
esteemed that it penetrated even to the nursery. But in the rest of
Greece we may conceive the young child arriving at his schoolboy age
more wilful and headstrong than most of our more watched and worried
infants. Archytas, the philosopher, earned special credit for inventing
the rattle, and saving much damage to household furniture by occupying
children with this toy.


  FOOTNOTES:

[2] Δ 130.

[3] Π 7.

[4] Herod. v. 93.

[5] Exposing children, instead of killing them, left open the chance
that some benevolent person would save them, from pity, or avaricious
person sell them as slaves--a result which, no doubt, often occurred.
Thus the parents could console their consciences with a hope that the
benevolence of the gods had prevented the natural consequences of their
inhuman act.




  CHAPTER II.

  EARLIER CHILDHOOD.


§ 10. The external circumstances determining a Greek boy’s education
were somewhat different from ours. We must remember that all old Greek
life, except in rare cases, such as that of Elis, of which we know
nothing, was distinctly _town life_; and so, naturally, Greek schooling
was day schooling, from which the children returned to the care of
their parents. To hand over boys, far less girls, to the charge of a
boarding-school was perfectly unknown, and would, no doubt, have been
gravely censured. Orphans were placed under the care of their nearest
male relative, even when their education was provided (as it was in
some cases) by the State. Again, as regards the age of going to school,
it would naturally be early, seeing that day schools may well include
infants of tender age, and that in Greek households neither father nor
mother was often able or disposed to undertake the education of the
children. Indeed, we find it universal that even the knowledge of the
letters, and reading, were obtained from a schoolmaster. All these
circumstances would point to an early beginning of Greek school life;
whereas, on the other hand, the small number of subjects required in
those days, the absence from the programme of various languages, of
most exact sciences, and of general history and geography, made it
unnecessary to begin so early, or work so hard, as our unfortunate
children have to do. Above all, there were no competitive examinations,
except in athletics and music. The Greeks never thought of promoting
a man for “dead knowledge,” but for his living grasp of science or of
life.

Owing to these causes, we find the theorists discussing, as they now
do, the expediency of waiting till the age of seven before beginning
serious education--some advising it, others recommending easy and
half-playing lessons from an earlier period. And then, as now, we find
the same curious silence on the really important fact that the exact
number of years a child has lived is nothing to the point in question;
and that while one child may be too young at seven to commence work,
many more may be distinctly too old.

§ 11. At all events, we may assume in parents the same varieties of
over-anxiety, of over-indulgence, of nervousness, and of carelessness
about their children; and so it doubtless came to pass that there was
in many cases a gap between infancy and school-life, which was spent
in playing and doing mischief. This may be fairly inferred, not only
from such anecdotes as that of Alcibiades playing with his fellows in
the street,[6] evidently without the protection of any pædagogue, but
also from the large nomenclature of boys’ games preserved to us in the
glossaries of later grammarians.

These games are quite distinct from the regular exercises in the
palæstra (of which we will speak presently, as forming a regular part
of education). We have only general descriptions of them, and these
either by Greek scholiasts or by modern philologists. But, in spite
of the sad want of practical knowledge of games shown by both, the
instincts of boyhood are so uniform that we can often frame a very
distinct idea of the sort of amusement popular among Greek children.
For young boys, games can hardly consist of anything else than either
the practising of some bodily dexterity, such as hopping on one foot,
higher or longer than is easy, or throwing farther with a stone; or
else some imitation of war, such as snowballing, or pulling a rope
across a line, or pursuing under fixed conditions; or, lastly, the
practice of some mechanical ingenuity, such as whipping a top or
shooting with marbles. So far as climate or mechanical inventions
have not altered our little boys’ games, we find all these principles
represented in Greek games. There was the hobby- or cock-horse (κάλαμον
παραβῆναι), standing or hopping on one leg (ἀσκωλιάζειν), which, as the
word ἀσκός implies, was attempted on a _skin-bottle_ filled with liquid
and greased; blindman’s-buff (χαλκῆ μυῖα), in which the boy cried, “I
am hunting a _bracken fly_,” and the rest answered, “You will not catch
it;” games of hide-and-seek, of taking and releasing prisoners, of fool
in the middle, of playing at king--in fact, there is probably no simple
child’s game now known which was not then in use.

A few more details may, however, be interesting. There was a game
called κυνδαλισμός, in which the κύνδαλον was a peg of wood with a
heavy end sharpened, which boys sought to strike into a softened place
in the earth so that it stood upright, and knocked out the peg of a
rival. This reminds us of the pegtop-splitting which still goes on
in our streets. Another, called ὀστρακίνδα, consisted of tossing an
oyster-shell in the air, of which one side was blackened or moistened,
and called _night_, the other _day_, or sun and rain. The boys were
divided into two sides with these names, and, according as their
side of the shell turned up, they pursued and took prisoners their
adversaries. On the other hand, ἐποστρακισμός was making a _shell_
skip along the surface of water by a horizontal throw, and winning by
the greatest number of skips. Εἰς ὤμιλλαν, though a general expression
for any contest, was specially applied to tossing a knuckle-bone or
smooth stone so as to lie in the centre of a fixed circle, and to
disturb those which were already in good positions. This was also done
into a small hole (τρόπα). They seem to have shot dried beans from
their fingers as we do marbles (φρυγίνδα). They spun coins on their
edge (χαλκισμός).

Here are two games not perhaps so universal nowadays. Πενταλιθίζειν
was a technical word for tossing up _five pebbles_ or astragali,
and receiving them so as to make them lie on the back of the hand.
Μηλολόνθη, or the _beetle_ game, consisted in flying a beetle by a
long thread, and guiding him like a kite. But by way of improvement
they attached a waxed splinter, lighted, to his tail; and this cruelty
is now practised, according to a good authority (Papasliotis), in
Greece, and has even been known to cause serious fires.[7] Tops were
known under various names (βέμβιξ, στρόμβος, στρόβιλος), one of them
certainly a humming-top. So were hoops (τροχοί).

Ball-playing was ancient and diffused, even among the Homeric
heroes. But as it was found very fashionable and carefully practised
by both Mexicans and Peruvians at the time of the conquest, it is
probably common to all civilized races. We have no details left us
of complicated games with balls; and the mere throwing them up and
catching them one from the other, with some rhythmic motion, is hardly
worth all the poetic fervor shown about this game by the Greeks. But
possibly the musical and dancing accompaniments were very important, in
the case of grown people, and in historical times. Pollux, however--our
main authority for most of these games--in one place[8] distinctly
describes both football and handball. “The names,” he says, “of games
with balls are--ἐπίσκυρος, φαινίνδα, ἀπόῤῥαξις, οὐρανία. The first
is played by two even sides, who draw a line in the centre, which
they called σκῦρος, on which they place the ball. They draw two other
lines behind each side, and those who first reach the ball throw it
(ῥίπτουσιν) over the opponents, whose duty it is to catch it and
return it, until one side drives the other back over their goal line.”
Though Pollux makes no mention of _kicking_, this game is evidently
our football in substance. He proceeds: “φαινίνδα was called either
from Phænindes, the first discoverer, or from deceiving (φενακίζειν),”
etc.--we need not follow his etymologies--“and ἀπόῤῥαξις consists of
making a ball bound off the ground, and sending it against a wall,
counting the number of the hops according as it was returned.” And as
if to make the anticipations of our games more curiously complete,
there is cited from the history of Manuel, by the Byzantine Cinnamus
(A.D. 1200), a clear description of the Canadian lacrosse, a sort of
hockey played with rackets: “Certain youths, divided equally, leave in
a level place, which they have before prepared and measured, a ball
made of leather, about the size of an apple, and rush at it, as if it
were a prize lying in the middle, from their fixed starting-point (a
goal). Each of them has in his right hand a racket (ῥάβδον) of suitable
length ending in a sort of flat bend, the middle of which is occupied
by gut strings dried by seasoning, and plaited together in net
fashion. Each side strives to be the first to bring it to the opposite
end of the ground from that allotted to them. Whenever the ball is
driven by the ῥάβδοι (rackets) to the end of the ground, it counts as a
victory.”[9]

Two games, which were not confined to children, and which are
not widely diffused, though they exist, among us, are the use of
_astragali_, or knuckle-bones of animals, so cut nearly square as
to serve for dice; and with these children threw for luck, the
highest throw (sixes) being accounted the best. In later Greek art
representations of Eros and other youthful figures engaged with
astragali are frequent. It is to be feared that this game was an
introduction to dice-playing, which was so common, and so often abused,
that among the few specimens of ancient dice remaining there are some
false, and which were evidently loaded. The other game to which I
allude is the Italian _morra_, the guessing instantaneously how many
fingers are thrown up by the player and his adversary. It is surprising
how fond Southern men and boys still are of this simple game, chiefly,
however, for gambling purposes.

There was tossing in a blanket, walking on stilts, swinging, leap-frog,
and many other similar plays, which are ill-understood, and worse
explained, by the learned, and of no importance to us, save as proving
the general similarity of the life of little boys then as now.

We know nothing about the condition of little girls of the same age,
except that they specially indulged in ball-playing. Like our own
children, the girls probably joined, to a lesser degree, in the boys’
games, and only so far as they could be carried on within-doors, in
the court of the house. There are graceful representations of their
swinging and practising our _seesaw_. Dolls they had in plenty, and
doll-making (of clay) was quite a special trade at Athens. In more than
one instance we have found in children’s graves their favorite dolls,
which sorrowing parents laid with them as a sort of keepsake in the
tomb.

§ 12. Most unfortunately, there is hardly a word left of the nursery
rhymes and of the folk-lore, which are very much more interesting than
the physical amusements of children. Yet we know that such popular
songs existed in plenty; we know, too, from the early fame of Æsop’s
fables, from the myths so readily invented and exquisitely told by
Plato, that here we have lost a real fund of beautiful and stimulating
children’s stories.[10] And of course here, too, the general character
of such stories throughout the human race was preserved.


  FOOTNOTES:

[6] Plut. “Alkib.,” c. 2.

[7] This seems to be the interpretation of “Achar.” 920 sq., according
to Grasberger.

[8] ix. 103.

[9] I do not know whether so late an authority is valid proof for
the early Greek origin of a game. Most certainly the polo played at
Constantinople at the same time came from an equestrian people, and not
from the Greeks.

[10] There is a possibility of recovering some of them by a careful
collection of the ναναρίσματα of the modern Greeks, which in many cases
doubtless correspond to their forerunners the βαυκαλήματα of the old
Greeks. Stories of _Mormo_ and _Gorgo_ and the _Empousa_ are still
current to frighten children, as are also (about Arachova) songs about
Charos (the old Charon), the ruthless genius of death. The belief in
Lamia is still so common that ἔπνιξεν ἡ Λάμια--_Lamia choked it_--is a
common expression when a child dies suddenly. Cf. Βενίζελος, “On the
Private Life of the Old Greeks,” Athens, 1873.




  CHAPTER III.

  SCHOOL DAYS--THE PHYSICAL SIDE.


§ 13. The most striking difference between early Greek education and
ours was undoubtedly this, that the physical development of boys was
attended to in a special place and by a special master. It was not
thought sufficient for them to play the chance games of childhood; they
underwent careful bodily training under a very fixed system, which
was determined by the athletic contests of after-life. This feature,
which excites the admiration of the modern Germans, and has given rise
to an immense literature, is doubtless all the more essential now
that the mental training of our boys has become so much more trying;
and we can quite feel, when we look at the physical development of
ordinary foreigners, how keenly they must envy the freedom of limb
and ease of motion, not only as we see it suggested by Greek statues,
but as we have it before us in the ordinary sporting Englishman. But
it is quite in accordance with their want of practical development,
that while they write immense books about the physical training of the
Greeks, and the possibility of imitating it in modern education, they
seem quite ignorant of that side of English education at our public
schools; and yet there they might see in practice a physical education
in no way inferior to that described in classical authors. I say it
quite deliberately--the public-school boy, who is trained in cricket,
football, and rowing, and who in his holidays can obtain riding,
salmon-fishing, hunting, and shooting, enjoys a physical training
which no classical days ever equalled. The athletic part of this
training is enjoyed by all boys at our public schools, though the field
sports at home only fall to the lot of the richer or more fortunate.

§ 14. When we compare what the Greeks afforded to their boys, we find
it divided into two contrasted kinds of exercise: hunting, which
was practised by the Spartans very keenly, and no doubt also by the
Eleans and Arcadians, as may be seen from Xenophon’s “Tract on [Hare]
Hunting;” and gymnastics, which in the case of boys were carried on in
the so-called palæstra, a sort of open-air gymnasium (in our sense)
kept by private individuals as a speculation, and to which the boys
were sent, as they were to their ordinary schoolmaster.[11] We find
that the Spartans, who had ample scope for hunting with dogs in the
glens and coverts of Mount Taygetus, rather despised mere exercises
of dexterity in the palæstra, just as our sportsmen would think
very little of spending hours in a gymnasium. But those Greeks who
lived in towns like Athens, and in the midst of a thickly populated
and well-cultivated country, could not possibly obtain hunting, and
therefore found the most efficient substitute.

Still, we find them very far behind the English in their knowledge or
taste for out-of-door games, such as cricket, football, hockey, golf,
etc.--games which combine chance and skill, which combine strength
with dexterity, and which intensely interest the players while keeping
them in the open air. Yachting, though there were regattas, was not in
fashion in ancient Greece. Rowing, which they could have practised to
their heart’s content, and which was of the last importance in their
naval warfare, was never thought gentlemanly, and always consigned to
slaves or hirelings. There are, indeed, as above quoted from Pollux,
descriptions of something like football and lacrosse, but the obscurity
and rarity of any allusions to them show that they are in no sense
national games. Running races round a short course was one of their
chief exercises, but this is no proper out-of-door game.

§ 15. Accordingly, the Germans, in seeking to base their physical
education on Greek lines, seem to make the capital mistake of ignoring
that kind of exercise for boys which vastly exceeds in value any
training in gymnasia. The Eton and Harrow match at Lord’s is a far more
beautiful sight, and far better for the performers, than the boys’
wrestling or running at Olympia. And besides the variety of exercise at
a game like cricket, and the various intelligence and decision which it
stimulates, a great part of the game lies not in the winning, but in
the proper _form_ of the play, in what the Greeks so highly prized as
_eurythmy_--a graceful action not merely in dancing and ball-playing,
but in the most violent physical exertion.

But the Greeks had no playgrounds beyond the palæstra or gymnasium;
they had no playgrounds in our sense; and though a few proverbs
speak of swimming as a universal accomplishment which boys learned,
the silence of Greek literature on the subject[12] makes one very
suspicious as to the generality of such training.

With this introduction, we may turn to some details as to the education
of Greek boys in their palæstra.

§ 16. In one point, certainly, the Greeks agreed more with the modern
English than with any other civilized nation. They regarded sport as a
really serious thing. And unless it is so regarded, it will never be
brought to the national perfection to which the English have brought
it, or to which the Greeks are supposed to have brought it. And yet
even in this point the Greeks regarded their sports differently from
us, and from all nations who have adopted Semitic ideas in religion.
Seriousness of the religious kind is with us quite distinct from the
seriousness of sport. With the Greeks it was not, or rather seriousness
was not with them an attribute of religion in any sense more than it
was of ordinary life. They harmonized religion and sports, not by the
seriousness of their sports so much as by the cheerfulness--a Semite,
ancient or modern, would say by the levity--of their deities; _for the
gods, too, love sport_ (φιλοπαίγμονες γὰρ καὶ οἱ θεοί), says Plato
in his “Cratylus,” a remarkable and thoroughly Greek utterance. The
greatest feasts of the gods were celebrated by intensifying human
pleasures--not merely those of the palate, according to the grosser
notion of the Christian Middle Ages, but æsthetical pleasures, and that
of excitement--pleasures, not of idleness, but of keen enjoyment.

§ 17. The names applied to the exercising-places indicate their
principal uses. _Palæstra_ means a wrestling-place; _gymnasium_
originally a place for naked exercise, but the verb early lost this
connotation and came to mean mere physical training. We hear that a
short race-course (δρόμος) was often attached to the palæstra, and
short it must have been, for it was sometimes covered in (called
ξυστός), probably with a shed roof along the wall of the main enclosure.

There is no evidence to decide the point whether the boys went to
this establishment at the same age that they went to school, and at a
different hour of the day, or at a different age, taking their physical
and mental education separately. And even in this latter case we are
left in doubt which side obtained the priority. The best authorities
among the Germans decide on separate ages for palæstra and school, and
put the palæstra first. But in the face of many uncertainties, and some
evidence the other way, the common-sense view is preferable that both
kinds of instruction were given together, though we know nothing about
the distribution of the day, save that both are asserted to have begun
very early. Even the theoretical schemes of Plato and Aristotle do not
help us here, and it is one of those many points which are now lost on
account of their being once so perfectly obvious and familiar.

We here discuss the physical side first, because it is naturally
consequent upon the home games, which have been described, and because
the mental side will naturally connect itself with the higher education
of more advanced years. And here, too, of the great divisions of
exercises in the palæstra--_wrestling_ and _dancing_, more properly
exercises of strength and of grace--we will place athletics first, as
the other naturally leads us on to the mental side.

§ 18. In order to leave home and reach the palæstra safely as well as
to return, Greek boys were put under the charge of a _pædagogue_, in
no way to be identified (as it now is) with a schoolmaster. The text
“The law was our schoolmaster, to bring us unto Christ” has suffered
from this mistake. The Greek _pædagogue_ means merely the slave who had
the charge of bringing his master’s sons safely to and from school, and
guarding them from mischief by the way. He was often old and trusty,
often old and useless, always ignorant, and never respected. He was
evidently regarded by young and gay boys as a great interference to
enjoyment, insisting upon punctual hours of return, and limiting that
intercourse with elder boys which was so fascinating, but also so
dangerous, to Greek children.

The keeper of the palæstra and trainer (παιδοτρίβης) was not appointed
by the State, but (as already mentioned) took up the work as a private
enterprise, not directed by, but under the supervision of, the State,
in the way of police regulation. We have, indeed, in the speech of
Æschines “Against Timarchus,” very stringent laws quoted to the effect
that no palæstra or school might be open before or after daylight; that
no one above boys’ age might enter or remain in the building; and the
severest penalties, even death, were imposed on the violation of these
regulations. But we know that, even if true, which is very doubtful,
the text of the laws here cited became a dead letter, for it was a
favorite resort of elder men to see the boys exercising. Restrictions
there were, of course; a fashionable lounge could in no way serve as
a strict training-school, and we know that at Sparta, even in the
gymnasia, the regulation _strip or go_ was enforced to prevent an idle
crowd.

§ 19. There is figured on many vases, often in brilliant colors, the
interior of the palæstra. It is denoted by the bearded Hermes--a rude
bust of the patron god. A middle-aged man in a short mantle, or
_chlamys_, with a rod or wand in his hand, is watching and directing
the exercises of the boys, generally a wrestling-match. We know
also, from the _pentathlon_ being once introduced at Olympia for
boys, that its five exercises were those in which they were usually
trained--leaping, running, throwing the discus, the spear, and
wrestling. For elder boys, boxing and the _pancratium_ were doubtless
added, if they meant to train for public competitions, but ordinary
gentlemen’s sons would never undergo this special training and its
hardships. Indeed, the Spartans strictly discountenanced such sports,
both as likely to disfigure, and as sure to produce quarrels and
ill-will. The lighter exercises were intended to make the frame hardy
and the movements graceful, and were introduced by a thorough rubbing
of the skin with olive oil, which, after the training, was scraped
off with a special instrument, the στλεγγίς, as may be seen in the
splendid Vatican statue of the athlete scraping his arm, the so-called
_Apoxyomenos_, referred to as an original of Lysippus. In luxurious
days they also took a bath, but this was hardly the case with ordinary
boys--indeed, the water supply of Greek towns was probably scanty
enough, and the nation not given to much washing.

§ 20. There remain little or no details as to the exact rules of
training practised in the ordinary palæstras, but we may fairly assume
them to have been the same in kind (though milder in degree) as those
approved for formal athletes. If we judge from these, we will not
form a high idea of Greek training. Pausanias informs us that they
trained on dry cheese, which is not surprising, as they were (like most
southerns) not a very carnivorous people. But when a known athlete
(Dromeus[13]) discovered that meat diet was the best, they seem to
have followed up the discovery by inferring that the more of a good
thing the better; and so athletes were required to eat very large
quantities of meat, owing to which they were lazy and sleepy when
not engaged in active work.[14] We need not suppose that the diet of
ordinary boys was in any way interfered with, but this particular case
shows the crude notions which prevailed, and the trainer came more and
more to assume the part of a dietetic doctor, as is stated by Plato.

§ 21. So much as to the conditions of good training; as to the
performance, there are points of no less significance. All the learned
Germans who write on these subjects notice that the Olympic races were
carried out on soft sand, not on hard and springy ground, so that
really good pace cannot have been a real object to Greek runners.[15]
But, what is worse, they praise their zeal and energy in starting (as
we see on vases) with wild swinging of their arms, in spread-eagle
fashion, and _encouraging themselves with loud shouts_.[16] This
style of running may seem very fine to a professor in his study, but
will only excite ridicule among those who have ever made the least
practical essay, or seen any competitions. But possibly the Greeks
were not so uniformly silly in this respect as they are now represented
by commentators, for there is preserved on the Acropolis at Athens one
little-known vase on which a running figure has the elbows held tightly
back in the proper way. We may also have grave suspicions about Greek
boxing, from the facts that they weighted the hand heavily with loaded
gloves, and that boxers are described as men with their _ears_, and not
with their _noses_, crushed. We cannot but suspect them of swinging
round, and not striking straight from the shoulder. This is further
proved by the use of protecting ear-caps (ἀμφωτίδες) in boxing, a thing
which no modern boxer would dream of doing.

§ 22. All these hints taken together make us reasonably suspect that,
_as athletics_, the training of the _pædotribes_ was not what we should
admire. But, on the other hand, the picturesque and enthusiastic
descriptions of beautiful and well-trained Greek boys, coupled with the
ideal figures which remain to us in Greek sculpture, prove beyond any
doubt that they knew perfectly what a beautiful manly form was, and by
what training it could be produced. Let us, however, not exaggerate the
matter. Very few boys really equalled the ideal types of the sculptor;
and if we make allowance for this, we may conclude that the finest
English public-school boy is not inferior to the best Greek types in
real life.[17] Perhaps some advantage may have resulted from the
greater freedom of limb obtained by naked training and rubbing with
oil; but the advantage of this over a modern flannel suit or tight
athlete’s dress is very small. Nevertheless, the English schoolboy is
physically so superior to the schoolboys of other European nations that
we may count him, with the Greek boy, as almost a distinct animal.

What surprises us is that by regular training in the simplest
exercises, such as running, leaping, wrestling, and throwing the
discus or dart, such splendid results were ever attained. Or shall we
say that it was not the _wrestling_ but the _dancing_ side of Greek
training which was of chief importance? We may dismiss with a word
the fabulous stories of athletic feats at Olympia, where a certain
Chionis, a Spartan of early date (Ol. 28-31, _cir._ 660 B.C.), was
said to have leaped fifty-two feet, and afterwards Phayllus of Croton
fifty-five feet. We may infer, too, from the use of weights (ἁλτῆρες),
that the jump was a standing one. Happily these assertions are only
made by late grammarians, and though some German critics are inclined
to extend their adoration of Greek training to this point, it will
rather, with practical readers, tend to discredit other statements made
by the same authority. As we do not hear of a running jump, so we do
not hear of a high jump either, at least in public games. Both may have
been practised in the palæstra. The distance for a sprint-race for men
was two hundred yards, and somewhat shorter for boys. Their longest
race at Olympia was twenty-four stadia (4800 yards, 2⅔ miles), which
the professors, without any knowledge of the time in which it was
done, think more wonderful than the fifty-five-feet jump, but which is
equalled in many English sports of the present day.

