Part 214

"It has sometimes been imagined that in Greece separate edifices were not erected as with us expressly for school-houses, but that both the didaskalos and the philosopher taught their pupils in fields, gardens or shady groves. But this was not the common practice, though many schoolmasters appear to have had no other place wherein to assemble their pupils than the portico of a temple or some sheltered corner in the street, where in spite of the din of business and the throng of passengers the worship of learning was publicly performed. … But these were the schools of the humbler classes. For the children of the noble and the opulent spacious structures were raised, and furnished with tables, desks,—for that peculiar species of grammateion which resembled the plate cupboard, can have been nothing but a desk,—forms, and whatsoever else their studies required. Mention is made of a school at Chios which contained one hundred and twenty boys, all of whom save one were killed by the falling in of the roof. … The apparatus of an ancient school was somewhat complicated: there were mathematical instruments, globes, maps, and charts of the heavens, together with boards whereon to trace geometrical figures, tablets, large and small, of box-wood, fir, or ivory, triangular in form, some folding with two, and others with many leaves; books too and paper, skins of parchment, wax for covering the tablets, which, if we may believe Aristophanes, people sometimes ate when they were hungry. To the above were added rulers, reed-pens, pen-cases, pen-knives, pencils, and last, though not least, the rod which kept them to the steady use of all these things: At Athens these schools were not provided by the state. They were private speculations, and each master was regulated in his charges by the reputation he had acquired and the fortunes of his pupils. Some appear to have been extremely moderate in their demands. … The earliest task to be performed at school was to gain a knowledge of the Greek characters, large and small, to spell next, next to read. … In teaching the art of writing their practice nearly resembled our own. … These things were necessarily the first step in the first class of studies, which were denominated music, and comprehended everything connected with the development of the mind; and they were carried to a certain extent before the second division called gymnastics was commenced. They reversed the plan commonly adopted among ourselves, for with them poetry preceded prose, a practice which, coöperating with their susceptible temperament, impressed upon the national mind that imaginative character for which it was preëminently distinguished. {681} And the poets in whose works they were first initiated were of all the most poetical, the authors of lyrical and dithyrambic pieces, selections from whose verses they committed to memory, thus acquiring early a rich store of sentences and imagery ready to be adduced in argument or illustration, to furnish familiar allusions or to be woven into the texture of their style. … Among the other branches of knowledge most necessary to be studied, and to which they applied themselves nearly from the outset, was arithmetic, without some inkling of which, a man, in Plato's opinion, could scarcely be a citizen at all. … The importance attached to this branch of education, nowhere more apparent than in the dialogues of Plato, furnishes one proof that the Athenians were preëminently men of business, who in all their admiration for the good and beautiful never lost sight of those things which promote the comfort of life, and enable a man effectually to perform his ordinary duties. With the same views were geometry and astronomy pursued. … The importance of music, in the education of the Greeks, is generally understood. It was employed to effect several purposes. First, to sooth and mollify the fierceness of the national character, and prepare the way for the lessons of the poets, which, delivered amid the sounding of melodious strings, when the soul was rapt and elevated by harmony, by the excitement of numbers, by the magic of the sweetest associations, took a firm hold upon the mind, and generally retained it during life. Secondly, it enabled the citizens gracefully to perform their part in the amusements of social life, every person being in his turn called upon at entertainments to sing or play upon the lyre. Thirdly, it was necessary to enable them to join in the sacred choruses, rendered frequent by the piety of the state, and for the due performance in old age of many offices of religion, the sacerdotal character belonging more or less to all the citizens of Athens. Fourthly, as much of the learning of a Greek was martial and designed to fit him for defending his country, he required some knowledge of music that on the field of battle his voice might harmoniously mingle with those of his countrymen, in chaunting those stirring, impetuous, and terrible melodies, called pæans, which preceded the first shock of fight. For some, or all of these reasons, the science of music began to be cultivated among the Hellenes, at a period almost beyond the reach even of tradition."