§ 23. Apart from the doubts here raised as to the perfection of Greek
training, let us revert, in conclusion, to the absence among elder
boys of those out-of-door games, like cricket, which are so valuable
for developing mental, together with physical, qualities. There is one
feature in these games which the Greeks seem to have missed altogether,
and which appears to be ignored in most German books on the reform of
physical education in schools. It is that forming of clubs and teams
of boys, in which they choose their own leaders, and get accustomed
to self-government and a submission to the superior will of equals,
or the decision of public opinion among themselves. Plato saw long
ago that the proper and peculiar intention of boys’ sports was more
mental than bodily improvement. But he confined himself to that part
of the question which advocates the cultivation of spirit in boys as
better than that which cultivates strength only. This is perfectly
true, and no game is worthy the name in which spirit and intelligence
cannot defeat brute strength. But there is little trace, save at
Sparta, of any free constitution in boys’ education, in which they
manage their own affairs, fight out their own quarrels, and praise or
censure according to a public opinion of their own. No Greek educator
seems to have had an inkling of this, and the foreign theorists who
have discussed educational reforms on the Greek models seem equally
unaware of its importance. Yet here, if anywhere, is the secret of
that independence of character and self-reliance which is the backbone
of the English constitution and the national liberty. The Greeks
were like the French and the Germans, who always imagine that the
games and sports will not prosper or be properly conducted without
the supervision of a _Turnlehrer_, or overseer; and they give great
exhortations to this man to sympathize with the boys and stimulate
them. In England the main duty of such people is to keep out of the way
and let the boys manage their own affairs. The results of the opposed
systems will strike any one who compares, on the one hand, the neat and
well-regulated French boys of a boarding-school, walking two-and-two,
with gloves on and toes turned out, along a road, followed by a master;
on the other, the playgrounds of any good English school during
recreation time. If the zealous and learned reformers who write books
on the subject in modern Europe would take the trouble to come and
see this for themselves, it might modify both their encomia on Greek
training and their suggestions for their own countries.


  FOOTNOTES:

[11] The exact relation of the ancient _palæstra_ and the _gymnasium_
has much exercised the critics. It seems plain that the former was a
private establishment, and intended for boys; the latter more general,
and resorted to by young men, not only amateurs and beginners, but also
more accomplished athletes. Hence the terms are often confused. In the
“Tract on the Athenian State,” however, the author mentions palæstras
as built by the demos for its public use; and this tract, whoever may
be its author, does not date later than 415 B.C.

[12] Herodotus, indeed (viii. 89), speaks of the generality of Greek
sailors as able to swim.

[13] Paus. vi. 7, 9.

[14] It was a curious rule at the Olympic games that the competitors
were even compelled to swear that they had spent a month in training
at Elis, as if it mattered whether the victory was won by natural
endowments only or by careful study. One would have thought that the
importance of the contest would insure ample training in those who
desired to win.

[15] I myself saw at the Olympic games now held at Athens, in the
re-excavated stadion of Herodes, a sprint-race of two hundred yards
over vine ground, cut into furrows, with dogs and people obstructing
the course. Cf. _Macmillan’s Magazine_ for September, 1876.

[16] Cf., for example, Grasberger, “Erziehung,” etc., iii. 212, quoting
Cicero, “Tusc. Disp.,” ii. 23, 26.

[17] It is a perpetual and perhaps now ineradicable mistake, because
we cannot see the real Athenians or Spartans of classical days, to
imagine them _in general_ like the ideal statues of the Greek artists.
We find it even generally stated that beauty was the rule and ugliness
the exception among them, in spite of Cicero’s complaint, when he was
disillusioned by a visit to Athens: “Quotusquisque enim formosus est?
Quum Athenis essem e gregibus epheborum vix singuli reperiebantur.”




  CHAPTER IV.

  SCHOOL DAYS--THE MUSICAL SIDE--THE SCHOOLMASTER.


§ 24. We will approach this side of the question by quoting the famous
description of Greek education in Plato’s “Protagoras,”[18] which will
recall to the reader the general problem, so apt to be lost or obscured
amid details. “Education and admonition commence in the very first
years of childhood, and last to the very end of life. Mother and nurse
and father and tutor (παιδαγωγός) are quarrelling about the improvement
of the child as soon as ever he is able to understand them. He cannot
say or do anything without their setting forth to him that this is
just and that is unjust; that this is honorable, that is dishonorable;
this is holy, that is unholy; do this, and abstain from that. And if
he obeys, well and good; if not, he is straightened by threats and
blows, like a piece of warped wood. At a later stage they send him to
teachers, and enjoin them to see to his manners even more than to his
reading and music; and the teachers do as they are desired. And when
the boy has learned his letters, and is beginning to understand what
is written, as before he understood only what was spoken, they put
into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads at school; in
these are contained many admonitions, and many tales and praises, and
encomia of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart,
in order that he may imitate or emulate them, and desire to become like
them. Then, again, the teachers of the lyre take similar care that
their young disciple is steady and gets into no mischief; and when they
have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the works
of other excellent poets, who are the lyric poets; and these they set
to music, and make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the
children, in order that they may learn to be more gentle and harmonious
and rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action; for the life
of man in every part has need of harmony and rhythm. Then they send
them to the master of gymnastics, in order that their bodies may better
minister to the virtuous mind, and that the weakness of their bodies
may not force them to play the coward in war or on any other occasion.
This is what is done by those who have the means, and those who have
the means are the rich; their children begin education soonest and
leave off latest. When they have done with masters, the State, again,
compels them to learn the laws, and live after the pattern which they
furnish, and not after their own fancies; and just as in learning to
write, the writing-master first draws lines with a stylus for the use
of the young beginner, and gives him the tablet, and makes him follow
the lines, so the city draws the laws, which were the invention of good
lawgivers which were of old time; these are given to the young man in
order to guide him in his conduct, whether as ruler or ruled; and he
who transgresses them is to be corrected or called to account, which is
a term used not only in your country, but in many others.”

This is the argument put by Plato into the mouth of Protagoras the
sophist, to show that virtue is a thing which can be taught, and not
a mere natural predisposition or a divine grace. The other _locus
classicus_, which may be referred to in close connection with it,
is the description of the traditional education given in Aristophanes’
“Clouds.”[19] The strict discipline of boys who were not allowed to
utter a whisper before their elders; who were sent in troops early
in the morning to school, in their single tunic, even in the deepest
winter snow; who were kept at work with the music-master studying old
traditional hymns, and in attitudes strictly controlled as regards
modesty and decency--all this is contrasted by the poet with what
he considers the corruption of the youth with florid and immoral
music, their meretricious desire to exhibit their bodily and mental
perfections, their luxury and sloth, their abandonment of sobriety and
diligence.

There are peculiarities of Greek taste so openly alluded to in this
passage that it will not bear literal translation into English, at
least into a book for ordinary readers; and therefore it need only be
remarked, in criticism of it, that too much stress has been laid by
theorists on Greek life, both on the picture of over-anxious morality
in the older time, and on the alleged immorality of the poet’s age.
It is from such passages that German historians draw their very
extravagant assertions of the rapid degeneracy of the Athenians under
what they call the _ochlocracy_, which followed upon the death of
Pericles. It is very easy to find in many other ages and times similar
assertions of the glory of the good old times, and the degeneracy of
the satirist’s own contemporaries. But there is generally no more truth
in it than in the assertion of Homer that his heroes took up and threw
easily great rocks which two, or five, or ten men, such as they now
are, could not lift. The same sort of thing was said in poetry of the
mediæval knights in comparison with modern Europe. One would imagine
them of greater size and might than we are, and yet their suits of
armor are seldom large enough for a man six feet high. The picture of
Aristophanes is doubtless a deliberate exaggeration, and would have
been readily acknowledged as such by the poet himself. But it, of
course, gives us the extremes possible in real life, as he knew it, and
is therefore of use in forming our ideas on the question, if we use
common sense and caution.

§ 25. With the exception of this feature, that Greek parents showed a
greater apprehension for the morals of their boys, and guarded them
as we should guard the morals of girls, it will be seen that the
principles of education are permanent, and applicable in all ages under
similar circumstances.

But what the ancients called _music_ in the wider sense must be held to
include a knowledge and recitation of good poetry, as well as proper
training in that figured dancing which was the most usual service
of the gods. Indeed, a good musical education in Greece, much in
contrast to ours, included every graceful æsthetical and intellectual
accomplishment. This wide use of the term, however, though co-ordinate
with the ordinary sense of playing instruments and singing, causes
little confusion. A distinction between “music and singing,” such as
we often see it (not satirically) set forth in the advertisements of
our professional teachers, was not admitted.

§ 26. I think we may be justified in asserting that the study of the
epic poets, especially of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” was the earliest
intellectual exercise of schoolboys, and, in the case of fairly
educated parents, even anticipated the learning of letters. For the
latter is never spoken of as part of a mother’s or of home education.
Reading was not so universal or so necessary as it now is; and as
it was in earlier days an accomplishment only gradually becoming an
essential, its acquisition seems always to have been intrusted to a
professional master, the γραμματιστής, or grammarian in the earlier use
of the word. Of course, careful parents, of the model above set forth
by Protagoras, must have inculcated early lessons from poetry before
that age. We may assume that books of Homer were read or recited to
growing boys, and that they were encouraged or required to learn them
off by heart.

This is quite certain to all who estimate justly the enormous influence
ascribed to Homer, and the principles assumed by the Greeks to have
underlain his work. He was universally considered to be a _moral
teacher_, whose characters were drawn with a moral intent, and for
the purpose of example or avoidance. In Plato’s “Ion” we distinctly
find something supernatural, some distinct inspiration by the muse,
asserted of Homer; and this inspiration was even passed on, like some
magnetic force, from bard to bard. These ancient poets were even
supposed to have uttered words deeper and holier than they themselves
knew, being driven by some divine _œstrus_ to compose what they could
not have said in their natural state. Accordingly, the “Iliad” and
“Odyssey” were supposed to contain all that was useful, not only for
godliness, but for life. All the arts and sciences were to be derived
(by interpretation) from these sacred texts.

Hence, when it occurs to a modern reader that the main superiority of
our education over the Greek is the early training in the Scriptures--a
training, alas! decaying in earnestness every day--an old Athenian or
Milesian or Cean would deny the fact, and say that they, too, had an
inspired volume, written for their learning, in which all the moral
virtues and all the necessaries of faith were contained. The charge of
objectionable passages in the old epic would doubtless be retorted by a
similar charge against the old Semitic books.

§ 27. It is well-nigh impossible that in the higher families throughout
Greece this moral training should not have begun at home; and there
must have been many Greek mothers able and anxious to help, though
history is silent about them, and does not even single out individual
cases, like the Roman Cornelia, where mothers influenced the moral
and intellectual training of their children.[20] Certain it is that
here and there we find evidences of a strong feeling of respect to the
house-mother which contrast curiously with the usual silence about
women. In the “Clouds,” the acme of villany in the young scapegrace
who has turned sophist under Socrates’ hands is to threaten violence
to his mother.[21] Here it is that Strepsiades exclaims in real horror
at the result of such teaching. We also find both Plato and (perhaps
in imitation of him) Cicero laying stress upon the purity of speech
preserved in the conversation of cultivated women, whose conservative
life and tastes rejected slang and novelty, and thus preserved the
language pure and undefiled. The very opposite complaint is made
concerning the pædagogues, whose often barbarous origin and rude
manners were of damage to the youth.

§ 28. On the question of punishments, both at home and at school, we
do not find the Greeks very different from ourselves. There are not in
Greek literature any such eloquent protests against corporal punishment
as we find in Seneca and Quintilian. They all acknowledge the use and
justice of it, and only caution against applying servile punishments
to free boys. Indeed, in many later writers, such as Lucian, the
severities of schoolmasters are noted; and we have among the Pompeian
pictures a scene of a master flogging a boy, who is hoisted on the
shoulders of another, with a third holding him up by the heels. These
evidences, together with those of the later Romans, on the sounds of
woe common in schools, must not be overestimated. They are probably
exceptional cases made prominent for satirical purposes, and not
implying any peculiar savagery in Greek above modern masters.

Most certainly the Greek schoolmaster was not harsher than the
lower-class masters in many primary schools, as, for example, the
Irish hedge schoolmasters described in Carleton’s “Tales of the Irish
Peasantry.”

Unfortunately, the Greek schoolmaster, at least of elementary schools,
was not generally in high repute, was evidently not highly paid, and
his calling was not such as to give him either dignity or self-respect.
He was accused of pedantry if he was really learned, and of bad temper
if he was zealous and impatient at idleness.[22]

Lucian, in a jocose description of the nether world, describes
kings and satraps as beggars or “primary” schoolmasters, and was
only carrying out into fiction the proverbial downfall of the tyrant
Dionysius of Syracuse, who spent his old-age teaching children at
Corinth. An unknown comic writer is quoted as saying, “The man is
either dead or teaching the alphabet.” We hear of philosophers accusing
each other--very absurdly--of having once followed this profession;
and every scholar will remember the famous passage in Demosthenes’ “De
Corona:” “But you, worthy man, who despise others compared with
yourself, now compare with mine your own lot, which consigned you to
grow up from boyhood in the greatest need, when you helped your father
to attend in the school, preparing the ink, cleaning the benches,
sweeping out the schoolroom, and so taking the rank of a slave, and not
of a free boy.” We even hear of Horace’s master, Orbilius, writing a
lamentable autobiography on account of his miseries, under the title of
_the man acquainted with grief_ (περιαλγής).

§ 29. The general question of the payment of teachers will be better
discussed when we come to the Sophists’ training of riper youth.
Indeed, on the whole value of the various attacks on the teaching order
in Greece, Grasberger concludes his elaborate summary of the above and
many other facts with the sensible remark:[23] “As regards the unpleasant
and objectionable features, which men seem to record with special
preference, the true state of the case may be the same as with the many
scandals which are reported from the life of the mediæval universities
in Europe. Evil did not predominate; but the chronicler, instead of
putting forward the modest virtues of diligence and of scientific
earnestness, preferred to note both the faults of the teachers and the
gross excesses of the students.”

We may be sure that in the Greek primary schools, though we hear of
one assistant sometimes, the master was required to teach all the
subjects. This was so not long ago in England, and still more in
Ireland, where the hedge schoolmasters, but lately supplanted by the
national school system (not without considerable loss), were required,
and were able, to teach classics, mathematics, and the old-fashioned
English. It is, indeed, clearly presupposed in all the many bequests of
pious benefactors, who leave forty or sixty pounds per annum for the
payment of a single master to keep a school in some remote part of the
country. And at Athens, as in the days of these bequests, there was no
official or state test of a master’s qualifications. Each man set up on
his private account; it depended on the reputation he made whether his
school was well attended. The worthy pedant in Goldsmith’s “Deserted
Village” gives us a fair specimen of the better class of such men.


  FOOTNOTES:

[18] P. 325 C. Cf. also “Axiochus,” p. 366 E: ὁπόταν δὲ εἰς τὴν
ἑπταετίαν ἀφίκῃται [τὸ νήπιον] πολλοὺς πόνους διαντλῆσαν, παιδαγωγοὶ
καὶ γραμματισταὶ καὶ παιδοτρίβαι τυραννοῦντες, κ.τ.λ.

[19] 961 sq.:

  λέξω τοίνυν τὴν ἀρχαίαν παιδείαν, ὡς διέκειτο,
  ὅτ’ ἐγὼ τὰ δίκαια λέγων ἤνθουν καὶ σωφροσύνη νενόμιστο.
  πρῶτον μὲν ἔδει παιδὸς φωνὴν γρύξαντος μηδέν’ ἀκοῦσαι·
  εἶτα βαδίζειν ἐν ταῖσιν ὁδοῖς εὐτάκτως εἰς κιθαριστοῦ
  τοὺς κωμήτας γυμνοὺς ἀθρόους, κεἰ κριμνώδη κατανίφοι.
  εἶτ’ αὖ προμαθεῖν ᾆσμ’ ἐδίδασκεν, τὼ μηρὼ μὴ ξυνέχοντας,
  ἢ Παλλάδα περσέπολιν δεινὰν, ἢ Τηλέπορόν τι βόαμα,
  ἐντειναμένους τὴν ἁρμονίαν, ἣν οἱ πατέρες παρέδωκαν.
  εἰ δέ τις αὐτῶν βωμολοχεύσαιτ’ ἢ κάμψειέν τινα καμπὴν,
  οἵας οἱ νῦν τὰς κατὰ Φρῦνιν ταύτας τὰς δυσκολοκάμπτους,
  ἀπετρίβετο τυπτόμενος πολλὰς ὡς τὰς Μούσας ἀφανίζων.
  ἐν παιδοτρίβου δὲ καθίζοντας τὸν μηρὸν ἔδει προβαλέσθαι
  τοὺς παῖδας, ὅπως τοῖς ἔξωθεν μηδὲν δείξειαν ἀπηνές·
  εἶτ’ αὖ πάλιν αὖθις ἀνιστάμενον συμψῆσαι, καὶ προνοεῖσθαι
  εἴδωλον τοῖσιν ἐρασταῖσιν τῆς ἥβης μὴ καταλείπειν.
  ἠλείψατο δ’ ἂν τοὐμφαλοῦ οὐδεὶς παῖς ὑπένερθεν τότ’ ἂν, ὥστε
  τοῖς αἰδοίοισι δρόσος καὶ χνοῦς ὥσπερ μήλοισιν ἐπήνθει·
  οὐδ’ ἂν μαλακὴν φυρασάμενος τὴν φωνὴν πρὸς τὸν ἐραστὴν
  αὐτὸς ἑαυτὸν προαγωγεύων τοῖς ὀφθαλμοῖς ἐβάδιζεν,
  οὐδ’ ἂν ἑλέσθαι δειπνοῦντ’ ἐξῆν κεφάλαιον τῆς ῥαφανῖδος,
  οὐδ’ ἄννηθον τῶν πρεσβυτέρων ἁρπάζειν οὐδὲ σέλινον,
  οὐδ’ ὀψοφαγεῖν, οὐδὲ κιχλίζειν, οὐδ’ ἴσχειν τὼ πόδ’ ἐναλλάξ. κ.τ.λ.

[20] Two or three stories of Spartan mothers in Plutarch form tardy and
unimportant exceptions.

[21] v. 1444 sq.

[22] Cf. the amusing notes in Cicero’s letters on a private tutor he
got for his son and nephew, vi. 1, 9: “I am in love with Dionysius.
The boys say he flies into furious passions. But no man could be more
learned or conscientious (_sanctior_) or more devoted to you and me.”
Presently Cicero’s tone alters, viii. 4: “Dionysius gave me impudence:
you would say I had procured another Dicæarchus or Aristoxenus, and not
a man that talks us all down, and is no good for teaching. But he has a
good memory.”

[23] ii. p. 189.




  CHAPTER V.

  THE MUSICAL SIDE--SCHOOLS AND THEIR APPOINTMENTS.


§ 30. The school was generally distinguished by the term
διδασκαλεῖον[24] from the palæstra. We know that every Greek town
possessed one or more, and in early times Herodotus[25] mentions one
existing at Chios as early as 500 B.C., of which the roof fell in
and killed one hundred and nineteen out of one hundred and twenty
children at work within it at the time. Pausanias tells of another at
Astypalæa, into which a madman rushed and pulled down the supporting
pillar, so that sixty boys were buried under the ruins. The sad affair
of Mycalessus is told by Thucydides, and extorts from him a most
ungrammatical grimace of pity, when Thracian mercenaries murdered all
the children assembled in school. These cases show how it was evidently
regarded as an essential in every town. So the Trœzenians, when
they received the fugitive Athenians during the invasion of Xerxes,
took care, even in that great and sudden crisis, to provide for the
teaching of the Attic children.[26] Of course, in early days and in
poor towns, the place of teaching was not well appointed; nay, even in
many places teaching in the open air prevailed. The oldest legends
speak of Cheiron teaching in his grotto on Pelion; in the latest Greek
χαμαιδιδάσκαλος (_teacher on the ground_) is a word for a low class of
teacher. This was, again, like the old hedge schools of Ireland, and,
no doubt, of Scotland too. They also took advantage, especially in hot
weather, of colonnades, or shady corners among public buildings; as at
Winchester the summer term was called _cloister-time_, from a similar
practice, even in that wealthy foundation, of instructing in the
cloisters.

On the other hand, properly appointed schools in respectable towns were
furnished with some taste, and according to traditional notions. As in
gymnasia and palæstras, there was a shrine of the Muses or of Hermes,
and the head of the institution was regarded as the priest of this
shrine, at which offerings were made, so in the schools also there were
statues of tutelary gods set up, and busts of heroes and other eminent
men, by way of ornament as well as reminder to the boys.

We hear that the master sat on a high seat, from which he taught; the
scholars often sat on the ground, as they still do in many countries,
or else they stood or occupied benches round him. The pictures and
descriptions extant do not point to the schools being so crowded, as
appears from the accidents above cited; but this is probably a mere
chance, or an omission for the artist’s convenience. For though the
laws quoted in Æschines’ speech forbid any one save the master and
boys to be present, we know that in later days this was not strictly
observed, and in Theophrastus’s “Characters,” the Chatterbox, among
other mistakes in tact, is represented going into the schools and
interrupting lessons with his idle talk. We may be sure that there were
no tables or desks, such furniture being unusual in Greek houses; it
was the universal custom, while reading or writing, to hold the book or
roll on the knee--to us an inconvenient thing to do, but still common
in the East.

There are some interesting sentences, given for exercise in Greek
and Latin, in the little-known “Interpretamenta” of Dositheus, now
edited and explained by German scholars. The entry of the boy is thus
described, in parallel Greek and Latin: “First I salute the master, who
returns my salute: good-morning, master; good-morning, school-fellows.
Give me my place, my seat, my stool. Sit closer. Move up that way. This
is my place, I took it first.” This mixture of politeness and wrangling
is amusing, and, no doubt, to be found in all ages. It seems that the
seats were movable. A scholium on Æschines tells us that there was a
supply of water close at hand, lest the boys might suffer from thirst.

The extant pictures show that along the walls were hung up various
vessels of which the use is not always plain to us. But we can clearly
distinguish the necessary implements for the teaching of reading and
writing, boxes for book-rolls, writing-boards, reckoning-boards with
parallel grooves, and pebbles fixed in them, geometrical figures,
flute-cases, and lyres. There is also late authority to show that there
were notice-boards on which regulations were posted. We hear from
Lucian of a notice over a sophist’s door, “No philosophy to-day.” The
notice-board was called “the white board,” being covered with chalk. We
are not told how this was written on; but if the ground was black, then
mere writing with the finger across the chalked surface would produce
distinct characters.

§ 31. What is far more interesting is the remnant now discovered of
the pictorial teaching of children, by hanging up in the schoolroom
illustrations of the Trojan and other legends. By the researches of
Böttiger and O. Jahn,[27] it appears that we still have the fragments
of such a table in the _tabula Iliaca_ of Theodorus, preserved at the
Capitoline Museum in Rome. These were large pictures, in a series,
with names or words of explanation attached to them. Thus we have one
picture (from “Iliad” Α) of Chryses praying Agamemnon to restore his
daughter, beside him a wagon loaded with ransom, and under each figure,
and under the wagon respectively, _Agamemnon_, _Chryses_, _the ransom_.
Other extant pictures illustrate the third and twenty-fourth books of
the “Iliad.” The “Odyssey” was similarly treated, so that there seems
to have been a traditional and widely circulated pictorial compendium
of the Homeric poems used, at all events, in later Greek and in Roman
schools. There are also chronological and historical fragments of the
same kind still extant, so that it is more than probable that even in
classical days Greek boys were not without the benefit of illustrated
school-books, or at least school-sheets, as the elegiac distich on the
back of one of them suggests.[28] The use of these pictures on the
walls explains the constant appearance of a long wand in the master’s
hand, which is more characteristic of him than the rod of punishment,
though this, too, was not missing.


  THE SUBJECTS AND METHOD OF EDUCATION--THE THREE R’S.

§ 32. The usual subdivision of education was into three parts:
_letters_ (γράμματα), including reading, writing, counting, and
learning of the poets; _music_ in the stricter sense, including singing
and playing on the lyre; and lastly _gymnastic_, which included
dancing. These were under the special direction of three classes of
masters, the _grammatists_ (to be distinguished from γραμματικός,
used in a higher sense), the _citharistes_, and the _pædotribes_. It
is said that at Sparta the education in reading and writing was not
thought necessary, and there have been long discussions among the
learned whether the ordinary Spartan in classical days was able to
read. We find that Aristotle adds a fourth subject to the three above
named--drawing, which he thinks requisite, like music, to enable the
educated man to judge rightly of works of art. But there is no evidence
of a wide diffusion of drawing or painting among the Greeks, as among
us; and the same may be said of swimming on the gymnastic side, though
the oft-quoted proverb, μηδὲ νεῖν μηδὲ γράμματα--_he can neither
swim nor read_--has led the learned to assert a general knowledge of
swimming, at least at Athens.