_J. A. St. John, The Hellenes, book 2, chapter 4._

"In thinking of Greek education as furnishing a possible model for us moderns, there is one point which it is important to bear in mind: Greek education was intended only for the few, for the wealthy and well-born. Upon all others, upon slaves, barbarians, the working and trading classes, and generally upon all persons spending their lives in pursuit of wealth or any private ends whatsoever, it would have seemed to be thrown away. Even well-born women were generally excluded from most of its benefits. The subjects of education were the sons of full citizens, themselves preparing to be full citizens, and to exercise all the functions of such. The duties of such persons were completely summed up under two heads, duties to the family and duties to the State, or, as the Greeks said, œconomic and political duties. The free citizen not only acknowledged no other duties besides these, but he looked down upon persons who sought occupation in any other sphere. Œconomy and Politics, however, were very comprehensive terms. The former included the three relations of husband to wife, father to children, and master to slaves and property; the latter, three public functions, legislative, administrative, and judiciary. All occupations not included under these six heads the free citizen left to slaves or resident foreigners. Money-making, in the modern sense, he despised, and, if he devoted himself to art or philosophy, he did so only for the benefit of the State."

_T. Davidson, Aristotle, book 1, chapter 4._

EDUCATION: Greek Spartan Training.

"From his birth every Spartan belonged to the state, which decided … whether he was likely to prove a useful member of the community, and extinguished the life of the sickly or deformed infant. To the age of seven however the care of the child was delegated to its natural guardians, yet not so as to be left wholly to their discretion, but subject to certain established rules of treatment, which guarded against every mischievous indulgence of parental tenderness. At the end of seven years began a long course of public discipline, which grew constantly more and more severe as the boy approached toward manhood. The education of the young was in some degree the business of all the elder citizens; for there was none who did not contribute to it, if not by his active interference, at least by his presence and inspection. But it was placed under the especial superintendence of an officer selected from the men of most approved worth; and he again chose a number of youths, just past the age of twenty, and who most eminently united courage with discretion, to exercise a more immediate command over the classes, into which the boys were divided. The leader of each class directed the sports and tasks of his young troop, and punished their offences with military rigour, but was himself responsible to his elders for the mode in which he discharged his office. The Spartan education was simple in its objects; it was not the result of any general view of human nature, or of any attempt to unfold its various capacities: it aimed at training men who were to live in the midst of difficulty and danger, and who could only be safe themselves while they held rule over others. The citizen was to be always ready for the defence of himself and his country, at home and abroad, and he was therefore to be equally fitted to command and to obey. His body, his mind, and his character were formed for this purpose, and for no other: and hence the Spartan system, making directly for its main end, and rejecting all that was foreign to it, attained, within its own sphere, to a perfection which it is impossible not to admire. The young Spartan was perhaps unable either to read or write: he scarcely possessed the elements of any of the arts or sciences by which society is enriched or adorned: but he could run, leap, wrestle, hurl the disk, or the javelin, and wield every other weapon, with a vigour and agility, and grace which were no where surpassed. These however were accomplishments to be learnt in every Greek palæstra: he might find many rivals in all that he could do; but few could approach him in the firmness with which he was taught to suffer. From the tender age at which he left his mother's lap for the public schools, his life was one continued trial of patience. Coarse and scanty fare, and this occasionally withheld, a light dress, without any change in the depth of winter, a bed of reeds, which he himself gathered from the Eurotas, blows exchanged with his comrades, stripes inflicted by his governors, more by way of exercise than of punishment, inured him to every form of pain and hardship. … {682} The Muses were appropriately honoured at Sparta with a sacrifice on the eve of a battle, and the union of the spear and the lyre was a favourite theme with the Laconian poets, and those who sang of Spartan customs. Though bred in the discipline of the camp, the young Spartan, like the hero of the Iliad, was not a stranger to music and poetry. He was taught to sing, and to play on the flute and the lyre: but the strains with which his memory was stored, and to which his voice was formed, were either sacred hymns, or breathed a martial spirit; and it was because they cherished such sentiments that the Homeric lays, if not introduced by Lycurgus, were early welcomed at Sparta. … As these musical exercises were designed to cultivate, not so much an intellectual, as a moral taste; so it was probably less for the sake of sharpening their ingenuity, than of promoting presence of mind, and promptness of decision, that the boys were led into the habit of answering all questions proposed to them, with a ready, pointed, sententious brevity, which was a proverbial characteristic of Spartan conversation. But the lessons which were most studiously inculcated, more indeed by example than by precept, were those of modesty, obedience, and reverence for age and rank; for these were the qualities on which, above all others, the stability of the commonwealth reposed. The gait and look of the Spartan youths, as they passed along the streets, observed Xenophon, breathed modesty and reserve. In the presence of their elders they were bashful as virgins, and silent as statues, save when a question was put to them. … In truth, the respect for the laws, which rendered the Spartan averse to innovation at home, was little more than another form of that awe with which his early habits inspired him for the magistrates and the aged. With this feeling was intimately connected that quick and deep sense of shame, which shrank from dishonour as the most dreadful of evils, and enabled him to meet death so calmly, when he saw in it the will of his country."