Later on, under the learned influences of Alexandria and the paid
professoriate of Roman days, subjects multiplied with the decline of
mental vigor and spontaneity of the age, and children began to be
pestered, as they now are, with a quantity of subjects, all thought
necessary to a proper education, and accordingly all imperfectly
acquired. This was called the _encyclical education_, which is
preserved in our _encyclopædia_ of knowledge. It included (1) grammar,
(2) rhetoric, (3) dialectic, (4) arithmetic, (5) music, (6) geometry,
(7) astronomy, and these were divided into the earlier _Trivium_ and
the later _Quadrivium_. But fortunately this debasement of classical
education is far beyond our present scope.

§ 33. The boys started very early for school, attended by their
pædagogue, and appear to have returned for late breakfast. We may
conclude from the Roman custom, though we have no positive evidence,
that the afternoons were devoted to recreation or the lighter gymnastic
exercises. The later theorists speak much of pauses and of variation
in study; but though we know there were a good many isolated holidays,
we hear of no period of rest for both masters and boys, such as there
must have been in the Roman dog-days. There is something humane and
affecting in the dying bequest of Anaxagoras, who gave his native
city, Clazomenæ, a property on the condition that the anniversary of
his death should be kept as a general school holiday. There were also
special days of school feasts, such as the _Hermæa_ and _Museia_, so
elegantly described at the opening of Plato’s “Lysis.”

§ 34. From the accounts we have of the teaching of the alphabet, as
implied in Plato’s “Cratylus,” and described by Dionysius (the rhetor)
in illustrating Demosthenes’ eloquence, it was not carried on in an
analytical, but a synthetical, way. Children were not taught words
first and then to analyze them, but started with individual letters,
then learned their simplest combinations, and so on. Nor is this method
ever likely to be supplanted by the other, at least in the case of
stupid children. But we do hear of one curious attempt to make the
alphabet an agreeable study in the so-called _grammatical tragedy_
of Callias, about 400 B.C. This was the time when (in the archonship
of Eucleides) the newer Ionic alphabet of twenty-four letters was
introduced, and apparently ordered to be used in schools. The work
of Callias was, accordingly, a poetical kind of A B C book, in which
the single letters in turn spoke the prologue. The choral parts seem
to have been refrains working out the simpler combinations of vowels
with each consonant. The seven vowels were also introduced before the
schoolmaster as female characters. But more we do not know, and it is
probable that the book was only called _tragedy_ from its external
form, not from any plot.[29] The use of mnemonic verses to help
children was, no doubt, as old as education; but we should have been
glad to know the divisions of letters followed by Callias; for up to
the times of the Sophists there was no proper analysis of the alphabet,
and it is to them that we owe such studies as Plato’s “Cratylus,”
which, though sound as to the alphabet, is wonderfully childish as to
etymology. Still, the popular knowledge of 400 B.C. must have been a
long way behind the “Cratylus.”

From the acquisition of letters, the child passed to the study of
_syllables_, and we find _syllabizing_ used generally by the Greeks
for elementary instruction in reading. But while the Greek child was
not afflicted, like English children, with the absurd conundrums of
a perfectly irrational spelling; while he had a fair guarantee that
the individual letters reproduced the sound of the whole word, there
were other difficulties in his way. He had not, indeed, to burden his
memory with the sounds to be attached to symbols like _though_ and
_tough_, _plague_ and _ague_, but he must, on the other hand, study
with peculiar care the separation of words--interpunction--and also
punctuation and accent. Accent, indeed, and the subtle use of the
numerous particles, were given, and could only be given, by familiarity
with Greek as a mother tongue. As Aristotle remarks, one could
always know a foreigner, however well he spoke Greek, by the use of
the particles. I heard Ernest Renan make the very same remark about
foreigners’ French a few years ago. But in classical days, accents
were not even written, and words were not separated, neither were
clauses distinguished by stops. Hence the difficulties of reading were
considerably increased, as any one may prove for himself by taking
up a mediæval Greek MS. There, indeed, the accents are a guide, but
even with them the separation of words is a difficulty, and has led to
endless mistakes in our printed texts. We know, too, that the Greeks
were particular about melodious intonation and rhythmical balance of
clauses even in prose: all this gave the _grammatist_ ample scope for
patience. There is even a special teacher--φωνασκός--mentioned in early
days as regulating and training the singing voice of children. Indeed,
we are surprised at the general assumption among their educators that
every one had both natural voice and ear.[30]

Thus reading aloud and recitations from the great poets attained a
double object: the schoolboy was taught to enounce accurately and read
rhythmically; he was made familiar at the same time with the choicest
extracts of the best masters in the older literature. I have already
spoken of Homer; but the lyric poets, like Tyrtæus, and the gnomic,
like Theognis, were also largely used at school. Indeed, it is not a
little remarkable how many of these old poets were themselves called
schoolmasters. This school use gave rise to _chrestomathies_, or
selections of suitable passages; and there are many critics who think
that our present texts of Theognis represent such a selection. The
“Golden Verses” of Pythagoras, the many collections of proverbs, or
ὑποθῆκαι, point to the same practice. Written books were still scarce,
libraries very exceptional, and thus the boy’s education was far more
prosecuted by dictation and by conversation than nowadays. Without
doubt this made them less learned, but more intelligent and ready, than
we are; and there are even in the days of Hellenic decay complaints
of the increase of books, of the lust after much reading and various
lore.[31] We are told that in Sparta and Crete all children learned
hymns to the gods, and metrical statements of the laws, to be sung to
fixed melodies; and this (if a fact) has justly been called a political
as well as religious catechism.

§ 35. It was very late in the history of Hellenism that any mention of
the learning of foreign languages meets us. Even in the wide studies
pursued at Alexandria, no systematic course in languages is ever
mentioned; and people still had recourse in international business
to those who happened to be born of mixed marriages, or by some
other accident had been compelled to acquire a second tongue. There
is, indeed, much curious evidence that the Greeks, being really bad
linguists, found great difficulty in acquiring the Latin tongue, even
when it became the language of the rulers of the world.[32] Strabo[33]
notes that whenever historical treatises were composed in foreign
languages, they were inaccessible to the Greeks, while the Romans did
nothing but copy partially and imperfectly what the Greeks had said--a
remark which might now be sarcastically applied to the relations
of German and English philology. This Greek inability to learn, or
contempt of, foreign languages reminds us of the French of to-day,
whose language, until lately, held the place in Europe which Greek held
in the Roman Empire, when every respectable person knew Greek, and when
the Senate were able to receive and treat with foreign ambassadors
speaking in Greek.[34] We have above noted the danger actually
threatening that children might learn Greek so early and exclusively as
to speak their native tongue with a foreign accent--a state of things
which the Romans would have resented strongly in their rulers--in that
respect widely different from the English people of to-day. Thus the
Romans attained, what the Greeks missed, the opportunity of learning
grammar through the forms of a foreign language.[35]

§ 36. When the children came to writing, we must not imagine them using
ink and paper, which was far too expensive. Instead of our slate,
they used tablets covered with wax, on which the pointed stylus drew
a sharp line, which could be smoothed out again with the flat reverse
end. There were double lines drawn on the tablets, and the master
wrote words for the boys to copy. We are told that he at times held the
hands of beginners in forming letters. Quintilian suggests that the
letters should be cut deep in a wooden tablet, so that the child could
follow them without having his hand held; and it was in this way that
the Ostrogoth Theodoric managed to sign his name, by having a metal
plate pierced with it, which he then laid on the paper, and stencilled
out the letters. There are on the walls of Pompeii many scribblings
of boys, evidently repeating their school exercises; and in Egypt
was found a tomb with a set of wax tablets, all containing the same
verses of Menander; but one of them a model, the rest copies varying in
excellence; and under some of them the approving judgment _diligent_
(φιλοπόνως). This curious set of relics, in the possession of Dr.
Abbott, of New York, is apparently the school furniture of a master
buried with him.

§ 37. There is no reason to think that the average Greek attained
anything like the fluency in writing which we now consider necessary.
Plato[36] says it is only necessary so far as to be able to write or
read; to write fast or elegantly must not be attempted within the range
of ordinary education, except in rare cases and with peculiar natural
gifts. Indeed, as slaves did all the copying work, and as published
books were always in their handwriting, there may have been the same
sort of prejudice against a very good, clear hand which many people
now feel against an _office hand_. At Athens there was a special
officer, γραμματεύς, to write out, or direct the writing-out of, public
documents; there was also a ὑπογραφεύς, a secretary to take minutes
(ὑπογράφεσθαι) at public meetings. Besides the formal writing in
separate capital letters, which we have on so many inscriptions, and
which was probably the hand taught to children, there was a cursive
hand, which we see in the Greek papyri of the second century B.C. found
in Egypt. In later MSS. we even find a regular shorthand, exceedingly
difficult to decipher.[37] The lines were drawn, especially on wax,
with a little coin-shaped piece of lead (μόλυβδος), and the drawing of
lines appears to be called παραγράφειν. Instead of the sharp metal or
bone stylus, a reed (κάλαμος), like our pens, was used on papyrus or
parchment with ink. Quintilian prefers the wax and stylus, because the
constant dipping in the ink distracts and checks thinking--a curious
objection, and worth quoting to show the difference between his age and
ours. But when the new stylograph has been used for some time, we will,
no doubt, find men asserting this of the old-fashioned pen and ink.

§ 38. The school commentary, or explanation of the poems or other
literature thus written out, was probably quite elementary. Grammar
only began to be understood by the Sophists, and we have specimens of
exercises on the use of the article, and on the question of genders,
in a very comic dialogue in Aristophanes’ “Clouds,” where the pupil
of the new school ridicules the ignorance of old Strepsiades. It is
likely Protagoras’s work _on the correct use of language_ (ὀρθοέπεια)
gave a great stimulus to this branch of education. But we cannot
argue that these studies of the mother tongue which make our use of
it more conscious than before, had any better effect on prose-writing
or on conversation than the very parallel studies of English which
have of late years invaded or infested all our schools. Good-breeding
and natural refinement seem the natural (and are probably the only)
safeguards of a mother tongue in its ordinary use, and there is even
great danger that a conscious analysis of idioms may banish from the
writing of a language many valuable and characteristic turns which
are based upon a more subtle propriety than that of school logic.
Fortunately, local dialects have a great power of resistance. The
Warwick or the Galway peasant will speak his own accents, and even use
his idioms, in spite of all compulsory teaching of English grammar in
the schools; but the reducing of all written English to one standard
(both in spelling and in idiom) is like the reducing of all written
Greek to the _common dialect_--a very great loss and damage.[38]

§ 39. We pass to the teaching of elementary science. Geometry was
still an advanced study, and, though in high esteem among the Greeks
as one of the most elegant and perfect, seems not to have been taught
in schools. Arithmetic was regarded either as the abstract science
of numbers (ἀριθμητική), and as such one of the most difficult of
sciences, or as the art of reckoning (λογιστική) to be employed in the
ordinary affairs of life. Mercantile Greeks, like the Athenians and
Ionians generally, among whom banking was well developed, must have
early found this a necessity; but even in Greek art, architectural
perfection was attained by a very subtle and evidently conscious
application of arithmetical proportions. This was first shown in the
accurate measurements of the Parthenon by Penrose, and was, no doubt,
expounded in the treatise written on this building by its architect,
Ictinus. In the great temple of Zeus at Olympia, the use of multiples
of 7 and 5 has been shown so curiously applied by an American scholar
that he suspects the application of Pythagorean symbolism by the
architect Libon. But of course this was ἀριθμητική in the strict sense,
and is only here mentioned to show how the Greeks must have been led
to appreciate the value of the science of numbers. Ordinary schoolboys
were taught to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, as they now are,
but without the advantage of our admirable system of notation.

Starting from the natural suggestion of the fingers--a suggestion
preserved all through later history by such words as πεμπάζεσθαι
(literally, _to count by fives_, but used of counting generally)--the
Greeks represented numbers by straight strokes, but soon replaced
||||| either by a rude picture of a hand, V (as we find in Roman
numbers), and made two such symbols joined together to represent 10
(X), or else the higher numbers were marked by the first letter of
their name--viz., M and C, in Latin _mille_ and _centum_. So in Greek,
Χ (χίλιοι), Μ (μυρίοι), etc. The smaller numbers were represented in
ordinary counting by the fingers of the hand, not merely as _digits_
(a suggestive word, in itself a survival of the process), but,
according as they were bent or placed, fingers represented multiples
of 5, and so were sufficient for ordinary sums. Aristophanes even
contrasts[39] this sort of reckoning, as clearer and more intelligible,
with reckoning on the abacus, or arithmetical board, which has still
survived in our ball-frames. We are told that the fingers were
sufficient to express all figures up to thousands, which is indeed
strange to us; but both the finger signs and the abacus failed in the
great invention we have gained from Arabic numerals, the supplying of
the symbol ○. The abacus used in Greek schools appears to have had
several straight furrows in which pebbles or plugs were set, and at the
left side there was a special division where each unit meant 5. Thus,
648 (DCXXXXVIII) was represented in the following way:

    +------+---------+
    |      |         | M
    +------+---------+
    |    o | o       | C
    +------+---------+
    |      | o o o o | X
    +------+---------+
    |    o | o o o   |
    +------+---------+
    +------+---------+

This abacus was ascribed to Pythagoras, but was in all probability
older, and derived from Egypt, where elementary science was well and
widely taught from very early times. When initial letters were used
for numbers, as Π for πέντε, and Δ for δέκα, combinations such as
IΔI meant 50. Last of all, we find in our MSS. a system of using the
letters of the alphabet for numbers, preserving ϛ (ἐπίσημον) for 6, and
thus reaching 10 with ι, proceeding by tens through κ (20), λ (30),
etc., to ρ (100), σ (200), and for 900 using Ϡ. This notation must not
be confused with the marking of the twenty-four books of the Homeric
epics by the simple letters of the alphabet.

Further details as to the technical terms for arithmetical operations,
and the amount to be attributed to a nation using so clumsy a notation,
must be sought in professed hand-books of antiquity.[40]

As regards geometry, all we can say is that in the days of Plato and
Aristotle both these philosophers recognize not only its extraordinary
value as a mental training, but also the fact that it can be taught to
young boys as yet unfit for political and metaphysical studies.

§ 40. Having thus disposed of the severer side of school education, we
will turn to the artistic side, one very important to the Greeks, and
suggestive to us of many instructive problems.


  FOOTNOTES:

[24] Διδασκάλιον is the thing learned.

[25] vi. 27.

[26] The Greek form of our word school, though in common use, meant
_leisure_, and only passed through its application to the leisurely
discussions of philosophers into its new and opposite sense. There is
some difficulty about the word παιδαγωγεῖον, which some have imagined
to be a waiting-room for the pædagogue slaves--absurdly enough. It is
probably a mere synonym for the schoolroom.

[27] Grasberger, ii. 224.

[28]

  [ὦ φίλε παῖ] Θεωδώρηον μάθε τάξιν Ὁμήρου
  ὄφρα δαεὶς πάσης μέτρον ἔχῃς σοφίας.

[29] All our evidence, with every possible surmise about it, may be
found in Welcker’s “Kleine Schriften,” vol. i. p. 371 sq.

[30] This assumption may perhaps hardly seem surprising when it still
prevails among the English public as regards girls. Accordingly, a vast
amount of time and brain power is wasted in the endeavor to make them
play and sing, though nature has peremptorily precluded it in most
cases.

[31] The objections of the Eleatics and Platonists to the moral side of
Homer and the other epic poets will be discussed in connection with the
philosophic attempts at reform in higher education.

[32] Plutarch (“Life of Demosth.,” 2) laments his inability to master
Latin, and the difficulties it presents when not acquired very early.

[33] iii. 4, 19.

[34] Up to the mission of Carneades and his fellows (155 B.C.) an
interpreter had been necessary.

[35] This seems to me a very important point, and I do not know how
our training of boys in the strict and clear Latin grammar can ever be
supplied adequately by any other means, though I have one great and
recognized authority--Mr. Thring--against me, who thinks that boys
should learn the logic of grammar through English analysis.

[36] “Laws,” 810--if the “Laws” be, indeed, Plato’s.

[37] Cf. Wattenbach’s specimens in his plates of Greek MSS.

[38] If we had phonetic spelling, our dialects would be preserved,
as the various Greek dialects were, or as the Italian now are, and
thus the history of our language in the present day might become
possible to ourselves and our descendants. As it is, we are concealing
from all inquiry this most interesting subject--I mean the varying
pronunciation--by our absurd artificial spelling, and we are banishing
local idioms by stamping them with the mark of vulgarity. This latter
is the natural and right consequence of having classical models. But
had we possessed the older dialects in phonetic writing, our standard
would have been widened, like that of the Greeks, to include important
provincial varieties.

[39] “Wasps,” 656 sq.

[40] These are the ordinary terms: adding = συντιθέναι, προστιθέναι;
subtracting = ἀφαιρεῖν, ὑπεξαιρεῖν, Latin _deducere_; multiplying =
πολλαπλασιάζειν, and the factors πλευρά, a geometrical conception, as
in the second book of Euclid; dividing = μερίζειν: no general word for
_quotient_ is found.




  CHAPTER VI.

  THE SUBJECTS AND METHOD OF EDUCATION--DRAWING AND MUSIC.


§ 41. It is likely that most writers on Greek education have
exaggerated the importance and diffusion of drawing as an ordinary
school subject. Even in Aristotle’s day it was only recognized by
some people, probably theorists;[41] and Pliny tells us that it was
Pamphilus, Apelles’ master, who first had it introduced at Sicyon,
from which it spread over all Greece. These combined notices point to
its not being general before the days of Alexander. But the theorists
recognized its use and importance earlier, first and most obviously for
critical purposes, that men might better judge and appreciate works
of art; secondly, for that æsthetical effect which is so forgotten by
us, the unconscious moulding of the mind to beauty by the close and
accurate study of beautiful forms.

The usual word ζωγραφία for painting, and ζωγράφος for drawing-master,
suggests to us that _figure-drawing_ was the early and the principal
branch of the art known and taught. From the earliest times rude
figures had been scratched and colored on vases, and the number of
vase-painters in historical Greece must have been so considerable as
to disseminate some general feeling for the art, though we hear of
no amateur vase-painting, such as is in fashion among ladies of our
own day. On the other hand, landscape-painting was of late growth
and very imperfect development. The prominence of sculpture, even
polychromatic sculpture, made its absence less felt. Owing to the old
Greek habit of personifying nature, and expressing every mountain and
river by its tutelary gods, we find in the great pediment sculptures
of the best epoch that curious indication of the landscape by its
tutelary gods--looking on calmly and unconsciously at the action of the
principal figures--which is perhaps the most peculiar characteristic
of all Greek art. Thus the local rivers, the Alpheus and Cladeus, are
represented lying at the ends of the great eastern pediment of the
temple at Olympia, witnessing the combat of Pelops and Œnomaus with no
more expression of feeling than the landscape which they represent
would manifest.

The earliest essays at landscape proper were, moreover, not rocks and
trees, or that wild country which the Greeks never loved, but buildings
and artificial grounds, with regular lines and definite design. The
first attempt was made to satisfy the requirements of the theatre, and
the fact that scene-painting and shade-painting (or perspective) were
used as synonymous terms shows the truth of the report that Apollodorus
(_cir._ 400 B.C.) first discovered the art of representing the straight
lines of a building in depth, by a departure from that _orthography_ in
geometrical drawing which had hitherto been practised.

If we may judge from the many sketches of this sort of suburban
landscape which are preserved on Pompeian walls, the proper knowledge
of perspective was not even in later times diffused among ordinary
artists, whose figure-painting on these walls is in every respect
vastly superior. On the other hand, the figure-painting even on vases
of the best epoch is so conventional that we cannot believe Greek boys
were taught to draw figures with a proper knowledge of living or round
models, and must assume the drawing-lessons to have been chiefly in
geometrical designs.

According to Ælian, there were maps of the Greek world to be had at
Athens, and therefore presumably in schools, when Alcibiades was a
young man; but this isolated notice, backed up by one or two allusions
in Aristophanes, must not be pressed too far. The confusion between
the terms for drawing and for writing utensils arises from the same
materials being used in practising both--as if we used pencils only
in learning to write. The same stylus (γραφίς) which was used for
writing on wax tablets was used for drawing outlines on the same; and
the earliest training in drawing, if we may trust the statement of
Böttiger, was the copying of the outlines of models proposed by the
master.[42] After firmness had been attained, delicacy of outline was
practised, and ultimately a fine paint, which was used to paint black
and red outlines on white tables, or white on black.

§ 42. Though the diffusion of drawing was late and doubtful, this was
not the case with music, in its strictest sense. For its importance was
such as to make it a synonym for culture in general, and to leave us
doubtful in some cases whether Greek authors are speaking in this wider
or the narrower sense. But it is from music proper that they all would
start, as affording the central idea of education.

Here is one of the features in which Greek life is so different from
ours, that there is the greatest possible difficulty in understanding
it. When modern educators introduce music into boys’ recreation time,
and say it has important influences in humanizing them, though in this
they may approach the language of Greek social reformers and statesmen,
they mean something widely different. The moderns mean nothing more
(I conceive) than this, that the practice of music is a humane and
civilizing pursuit, bringing boys into the company of their sisters
and lady friends, withdrawing them from coarse and harmful pursuits,
and thus indirectly making them gentler and more harmless men. It
is as an innocent and social source of amusement that music is now
recommended. Let us put out of all account the far lower and too often
vulgar pressure on girls to learn to play or sing, whether they like
it or not. For here the only advantage in view is not the girl’s moral
or social improvement, but her advancement in life, by making her
attractive in society. Such a view of musical training is quite beneath
any serious notice in the present argument.

What has above been said will be considered a fair statement of the
importance given to music by modern thinkers. And accordingly, when
we find all Greek educators and theorists[43] asserting a completely
different kind of importance in music, we find ourselves in presence
of what is strictly an historical problem. It is not enough for the
Greeks to admit that martial music has strong effects on soldiers going
to battle, or that doleful music turns the mind to sadness in a solemn
requiem for the dead. They went so far beyond this as to assert that by
constantly playing martial music people would become martial, that by
constantly playing and singing passionate and voluptuous music people
became passionate and voluptuous. Consequently, the proper selection
of instruments of music and of words became a subject of serious
importance. The flute was cultivated at Athens till Alcibiades spurned
it for distorting his handsome face, and caused it to go out of fashion
at Athens. But this aversion to the Bœotian instrument was supported
by the theorists on the ground that it had no moral tendency, that it
was too exciting, and vague in the emotions it excited; also, that it
prevented the player from singing words to his music.

But when we would infer from this that it is really the text, and not
the actual music, which has the mental effect--when we are disposed
to add that in our own time instrumental music is a higher and more
intellectual kind of music, which has no moral effects save good ones,
and that it is the libretto of the opera or the sentiment of the song
which does harm--the answer from the Greek point of view is conclusive
against us. Though much stress was laid upon the noble words which were
sung, the music was known to have the principal effect. Plato, in a
celebrated passage, even inveighs bitterly against the gross immorality
and luxuriousness of all mere instrumental music, which allowed of so
much ornament, so much exaggeration of expression, so much complexity
of emotion, as to be wholly unsuited to his ideal state. It is,
indeed, perfectly true that the intellectual effort in understanding
instrumental music, at least some instrumental music, is far greater
than is required for appreciating, or imagining one appreciates, a
simple song. To understand a string quartet of Mendelssohn, or, still
more, a symphony of Beethoven, is an intellectual task far exceeding
the abilities of nine tenths of the audiences who hear them.[44] But,
apart from all such intellectual strain, there is a strong though
indefinable passion about this very music which has the deepest effects
on minds really tuned to appreciate it.

If this be too subtle an instance, there is another so striking that
it is worth mentioning on the chance of the reader’s verifying it some
day for himself. The Hungarian gypsies who form the national bands
are chiefly occupied at entertainments in playing for the national
dance--the _csárdás_--tunes which have now become familiar, some of
them, through the transcriptions of Liszt and Johannes Brahms. The
dance consists in a gradually increasing excitement, starting from a
slow and grave beginning. The change is produced merely by increase of
time in often repeating the same air,[45] and also in adorning it with
flourishes, which are added _ad libitum_ and somewhat barbarously, by
the members of the band according to their taste. The effect of this
gradual hurrying and complicating of the same tune is inexpressibly
affecting to the mind. It represents excitement, and often voluptuous
excitement, to the highest degree. It would have thoroughly shocked
Plato and his school.

This simpler example, though less easily verifiable to the English
reader, is really more to the point, for there can be no doubt that
it is owing to the increase of complication, and the growth of the
intellectual combinations in music, that we have lost sight of what the
Greeks thought so vital--the direct moral effects of music.

§ 43. The question remains, What did the Greeks convey by this theory?
Were they talking nonsense, or was their music so different from ours
that their theories have no application in our day? We cannot adopt
either of these solutions, though all our researches into Greek scales,
and into the scanty examples of tunes still extant, are unable to show
clearly what they meant. We cannot make out why tunes in the Doric
scale--a scale varying slightly from our ordinary minor scale--should
be thought manly and moral, while Lydian measures--a scale like our
ordinary major scales--should be thought immoral.[46] We must give up
the problem of finding out a solution from the Greek scales. But this
we may fairly assert, that our music, being directly descended from
the old Church scales, which again were derived from the Greek, cannot
be so totally different from that of the old Greeks as to warrant
the inference that theirs could be moral or the reverse, and ours
indifferent to morals. We may depend upon it that they did not talk
nonsense, and that the general consent of all their thinking men on
this curious point is well worthy of our most serious attention.

It is probable that the far greater complexity of our music, the
multiplication of instruments, the development of harmony, has brought
out intellectual instincts unknown to them, and so obscured the moral
questions once so striking. The Chinese of the present day, who have
a music far simpler than ours, mostly on the tetratonic scale, are
said to speak of the moral influence of music as the Greeks did, and
to put the composing and circulating of tunes under a certain control.
They used to have state composers charged with this duty, in order to
preserve and improve the morals of the people. Although, then, it seems
that the simpler the character of a national music, the more clearly
its moral effects are perceived, we only want a closer analysis to
detect the same qualities in our own composers. Much of the best music
we now hear is unduly exciting: it feeds vain longings, indefinite
desires, sensuous regrets; and were the evidence stated in detail, the
sceptical reader might be convinced that here we are far behind the
Greek educators, and that we often deliberately expose our children
to great moral risk by inciting them to express their semi-conscious
desires in affecting music. The majority who have no soul for music
may be safe enough (though this is not certain); but those whose
soul speaks through their fingers, or their voice, are running a
very serious danger, of which there is not the least suspicion among
modern educators. To seek corroboration from the characters of leading
musicians were invidious, but not without instruction.[47]

This inquiry is no digression which requires apology. It is a point in
which we do not seem to have reflected as deeply as the ancients, and
which is well worth discussing without pedantry or sentimentality. It
is also true that the general aspect of this side of Greek education
is more interesting and fruitful than the inquiry into the structures
of the particular instruments they used--an antiquarian question very
minutely discussed by learned historians of music, and by compilers of
archæological lore. On these details we may here be brief. The subject
has been exhausted by Mr. Chappell, our best historian of music.

§ 44. In education we never hear of the use of those more complicated
instruments, such as the τρίγωνον, or harp, the double flute and
others, which were used by professionals. On the other hand, the
favorite syrinx, or pandean-pipe, was only in fashion among shepherds,
and not in schools. We may assume that nothing was there admitted but
the simplest form of stringed instrument, the lyre (λύρα), which was
originally made by stretching strings across the inside of the back
shell of a tortoise. These shells are often to be found dry and clean
in river-courses through Greece. The tortoise when dead is eaten out by
ants or other insects; the shells separate, and are carried away and
cleaned by floods. This most primitive kind was, however, supplanted by
a more elaborate form, which used the two shells of the tortoise, and
fastened, in the position of its front legs, a pair of goat’s horns,
which were spanned near their extremity by the ζύγον, or yoke, to which
strings were drawn from the far end of the shell, over the nether
surface, or breast shell, which was flat. This, with seven or at most
ten strings, was the ordinary instrument used to teach Greek boys to
play. The more elaborate cithara, which still survives, both in name
and structure, among the Tyrolese, was a lyre with a sound-box built
of thin wood or metal plates, and elongated into hollow arms (where
the lyre only had horns, or solid wooden arms), so that the resonance
was considerably greater. This, in the form called πηκτίς, had fifteen
or more strings, and does not here concern us. The use of the bow for
stringed instruments was unknown to the Greeks, but they used for
playing the _plectrum_, which is still used by the Tyrolese for their
_zither_.

The favorite wind-instrument was not our flute, which was called
πλαγίαυλος, or “cross-played aulos,” and which was not popular, but our
clarinet, the αὐλός, which was held straight, was wide at the mouth,
and produced its tone by means of a vibrating tongue in the mouthpiece.
The ordinary aulos was played without any artificial aid; but for the
double aulos, where two reeds of different pitch were blown from the
same mouthpiece, a leather bandage was tied over the player’s mouth,
into which the mouthpiece was fitted. This was the most extreme form of
that disfigurement of which the Greeks complained in flute-playing.

The tunes taught to boys are now lost, and we cannot hope to reproduce
them. But there is good reason to think that they would not suit the
developed taste of our day, and would be considered dull and even ugly.
This we may infer from the few extant fragments of Greek tunes.


  FOOTNOTES:

[41] ἔστι δὲ τέτταρα σχεδόν, ἃ παιδεύειν εἰώθασι, γράμματα καὶ
γυμναστικὴν καὶ μουσικήν, καὶ τέταρτον ἔνιοι γραφικήν.--_Pol._, viii.
p. 259.

[42] Ὑπογράφεσθαι is the technical term for this drawing of models.

[43] Aristotle implies in his discussion (“Pol.,” bk. vii. 1) that
there had arisen in his day radical critics who asserted that music was
merely an amusement, with no other importance. But he sets aside this
opinion as hardly deserving of refutation, seeing how strong was the
consensus of opinion against it.

[44] Aristotle fully appreciates this, and admits, even in his
perfect polity, popular music to suit the vulgar listener, who cannot
understand what is really classical (“Pol.,” viii.: ὁ γὰρ θεατὴς
φορτικὸς ὤν. κ.τ.λ.).

[45] In some cases a very florid adagio is succeeded by a lively plain
tune in galop time.

[46] Some people have thought these scales only indicated differences
of pitch. This is false, or rather a misapprehension, because in a
fixed set of notes--like the white notes in our pianos--various scales
could only be found by starting higher or lower. But how could a
difference of pitch affect morals?

[47] It is not difficult for a man who has devoted sufficient time
to music, and has known many musical people, to find some analogy to
Dorian, Phrygian, and Lydian modes, as moral agents, in our modern
music. For surely the real meaning, the real depth, in the art is
this: that it represents, and by representing stimulates within us,
various emotions. Like all the other faculties of man, the emotions
are a great class of mental phenomena improved and strengthened by a
certain quantity of stimulus, but exaggerated and injured by being
overstrained, or too perpetually exercised. And it is the peculiar
province of music to awaken emotions too subtle and various for the
coarser utterance of words, and therefore to fill the mind with
feelings delightful, indeed, and deep, but from their very nature
unutterable in words and inexplicable except by sympathy. You cannot
convey to an unmusical man what is called the expression of an
air--that is to say, the emotion it has caused within you. Let us add
that if you could explain it, it would not have the distinctive value
which it really possesses. It is this very feature in the question
which has caused the moral effects of music to be wholly overlooked
in a cold and logical age, when many men are not affected by it, and
in which everything inexplicable by direct statement is likely to be
considered unreal.

The emotions, then, which it is the proper object of music to
stimulate, are of that subtle character that they cannot be defined.
Different composers will, no doubt, excite a different _complexion_
of feeling in the mind. The works of Handel and J. S. Bach produce a
thoroughly satisfied and cheerful temper, even when they treat sad
subjects; whereas Beethoven has almost always about him that profound
melancholy which is to a mind in distress more sustaining in its
sympathy than all the comfort of consolation. But this only describes
the general character of the emotions produced, and not the emotions
themselves. For these are often not consciously before us at all, but
influence us, like our prejudices, from a hidden vantage-ground within
the soul.

But, alas! the history of this delicious stimulant is like that of all
the rest. Men begin to crave for it, and then constantly pursue it;
they will not be satisfied without stronger doses, and, presently,
even these cease to have their effect except by intoxication. In such
case, the stimulant is no longer applied to exciting an emotion, but
to satisfying a passion. And this latter differs from the former in
being more violent (being, perhaps, compounded of several emotions),
and in containing some coarser bodily element, either consciously or
unconsciously.

It may be illustrated from what are called sentimental songs. If we
compare the old chaste love-songs that are found among the national
melodies of England, and still better of Ireland, with the love-songs
in one of the greatest of modern operas, Gounod’s “Faust,” the
distinction will be easily apprehended. When an Irish girl puts sweet
wild music to the words of her song, and is then better satisfied with
it than if she merely spoke it, the reason is this, that there are in
her love a number of tender emotions, far too subtle to be uttered in
the words, but which are conveyed in the expression of the melody. The
very same may be said of the solemn, almost religious love-songs of
the old Italian composers, in which knightly reverence for the gentler
sex is so apparent. Let the soberest critic compare this music with
the splendid duet in the garden scene of Gounod’s “Faust,” and more
especially with the concluding song of the act (that in six flats).
Expressive this music is beyond description, and expressive of love;
but how different!




  CHAPTER VII.

  THE LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION--MILITARY TRAINING OF THE EPHEBI.


§ 45. The small size and narrow bounds of Greek states made the support
of a professional army seldom possible, and accordingly we find
expedients now suddenly again become fashionable from very different
causes--a citizen army, and general liability to military service. No
Greek boy was allowed to pass from his school-days into citizen life
without some preliminary training and practice in the use of arms and
in military discipline. This is the discipline of the _ephebi_, or
grown-up boys, concerning which so much has been written of late years
by the learned. A number of inscriptions regarding the duties and
ceremonies to be performed by them have been lately discovered, and
we seem to see in them a sort of general agreement throughout Greece,
rather differing in the time allotted, and in other details, than in
principles.[48] There were actual masters in the art of using arms,
so far as this was not included in the gymnastic exercises of the
palæstra; we do not hear, however, of much drilling, and probably the
drill of Greek armies, if we except the Spartans, was very imperfect
in the best period. It was not until the growth of mercenary armies,
and (almost simultaneously) the great military outburst at Thebes under
Epaminondas, that war became a science in our sense.

On the other hand, all the patrol duty of the frontier was done by
these _ephebi_, who, at about the age of sixteen, were brought into
the rank of citizens by a solemn service and sacrifice, at which they
swore oaths of fidelity and patriotism, and undertook their military
duties as a preliminary to their full life of political burgesses.
The orphans of citizens killed in battle had their arms and military
dress presented to them (at Athens) by the State. The youths assumed
the short dark-gray cloak (χλαμύς), and the broad-brimmed soft hat
(πέτασος), suitable for marching duty, and then, as περίπολοι, or
patrolling police, they looked to the safety of the country, the
condition of the roads, and occupied the frontier forts, of which we
see such striking remains still in Attica. The mountain fort of Phylæ,
that of Dekelea, of Œnoe (or Eleutheræ), of Sunium, of Thorikos, of
Oropos, and others, were the stations from which the frontiers were
patrolled.

It is doubtless owing to this precaution that, though we read of
insecurity in the streets of Athens by night, we never read of
brigandage through the country. Some scholars have, indeed, asserted
that the περίπολοι had police duty to perform in the city, and at the
public assembly. This we need not accept; though on solemn occasions,
and when a great ceremony was to be held, they appeared, not only to
preserve order, but to participate in the show. It is the latter duty
which we see them performing in the famous friezes of the Parthenon,
which represent the Panathenaic procession. They were allotted a
separate place in the theatre, and were in every respect regarded as a
distinct order in the State, the hope and pride of their city, and its
ornament on all stately occasions.

Their patrol duty on the frontier was appointed to them for divers
reasons. They attained through it the discipline of arms, and learned
some of the hardships of campaigning. They learned an accurate
knowledge of the roads and ways through their country, and of the
nature of their frontier, and that of their neighbors. They were kept
away from the mischiefs which threaten youths of their age in every
city.

But the Athenians and other Greeks were careful not to commit the
mistake of which we now hear so much--that of expecting these youths
under twenty to face the enemy in battle. They were specially reserved
for garrison duty, and one of Myronides’ victories was particularly
noted, because he fought it with these boys, who were not expected to
stand firm in the horrors of a battle.

§ 46. According to the words of the oath, indeed, as preserved by
Stobæus and Pollux, the standing firm beside one’s comrade is specially
mentioned; but even if this interesting document be not spurious, as
Cobet supposes,[49] this particular declaration may be considered
prospective, and applying to the remainder of the citizen’s life. I add
the words here for the benefit of those who have not the Greek text
at hand: “I will never disgrace these hallowed weapons, or abandon
my comrade, beside whomsoever I am placed, and I will fight for both
sacred and common things personally and with my fellows. I will not
leave my country less, but greater and better by sea and land, than I
may have received it. I will obey the rulers for the time being, and
obey the established laws, and whatsoever others the commonwealth may
agree to establish; and if any one abolish the ordinances or disobey
them, I will not allow it, but will defend them personally and with the
rest. I will obey the established religion. Be my witnesses Aglauros,
Enyalios, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, Hegemone.” Though Cobet be right
that some features of this oath can hardly have been generally used
through the course of Athenian history, and that it was probably made
up at a late period, the list of gods, so curious and unlike what a
late pedant would invent, points to some old source; and perhaps there
are other really historical traditions in it.

The _general_ authenticity of this text has rather been confirmed by
the discovery of the oath of the ephebi of Dreros (near Knossus) in
Crete--an inscription of undoubted authenticity. Here, there are not
only the general declarations of loyalty and patriotism, but special
oaths to support the allied Knossus, and declarations of hatred and
hostility against the town of Lyttos.[50] This formal declaration of
hatred may be compared with the outspoken aristocratic oath quoted
by Aristotle: “I will be ill-disposed to the demos, and will do it
whatever harm I can devise.”

The various religious ceremonies connected with the admission to the
status of an ephebus, which was considered distinct both from a boy
and from a man--the sacrifices, the cutting of the long hair (except
in Sparta), the solemn assembly of relatives, remind us strongly of
the _confirmation_ of the Christian Church, to which it is the heathen
parallel.

§ 47. What a solemn procession of ephebi must have been is best shown
by the equestrian and sacrificial procession on the frieze of the
Parthenon. We notice some young men naked, some in the short cloak and
hat, riding horses and leading victims. The riding of the horses was
not so easy as with us, for, in the first place, they had no saddles
and stirrups, and, in the second, it was thought necessary for a good
display to have the horse continually on his hind-legs. A quiet walking
horse in a procession was thought very tame by the Greeks. Hence
the management of these curvetting and caracoling steeds must have
necessitated careful training in their riders. Again, we find others
leading bulls to the sacrifice, and the frequent mention of contests
with bulls has even misled many authorities to imagine that the Attic
ephebi practised bull-fighting. The fact is that an unruly victim was
of evil omen, and hence the careful leading of these beasts, with skill
and strength combined, so as to make a proper part of a great show,
came under ephebic training. This, too, we see on the Parthenon frieze.
Wherever, in fact, any public display was required, the artistic taste
of the Greeks ordained that the fairest and most stalwart men should
be there to adorn it; and as nothing is so beautiful as a crowd of
vigorous fresh youths, in the bloom of life and the happiness of youth,
we can conceive how splendid was a State procession then compared
with those of our day, when the grandest show is one of old generals,
effete officials, and other venerable but decrepit magnates, who must
be covered with fine clothes, brilliants, and orders to prevent their
real ugliness and decay from being painfully obtrusive. In Roman
days we hear of these youths being employed as guards of honor when
distinguished foreigners visited Athens.

§ 48. Though this ephebic training is spoken of as universal--and it
seems that after his inscription into the _register_ (ληξιαρχικὸν
γραμματεῖον) of his deme, which was his patent of citizenship, every
Athenian lad was bound to serve as _patroller_ (περίπολος) and undergo
his military training--there must have been many exceptions; and,
indeed, this whole education is evidently that of the higher classes,
and unsuitable for the poor. In Roman days, we even find strangers
coming to Athens and enrolling themselves among the ephebi, as those
wealthy foreigners who understand what culture means often send their
sons to England to receive the unique training of the English public
schools. But this points to its being a privilege, a special and
much-prized education, though we do not know what restrictions there
were, or how the sons of poorer men, who could not afford the time and
outlay, avoided it. The number of official ephebi was never, I fancy,
large, and always a class from which Phidias might well select for his
models, when seeking for ideal types of youth and manliness.

It has, indeed, not been sufficiently noticed, in the various essays
on this ephebic training, that the very idea of such a class never
occurs in Herodotus or in Thucydides, though it does in Xenophon;[51]
and if Plutarch speaks of Alcibiades influencing the ephebi in the
gymnasia with his wild schemes of western conquest, we may be sure the
historian transferred the titles and notions of his age to older times.
In the third century B.C., there are so many inscriptions about this
class extant that it must have assumed a most prominent place in Attic
life. From that time onward into Roman times, we hear of it constantly,
and from many sources. It is impossible that Socrates and his school
should not have alluded to it, had it already formally existed. We may
therefore infer that though its component parts--the formal enrolment
and sacrifices at a certain age, the patrol duties, the gymnastic and
musical training, the procession duty at festivals--were developed in
the best period of Attic history, their official reduction to a State
system of education could not have taken place till later, till the
decay of practical public life had given men time to theorize about
methods of restoring by education what was irreparably lost.

Apparently, the earliest _formal_ notice is in a fragment of the orator
Lycurgus, who, in his famous speech on his own management of the
Athenian exchequer, alluded to the statue of a certain Epicrates, which
had been set up in bronze _on account of his law about the ephebi_. We
cannot tell whether this was a special enactment or not. But it _may_
have been the very law which established this famous system, so praised
and sought after by all the Hellenistic world in Roman days. If so, the
establishment would date from the very time when it proved of little
real importance to the history of Attica or of the world.

Nevertheless, the many inscriptions reveal to us certain curious and
interesting features, which make us approve of the good taste of
Cicero and his friends, when they sent their boys away from Rome to
Athens, as we send our sons to schools in England. Thus the learned
Germans who have investigated with great pains the various titles of
the magistrates or dignitaries among these ephebi are often at a loss
to determine whether they are masters set over them, or leaders among
the ephebi themselves. Indeed, the so-called ἄρχων τῶν ἐφηβῶν (head of
the ephebi) appears to have been no other than the most successful and
brilliant youth, the representative and spokesman of the rest, like the
senior prefect at some of our public schools. No doubt, learned men
who, in future ages, investigate the ephebic training of the English
will puzzle themselves over the senior prefect at Winchester, and
wonder whether he was a master or a boy; and, if a boy, how he could
have so much power intrusted to him. We also find that the expenditure
of keeping up the solemn processions and public contests was so great
that the ephebi themselves were encouraged to contribute largely; and
if they were rich, they gained an importance disproportionate (we
may suspect) to their age. What is even more interesting to English
students is that they had independent clubs and associations, and
even held solemn meetings, where they used the terms of public life,
and entitled the resolutions (ψηφίσματα) enacted in their assembly
(ἀγορά) laws (νόμοι). They had archons, strategi, agoranomi, and even
areopagites in these associations of youths. It must have been with
the approval of these formal meetings that the gymnastic side of the
ephebic training became gradually discredited. Whether the dislike of
great generals like Alexander and Philopœmen to athletics contributed
to change public opinion, we cannot tell. But I confess to feeling a
considerable sympathy with the reform which asserted the superiority of
hunting and riding to the exercises of the gymnasium--a change which is
regarded by some German critics as a melancholy sign of degradation.

§ 49. In these later days, when the seven subjects of knowledge,
including rhetoric, philosophy, etc., were formally adopted, the
ephebic training assumed the character of a university course. There
were, indeed, masters appointed for fencing, the use of arms, dancing,
and wrestling, as of old; but the leading philosophical schools
did not then carry off the youths from the ephebic training; they
rather supplied it with formal professors. In the better and strictly
classical days, before we hear of the technical term _ephebi_, the
practical training of the youths for patrols, and then as incipient
citizens, rather corresponded to what we call the sixth form at a
public school, and did not embrace really philosophic teaching, such
as is supposed to be found at our universities. It had the same
mixture of the physical and intellectual, the same attention to mere
accomplishments, the same careful surveillance which we practise in
schools, but which are not a complete introduction to full citizen
life. This was the summit of Spartan training, where the object was not
to train really political men able to discuss public affairs and assist
in the government of the State, but brave soldiers, and fine men,
physically able to endure hardship and submit to strict discipline.
Something quite different and intellectually higher was needful for
a really democratic life, for an intelligent understanding of State
functions, and the proper discussion of them. It was all very well to
dance complicated figures with grace, to play the lyre and sing sweetly
with it, to wrestle and run with force and ease. This was the old
training, which made fine soldiers, but good citizens only in the sense
of stupidly ignorant, and therefore obedient, hearers of the orders
of their superiors. The necessity of a change came with the rise of
democracy in Greece, and the Greeks provided themselves, when the need
arose, with teachers suited to their wants. These men, the Sophists,
were the first who gave any education corresponding to our university
courses, and to these we now turn.


  FOOTNOTES:

[48] Cf. the list in Grasberger, iii. 65.

[49] “N. L.,” p. 233.

[50] Cf. for the text of his oath _Philol._ for 1854, p. 694, or
Grasberger, iii. 61.

[51] Especially in his “Education of Cyrus.”




  CHAPTER VIII.

  HIGHER EDUCATION--THE SOPHISTS AND SOCRATES.


§ 50. As every one knows now, the real position and merits of the
Sophists were first brought to light by Grote in his monumental
“History of Greece.” Since the publication of that book the English
scholar has learned that sophist, in early Greek history, is not
synonymous with liar and villain, undermining public morals and sapping
religion. Within the last few years the influence of this new view is
gradually reaching the Germans, a nation not very ready to adopt, in
philology at least, English opinions. But this very natural reluctance
has its exceptions; for in the most important new book on the history
of Greek philosophy, Zeller’s last edition, we find that, in spite of
sundry reservations, the main results of Grote’s investigations are
recognized and adopted.

Before I go on to appropriate from these authors that part of their
account of the Sophists which belongs properly to the subject of Greek
education, it is worth reflecting a moment on so very remarkable an
instance of misunderstood evidence as this controversy exhibits.
The main body of philologists simply followed like a flock of sheep
Plato’s and Aristotle’s polemic against their own rivals. Plato
inherited from Socrates a strong antipathy to these practical and often
utilitarian teachers. But it was for the most part the same sort of
antipathy that the solid university professor of our own day has for
the successful crammer. The competition mania of the present day has
created a demand for these specialists, who do not profess anything
more than their special trade of passing men for examinations, and who
do it admirably, and derive from it large emoluments. So the rise of
democratic institutions, and the spread of international debates, made
the fifth century B.C. in Greece one that required suddenly a set of
practical teachers for men who practised at the bar or debated in the
public assembly. We are too much in the habit of thinking that such
men required training merely in rhetoric--in the way of disputing and
of plausibly stating their views. They required more; they required
education in general subjects, and of course not a deep education,
but such a one as would enable them to talk intelligently, and make
and understand allusions to the deeper questions of the day. We hear
that now in America it is not an uncommon thing for men who have risen
suddenly in the world, and for their wives, to send for a teacher and
say, “I am now in a position to move in educated society, and to be
required to speak on public affairs. My early training was entirely
neglected. I want you to instruct me in the ordinary topics of the day,
as well as in those points of art and science which may be serviceable
for my purpose.” And such instruction, very superficial, no doubt, and
inaccurate, but highly practical, is often given.