_C. Thirlwall, History of Greece, volume 1, chapter 8._

EDUCATION: Free-School Ideas in Greece.

"It is a prevalent opinion that common schools, as we now have them, were an American invention. No legislation, it is asserted, taxing all in order that all may be taught can be traced back further than to the early laws of Massachusetts. Those who deny this assertion are content with showing something of the sort in Scotland and Germany a generation or two before the landing of the Plymouth pilgrims. The truth is, however, that, as much of our social wit is now credited to the ancient Greeks, something of our educational wisdom ought to be. Two centuries ago John Locke, as an able political writer, was invited to draw up a code of fundamental laws for the new colony of Carolina, and in like manner, more than 2,300 years ago, Charondas, a master of a similar type in Magna Græcia, was called to a similar task. This was to frame a series of statutes for the government of a Greek colony founded about 446 B. C., in the foot of Italy. This colony was Thurii, and conspicuous among the enactments of Charondas was the following: 'Charondas made a law unlike those of lawgivers before him, for he enacted that the sons of the citizens should all learn letters (or writing) … the city making payment to the teachers. He thought that the poor, not able to pay wages themselves, would otherwise fail of the best training. He counted writing the most important study, and with reason. Through writing, most things in life, and those the most useful, are accomplished—as ballots, epistles, laws, covenants. Who can sufficiently praise the learning of letters? … Writing alone preserves the most brilliant utterances of wise men and the oracles of gods, nay philosophy and all culture. All these things it alone hands down to all future generations. Wherefore nature should be viewed as the source of life, but the source of living well we should consider the culture derived from writing. Inasmuch, then, as illiterates are deprived of a great good, Charondas came to their help, judging them worthy of public care and outlay. Former legislators had caused the sick to be attended by physicians at the public expense, thinking their bodies worthy of cure. He did more, for he cured souls afflicted with ignorance. The doctors of the body we pray that we may never need, while we would fain abide for ever with those who minister to the mind diseased.'—This extract is from the 'Bibliotheca Historica' of Diodorus Siculus (Book x. § 13), who was flourishing at the birth of Christ and was the most painstaking chronicler of the Augustan age. The legislation is worth notice for more than one reason. It rebukes the self-conceit of those who hold that the education of all at the charge of all is an idea born in our own time or country. It has also been strangely unnoticed by historians who ought to have kept it before the people."

_The Nation, March 24, 1892, pages 280-231._

EDUCATION: Socrates and the Philosophical Schools.

"Before the rise of philosophy, the teacher of the people had been the rhapsode, or public reciter; after that event he gradually gives place to the sophist (… one who makes wise), or, as he later with more modesty calls himself, the philosopher (… lover of wisdom). The history of Greece for centuries is, on its inner side, a history of the struggle between what the rhapsode represents and what the philosopher represents, between popular tradition and common sense on the one hand, and individual opinion and philosophy on the other. The transition from the first to the second of these mental conditions was accomplished for the world, once for all, by the Greeks."