§ 51. Now, let us imagine that an intelligent Greek or other foreigner,
totally unacquainted with modern journalism, were to seek for evidence
of its moral value and the real benefits it confers upon us. What
answer would he receive? If he applied to the journalists themselves,
they would tell him that it was their object so to furnish their
readers with all the current topics of instruction as to make them
able to converse intelligently without any further study. They would
also profess to be leaders of the moral sense of the public, praising
what was of good repute, and blaming the wicked, exposing abuses, and
expounding virtue. They would also claim the merit of supplying the
public with arguments in favor of a disputed conclusion, so that men
might be furnished with weapons to meet their intellectual adversaries.
He would naturally ask, on hearing this exalted programme, whether
all this was done out of pure philanthropy or with any ulterior view;
more especially, whether there was any pecuniary gain attached. They
would reply that they did indeed take money for their teaching--and the
laborer is worthy of his hire--but they would appeal to any of their
readers whether the instruction afforded was not greatly in excess of
their remuneration. With this reply our stranger might perhaps be but
half satisfied, and might have some suspicion that independent evidence
would not come amiss; and on inquiring from thoughtful men what
emoluments were to be gained by this profession, he would hear that, if
successful, it was one of the most lucrative known, and that many of
the contributors confessedly worked, not for the sake of conviction,
but of gain. He would next inquire whether success was always in their
case a test of solid merit, and would discover that, however it might
be so intellectually, from a moral point of view such was not the case.
The most thoughtful and candid members of our society would explain to
him that, here as elsewhere, men delighted more in reading what fell in
with their prejudices than what exposed them, and that by pandering to
this defect, and following in the wake of public opinion, newspapers
often succeeded better than by honest and fearless teaching. He would
hear that almost every paper belonged to some political party,
whose errors and weaknesses it felt bound to justify and protect.
Furthermore, that for the sake of clearness and of brevity, as well as
from a want of care to do more than please for the hour, many arguments
in the daily papers were superficial and illogical, not clearing, but
obscuring, the real questions at issue. He would certainly, therefore,
in the course of his inquiry, come to look upon them as a class or
profession; but yet, if he spoke of them as such, he might be surprised
to hear himself corrected by the journalists or by their friends.
They would deny that they were a distinct profession, and say with
truth that _all_ intelligent men who desired to teach were to some
extent journalists, who are marked by no fixed principle, by the bonds
of no special education. Even their own critics, he would hear with
surprise, at times joined them and wrote to instruct the public. They
were a class and not a class, a profession and not a profession; with
a common object, to some extent a common method, but hardly any common
principles, any direct co-operation, any common interest, to outbalance
their jealous rivalry.

§ 52. Is this a fair picture of the moral side of journalism? It is
obtained simply by describing, in the wake of Plato and of Mr. Grote
and of Sir Alexander Grant, the old Greek Sophists. These, then,
were really the Greek journalists, who, before the days of posts and
printing, carried about from city to city the latest news, the most
recent criticism, the most modern views of politics and of education,
the newest theories on morals and on religion. It may be thought
irreverent to compare St. Paul to our daily press, but I cannot better
explain myself than by pointing to that most graphic scene in the Acts
where the apostle arrives at Athens. He is seized by the eager and
curious public as we seize the precious journal in some remote country
place when we have been separated from the current of affairs for a
few days. And, no doubt, they first asked him what local or political
information he had brought from his previous sojourn, just as we first
read the messages from Paris or London; and when this curiosity was
satisfied, they began to inquire what more he had to say; and, finding
that he was an ethical teacher, or sophist, they proceeded at greater
leisure to enjoy the rest of his communications, just as we should
turn on to the leading article, the correspondence about ritualistic
innovations, or the reviews. St. Paul was taken for a sophist, and
justly so in some sense, for he taught morals and religion; still
more, he taught a new religion. We all know how far he differed from
that class. Flippant, plausible, ingenious, sceptical, they were the
idols of the public, but the aversion of those deeper minds to whom
the ignorance and prejudice of the masses are not a source of material
gain, but rather a grievous and galling spiritual burden.

§ 53. This is what the Greek Sophists really were, crammers not for
special competitions, but for the general requirements of higher
society and of political life. They crammed more or less honestly, more
or less efficiently, for a generation or two. Then the want of them
passed away, as we may hope the want of the modern crammer will pass
away with the superstition that we can find out practical merit by mere
examinations. At Athens and throughout Greece the encyclopædic teaching
of the Sophists was presently carried into minute specialty by teachers
of rhetoric, of dialectic, and of morals, just as the professors of
geology of thirty years ago are being supplanted by special teaching in
fossil anatomy, botany, and mineralogy. From the middle of the fourth
century B.C. the Sophists disappear as a class altogether. It is,
nevertheless, certain that they left no bad name behind them in Greece,
except among the immediate followers of Plato and Aristotle; for in the
second century A.D. the title was revived as one of the highest honor,
and attaching to the greatest literary post in Athens.

We need not assert that these teachers were as strictly business-like
as the modern _coach_, or that they confined themselves as strictly
to their definite object. They often boasted of great performances
which were beyond the reach of ordinary people, and were merely meant
for display. But then their aims were far wider and more varied than
those of the coach, and were not to be tested by the clear and definite
result of the examination lists. Hence Plato and Socrates found it easy
to pick holes in their programmes, and to accuse them of getting money
under false pretences. These philosophers went further, and reviled
them for taking money at all, bartering their wisdom for gold, and
imparting virtue for a fee. All this was mere jealous polemic, and
based on an unfair estimate of the attempt made by practical men to
supply a public want. Yet even though Plato himself paints the leading
Sophists as most respectable men, though we know from independent
evidence that they were so, whether Plato confessed it or not, the
attacks on the profession made by him and by Aristophanes--the one a
radical reformer, and the other a blind conservative--have so imposed
upon the learned that they have completely mistaken the real evidence
on the question, and set down the arguments for the prosecution as if
they were a judicial charge or a mature verdict. So powerful is the
influence of literary skill, when it causes the survival of a single
work amid the loss of all its fellows. Because Plato is our leading
witness on the Sophists, because Aristophanes’ satire has survived, men
imagine that this must be the general verdict, and set down the bias
and the prejudice of an individual as the reflex of public opinion.

§ 54. These men really shaped out the first form which university
education took in Europe, meaning by university education that higher
general training which, coming after school discipline, trains men for
the duties of social and political as well as scientific and literary
life.

In the city life of the Greeks, when residence in any foreign place
entailed great inconvenience, it was evident that this university
teaching could not occupy a fixed place. It was not till the
amalgamation of the Greek nation under Roman sway that Athens became
(like Alexandria) strictly a university town. So, as the students could
not gather round the early sophist, he was obliged to go to them,
wandering through Greece, and staying for a considerable time in each
great centre, where the native youth could profit by him. But even in
early days there were some enthusiastic pupils, who abandoned home and
country, and wandered about as aliens in the wake of these brilliant
teachers. The latter generally made high display of their acquirements,
and gave exhibitions of eloquence and of argument to show the value of
their wares. They lived an ostentatious life, like the professional
artists of the present day, and though they made large profits, saved
but little money. Their first object was to make ready and practical
citizens, men able to collect and express their thoughts and give
sound advice on public matters. For this purpose they not only taught
the art of rhetoric and that of disputation, but they were obliged
to enter upon some of the great theories which form the basis of all
practical life--the problems of philosophy, of ethics, and of religion.
As we might expect, they took in all these a utilitarian view, such
as a practical crammer would take. Some of them, such as Gorgias and
Protagoras, studied philosophy deeply, but only to show that a devotion
to metaphysic or to abstract science was idle, all knowledge being
subjective, and varying with the age. Man was the measure of things;
abstract nature was mere nothing. On the more pressing question of
morals, though practically sound enough, and though some of them,
such as Prodicus, were celebrated as moral preachers, they denied
all immutable morality, and were content with obeying the existing
laws of society, without admitting any permanent scientific basis
for them. It was Socrates who first applied his great mind to solve
this question, and his classes of young men--he was in this a regular
sophist or university teacher, and was commonly so called--were
specially exercised in seeking for the permanent and immutable ideas
implied in our moral terms which characterize our moral actions. As
regards religion, seeing that the Greek faith had grown up in myths
and poetry, and was imbedded in an elaborate polytheistic mythology
full of immoralities and absurdities, the Sophists were, as we might
expect, sceptical, and so far opposed to the conservative public. One
of them, Protagoras, actually professed his unbelief in the national
faith, and was persecuted accordingly; others, though more cautious,
and regarding any formal denial of transcendental truths as hardly
practical, were justly suspected of agnosticism, as their moral essays
kept suspiciously clear of theology. They were regarded as unsound in
faith, and hence alleged to be unsound in morals by the orthodox,
whose faith the Sophists charged fairly enough with the same objection.

§ 55. So the education of the Sophists came to be regarded by the
soberest part of the public, the steady-going old people, as subversive
of ancient and venerable traditions. In religion it was supposed
to suggest, if not to teach, infidelity; in politics and society,
radicalism. This is exactly the sort of charge we hear made by the
old-fashioned public against the universities--still more in Germany,
where the gulf between the average and the learned part of society
is far wider than it is here. When we university teachers make young
men think, even though carefully avoiding (as we are in honor bound)
anything which may shock the traditions in which they have been brought
up, the mental agitation produced must, nevertheless, lead them to
reject at least some superstitions which they have accepted on weak
evidence. If our education does not produce this result, it is not
worthy the name. But this partial and cautious scepticism is of course
identified by the older generation, who are less spiritually developed,
with the rejection of vital truths. And there are many cases where the
young sceptic really oversteps his just bounds, and becomes as rash in
negation as his fathers were uncritical in affirmation. Let us add that
the orthodox party are not very particular about evidence, and will
start a calumnious charge against a teacher whom they suspect and fear,
with very little care about really proving their case. This party are,
moreover, always supplied with powerful allies by the jealousies and
differences among the teachers themselves, the elder and less able of
whom often try to sustain their waning influence by an alliance with
orthodoxy, and make up by theological popularity what they have been
unable to attain for want of intellectual force and sympathy.

All these things, which now happen constantly in our universities,
are the exact counterparts of what happened in Greece in the days of
the Sophists. They taught clever young men such surface-knowledge
of science as disgusted the deeper experts, and, what was more,
they taught them that the experts were pursuing a vain shadow, and
attempting insoluble problems. They taught them to avoid becoming
specialists, and to apply themselves to public life. Just as the
English universities can boast of many great politicians and literary
men, rather than of specialists in the sciences, and as they might hold
that to produce a Gladstone or a Cornewall Lewis is better than to
produce a Faraday, so the Sophists made general culture their professed
object, and so far quarrelled with deeper philosophy.

§ 56. The same sort of proceeding in morals brought them into contact
with Socrates, whose daily teaching may be regarded as the best
university teaching of the day. Socrates was in all external respects
a sophist, and commonly regarded as such. He did not, indeed, travel
about, being luckily a citizen of the largest and most enlightened city
in Greece. He despised, too, wealth and ostentation of the ordinary
kind, though he made himself no less remarkable by his voluntary
poverty. But in more important respects, in despising abstract science
and speculative philosophy, and sifting traditional theories of
morals and society, in radically shaking up and often upsetting all
preconceived notions, Socrates was a sophist, and one of the most
dangerous of them. He sought, indeed, to do what they had not done--to
find some better and surer positive basis for morals, but the negative
part of his work was far the most successful and striking. Hence the
conservative public at Athens not only suspected and disliked him, but
at the prosecution of their mouthpiece, Anytus, a most respectable
and earnest man, condemned him to death, when he showed clearly that
no verdict of theirs would restrain him from pursuing his occupation.
This sentence on Socrates, which the orthodox party at Athens never
regretted, and even justified, should indeed be a warning to those who
calumniate their fellows in the interests of orthodoxy. But with this
we are not now concerned.

The higher teaching of the Sophists and of Socrates, which was at
best desultory, passed into the hands of successors like Plato and
Isocrates, who established regular schools, and subjected their pupils
to a regular course of training. This was all the more necessary, as
the training given by Socrates had no definite limits, and his tendency
was to keep young men talking and discussing ethical problems when they
ought to have turned to practical life. Leisure was, indeed, in such
high repute among the old Greeks that idleness was not reprehended as
it should have been. The orthodox party made this objection with much
force to the school or following of Socrates. In the case of Plato
there was a regular course of higher philosophy, and his principal
pupils became, in their turn, philosophic teachers. But the school
of Plato was even more than that of Socrates a university training,
for which there may even have been a matriculation examination, if we
adopt literally the statement that no one was allowed to enter without
knowing elementary geometry. The great fault of Plato, as of Socrates,
was that he did not introduce men to public or practical life, but made
them philosophers or idlers. In science, indeed, this special training
was of great service, and the history of geometry would have been
very different without these speculators. But the Platonic pupil when
completely trained was professedly, according to the master himself,
disinclined to join in politics, and only to be persuaded by his sense
of duty and the willing obedience of the public.

It is on account of the same sort of exclusiveness, even monastic in
its strictness, that the famous brotherhood of Pythagoras deserves but
a small place in any general history of Greek education. Admission to
this brotherhood was only obtained through a strict novitiate, and
the object of it was to combine peculiar religious asceticism with an
aristocratic policy, and a sort of club life antagonistic to ordinary
society. We have, unfortunately, only few authentic details concerning
this sect, and know it best from the few echoes of it in early, and
the many in later, Platonism. But it, too, may be regarded as a higher
intellectual or university training, combined with collegiate life and
its restraints, thus anticipating in spirit that feature which makes
the English universities so peculiar among the modern seats of learning
in Europe.

I will return to Plato and his followers when we come to consider the
theories of education which the philosophers based on the phenomena of
Greek history. And before we pass from the Sophists to the Rhetors,
and show a further specializing of higher education in that direction,
we may say a word in conclusion on the external history of these once
celebrated, and since much-maligned, educators. We hardly know them
at all, save through their enemies, the specialist philosophers and
specialist rhetoricians; and what we hear of them must be distrusted
and sifted accordingly. Nevertheless, even from their enemies, we
learn that the three greatest of them--Protagoras, Gorgias, and
Prodicus--were eminently respectable and respected men. So was the
fourth in importance, Hippias, though the encyclopædic pretensions he
put forth to practise all trades and manual dexterities, as well as
philosophy, history, and rhetoric, have left an unpleasant impression
against him. Nevertheless, he was honored at Elis, his native place, as
their leading citizen, and compiled for them the annals of their famous
past in such a way as to gain universal acceptance.

As regards the other three, though they all professed to impart
general education, and to give their pupils that negative training
in philosophy which would arm them against false theories, yet they
were each remarkable for some special line. Protagoras, apart from his
famous philosophical position of the relativity of knowledge to him who
knows, openly professed to teach _political_ wisdom, and despised all
other kinds of knowledge in comparison with it. Gorgias, on the other
hand, though he wrote a famous treatise with the very Hegelian title
“concerning nature or the non-existent,” devoted his main attention
to _rhetoric_, and was truly the father of technical Greek oratory.
For though we hear of Corax and Tisias in Sicily, and of Empedocles,
as having cultivated the art, the first recognized theorist and
practical speaker was Gorgias. He not only delivered set speeches, but
so trained himself as to deliver elegant discourses on any proposed
subject, apparently without preparation, but of course with the help of
a clever system of well-arranged commonplaces, which he applied with
quickness and variety. The philosophy of Prodicus was chiefly ethical,
and his apologues were very popular and quoted in after-days. But
more important were his _grammatical_ studies, whereby he fixed the
parts of speech, and laid the groundwork of the grammar of the modern
languages of Europe. Indeed, the strict attention to form shown by all
the Sophists led them to study language with peculiar care, and they
were the forefathers of modern philologists in this as in some other
respects.

A great many more Sophists are known by name, some of them depicted or
maligned in Plato’s dialogues, such as Thrasymachus, Polus, Euenus;
but they do not present to us any special features. All are said to
have insisted on the dictates of society as superior to any supposed
law of nature, and this Hobbism has brought upon them the anathemas of
moralists. Within the century 470-370 B.C. their part was played out;
and even Plato, in his later works, no longer thinks them worthy of
refutation.




  CHAPTER IX.

  THE RHETORS--ISOCRATES.


§ 57. It is argued by many scholars, who believe all that Plato says
literally, and who think that the dark pictures of Thucydides apply
only to his own day, and not to previous generations, that the Greeks
were so degraded and debauched by this sophistic tampering with
religion and morals, by this scepticism in philosophy, and by the
rise of radicalism in politics, as to present from this time onward
(430 B.C.) the symptoms of a decaying race. The Athenian State, in
particular, is supposed to have lost its splendor and its seriousness,
and to be now a mere mob-rule, far removed from the democracy, tempered
with despotism, which made it so great under Pericles. This view, which
is strongly urged, for example, in Curtius’s “History of Greece,” is
based altogether on the complaints of Plato and Aristophanes, and the
impression produced by the history of the aristocratic Thucydides,
by Xenophon, and by the plays of Euripides. This is not the place to
refute the theory generally, as has been done by Grote, who shows
that never was the Athenian democracy so enlightened and moderate in
policy as in the period after the close of the great war (403 B.C.).
But in the particular department before us, that of education, we have
already seen that this period after the Peloponnesian war is exactly
the period when the sophistic higher education began to be discarded
as superficial and even morally questionable, and the task of training
the keener and more ambitious youth passed into the hands of greater
specialists--either philosophers like Plato and his followers, or
rhetoricians like Isocrates and Antiphon. Socrates forms the connecting
link between the Sophists and the philosophic schools. Isocrates is
hardly such a link, though he professes to be the philosopher in the
guise of a rhetorician. Though he inveighed against his rivals the
Sophists, he is hardly to be distinguished from them save in his being
fixed at Athens, in his avoidance of displays (from natural inability
rather than from choice), and in his declared conservatism in religion
and politics, as contrasted with their scepticism. It is not just that
the eminent respectability of Isocrates personally should be urged as
another difference, when we adopt the fair view of the high characters
of the leading Sophists. Isocrates, whose views are fortunately
preserved in his own very diffuse advocacy of them, was strictly a
university teacher; and so well recognized was this that _a pupil of
Isocrates_ meant something like our A.B. Oxon. For he had a regular
course, and charged a considerable fee for his lessons. His pupils came
from all parts of Greece, and stayed with him a considerable time.
Moreover, he could boast that the most famous public men had been
educated by him, and owned his influence in after-days. This higher
education he called _philosophy_, and he only differed from other
professed Sophists (he says) in the modesty of his promises, and his
distinct admission that he undertook merely to improve natural talent,
not to change a stupid and ignorant youth into a man of acuteness and
power.

§ 58. There is an interesting passage in the speech in vindication of
his life,[52] which gives so clear a view of the prevailing opinions
about higher education at Athens that I will transcribe it freely:

“The ordinary attacks made upon us are of two kinds. Some say that
going to the Sophists for education is mere arrant imposture; never
has there been any system of training discovered by which a man can
become abler in speech or wiser in deed, since all who excel in these
respects differ by nature from the rest of mankind. The other objectors
concede that those who submit to this training become indeed abler, but
in a bad sense, and coupled with moral loss; for when they gain power,
they use it to injure their neighbors. I will now refute both these
objections.

“First, let us consider the absurdity of those who decry all higher
education. They revile it, indeed, as worth nothing, and mere deceit
and imposture, but yet demand from us that our pupils, as soon as
they come, should show a complete change, that after a few days’
intercourse with us they should appear better in discourse and abler
than their elders in age and experience; but if they stay one whole
year, they should all be perfect orators--the idle as well as the
diligent, the commonplace as well as the gifted. This they expect from
us, though we never have made such promises, and though it contradicts
the analogy of all other kinds of training, in which results are
acquired with difficulty, and each with a various measure of success,
so that some two or three only out of all the schools of all kinds
turn out thoroughly proficient, while the rest remain mere average
amateurs. Accordingly, the objectors are silly enough to demand from
a training, which they call unreal, an influence unknown in the
recognized instruction of all arts and sciences! Our teaching, then,
is discredited for accomplishing exactly what the other arts do. For
which of you does not know that many of those put under the Sophists
were not imposed upon, as is alleged, but have become, some of them,
real experts in public life, others able instructors of youth, and even
those who chose to remain in private life more polished in manners than
they had been, and more accurate critics of arguments as well as of
most ordinary things?

“How, then, can a pursuit be fairly despised which has produced such
results? for do not all men confess this, that those are to be esteemed
the most thoroughly versed in their art or handicraft who can make
their apprentices as good workmen as themselves? Now, in philosophy
this very thing has happened. For as many as happened on a genuine
and sensible guide will be found to have such a family likeness in
their way of expressing themselves that any one can tell they have
come from the same trainer. This similarity of type is conclusive
evidence of the method and system to which they have been subjected.
So, too, any of you could mention fellow-pupils who, as children, were
the most ignorant of their fellows, but as they advanced in age became
far superior in good sense and in eloquence to those once far ahead of
them.”

The orator goes on, with his usual elegant diffuseness, to make many
other developments of the same leading idea, all of which might be
used with hardly a word of change by any one defending our university
education against the vulgar objectors who think that vast sums of time
and money are spent upon it, with little or no result. Nor is the good
which he does claim for his higher education anything different from
what our universities could claim, apart from the material good of
prizes and degrees.

§ 59. The peculiar position of Isocrates was that of opposition to
both Sophists and philosophers, and yet of likeness to both. He joined
the Sophists in urging sceptical objections to the subtle theories of
the metaphysicians, and in commenting upon the small outcome of their
elaborate speculations. He joined the philosophers in attacking the
boastful claims of the Sophists, who pretended to teach everything.
But he joined with the more practical side in putting a training in
rhetoric--a training in style--above everything. There were many
reasons why this should be the case with higher education at Athens.
In an age when books were scarce, and a reading public small; when the
power of publicism only existed for poets, and when all State affairs
were settled by discussion either in the assembly or in private
meetings--in such a society a power of clear and elegant utterance was
the highest and best outcome of education. Nor could any man then be
considered educated who lacked that power, just as nowadays no man is
called educated who cannot write correct English; and, furthermore, the
writing of elegant English is justly accounted to indicate a thorough
and general culture. For we are such severe judges in this matter,
everybody thinks himself in this so well able to appreciate beauty and
pick out defects, that a man who can pass through the fire of criticism
unscathed must indeed be equipped with no ordinary preparation, and
may be pronounced a really cultivated man. This will explain to us the
enormous importance of rhetoric in Isocrates’ system--an importance,
perhaps, enhanced by his feeling that here he was really able to do
great and unique service. He evidently depended on natural mother wit
to suggest ideas to his pupils; he apparently assumed that they had
learned the ordinary elements of culture at their primary schools. He
trained them, so far as we know, in nothing but the careful arrangement
of their materials, the smooth transition of their arguments, and the
perfection of their choice and collocation of words. In this matter of
style, Isocrates may be regarded as not only the greatest master that
ever lived, but as the father of the periodic or oratorical style in
all the languages of Europe. Demosthenes, Cicero, St. John Chrysostom,
Massillon, Burke--all these immortal men have profited by the analysis
of expression which, through Isocrates, first formed Greek prose, and
through it the borrowed graces of those who followed Greek models.

§ 60. To enter into a closer description of this system would not be
to discuss education, but rhetoric, and we must refer the reader to
treatises on that subject. We need only here call attention to the
intense _studiedness_ of Greek eloquence, and how they attained their
perfection in prose--not by those violations of propriety which now
please our sated taste, and which, when violent enough, as in the
case of Carlyle, even pass for thoughts, and are to many the index of
deep originality in something or other--but by a close and perpetual
adherence to rules, often of a trivial, generally of a minute kind.

It is very curious for us moderns to read the details of these things
in the old rhetoricians. There is not an apparent touch of nature--a
word emphatically repeated, a sudden break off, an angry burst,
even a _don’t you see?_ or a _by Jove!_ or a _dear me!_--in a Greek
oration which was not noted as a _figure of diction_, or a _figure of
thought_, and brought under the discipline of rules. We are even told
that Demosthenes composed his prose in rhythm, and avoided the use
of more than two short syllables together. Isocrates certainly made
the law against hiatus--against closing a word and beginning the next
with vowels--a law adopted by all the prose writers of his age. Thus
the formal education in rhetoric must have been no light task for the
pupils of Isocrates and the other rhetors, and writing or speaking good
Greek a far stricter and more difficult thing than writing English
which will pass muster with the critics.

§ 61. Still, there is room for surprise that the _matter_ of higher
education, the ideas to be acquired, should have been introduced
indirectly under the guise of preparation for public speaking. No
doubt, this was an artificial and unnatural order of things. To
subordinate the matter of knowledge to the form is always a mistake.
But we may at least conceive the position of Isocrates’ pupils if
we compare it with that of the popular preachers, so powerful a
generation ago, and even now playing no unimportant part in society. I
have known more than one of these eminent men who educated themselves
with great care generally, and in all directions, for the purpose of
supplying themselves with matter for their discourses. And this is
very well-meant, legitimate, and honest education, though perverted in
order, and, like that of Isocrates, not likely to lead to really deep
and thorough knowledge. We are told that in the present day there are
people who read all kinds of books for the purpose of solving double
acrostics, and I have heard men of intelligence advocate this foolish
kind of riddles as promoting general education!