_T. Davidson, Aristotle, book 1, chapter 5._

"There is no instance on record of a philosopher whose importance as a thinker is so closely bound up with the personality of the man as it was in the case of Socrates. … His teaching was not of a kind to be directly imparted and faithfully handed down, but could only be left to propagate itself freely by stirring up others to a similar self·culture. … The youth and early manhood of Socrates fall in the most brilliant period of Grecian history. Born during the last years of the Persian war, he was a near contemporary of all those great men who adorned the age of Pericles. As a citizen of Athens he could enjoy the opportunities afforded by a city, which united every means of culture by its unrivalled fertility of thought. Poverty and low birth were but slender obstacles in the Athens of Pericles. … Socrates, no doubt, began life by learning his father's trade, … which he probably never practised, and certainly soon gave up. {683} He considered it to be his special calling to labour for the moral and intellectual improvement of himself and others—a conviction which he felt so strongly that it appeared to him in the light of a divine revelation. Moreover he was confirmed in it by a Delphic oracle, which, of course, must not be regarded as the cause of, but rather as an additional support to his reforming zeal. … To be independent, he tried, like the Gods, to rise superior to his wants; and by carefully practising self-denial and abstemiousness, he was really able to boast that his life was more pleasant and more free from troubles than that of the rest of mankind. Thus he was able to devote his whole powers to the service of others, without asking or taking reward; and thus he became so engrossed by his labours for his native city, that he rarely passed its boundaries or even went outside its gates. He did not, however, feel himself called upon to take part in the affairs of the state. … Anyone convinced as he was, that care for one's own culture must precede care for public business, and that a thorough knowledge of self, together with a deep and many-sided experience, was a necessary condition of public activity, must have thought that, to educate individuals by influence, was the more pressing need, and have held that he was doing his country a better service by educating able statesmen for it, than by actually discharging a statesman's duties. Accordingly, Socrates never aimed at being anything but a private citizen. … Just as little was he desirous of being a public teacher like the Sophists. He not only took no pay, but he gave no methodical course. He did not profess to teach, but to learn in common with others, not to force his convictions upon them, but to examine theirs; not to pass the truth that came to hand like a coin fresh from the mint, but to stir up a desire for truth and virtue, to point out the way to it, to overthrow what was spurious, and to seek out real knowledge. Never weary of talking, he was on the look out for every opportunity of giving an instructive and moral turn to the conversation. Day by day he was about in the market and public promenades, in schools and workshops, ever ready to converse with friends or strangers, with citizens and foreigners, but always prepared to lead them to higher subjects; and whilst thus in his higher calling serving God, he was persuaded that he was also serving his country in a way that no one else could do. Deeply as he deplored the decline of discipline and education in his native city, he felt that he could depend but little on the Sophists, the moral teachers of his day. The attractive powers of his discourse won for him a circle of admirers, for the most part consisting of young men of family, drawn to him by the most varied motives, standing to him in various relations, and coming to him, some for a longer, others for a shorter time. For his own part, he made it his business not only to educate these friends, but to advise them in everything, even in worldly matters. But out of this changing, and in part loosely connected, society, a nucleus was gradually formed of decided admirers,—a Socratic school, which we must consider united far less by a common set of doctrines, than by a common love for the person of Socrates."

_E. Zeller, Socrates and the Socratic Schools, chapter 3._

"Nowhere, except in Athens, do we hear of a philosophic body with endowments, legal succession, and the other rights of a corporation. This idea, which has never since died out of the world, was due to Plato, who bequeathed his garden and appointments in the place called after the hero Hekademus, to his followers. But he was obliged to do it in the only form possible at Athens. He made it a religious foundation, on the basis of a fixed worship to the Muses. … The head or President of Plato's 'Association of the Muses,' was the treasurer and manager of the common fund, who invited guests to their feasts, to which each member contributed his share. … The members had, moreover, a right to attend lectures and use the library or scientific appointments, such as maps, which belonged to the school. It was this endowment on a religious basis which saved the income and position of Plato's school for centuries. … This then is the first Academy, so often imitated in so many lands, and of which our colleges are the direct descendants. … The school of Plato, then governed by Xenocrates, being the bequest of an Athenian citizen who understood the law, seems never to have been assailed. The schools of Epicurus and Zeno were perhaps not yet recognised. But that of Theophrastus, perhaps the most crowded, certainly the most distinctly philo-Macedonian, … this was the school which was exiled, and which owed its rehabilitation not only to the legal decision of the courts, but still more to the large views of King Demetrius, who would not tolerate the persecution of opinion. But it was the other Demetrius, the philosopher, the pupil of Aristotle, the friend of Theophrastus, to whom the school owed most, and to whom the world owes most in the matter of museums and academies, next after Plato. For this was the man who took care, during his Protectorate of Athens in the interest of Casander, to establish a garden and 'peripatos' for the Peripatetic school, now under Theophrastus. … It is remarkable that the Stoic school—it too the school of aliens—did not establish a local foundation or succession, but taught in public places, such as the Painted Portico. In this the Cynical tone of the Porch comes out. Hence the succession depended upon the genius of the leader."

_J. P. Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, chapter 7._

An account of the Academy, the Lyceum, etc., will be found under the caption GYMNASIA.

EDUCATION: University of Athens.