Thus the school of Isocrates stood side by side, and in rivalry, with
the schools of Plato and Aristotle, as one in which elegance of form,
and a superficial but graceful culture, was given to the higher youth,
instead of the exact science and metaphysic which unfitted men for
public life. It was a contrast somewhat like the Oxford and Cambridge
type in England. Isocrates’ own failure as a politician, and the little
influence which his open letters on politics attained, made the wiser
portion of men drift away still farther from the sophistic aspect
of his teaching, from the mixture of philosophy and politics with
rhetoric; and so they again subdivided their training into strictly
rhetorical, such as had already been begun by Lysias and was carried
out by Isæus, and the philosophical, for which an increasing number
of schools now offered themselves. As the political power of Greece
decayed, and its literary and artistic splendor became universally
recognized, Athens became an educational centre, to which youths from
all parts of the civilized world flocked for their training. This
later history of Greek culture will occupy us in our last chapter. But
we must first give a brief account of the deeper theories of State
education which Plato and Aristotle have left us, in contrast to the
shallow popularity of Isocrates.


  FOOTNOTES:

[52] Περὶ ἀντιδόσεως, p. 98 sq.




  CHAPTER X.

  THE GREEK THEORISTS ON EDUCATION--PLATO AND ARISTOTLE.


§ 62. It is usual in books on Greek education to give a very large
space to the discussion of the “Republic” and “Laws” of Plato and the
“Politics” of Aristotle, because they contain elaborate and systematic
recommendations as to the training of youth. But the states of both
philosophers are ideal, Aristotle’s not less than Plato’s; and, though
the educational portion of Aristotle’s work seems fragmentary and
unfinished, we cannot hold that any further developments would have
brought it within the range of practical politics. Plato’s notions
were confessedly theoretical, and are discussed as such by all his
commentators; but some scholars have given themselves endless trouble
to find out how much of his system, especially in the tamer and less
extravagant “Laws,” was borrowed from real life, and from actual
states, as opposed to the creations of his own fancy. But in nearly
every detail the distinction is purely conjectural. It is really for
want of positive evidence that these theories have assumed such
undue importance. To the philosophical theorist and the educational
reformer the speculations of such splendid intellects in the early
post-meridian of the glorious day of Greece must ever be most
attractive and suggestive; but it is idle to transfer to a practical
book, or to an historical account, what has never been realized.[53]
These speculations, however, may fairly find a limited space here as
showing what general effect the practical education already described
had produced upon the most advanced thinkers of the day.

Unfortunately, we have here again only the aristocratic side, and
that which would assert the State to be paramount and all-interfering
through individual and private life. If we had the speculations of
Lycophron and his school, who held, with truly democratical instinct,
that laws were only useful to repress crime, and that the rest of the
citizen’s life was to be left free and uncontrolled, our notions about
the theories of Greek education might be considerably modified. But, on
the other hand, we have preserved to us the Hellene of the Hellenes;
the school of Lycophron might only have recommended to us what we know
by practical experience in modern society.

From the very outset Plato and Aristotle adopt quite definite
principles. They assume that the State is to interfere everywhere and
control the whole life of man. Thus the splendid Athenian democracy
in which Plato lived had no power to wean him from his somewhat
narrow prejudices. He despised the goods he possessed, and longed for
a Spartan ideal, though its defects were plain enough before his
eyes.[54] Still worse, the wide vista opened by Alexander into a
larger fusion of ideas, and into widely various forms of society, had
no power to emancipate the intellect of Aristotle from its ingrained
Hellenic narrowness. It is necessary to make this strong protest at
the outset, on account of the chorus of admiration sung by the pedants
and pedagogues of modern days over these thoroughly unpractical and
retrograde theories. One fact will speak volumes to the modern reader.
Both of them look upon a small number of citizens, and, indeed, a
small limit of territory, as essential to their schemes, no accurate
or perpetual supervision by State police and direction being possible
either in a great city or a large territory.[55] This will in itself
show how antiquated they must have seemed even in the next century,
when the Greeks woke to the ambition of ruling over kingdoms in the
East.

§ 63. And yet there were some points on which these thinkers,
especially Plato, were far more thoroughgoing than we are, chiefly
from a total absence of that sentiment or sentimentality which infects
modern life. For Plato, both in the “Republic” and the “Laws,” insists
that education will be of little avail if children are brought into
the world deformed in body and warped in mind by the bad physical and
mental condition of their parents. On some of these cases Greek society
was agreed with him. In most states a deformed child was exposed
either to die or to be picked up by some one who might run the risk
of bringing it up to make a household slave.[56] For in most states,
and certainly at Sparta, it would have been held a crime to propagate
hereditary disease; and men were spared the disgusting spectacle of
the scrofulous or deaf-and-dumb heir to a great name being courted in
matrimony to perpetuate the miseries or the vices of his progenitors.

But Plato went further, and held that the production of the most
important animal, man, should be regulated with even more care than
that of the lower animals, in which such striking results have been
obtained by artificial selection. He therefore recommended, in his
ideal State, not community of wives--Heaven forbid that we should
follow Aristotle in repeating this gross libel!--but a careful State
selection of suitable pairs, and their solemn union, under the guise of
a direction from Providence by an appeal to the lot. These marriages
were to take place at a fixed season, and all the children born of them
within the year to be regarded the common children of all: here the
word _community_ may fairly apply. He has nowhere told us whether in
successive years the same parents were to remain united, and hence we
do not know whether his marriages were meant to be temporary or not.
I fancy the point was of little importance to him. If the offspring
turned out well, there would be no change; if badly, of course the
guardians of the State would not sanction the continuance of an
unwholesome union. Thus, though Plato was willing to allow sentiment
its sentimental place, and to bring forward the decision of the
rulers of the State as the will of Providence, marriages professedly
arranged in heaven were to be permitted only with a strict view to the
improvement of the race.

The objection that such an arrangement would destroy the sanctity
and the influence of the family, and thus abolish our most powerful
engine of early education, was no objection to Plato. He wished to
abolish separate families, and rescue children from the tyranny, the
indulgence, and incompetence of individual parents, so as to put them
under state discipline. And the State was absolutely nothing but one
huge family, as far as the higher classes were concerned. To us who
live in large kingdoms, who know that the family gives the law for
individuals in ordinary life, and that schemes of public education
cannot replace it, all systems which abolish the sanctity of the home
are inadmissible.

§ 64. No point in Plato’s scheme excites more sympathy nowadays with
advanced thinkers than that of equalizing the sexes in education, and
subjecting women to the same training and duties as men. For he held
that, though nature had not made women as strong as men, and that
their important functions in the production of the race put them
under some inconveniences and disabilities, there was, nevertheless,
no reason to assume any permanent difference in kind. If such a theory
is thought revolutionary by most people in modern society, what must
it have been in the days and among the people of Plato’s age! Here,
again, what guided him was an exaggerated estimate of the liberty
and importance of Spartan women, who, when young, were encouraged
to exercise in public; and who, when married, maintained over their
husbands an influence far exceeding that of women in other Greek
households. But then we must not forget the small culture of the men,
their devotion to military training, and the consequent necessity for
women to use their own judgment in the management of their homes.

§ 65. On the other hand, if we may digress for a moment on account of
the interest and importance of the subject, there is no valid reason
why the physical production of the race should not receive infinitely
more attention than it does within the bounds of our present social
arrangements. In the first place, though the sentimental reasons
for marrying are still put in the foreground, and though at wedding
speeches and in amatory correspondences some divine predestination,
or the sentimental compulsion called falling in love, is assumed
the only efficient cause of marriages, we know that many reasonable
considerations intervene and are the real motives of action. These
motives--the acquisition of wealth or position or connection, the
desire of home comforts and of a life independent of external
amusements, a calm mutual respect--are commonly enough confessed even
by the very people who parade sentimental reasons; and whenever a
marriage appears suitable from rational considerations, no trouble is
spared by match-makers to induce young people to imagine themselves
drawn together by some subtle and sentimental affinity--like Plato’s
guardians, who were to pretend the providential lot as their guide.

If, then, such be the case; if even now there are civilized countries
and classes of people who openly profess prudential reasons as the
best for marrying, it will only require a better education of public
opinion to enable men to advance to the position that the physical and
mental vigor of the resulting children is a motive to be consciously
considered in the selection. We may first reach the stage of avoiding
an hereditary taint as people now fly an infectious disease. Such
avoidance would ultimately stamp out or reduce to a minimum this evil,
and the race would escape a great part of the direst and most hopeless
of its physical miseries. Then the systematic and deliberate desire
that there should be healthy children will discover many conditions
now unknown, when so many of our unions are the result of chance or
avarice, or, still worse, of passion. Men of science will begin to make
observations on the difference of physical antecedents which cause such
curious differences in children of the same house. And the day will
come when, from a body of such observations, valuable practical rules
may be deduced. We may thus improve our race as the Spartans did in old
Greece; and they, we know, were perfectly successful in obtaining what
they sought--a high average of physical strength and beauty.

All this, we may hope, will only be the introduction to a far more
important, but far more difficult, problem--the determining of the
conditions which produce genius. There is no reason to doubt that these
conditions are mainly transient, for genius is no fixed heritage,
the most splendid instances coming from obscure and ordinary parents.
Nor does the mere combination of the suitable parents work its effect
uniformly without other more limited conditions. For we find the great
leaders of the world sometimes the only child, sometimes eldest,
sometimes youngest, or in the middle of a family of brothers and
sisters as obscure as their parents. The careful observation, then,
not only of the parents, but of the particular passage in their life
which produced an intellectually splendid offspring, is one upon which
we cannot expect light for a long time, and until people have become
accustomed to regard the general improvement of the race of far greater
importance than they now do. If such results could be obtained even
approximately--if, even in one case out of ten, intellectual excellence
could be produced as we reproduce physical perfections--then, indeed,
the perfectibility of mankind would no longer be a vague dream, but
would show some signs of a partial fulfilment.

Are we to hope that such an advance in ideas will take place in our
own day? We have perhaps advanced beyond the stage when men regard
genius as distinctly heaven-born, and the direct gift of the gods,
apart from any natural conditions. If it is indeed heaven-born, it is
now conceded to be such through the combination of natural causes. But,
on the other hand, our best and most refined people will recoil with
deep aversion from making a scientific analysis of such conditions;
they will exclaim that the possible advantages are as nothing compared
with the desecration of that mystery which has been hallowed by the
sacraments of the Church, and protected from profane inquiry by a cloud
of delicate sentiment. To reduce the holy estate of marriage to the
deliberate and scientific production of conditioned offspring will
destroy, say they, all the sanctity of the relation, and with it the
purity and dignity of our homes.

These weighty and respectable objections are to be met by observing
that it would be idle and wrong to attempt any reform in opposition to
the unanimous sentiment of the very people who alone could carry it
out--our most sober and refined classes. Until this sentiment can be
gradually changed by argument, and come to be looked on as a venerable
and amiable superstition, nothing will be accomplished. But it is a
matter of history that the most respectable and hallowed sentiments,
if irrational, can be gradually removed by a progress in what Mr.
Lecky calls _rationalism_, or intellectual enlightenment. We can even
now point to the important fact, that in those countries and those
ages where marriages had been confessedly arranged from prudential
reasons, they have not been less sacred, nor has home life been less
pure, than where vague and irrational sentiments have been brought
into the foreground. The lower-class Irish are as faithful and happy
in their homes, and the marriage-tie is a sacred and honored as it is
anywhere in the world; and yet among them a love-match is rare. It is
a matter of cows and of pigs, of the succession to a farm--nay, often
of arrangement by the landlord for reasons of his own; and yet these
marriages are as happy and as pure as if they had been the outcome of a
great mutual passion. The same thing may be said of married life in the
country parts of France, where a thrifty and provident race accommodate
their unions to their circumstances, and leave the extravagances of
great passion to poets and Parisians.

The history of Greece offers a more notable instance. If we ask where
in Greece the home enjoyed the greatest honor and sanctity, where the
house-mother stood highest in reverence and social importance, and
where violations of fidelity were rarest, no one would hesitate to
answer, At Sparta. Yet at Sparta all the sentiment, all the delicacy,
of the marriage-tie was sacrificed to the duty of producing healthy
children for the State. Plutarch tells us of a state of things which
modern people would think wholly subversive of all purity--of old men
ceding their rights of temporary unions and exchanges for the sake of
desirable offspring. The Spartan men and women were not wanting in
sentiment about marriage, in advocating the honor and sanctity of the
marriage-tie; but their sentiment led them to regard a fine offspring
as the noblest outcome of marriage, and one to which all other
considerations were secondary. Hence it was in accordance with their
sentiment that they adopted the same kind of precautions as regards
physical perfection which a later and wiser age may adopt as regards
intellectual and moral perfection.

This possibility of improving intellect by careful selection was
beyond Plato’s vision; he only thought of physical qualities in the
arrangement of his unions. But it is one of the most remarkable points
in his exclusive and aristocratic society that he makes provision for
the adopting of any particularly bright child of the operative class
among his guardians, so that they might benefit by the accident. The
degradation of poor or unhealthy children of the higher class is also
contemplated.

His arrangement of the years of education is as follows: It is divided
into three parts. Beginning with the learning of proper myths and
tales, it proceeds to easy gymnastic, followed by music and poetry,
with reading, writing, arithmetic, and some elementary mathematics,
all of which occupy from the seventh to the eighteenth year, and thus
correspond to our schooling. Then comes military training up to the
twentieth year--a division to which we, who have no conscription, have
no analogy, as the Germans have. Next follows the second division of
higher studies in pure and applied mathematics for ten years, and the
third in metaphysic for five years. These are, of course, quite wide of
any practical scheme, and are intended to form those philosophic rulers
who will regard their whole life here as a preparation for a higher
sphere.

§ 66. His views on the details of music and gymnastic were not
materially different from those of the practical educators which we
have discussed, save that he proposes to train his guardian class with
more detail and circumstance than were possible for any ordinary public.

He is unpractical, and even absurd, in his curious prudery about the
tales and legends which children are to learn. He objects to Homer,
to the tragedies, still more to the comedies, and, no doubt, to the
folk-lore of the day, as inculcating base and immoral views of the gods
and their relations to men. Fairy tales are always to represent God as
one and as perfectly good. He even goes so far--but here he can hardly
be in earnest--as to recommend that children shall learn by heart
his laws instead of poetry and myths![57] Throughout all his remarks
on this subject, he evidently ignores the culture of the imagination
as such, which we recognize as so important that we even tolerate or
overlook immoralities or manifest fictions in aiming at this kind of
amusement and culture of children. Indeed, it is certain that when
children are taught fairy tales _as such_, the immoral acts of real
life, such as robbery and murder, are only accessories to the imaginary
life, in which there is generally some rude justice.

Even apart from this particular question, we find all through Plato’s
theory of education a very mischievous dislike of any liberty of
opinion, or liberty of life, in the youth of his State. He goes so
far in the “Laws” as to make heresy of opinion penal, and to punish
with imprisonment those who will not conform to the doctrines of the
lawgiver. If there be anything which would tempt us to reject the
“Laws,” as not the genuine work of Socrates’ disciple, it is this
strange narrowness of view, which makes Grote argue that the actual
Athens of Plato’s day was superior to the ideal he constructed. But
doctrinaires of all ages hate human liberty. Nor do the Greeks ever
seem to have been forced by the pressure of circumstances to mark off
the close of formal education by a fixed period, like our graduation
at a university, when the young man is expected to strike out into the
world and henceforth educate himself in practical life.

§ 67. The educational book of Aristotle’s “Politics” (VII. in the now
received order) is a mere fragment, which suggests many problems, and
solves but few. Even with the help of some important corrections from
the “Ethics,” we find it the narrow and old-fashioned scheme of a
pedant Greek, written with admiration for the artificial discipline of
Sparta, and unable to understand even the far more splendid Hellenic
ideal sketched by Thucydides in his speech of Pericles. We know,
however, from the “Ethics” that he felt the essential importance of
family ties between husband and wife, between parents and children.
Hence he rejects Plato’s proposal of abolishing the family, and insists
that the ideal State must consist of households in the strict sense.
But, on the other hand, he quite agrees with Plato’s view that the
social and moral aspects of marriage are by no means inconsistent with
a strict supervision of the producing of healthy children by the State.
He foreshadowed the state of things anticipated above, when husband
and wife will still feel the deep sanctity and thorough loyalty of
their relation, and yet not leave to mere accident the most important
product, nay, the only product, so far as the State is concerned, of
their union. He is just as careful as Plato in recommending care of
unborn children by attention to their mothers’ air and exercise. He is
still more ruthless in advocating the destruction, either before or
after birth, of illegitimate offspring. Neither can he, any more than
Plato, imagine an ideal state capable of such expansion as to contain
a great people, nor can he dispense with disabilities for most of its
members, such as slaves and operatives.

He does not contemplate the very long and elaborate after-training of
Plato’s guardians, for he does not conceive this world as a preparation
for another, but as an end in itself. And it is probably for this
reason that he is so superior to Plato in analyzing the function
of refined recreation, and the ennoblement of leisure by æsthetic
pleasures. Thus he sees that music is to be utilized as a recreation
for youth, as well as for a moral engine of education. He has explained
in his “Poetic” that dramatic poetry is not mere fiction, to be
banished from the ideal State as teaching falsehood or depicting crime,
but a representation of human life deeper and more philosophic than
history, inasmuch as history only widens the intellect, while the drama
also purifies the emotions of the spectator. It may even be argued
that history widens the intellect only so far as it is conceived as a
drama--a development of human character--and not as a mere recitation
of facts.

While he does not enounce so clearly as Plato that gymnastics are
mainly a training for the character, he sets his face against that
physical training which studies nothing but the development of muscle,
on the ground that, if at all excessive, it defeats its own object by
engendering an unhealthy state; and that, as we cannot work the body
and the mind together with any severity, it must generally coincide
with ignorance or with an illiterate life. Even the Spartan military
training, which was opposed by them to athletic training, falls under
his censure.

He will not concede, with Plato, the equality in kind of the sexes,
but thinks the functions of women are distinct in kind from those of
men, and therefore not to be perfected by adopting the same training.
Thus he is, on the whole, tamer and more conservative, but also less
suggestive, than his great master.

§ 68. The main value of his fragment on education is that it shows
how thoroughly the subject had been discussed in his day. Thus, after
determining that the civic side of the citizen is all-important,
and that, therefore, all education must be public and the same for
all, as in Sparta, he proceeds thus with his argument:[58] “What,
then, is education, and how are we to educate? For there is as yet
no agreement on the point; all men are not of the same opinion as to
what the young should learn either with a view to perfection or to
the best life; nor is it agreed whether education is to aim at the
development of the intellect or the moral character. Nay, more; from
the ordinary standpoint the matter is quite confused, and it is not
clear to anybody whether we are to train in what leads to virtue, in
what is useful for ordinary life, or in abstract science. All these
alternatives have their advocates. Again, as regards what leads to
virtue, there is no general consent, for since men do not agree in what
they honor as such, of course they cannot agree about the training
to obtain it. As regards what is useful for life, it is obvious that
there are certain indispensable things which must be taught, and it is
equally clear that there are others which must not. All occupations
are divided into those which a free man should practise and those
which he should not, and, therefore, this affords us a limitation in
the learning of useful arts.” He goes on to show that no trade is
gentlemanly if it injuriously affects the body, or enslaves the mind by
being practised for hire. Even the fine arts, if studied in this way,
or professionally, are to him an unworthy occupation, and are only to
be pursued in youth as a recreation or æsthetic training; so that in
middle life men may be competent judges of such productions, and either
better able to enjoy them (as in music), or less likely to be deceived
(as in the purchase of works of art). Having applied these principles
to athletics, about which he says little save in recommendation of
moderation, and against any professional training, he turns to the
question of music, on which we have already given the views which he
held in common with the most serious Greek educators. On this subject,
too, there was controversy. He has before him three theories: is it
mere _amusement_ (παιδία), or an engine of _education_ (παιδεία), or
an æsthetic _pleasure_ (διαγωγή)?[59] Perhaps we have dwelt too long on
these theories, but it seemed desirable to give the reader the _locus
classicus_ on the Hellenic theory of music, which was discussed above
(§ 43), and which, in spite of all our studies of Greek life, is still
quite strange and incredible to modern theorists in education.

§ 69. There is yet another scheme of education left us by the classical
age of Greece, Xenophon’s “Education of Cyrus,” which, in the form of
a very tedious novel on the life of the Persian king, gives a theory
of the education of a prince and his surroundings which may deserve a
very few words in concluding this chapter.[60] He shares with Plato and
Aristotle the belief that private education, with mere prohibitive laws
to guide the citizen, is quite insufficient. All the theorists were
agreed that there must be one public education, and they imagined that
crime would be to a great extent precluded by such effective training.

Xenophon, dividing his period of education into boyhood up to
sixteen, and _youth_ (ἐφηβεία) up to twenty-six, provides a regular
public-school education for the boys, keeping them all together in
a sort of polity of their own, where their teaching is performed by
special State masters, and their quarrels and delinquencies settled
by tribunals of their own. To the elder youth is assigned all the
police and patrol duty, as well as the accompanying of the king in
hunting, especially of beasts of prey. This sort of exercise Xenophon
had learned to know in the East, and he recognized its superiority
over ordinary gymnastics. But the musical education, on which Plato
and Aristotle lay such stress, he omits altogether, without giving his
reasons. Perhaps he found from experience that the great Aryan nobles
were men of refinement, and understood the harmony of life no less
than the more theoretical Greeks. He also differs from them in alone
recognizing the importance of a system which will control not one
limited city, but an empire of various peoples and languages. Yet his
education is, in consequence, only the expensive and exclusive training
of a dominant aristocracy, and is not supposed to be compulsory for the
ordinary citizen. In his State all higher official position is only to
be attained by this training.

There are no other ideas in the scheme which make it worthy of any
special consideration. The Spartan system blinded the vision of all
these speculators, and kept them from understanding the true character
of a free and various development of individual genius.


  FOOTNOTES:

[53] Few people have ever heard of the attempt to found a Platonopolis
in Italy in the Renaissance times.

[54] Of course, he saw and admitted these defects; but it is obvious
that he thought them only defects of detail, which could be remedied
by better arrangement; whereas the Athenian democracy appeared to
him radically unsound. And yet could Sparta ever have produced such
a splendid passage of history as the conduct of the Athenian army at
Samos when the news came (411 B.C.) that the constitution of their
city had been overthrown and an oligarchy established? Let the reader
consult Grote’s chapter on this.

[55] Plato even insists upon a fixed number, 11,080 men and the same
number of women, all excess being guarded against either by exposing of
infants or transporting adults into colonies.

[56] The critics have shown that Plato gradually softened his
recommendations on this point. In the “Timæus” he speaks as if he had
never recommended exposal, but only a relegation of the children of
unhealthy parents into his third grade of society. In the “Laws” (if
it be, indeed, his work) he lets the whole matter drop, though it was
to be expected that he should discuss it. Whether this arose from a
gradual advance of humanity in Plato himself, or from the adverse
criticism of the day, we cannot tell. The German critics (Zeller,
Susemihl, etc.) hold the former; I am disposed to the latter, even
though his successor, Aristotle, as they remark, is even more inhuman.

[57] This is in the “Laws,” of which the genuineness is not without
doubt.

[58] vii. 2.

[59] viii. 5, §§ 3-10: Περὶ δὲ μουσικῆς ἔνια μὲν διηπορήκαμεν τῷ λόγῳ
καὶ πρότερον, καλῶς δ’ ἔχει καὶ νῦν ἀναλαβόντας αὐτὰ προαγαγεῖν, ἵνα
ὥσπερ ἐνδόσιμον γένηται τοῖς λόγοις, οὓς ἄν τις εἴποι ἀποφαινόμενος
περὶ αὐτῆς. Οὔτε γὰρ τίνα ἔχει δύναμιν, ῥᾴδιον περὶ αὐτῆς διελεῖν,
οὔτε τίνος δεῖ χάριν μετέχειν αὐτῆς, πότερον παιδιᾶς ἕνεκα καὶ
ἀναπαύσεως, καθάπερ ὕπνου καὶ μέθης· ταῦτα γὰρ καθ’ αὑτὰ μὲν οὔτε τῶν
σπουδαίων, ἀλλ’ ἡδέα καὶ ἅμα παύει μέριμναν, ὥς φησιν Εὐριπίδης· διὸ
καὶ τάττουσιν αὐτὴν καὶ χρῶνται πᾶσι τούτοις ὁμοίως οἴνῳ καὶ μέθῃ καὶ
μουσικῇ· τιθέασι δὲ καὶ τὴν ὄρχησιν ἐν τούτοις. Ἢ μᾶλλον οἰητέον πρὸς
ἀρετήν τι τείνειν τὴν μουσικὴν, ὡς δυναμένην, καθάπερ ἡ γυμναστικὴ τὸ
σῶμα ποιόν τι παρασκευάζει, καὶ τὴν μουσικὴν τὸ ἦθος ποιόν τι ποιεῖν,
ἐθίζουσαν δύνασθαι χαίρειν ὀρθῶς· ἢ πρὸς διαγωγήν τι συμβάλλεται καὶ
πρὸς φρόνησιν; καὶ γὰρ τοῦτο τρίτον θετέον τῶν εἰρημένων. Ὅτι μὲν οὖν
δεῖ τοὺς νέους μὴ παιδιᾶς ἕνεκα παιδεύειν, οὐκ ἄδηλον· οὐ γὰρ παίζουσι
μανθάνοντες· μετὰ λύπης γὰρ ἡ μάθησις· ἀλλὰ μὴν οὐδὲ διαγωγήν τε παισὶν
ἁρμόττει καὶ ταῖς ἡλικίαις ἀποδιδόναι ταῖς τοιαύταις· οὐθενὶ γὰρ ἀτελεῖ
προσήκει τέλος. Ἀλλ’ ἴσως ἂν δόξειεν ἡ τῶν παίδων σπουδὴ παιδιᾶς
εἶναι χάριν ἀνδράσι γενομένοις καὶ τελειωθεῖσιν. Ἀλλ’ εἰ τοῦτ’ ἐστὶ
τοιοῦτον, τίνος ἂν ἕνεκα δέοι μανθάνειν αὐτοὺς, ἀλλὰ μὴ, καθάπερ οἱ
τῶν Περσῶν καὶ Μήδων βασιλεῖς, δι’ ἄλλων αὐτὸ ποιούντων μεταλαμβάνειν
τῆς ἡδονῆς καὶ τῆς μαθήσεως; καὶ γὰρ ἀναγκαῖον βέλτιον ἀπεργάζεσθαι
τοὺς αὐτὸ τοῦτο πεποιημένους ἔργον καὶ τέχνην τῶν τοσοῦτον χρόνον
ἐπιμελουμένων, ὅσον πρὸς μάθησιν μόνον. Εἰ δὲ δεῖ τὰ τοιαῦτα διαπονεῖν
αὐτοὺς, καὶ περὶ τὴν τῶν ὄψων πραγματείαν αὐτοὺς ἂν δέοι παρασκευάζειν·
ἀλλ’ ἄτοπον. Τὴν δ’ αὐτὴν ἀπορίαν ἔχει καὶ εἰ δύναται τὰ ἤθη βελτίω
ποιεῖν· ταῦτα γὰρ τί δεῖ μανθάνειν αὐτοὺς ἀλλ’ οὐχ ἑτέρων ἀκούοντας
ὀρθῶς τε χαίρειν καὶ δύνασθαι κρίνειν; ὥσπερ οἱ Λάκωνες· ἐκεῖνοι γὰρ οὐ
μανθάνοντες ὅμως δύνανται κρίνειν ὀρθῶς, ὥς φασι, τὰ χρηστὰ καὶ τὰ μὴ
χρηστὰ τῶν μελῶν. Ὁ δ’ αὐτὸς λόγος κἂν εἰ πρὸς εὐημερίαν, καὶ διαγωγὴν
ἐλευθέριον χρηστέον αὐτῇ· τί γὰρ δεῖ μανθάνειν αὐτοὺς, ἀλλ’ οὐχ ἑτέρων
χρωμένων ἀπολαύειν; Σκοπεῖν δ’ ἔξεστι τὴν ὑπόληψιν ἣν ἔχομεν περὶ τῶν
θεῶν·

οὐ [δὲ] γὰρ ὁ Ζεὺς αὐτὸς ἀείδει καὶ κιθαρίζει

τοῖς ποιηταῖς· ἀλλὰ καὶ βαναύσους καλοῦμεν τοὺς τοιούτους, καὶ τὸ
πράττειν οὐκ ἀνδρὸς μὴ μεθύοντος ἢ παίζοντος.

[60] The second chapter of his first book gives a general description
of the education among the Persians, which is, of course, a fancy
sketch, accommodated to his own theories.




  CHAPTER XI.

  THE GROWTH OF SYSTEMATIC HIGHER EDUCATION.--UNIVERSITY LIFE AT ATHENS.


§ 70. It has been stated in the foregoing chapters that during the
earlier or strictly classical period the Greeks never thought of
endowing or regulating higher education. The careful system of training
at Sparta, promoted and controlled by the State, hardly included even
primary education. The police regulations alluded to at Athens only
concerned details of management in private schools, and only primary
schools, which were worked by masters self-appointed and supported
by the demand for them or their popularity in their district. Nowhere
do we find anything approaching to a State endowment or regulation
of university education. In fact, the want of such higher education
was only felt when the Greek mind began to turn inwards upon itself
after its extraordinary expansion in the Persian wars. And then the
first want was supplied by voluntary efforts--by the Sophists who
wandered from town to town, citizens of no fixed State, teachers in
complete independence of all State direction. Indeed, their avoidance
of political duties and responsibilities often brought them into
suspicion, oftener into contempt.

Socrates and Plato brought against them two other objections--the one
serious and capital, the other trivial and absurd; and yet it was
the latter which told with the public. The former objection was that
of superficiality and boastful assumption; they professed, within a
short time, to teach all that was needful in science and literature,
in philosophy and politics. And here the deeper thinking of professed
philosophers superseded them, though they had not been either useless
or contemptible in their day. The second objection reminds us strongly
of the prejudice once felt against taking interest for money--all such
profit being regarded as usury in the worst sense of the term. It
was urged that the Sophists asked and received pay for spreading the
truth, and for teaching what every honest man ought to communicate (if
he were able) for nothing. But although it was all very well for the
eccentric and exceptional Socrates, for the wealthy Plato, to refuse
all remuneration, the theory that the Sophist was not a laborer worthy
of his hire asserted that all higher education must be carried on by
amateurs, and thus tended to destroy all systematic and widely diffused
culture.

§ 71. This narrow prejudice, therefore, did not resist the common-sense
of the public when brought to bear upon it. We are assured that Plato,
like Socrates, took no payment. Our authorities are silent about
Aristotle, and it is hence inferred that he followed the same rule.
But Speusippus, his successor in the school, is said to have demanded
regular fees. This had been the practice with all the rhetoricians
who taught young men after their emancipation from school, and who
followed the natural precedent of the Sophists. Such a practice was all
the more reasonable, as the pupils in philosophical schools, even in
Plato’s, were divided into amateur pupils, who came for mere general
training, and professional students, who meant to take up teaching for
their livelihood, and who spent a long time in special studies. Thus
pupils’ fees were always a possible, and became an actual, endowment
for higher teaching. In the Sophists’ days men complained that these
fees were exorbitant, though perhaps not with justice. In later days
we hear of large fees from rich pupils, but always as voluntary
donations, and for the purpose of relieving poorer fellow-students.
For the schools of philosophy began to be secured from difficulties
by a second means of endowment--the donations of patrons and the
bequests of pious founders. As regards these donations by rich pupils,
we hear from Philostratus[61] that a rich scholar, Damianus, gave
to each of the Sophists Aristeides and Adrianos 10,000 drachmæ, to
supply poor students with free lectures. This gift, about £400 of our
money, represents a far larger sum in relation to the then existing
conditions of wealth. One hundred drachmæ were probably considered an
adequate fee for a complete course; and if it be true that a popular
teacher could often command one hundred pupils, even though the course
occupied more than one year, the endowment was considerable.

The desire of procuring free education for poorer lads with literary
tastes is, however, an interesting and permanent feature in the Greek
mind. At the present moment the University of Athens provides free
education for every Greek, and is wholly supported by a State subsidy.
This now unique provision brings to Athens an influx of young Greeks
from all the Levant, from Turkish countries, from Egypt--nay, even
from Italy. They support themselves as best they can, often by menial
employments, provided they can keep their lecture hours free. Lodging
together in the humblest apartments, they club their scanty earnings
for the purchase of a light and a text-book, which they use in common,
the one sleeping till his fellow has done his work, and wakes him to
hand him the fresh-trimmed lamp and well-worn manual.

This state of things, which reminds us so strongly of the mediæval
universities, and is inestimably honorable to a growing age of culture
when the masses want leavening, may be driven to a dangerous excess
when the educated classes become too numerous; for it dissuades every
ambitious young man from agriculture and the commercial pursuits so
necessary to a nation’s welfare. And as this is the case in Greece
now, so it was doubtless the case when, in the days of Hellenism,
Athens offered philosophy at so cheap a rate to all the Greek-speaking
world. The class of learned idlers who would not pursue any mercantile
calling increased throughout Greece.[62] Although, therefore, the
condition of things at Oxford and Cambridge--which, in addition to
their vast endowments, demands a heavy outlay from their alumni--is not
to be defended, there is an opposite error, and one likely to do more
mischief: it is the setting-up of the lower classes to seek university
degrees with a minimum of expense and trouble, and consequently a
minimum of culture. This mistaken course, which now threatens the Irish
people, in addition to all their other misfortunes, tends strongly to
increase (as is the case in modern Greece) a dangerous class of social
and political malcontents, who consider that their high education is
not recognized, and that they have no scope for their literary or
political talents.[63]

§ 72. We turn to the endowments by bequest, which were the direct cause
of the establishment of philosophical schools at Athens. This idea
seems due to Plato, who acquired for his school a local habitation as
well as a name. It is well known that from early times there were two
gymnasia (in the Greek sense) provided for the youth who had finished
their schooling--that in the groves of the suburb called after the hero
Academus, and that called the Kynosarges, near Mount Lycabettus. The
latter was specially open to the sons of citizens by foreign wives.
Thirdly, in Pericles’ day was established the _Lykeion_, near the river
Ilisos. They were all provided with water, shady walks and gardens, and
were once among the main beauties of Athens and its neighborhood.

The Academy became so identified with Plato’s teaching that his
pupils Antisthenes (the Cynic) and Aristotle settled beside or in the
Kynosarges and Lykeion respectively, and were known by their locality
till the pupils of Antisthenes removed to the frescoed portico (_stoa_)
in Athens, and were thence called Stoics. Epicurus taught in his own
garden in Athens. All these settlements were copied from Plato’s idea.
He apparently taught both in the public gymnasium and in a private
possession close beside it; and in his will, preserved by Diogenes
Laertius, he bequeaths his two pieces of land to Speusippus, thus
designating him as his formal successor. His practice being followed,
the title _scholarch_ soon grew up for the head of the school, and
the owner of a life interest in the διατριβή or locality devoted to
the purpose. Each master was called the _successor_ (διάδοχος) of his
predecessor, and the succession of these heads of schools has been
traced with more or less success all through the Hellenistic period.

§ 73. This is, no doubt, the cause of the fixed and traditional
character of the philosophical schools at Athens, and one main reason
why this city became in the Roman Empire, when original research had
died out, the principal university of the old world. The successive
scholarchs seem to have thought of nothing but the repeating and
expounding of the founder’s views; and it is mentioned as a special
loss to the Peripatetic school that Aristotle’s works were left away
from the school, and travelled into the possession of Neleus to
Scepsis in the Troad. Hence the scholarchs, instead of developing a
new doctrine, were simply helpless, and only taught what they could
remember, or what had been preserved by fragments in the note-books
of the school. The proper investment of the school property was also
the scholarch’s duty, and we hear that in the fourth century A.D.,
under Proclus, the Platonic endowment was worth more than one thousand
pieces of gold annually. Suidas tells us[64] “that from time to time
pious patrons of learning bequeathed in their wills to the adherents
of the school the means of living a life of philosophic leisure.” This
is very analogous to the bequests of pious founders in the Middle
Ages, especially of those who had the far-seeing wisdom to free their
endowments from the penalty of teaching--a humane and enlightened
intention, now frustrated by the rage for turning universities into
mere training establishments.

The designating of a successor by will, or shortly before the
scholarch’s death, became the rule in the principal schools of
rhetoric, except that at Athens election by the school came to take
its place. So far as we know, this was first suggested by Lycon,
Aristotle’s third successor, if not by Theophrastus. But the will of
Lycon, preserved by Diogenes, is express: “I bequeath the _peripatos_
to my pupils Bulon, Kallinos, etc., without condition. Let them appoint
whomsoever they think will be most zealous and best keep together
the school. May the rest of the school stand by him, for my sake and
that of the place.” These words not only imply that there was a staff
of assistants, selected from favorite pupils who intended to make
philosophy their profession, but is peculiarly interesting as naturally
suggesting a competitive examination, without naming it, as the method
of choice. In Lucian’s “Eunuch,” the appointment is described as
an election by votes of the chief men, after an examination of the
candidate in his knowledge of, and faith in, the system. There were
cases when the electing body was not the school, but the Areopagus,
or the council; for the hatred and jealousy of the schools made an
election from without safer. When the chief literary posts at Athens
became salaried by the State, such interference was natural, and
disputed elections were even referred to the emperor at Rome.

§ 74. Eunapius tells us of an interesting dispute of this kind for the
office of Sophist (the highest literary post at Athens) on the death of
Julianus, 340 A.D., and its consequent vacation. Six candidates--four
of them pupils of Julianus, and two other needy persons--were selected
by common consent; the Roman proconsul was president of the electing
court, and so violent was the canvassing that he was obliged to
interfere and order people out of Athens. The candidates handed in
essays and made set speeches. There were _claqueurs_ ready with their
prepared applause. Then the proconsul again cited them, and gave them
a theme for an extempore speech. Five refused, saying they were not
accustomed to pour out, but to think out, their orations. Prohæresius,
a pupil of Julianus, alone took up the challenge, and, all applause
being interdicted, maintained his reputation splendidly. Nevertheless,
he did not then obtain the chair; for his opponents secured influential
electors with dinners and presents, and, no doubt, the social talents
of a Sophist in this chair were very important. They took shameful ways
of succeeding; “but, indeed,” says Eunapius, “you can hardly blame them
for working their case as best they could.”

This interesting story belongs to later days, when the chairs of
philosophy and rhetoric at Athens came under State support and
control. In early days, up to the Christian era, the schools were
perfectly private, free, and independent of the State. We hear, indeed,
of such decrees as that of the Thirty Tyrants forbidding rhetoric
and philosophy to be taught. But though any ancient state, even a
free democracy, would have thought itself quite justified in such
interference for public reasons, there is no definite attempt at such a
policy till the days of Theophrastus, when (about 316 B.C.) Sophocles,
son of Amphicleides of Sunium, passed a law that no one should open a
school of philosophy without the approval of the senate and people.
There was a formal exodus of philosophic students, who only returned
with Theophrastus, when Sophocles was convicted under the _law against
illegal procedure_ (γραφὴ παρανόμων), and his law repealed. This
attempt of Sophocles might have been defended from Plato’s “Republic”
and “Laws,” where the philosopher distinctly recommends State control
of education. But it was, no doubt, the antidemocratic tone of the
schools, especially of the Platonic school, which prompted this action,
for we hear that Demosthenes’ nephew, Demochares, and other democratic
leaders, supported Sophocles, on the special ground that Plato’s school
had supplied most of the later tyrants to Greece.

The true way of controlling education had not yet dawned upon the
public men of Athens--the endowing of chairs, with a power of removal.
We hear, indeed, gradually of small salaries for _sophronistæ_ and
other guardians of youth, but direct State patronage of teachers first
meets us among the Egyptian and Pergamene successors of Alexander.
Then the Roman emperors, as we shall presently see, appointed regular
professors. But all this took the form of honoring a great teacher,
as states honored him with civic freedom, immunity from taxes, bronze
statues, and the like. His special teaching was not criticised or
directed from without.

§ 75. The time came, however, when more than formal or irregular honors
were paid to the teaching profession. The Roman emperors established
chairs (θρόνοι) of theoretical and practical rhetoric, and of the four
sects of philosophy, the former of which they endowed with 10,000
drachmæ per annum each. The highest chair was entitled the Sophist’s
chair, that term having, after all, maintained its old respectability,
and recovered from the obloquy thrown upon it by Socrates and Plato.
There was even a subdivision of the Sophist’s chair, a second chair
being called the _political_ chair. These appointments seem to have
been the device of Hadrian, though L. Egnatius Lollianus of Ephesus
was the first salaried occupant of the chair, and was appointed under
Antoninus Pius. The same policy, carried out by Marcus Aurelius,
gave immunity from taxes and civic duties to all the learned
professions--physicians, philosophers, rhetoricians, and grammarians.
Then the term δημοσιεύειν (_to be a public servant_), once applied to
a public hangman or a dispensary doctor, now came to mean a public and
salaried professor.

The salaries were paid in kind--five Roman modii of wheat per
month--and were thus free from the great fluctuations in money values
common in those days. The pupils’ fees were paid in money, and were
due on January 1; but we hear many complaints of irregularity in this
respect. This was mainly caused by the ambition of the rival teachers
to have their class-rooms filled, and hence their indulgence in the
case of the poor and the procrastinating, who could not or would not
pay, and were nevertheless permitted to continue their studies. One
hundred drachmæ paid down seem to have been thought an average fee; but
great variations were allowed, and there was evidently no tariff, or
any such credentials as our parchments to show that a man had attended
his course, paid his fees regularly, and obtained what we call a
degree. Libanius mentions an amusing case of a man sending with his son
to Athens a donkey, by the sale of which the fees were to be paid. No
doubt, the profits made by the greater chairs were considerable, and
the _sophist_ and _rhetor_, with their higher colleagues, represented
Athens on state occasions as civic dignitaries. They were expected to
go out to meet any very distinguished visitor, and address him with
complimentary harangues; they had to present themselves officially
every month to the proconsul at Corinth, presumably to report on the
state of Athens. We hear that they obtained leave of absence only by
special permission and with difficulty. In contrast to this importance
and splendor, we have a pitiable account in Libanius of the miseries
of the rhetors at Antioch, who strove to keep up a respectable
appearance while they were persecuted with duns and creditors, and
almost starved at home.

§ 76. A great deal of obscurity still remains, not only concerning the
exact number of salaried professors of sophistic and rhetoric, but
concerning their relations to the crowd of assistants, recognized and
unrecognized, which must have existed at the University of Athens. So
clear was the policy of Hadrian, and still more of M. Aurelius, to make
it the main seat of the world’s learning, that all manner of students
went thither to enjoy the various privileges offered. The grand man,
the _Sophist_, could not be expected to do tutor’s or coaching work;
and as many lads came from the far East and West with little training,
there must have been a considerable class of private teachers to help
them on. This was also done by the lad’s _pædagogue_, who came with
him from home. But there appears to have been a licensed class of
secondary professors, the _Privat-Docenten_ of the Germans, who enjoyed
no salary, but lived on the fees of pupils. It is not likely that the
total number of these licensed lecturers in sophistic and rhetoric
exceeded eight or ten; the private tutors were probably very numerous.

We naturally inquire how this State appointment to professorial
chairs was consistent with the succession already described in the
four philosophical schools. In these there was no formal change;
they were elected by a committee of recognized heads of each school.
But gradually the influence of the emperor made itself felt. The
procurator, who came from Corinth to look after such matters, either
influenced the nomination of the committee, or _recommended_ the
election of a particular candidate. Even in the case of the public
chairs there was sometimes a competition, and often the emperor did
not interfere with his lieutenant’s arrangements. Herodes Atticus was
almost omnipotent in his day in these appointments. Dismissals from
the public chairs were very unusual, but distinctly asserted as the
emperor’s right. The Prohæresius above mentioned was dismissed by the
Emperor Julian, because he appeared to be a Christian.

§ 77. It is more interesting to turn to the peculiarities of life
which bound together the young men at the University of Athens, and
the various customs which then, as now, gave a peculiar tone to
the student’s life. What is called the _atmosphere_ of Oxford or
Cambridge, of Dublin or Harvard, consists in a body of traditional
customs maintained by the peculiar conservatism of youth, which
moulds every new-comer, and produces a certain type of character,
and even a certain fixity of manners. It seems probable that the
earliest Italian universities in the Middle Ages, which go back to the
eleventh or twelfth century, acquired some of these traditions from
the Greek universities of the decadence, and thus a direct filiation
may be traced between the customs now to be described, as existing at
Athens in the Hellenistic period, and those of modern Europe. But to
investigate this obscure subject thoroughly would lead us far beyond
our present limits.

We hear that no one was allowed to attend lectures, at least in the
fourth century A.D., without dressing in the scholar’s short _cloak_
(τρίβων)--in fact, our college gown; and the right of wearing it was
only obtained by leave of the Sophist. This in itself was a mark
probably more universal than the gowns at Oxford and Cambridge, for we
have no evidence that Greek gentlemen, like the modern English, hated
all official costumes.[65]

There was no arrangement for a daily commons of students; there were no
college buildings, and the students lodged where they could, as they
do in the foreign universities, such as Göttingen or Leyden. But there
were special dining societies in each of the four philosophic schools,
meeting once a month or oftener, for which funds were bequeathed, and
which were regarded as a special bond of union. Of course, simple fare
and philosophical conversation was the original plan: it degenerated
into luxury and sumptuous feasting; for the dinners given by Lycon,
when head of the Peripatetic school, lasted till the following morning.
He entertained twenty at a time for the nominal fee of nine obols,
which was even remitted to poor scholars. This took place on the last
day of the month. Epicurus, in his will, made special provision for a
feast every twentieth of the month. The Stoics had three such clubs,
called after scholarchs who probably were the founders. The intention
of these feasts, which were more like Oxford _gaudies_ than ordinary
commons, was to bring masters and pupils into closer relation, and
this is found a true plan in all modern society. People seldom become
intimate who do not dine together.

At Athens, too, there was no official tutorial discipline;[66] there
were no compulsory chapels, or lectures, or fines; and order seems
to have been kept by the very republican arrangement of a senior
prefect (ἄρχων), elected by the class every ten days. We are told
that the professor, besides remonstrance, sometimes struck idle or
stupid scholars; and Libanius talks of being “sent down” as a terrible
disgrace, involving serious consequences to the lad’s parents, and
even to his native town. Perhaps it may correspond to expulsion from
our universities; but this must have been for the gravest crimes only.
The pupils of any professor were merely known as his _circle_ (οἱ ἀπό,
or περί, τινος); they were only his pupils or hearers in that they
attended his lectures. Indeed, they often designated him by a nickname
public enough to have been transmitted in after-literature.

§ 78. We find an unusual variety of terms,[67] all transferred from
other combinations, to express the clubs or unions of students among
themselves, and they are constantly mentioned in books and inscriptions
of the second and third centuries A.D. They naturally grew out of
the old separation of the ephebi into a separate class long before
university education was organized, or rather crystallized, into
the shape we are now discussing. The presidents of these clubs were
called _choregi_ (also κορυφαῖοι and ἀκρωμῖται). Inscriptions tell
us of similar private combinations among the ephebi in the second
century A.D., in which names from the general lists are repeated under
the separate heads of _Heracleids_ and _Theseids_, two associations
to be compared with the students’ clubs at the Italian and German
universities, which often bear the names of nations, thus pointing to
their mediæval origin. There is evidence of some peculiar importance,
possibly of rivalry, as regards the Theseids and Heracleids at Athens,
and the German critics are probably right in suspecting a political
bias to have been the true ground of difference. The constant relations
of Heracles and Theseus in the legends and the religion of Attica
are well known; the Temple of Theseus, still standing at Athens, is
by many considered a Heracleion, and the deeds of Heracles are more
conspicuously celebrated than those of Theseus in its sculptured
reliefs. Theseus was certainly raised by Attic legends into the
position of founder of the democracy, and the ideal of an ephebus, and
as such he may have been contrasted to Heracles, who was the ancestor
of Doric nobility, and might be regarded as of aristocratic tendency.
This conjecture has the merit of probability, though it has no basis
beyond these general grounds.

§ 79. When we come to later days, especially to the fourth century
A.D., we hear much about the students’ clubs from Philostratus,
Eunapius, Libanius, and others. It is remarkable that they were not
then formed on the national basis, as we may conceive the older
Heracleids to have been Bœotian youths, severed from the Attic
Theseids, or as we could conceive Irish students associating
themselves in an English university. They were rather suggested by the
rivalries of their teachers, originally of the separate philosophic
schools, but afterwards merely formed on the grounds of ambition and
popularity. A crowded attendance at lectures was so anxiously desired
that every kind of device was used by the rival professors to induce
students to come to them. This evil became so apparent in its effects
upon the students, who were flattered and courted by their masters,
that Libanius mentions a proposed _agreement_ (συνθήκη) between the
professors on the question, which was, however, unsuccessful. Thus
in the older University of Dublin the profits of college tutors were
so great that a similar rivalry in popularity existed, and the dons
are said to have studied unworthy arts to secure a full chamber. Such
canvassing has almost disappeared since the _treaty_, as Libanius
calls it, of putting the pupils’ fees into a common fund, of which the
greater part is divided according to the tutor’s standing, and only a
small premium is allowed for the actual number of pupils.

The constant jealousies and factions occasioned by this competition
among professors were reproduced in the Italian universities of
the Renaissance period; indeed, all through the Middle Ages. Thus,
according to Eunapius, the president of the club called Σπάρτη ἄτακτος
considered it part of his duty to bring his club in full force, and
well armed, to the Peiræus, or even down to Sunium, in order to catch
students coming from the East, green and fresh, and secure them for
the professor he patronized. Rival clubs met on these errands, and
had pitched battles worse than those of town and gown in England.
Every attempt was made to secure lads, even before they left their
homes. Libanius tells us he came to Athens, having been already
canvassed at his home in Antioch to attend the rhetor Aristodemus,
but was seized by a club in the interest of Diophantus, and only let
free with great difficulty, and after he had sworn allegiance to
Diophantus. We hear of every sort of violence being committed by these
students, in whose disputes the Roman governor at Corinth was sometimes
obliged to interfere. We hear of their debts and their poverty, their
dissoluteness and idleness. But, of course, the diligent and orderly
minority have left no trace behind, and we must take care to give no
exaggerated weight to the noisy doings of the baser sort. Even tossing
in a blanket (or carpet) was well known to them,[68] and applied to
unpopular teachers, probably of the obscurer sort, as may be seen from
Libanius’s oration _On the Carpet_, in which he lectures them on the
subject. We do not hear of any scholarships, bursaries, or exhibitions
intended to help indigent lads of ability. Indeed, this giving a lad
money rewards for educating himself seems a very evil device of modern
times. To support a student with the bare necessaries of life, and
give him free instruction, is a different thing, and this was the
idea of the pious founders of scholarships. To repay him in part for
an extravagant preparation by extravagant prizes is a very different
notion, but now so diffused that its absurdity no longer strikes the
public mind in England.

§ 80. Gregory the Nazianzen tells us of comic ceremonies by which
the freshman was initiated to his studies, and these practices were
technically called τελεταί, or initiatory rites. These are to be
compared to the teasing of beginners known at the German universities
under the name of _deposition_. At Athens the novice was brought by a
band to the baths through the market-place. Then those in front began
to push him back, and refuse to let him in, while those behind thrust
him forward. After a rude struggle, probably intended to try his
temper, he was let in, bathed, and thus formally admitted, receiving
his _tribon_, or college gown. There was also some unknown ceremony in
the theatre, called κυλίστραι, of which the name only is preserved,
from its being forbidden by law in 693 A.D., and this by a Church synod
in Constantinople. It was identified with other heathen practices
and traditions, and hence considered worthy of being threatened with
excommunication. These late occurrences of student practices give rise
to the suspicion that they may have been copied in the early school of
Bologna. Perhaps the most curious allusion[69] is to the fact that,
after a certain standing, students were by common consent excused from
these follies, as now in Germany a graduate at Leipzig or Göttingen, or
a professor, would no more think of fighting a student’s duel than an
English gentleman would; while every younger man is compelled to do so
by an iron custom amounting to the most absolute tyranny.

The example of the Stoics, who taught in the city, was followed
by other schools, after that the successive devastations of the
neighborhood of Athens by Philip V. of Macedon (200 B.C.), and by
Sulla, had injured the gardens and groves of both Kynosarges, Academy,
and Lykeion. We hear of the _Ptolemeion_ and _Diogeneion_ as the
fashionable places of resort, then Hadrian’s gymnasium--all within
the town, and all the gift of individual founders--the Diogenes in
question being a condottiere who commanded the second King Demetrius’s
troops in Attica, 225 B.C. There is some slight evidence that this
man’s gymnasium was used for beginners, and possibly they may even have
resided there; for we hear that scholars often set up _huts_ (καλύβια)
near the house of their favorite teachers. There were libraries in
connection with Ptolemy’s and Hadrian’s gymnasia. Indeed, it seems,
in later days, that such was the danger of a riot if professors
lectured in any public building, that they built private theatres for
themselves, attached to their own houses, and elegantly appointed. In
these we may be sure that their teaching took the form of a lecture,
not of disputation or of catechising. This latter kind of lesson was
very popular in Socrates and Plato’s time; but Aristotle already
severed it from his regular discourses, and held his philosophic
conversations with his pupils walking in the _Peripatos_: hence the
title of his school.

§ 81. We only know now the names of those professors who lived for the
world and for posterity, and strove to teach by publishing their works.
In an age when originality was dead, and the highest ability consisted
in the best commentary on Plato and Aristotle, this literary activity,
once admired and praised, seems to us, for the most part, idle
subtlety. Even in rhetoric all the laws and models were fixed; Longinus
only shows us a modern and æsthetic appreciation of beauty in style,
which we do not find in earlier rhetors. But, of all the scholarchs at
Athens, none are now of the least consideration save the heads of the
Neo-Platonic school; and even these were but followers of this strange,
fascinating doctrine, already preached in Alexandria and in Rome, which
strove to give a new meaning to the metaphysic of the Academy, and
accommodate it to the spiritual wants of earnest heathen, in the face
of Christianity.

But it is more than probable that, as in our own universities, so at
Athens, the best and most earnest of the teachers set themselves so
exclusively to their task that they left nothing behind them except in
the note-books of their classes. This sort of university teacher never
earns any wider popularity than that of his college; and yet there, and
among those who have known his diligence, his patience, and his power,
he will always rank far higher than those who rush before the public
from ambition, often with badly digested ideas. We shall, therefore, do
well not to set down the philosophical teaching at Athens at the level
of those tedious commentaries which the student will find collected in
the later volumes[70] of Mullach’s “Fragmenta Philosophorum Græcorum.”

§ 82. As regards the length of the course which the students were
expected to attend, there are very varying statements. Five to eight
years are mentioned, a period far too long for young gentlemen like
Cicero’s nephews, and probably only meant to apply to those who went
for professional purposes. There were lads of tender age, sometimes
under the care of a pædagogue, and men of middle-age, waiting for
the chance of a post. There seems to have been no limit of age, or
any compulsion or rule as to the number of courses to be kept. Every
student (or his parent) was supposed to select for himself what
subjects he should pursue. This was perhaps less mischievous than it
would now be, seeing the quadrivium of humanities was so fixed by
tradition that most students fell into it as a matter of course.
Neither was there in old days that multitude of special subjects,
totally unconnected either with each other or with a liberal education,
which now infests our educational establishments, and causes the hurry
after tangible results to displace the only true outcome of a higher
education--that capacity to think consecutively and clearly, which is
to be acquired by studying a logical and thoroughly articulated branch
of knowledge for the sake of its accuracy and method.

During most of the flourishing age of Hellenistic culture the rhetor
was the acknowledged practical teacher; and his course, which occupied
several years, with the interruption of the summer holidays, comprised
first a careful reading of classical authors, both poetical and
prose, with explanations and illustrations. This made the student
acquainted with the language and literature of Greece. But it was
only introductory to the technical study of expression, of eloquence
based on these models, and of accurate writing as a collateral branch
of this study. When a man had so perfected himself, he was considered
fit for public employment. In the latest times a special knowledge of
jurisprudence became more and more necessary for public servants, and
was provided for by special schools. We have, unfortunately, no minute
description of the precise course of reading adopted by either Sophists
or Rhetors, and are therefore confined to this general description.
But it is, in our days of hurry and of intellectual compression of
subjects, a remarkable thing to contemplate the youth of the civilized
world spending four or five years in the mere acquiring of accuracy
and elegance of expression after they had learned at school reading,
writing, and the elements of science.

§ 83. In this account of ancient university life our attention has been
almost exclusively confined to Athens, though there were other seats
of education very celebrated, and in much request--Rhodes, Massilia,
Tarsus, and, above all, Alexandria. Many Roman nobles preferred sending
their sons to Massilia for their education--a Greek town, planted far
away from the vices and luxuries of the East. Rhodes maintained its
political freedom longer than any other Hellenic settlement, and was
famous as a school of rhetoric. Tarsus, from which we know at least
one splendid specimen of a student--the Apostle Paul--always had a
high and solid reputation for work, and it is very remarkable how the
most serious of all the practical systems, the Stoic, is identified
with that part of Asia Minor. Afterwards iconoclasm found its cradle
there, and thus this land of serious reforms over and over again forced
upon the world an earnest view of life.[71] It is worthy of note how
constantly the great chairs at Athens were filled by men from these
outlying schools; indeed, a native Athenian in the Sophist’s chair was
a great rarity. Yet we know so little of the inner life of these remote
towns that they cannot now afford us any materials for our inquiry.

§ 84. The case is different with Alexandria, concerning which much
has been written and recorded. But, in the first place, it is hardly
correct to speak of education in Alexandria as strictly Hellenic,
or even Hellenistic. It was the meeting-ground of all the faith and
dogma of the old world. The Egyptian, Jewish, and Syrian elements were
so strong there that, considering the absence of all old Hellenic
traditions in this newest of all Greek-speaking towns, we could
hardly use it as a fair specimen of the good and evil in old Greek
training. We may add that up to the days of the great theological
controversies--days so graphically pictured in Kingsley’s “Hypatia”--we
know comparatively little about the students of Alexandria. All our
information clusters about the teachers. As we might expect, Alexandria
was regarded as the university of progress, the laboratory of positive
science, in contrast to the conservative and literary Athens.
Nevertheless, even all the sound literary criticism of those days comes
from Alexandria. For it is plain that the Ptolemies intended it not
as a training-place for youth so much as a home for research, richly
endowed with the means and materials for serious study--first of all,
an ample library, then handsome buildings, retirements, and adequate
endowments. These conceptions, and the success in their execution, are
profoundly interesting in the history of education, but are beyond the
scope of the present work.


  FOOTNOTES:

[61] Βίοι σοφ. ii. 32, 2.

[62] The picture of Athens given in the Acts of the Apostles (ch.
xvii.) shows that the city was full of people cultivated in philosophy
and letters, but indisposed to pursue any serious calling. They lived
in the agora all day, as in a great club, looking out for gossip and
news. If any one desires to see a modern parallel, I refer him to the
Hall and Library of the Four Courts in Dublin--the most agreeable place
in the world to visit; for there the bar of Ireland, many of them for
want of briefs, occupy themselves with all the scandal of the day.
Nay, even those who are busy refresh themselves, in passing, with five
minutes’ talk, and are never too hurried to enjoy a good story when it
is offered to them. There is even a great deal of real business done in
this desultory and peripatetic way. Whether a new system of philosophy
or a new religion would find a hearing is perhaps doubtful, and marks
the difference between the old Greek and the modern idler.

[63] Thus, a critic might argue that the present ills of Ireland arise
not only from general idleness and want of thrift, but from melancholy
ignorance of all scientific principles of agriculture, and from a total
misappreciation of the conditions of trading; for here, if anywhere,
honesty is the best policy; but it is not obvious to the ignorant,
especially if they be astute. These evils might be diminished by
diffusing agricultural and commercial schools through the country, not
by granting university degrees for a smattering in arts.

[64] In his Lexicon, sub voc. _Plato_.

[65] All foreigners, on the contrary, seem to love official dress,
whether military or not. I was once in Genoa during a regatta, when a
crew of visitors from Spezia or Livorno used to walk about the streets
in boating costume, with their oars over their shoulders, to the
admiration of the Genoese. Imagine the Oxford eight, the day before the
University race, sauntering along Piccadilly in this style! I recommend
this case to the theorists who maintain that human nature is the same
at all times and places.

[66] The description by Libanius of the rhetor’s duty, to receive
the lad from his parents, to advise him, and even to punish him for
idleness, to acquaint the parents periodically of his progress, etc.,
reminds us perfectly of the duties of a college tutor. But this was
clearly a voluntary task, and generally undertaken not merely from duty
towards the lad, but from a desire to be popular and to secure a large
following.

[67] Χορός, θίασος, σύνοδος (religious), συνουσία, ποίμνιον, ἀγέλη.
I see that Sievers, in his life of Libanius, understands ἄρχων and
χορός of a council of professors; but this is surely incorrect. He was
probably misled by finding so much power attributed to a mere student.

[68] Called by the Romans _sagatio_, and hence probably soldiers’
horse-play, as _sagum_ is a soldier’s cloak.

[69] Libanius, i. 17.

[70] ii. and iii. are published; iv. is to follow.

[71] It is said that the exiled iconoclasts, driven out to Bulgaria,
were the spiritual parents of the Hussites and other early reformers
in Bohemia. From this new centre Protestantism spread across Europe.
So that the Scottish Puritan, and, for that matter, the New England
Puritan, derives his uncompromising earnestness from the remote source
which produced both Stoicism and the most vigorous early Christianity.




  INDEX.


 Abacus, 56

 Academy, the (of Plato), 121

 Accent, bad, 13

 Æschines cited, 26

 Æsop, 20

 Age for beginning education, 15

 Alcibiades, 15, 59

 Alexandria, 50, 138

 America, 79

 Ἀμφωτίδες, 29

 Anaxagoras, 47

 Andromache, 8

 Anytus, 88

 Apollodorus, 59

 Ἀπόῤῥαξις, 18

 Ἄρχων of students, 130

 Archytas’s rattle, 13

 Aristophanes cited, 17, 34, 38, 53, 59, 83

 Aristotle cited, 57, 61, 62, 110

 ---- his school, 122

 Arithmetic, 54-56

 Ἀσκωλιάζειν, 16

 Astragali, 17, 19

 Astyanax, 8

 Athens, a university town, 82

 ---- modern university of, 119


 Βαυκαλήματα, 20

 Beethoven, 65

 Βέμβιξ (top), 17

 Βενίζελος cited, 20

 Boating not a Greek amusement, 23

 Bologna, early schools of, 134

 Boxing, Greek, 29


 Callias, grammatical tragedy of, 47

 Carleton cited, 39

 Carpet, tossing in, 133

 Chairs at Athens, 125

 Χαλκῆ μυῖα, 16

 Χαλκισμός, 17

 Chappell, Mr. Wm., 67

 Chionis, feats of, 30

 Choregi, 131

 Chrestomathies, 50

 Cicero quoted, 29, 39, 75

 Cinnamus quoted, 18

 Cithara, 67

 Claqueurs of Sophists, 123

 Clubs, student, 131

 Cobet cited, 71

 Community of wives and children, 102, 103

 Competitive examinations, 14

 Confirmation, 72

 Course, length of university, 137

 Crammer, the modern, 81, 82

 Csárdás, Hungarian, 63

 Curtius, Ernst, cited, 92


 Demosthenes cited, 40

 Διάδοχος, in the schools, 121

 Dialects, preservation of, 54

 Diogeneion, 134

 Diogenes Laertius, 121

 Diophantus, 133

 Dolls, 20

 Dositheus cited, 44

 Drawing materials, 59

 Dromeus, 27


 Education, general contrasts of Greek and modern, 3

 Egnatius Lollianus, 125

 Egyptian education, 4

 Εἰς ὤμιλλαν, 17

 Elis, country life of, 14, 22, 28

 Encyclical course, 46

 Ephebi, 69 sq.

 Epicrates, law of, 75

 Ἐποστρακισμός, 17

 Eton and Harrow match, 23

 Eunapius cited, 124

 Euripides cited, 8

 Examinations, 14

 Exposing of children, 10-12

 Expression in music, 65


 Field sports, value of, 21

 Football, 18

 Foreign languages, ignorance of, 13, 50

 Form, in games, 23


 Games of boys, 15 sq.

 ---- Olympic, 27, 30

 Genius, production of, 105

 Gods, the Greek, 24

 Goldsmith, 41

 Gorgias, 90

 Gounod’s “Faust,” 66

 Grammatical studies of Sophists, 89

 Γραμματιστής, -ικός, 46

 Grasberger quoted, 17, 28, 40

 Gregory Naz. cited, 133

 Grote cited, 77, 79, 101, 110

 Gymnasia, 121


 Hedge schools, 43

 Hellenic character compared to Roman and English, 7

 Heracleids, club of, 131

 Hermes, tutelary god of schools, 43

 Herodes Atticus, 128

 Herodotus quoted, 6, 8, 24, 42

 History, the lessons of, 2, 112

 Homer cited, 7, 10, 36;
   used in education, 37, 45

 Hoops, 17

 Human nature not uniform, 1, 2, 129 _n._

 Hungarian gypsies, 62

 Hunting, 22


 Irish people threatened with new dangers, 120

 Isocrates, 91 sq.


 Journalism compared to Sophists, 78 sq.

 Julian (emperor), 128


 Κάλαμον παραβῆναι, 16

 Κυλίστραι, 134

 Κυνδαλισμός, 16


 Lacrosse, 18

 Lamia, 20

 Landscape, Greek notions of, 58

 Ληξιαρχικὸν γραμματεῖον, 73

 Libanius cited, 126, 130, 133

 Longinus, 135

 Love-songs, contrasts in, 66

 Lucian quoted, 39, 40, 44, 123

 Lycon, will of, 123;
   dinners of, 129

 Lycophron, 100

 Lycurgus (the orator), 75

 Lyre, 67, 68


 Marcus Aurelius, 125, 126

 Marriage between relations, 12

 ---- rational theory of, 102 sq.

 Massilia, 138

 Μηλολόνθη, 17

 Morra, 19

 Moses, 5

 ---- the Attic (sc. Plato), 12

 Mullach, Fragg. Phil., 136

 Music, 35 sq., 113

 ---- dangers of, 64

 ---- Greek views of, 60 sq.


 Ναναρίσματα, 20

 Notice-boards in schools, 44

 Novices at the university, 134

 Nursery rhymes, 20


 Ochlocracy, the so-called Athenian, 35

 Official dress, foreign love of, 129

 Olympia, Temple of, 58

 Olympic games, 28, 30

 Organization, ephebic, 75

 Orphans, care of, 14

 Orthodoxy in universities, 84, 85

 Ὀστρακίνδα, 16


 Pædagogus, the Greek, 26

 Παιδαγωγεῖον, 42

 Painting, 58 sq.

 Palæstra, 22, 24 sq.

 Pamphilus, 58

 Παραγράφειν, 53

 Parthenon, frieze of, 70, 72

 Paul, St., 81, 82, 138

 Pausanias, 27, 42

 Payment of teaching, 117 sq.

 Πενταλιθίζειν, 17

 Pentathlon, 27

 Peripatos, Aristotle’s, 135

 Περίπολοι, 70, 74

 Permanence of educational problems, 2

 Persian education, 5;
   in Xenophon, 115

 Φαινίνδα, 18

 Phayllus, feats of, 30

 Philosophy, Isocrates’ definition of, 92, 93

 Philostratus cited, 118

 Φρυγίνδα, 17

 Πλαγίαυλος, 68

 Plato quoted, 5, 10, 12, 24, 28, 31, 32, 48, 52, 62, 78,
   cap. xi. _passim_

 ---- school of, 88, 89

 Platonopolis, 100 _n._

 Pliny cited, 58

 Plutarch quoted, 15

 Pollux cited, 18, 71

 Polo at Byzantium, 19 _n._

 Prefects (at school), 76

 Prodicus, 53, 85, 90

 Prohæresius, 124, 128

 Protagoras, 85, 89

 Protestantism, Stoic origin of, 138

 Ptolemeion, 134

 Public schools, English, 29

 Pythagoras, system of, 89


 Quintilian quoted, 7, 52


 Rackets, 19

 Rationalism, Mr. Lecky’s, 107

 Renan, E., cited, 49

 Rhetor, the duties of, 126

 Rhodes, 138

 Riding, Greek notions of, 73

 Roman education, 6

 ---- character, 7


 Sagatio, 133

 Scales, Greek musical, 64, 65

 Scholarch, 121

 School, the term, 42

 ---- appointments of, 42, 43

 Schoolmaster’s tomb, 52

 Science, elementary, 55

 Sentiment about marriage, 107

 Sex, differences of, 104, 112

 Sleeping of infants, 9

 Socrates, 74, 87

 Sophist, the (title), 123

 Sophists, the, 78 sq.;
   their fees, 118

 Sophocles of Sunium, 124

 Sophronistæ, 125

 Spartan nurses, 9, 10

 Spartan mothers, 13, 38

 ---- objection to athletics, 27

 ---- training, 77

 ---- morals, 108

 Σπάρτη ἄτακτος, a club, 132

 Spelling, phonetic, 54

 Speusippus, 118, 121

 Sports, real value of, 31

 Sprint races, 28

 Stoics, 129, 134

 Strabo, 50

 Στρόβιλος (humming-top), 17

 Studiedness of Greek eloquence, 97

 Suidas quoted, 122

 Swimming, 46


 Tarsus, 138

 Theodorus, Homeric pictures of, 45

 Theognis, 50

 Theophrastus cited, 43, 124

 Theseids, club of, 131

 Thring, Rev. G., cited, 58 _n._

 Θρόνοι, 125

 Thucydides cited, 42

 Τρίβων, 128, 134


 Uniformity in human nature, how far true, 1, 2, 129 _n._

 Uniformity in children, 2

 Ὑπογράφεσθαι, 52, 60 _n._

 Ὑποθῆκαι, 50


 Welcker cited, 48

 Women, education of, 103, 104

 Writing materials, 53


 Xenophon, 7, 22

 Ξυστός, 25


 Zeller cited, 78

 Zither, Tyrolese, 68

 Ζωγράφος, -ία, 58




  A History of Classical Greek Literature.

  By J. P. MAHAFFY.

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By far the best account of the literature of Greece that has hitherto
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It is a work of immense learning and practical value. Indeed, it is a
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English language covering the same ground.--_Evangelist_, N. Y.


  PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

  ☞ HARPER & BROTHERS _will send the above work by mail, postage
prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt of the price_.




  STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS.

  BY

  JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS.

  Revised and Enlarged by the Author.

  2 vols., Square 16mo, Cloth, $3 50.


Mr. Symonds has here brought his rich classical learning and excellent
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  PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK.

  ☞ HARPER & BROTHERS _will send the above work by mail, postage
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      *      *      *      *      *      *




Transcriber's note:

The following changes have been made to the text as printed:

    1. Footnotes have been renumbered and assembled at the end of each
          chapter.

    2. A small number of errors in the punctuation and spacing of the
          original work have been silently corrected.

    3. Page 34: "re-referred" has been corrected to "referred".

    4. Page 39: A missing footnote marker has been inserted after
          "impatient at idleness:".

    5. Page 40: A missing footnote marker has been inserted after
          "sensible remark."

    6. Footnote 19, 5th line from end: τρὸς has been corrected to πρὸς.

    7. Page 56: The symbol "IΔI" in the phrase "combinations such as
          IΔI meant 50" stands for a combination of the letters Π (Pi)
          and Δ (Delta) in the original.

    8. Footnote 28: Οεωδώρηον has been corrected to Θεωδώρηον.

    9. Footnote 41: γυμναστικήν has been corrected to γυμναστικὴν.

   10. Footnote 44: θεατής has been corrected to θεατὴς.

   11. Page 86: "spritually" has been corrected to "spiritually".

   12. Page 96: Comma removed from "St. John, Chrysostom".

   13. Footnote 59, line 9: Η (Greek letter) has been corrected
          to Ἢ.

   14. Footnote 67, line 3: χόρος has been corrected to χορός.

   15. Page 141, Index: Διαδόχος has been corrected to Διάδοχος.

   16. Page 143, Index: "Ptolemeion" referenced to Page 134,
          not Page 151.

The following anomaly in the printed text is noted, but no change has
been made:

    1. Page 146, Index: Appletons’ Journal (New York City, 1869-1881)
          printed its own name with the apostrophe in that unexpected
          position.

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is in the public
domain.





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