ATHENS, ETC.: TERTIARY EDUCATION――THE EPHEBOI AND THE UNIVERSITY 210
PART II
THE THEORY OF EDUCATION
CHAPTER VIII
RELIGION AND EDUCATION IN HELLAS 227
CHAPTER IX
ART, MUSIC, AND POETRY 237
CHAPTER X
XENOPHON 259
PART III
CHAPTER XI
GENERAL ESSAY ON THE WHOLE SUBJECT 275
INDEX 293
ILLUSTRATIONS
AFTER PAGE
Vase by Euphronios, Louvre (centre of X. A and
X. B)――Mounted Ephebos in Riding-School _Frontispiece_
I. A. Kulix by Douris, Berlin (No. 2285)――The Flute-Lesson
and Writing-Lesson
I. B. Kulix by Douris, Berlin (No. 2285)――The Lyre-Lesson
and Poetry-Lesson 52
II. Kulix by Hieron, now at Vienna――A Flute Lesson:
The Boy’s Turn 70
III. Hudria in British Museum (E 171)――Music-School Scenes 104
IV. Hudria in British Museum (E 172)――In a Lyre-School 108
V. A. Kulix attributed to Euphronios, at Munich――Scenes
in a Palaistra
V. B. Kulix attributed to Euphronios, at Munich――Scenes
in a Palaistra 120
VI. A. Wrestlers, etc., in the Palaistra
VI. B. Boxers, etc., in the Palaistra 128
VII. The Stadion at Delphi 132
VIII. Kulix signed by Euphronios, at Berlin――Scenes in
the Palaistra 174
IX. Vase attributed to Euphronios, at Munich――A
Riding-Lesson: Mounting 214
X. A. Kulix by Euphronios, now in the Louvre――Scene in
a Riding-School
X. B. Kulix by Euphronios, now in the Louvre――Scene in
a Riding-School 258
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
DITTENBERGER, W. De Ephebis Atticis Dissertatio. Dieterich,
Göttingen, 1863.
DUMONT, A. Essai sur l’Éphébie Attique. 2 vols. Didot, Paris,
1875-76.
GIRARD, P. L’Éducation Athénienne au vᵉ et au ivᵉ siècle avant
J.-C. Hachette, Paris, 1889.
GRASBERGER, L. Erziehung und Unterricht im klassischen
Alterthum. 3 vols. Würzburg, 1864-81.
LAURIE, S. S. Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Education.
2nd Edition. Longmans, London, 1900.
MAHAFFY, J. P. Old Greek Education. Kegan Paul, 1883.
MÜLLER, K. O. Dorians. Edition 1824. English translation;
Oxford, 1830.
NETTLESHIP, H. In _Hellenica._ 2nd Edition. Longmans, 1898.
SIDGWICK, A. Essay in _Teachers’ Guild Quarterly_, No. 8.
USSING, J. L. (Danish.) German translation. Erziehung bei
den Griechen (und Römern). Altona, 1870.
WILKINS, A. S. National Education in Greece (Hare Prize,
Cambridge). Isbister, London, 1873.
INTRODUCTION
The meeting-place of two streams has always a curious fascination for
the traveller. There is a strange charm in watching the two currents
blend and lose their individuality in a new whole. The discoloured,
foam-flecked torrent, swirling on remorselessly its pebbles and
minuter particles of granite from the mountains, and the calm,
translucent stream, bearing in invisible solution the clays and sands
of the plains through which its slow coils have wound, melt into a
single river, mightier than either, which has received and will carry
onward the burdens of both and lay them side by side in some far-off
delta, where they will form “the dust of continents to be.”
To the student of history or of psychology the meeting-place of two
civilisations has a similar charm. To watch the immemorial culture of
the East, slow-moving with the weight of years, dreamy with centuries
of deep meditation, accept and assimilate, as in a moment of time, the
science, the machinery, the restless energy and practical activity of
the West is a fascinating employment; for the process is big with hope
of some glorious product from this union of the two. Those who live
while such a union is in progress cannot estimate its value or its
probable result; they are but conscious of the discomforts and
confusion arising from the ending of the old order that passes away,
and can hardly presage the glories of the new, to which it is yielding
place. It is in past history, not in the contemporary world, that such
combinations must be studied.
The chief historical instance of two distinct civilisations blending
into one is the Renaissance, that mighty union of the spirit of
ancient Hellas and her pupil Rome with the spirit of medieval Europe,
which has hardly been perfected even now. But it is often forgotten
that there were at least two dress-rehearsals for the great drama of
the Renaissance, in the course of which Hellenism learnt its own charm
and adapted itself to the task of educating the world. Alexander
carried the arts, the literature, and the spirit of Hellas far into
the heart of Asia; and, though his great experiment of blending West
with East was interrupted by his early death and the consequent
disruption of his world-empire, yet, even so, something of his object
was effected in the Hellenistic culture of Alexandria, Syria, and Asia
Minor. Within a century of his death began the second dress-rehearsal,
this time in the West. Conquered Hellas led her fierce conqueror
captive, and the strength of Rome bowed before the intellect and
imagination of the Hellene. Once more the great man who designed to
unite the two currents into one stream without loss to either was cut
off before his plans could be carried out, and the murder of Julius
Cæsar caused incalculable damage to this earlier Renaissance, for the
education of Rome, the second scholar of Hellas, was not too wisely
conducted. Yet the schooling produced Virgil and Horace and that
Greco-Roman civilisation in which the Teutonic nations of the North
received their first lessons in culture. After several premature
attempts, medieval Europe rediscovered ancient Hellas and her pupil
Rome at the time of the Renaissance. Since that time the influence
exerted by Hellenism upon modern civilisation has been continuous and
incalculable. How much of that influence remains unassimilated, how
far it is still needed, may perhaps be realised best by passing
straight from the Elgin marbles or a play of Sophocles to a modern
crowd or to modern literature.
Hellas has thus been the educator of the world to an extent of which
not even Perikles ever dreamed. How then, it may naturally be asked,
did the teacher of the nations teach her own sons and daughters? If so
many peoples have been at school to learn the lessons of Hellenism,
what was the nature of the schools of ancient Hellas? How did those
wonderful city-states, which produced in the course of a few centuries
a wealth of unsurpassed literature, philosophy and art, whose history
is immortalised by the names of Thermopylae and Marathon, train their
young citizens to be at once patriots and art-critics, statesmen and
philosophers, money-makers and lovers of literature? They must have
known not a little about education, those old Hellenes, it is natural
to suppose. Have the schools, like the arts and literature and spirit,
of Hellas any lesson for the modern world? These are the questions
which the present work will attempt in some measure to answer.
In some measure only; for the spirit of Hellas cannot be caught at
second hand: it consists in just those subtler elements of refined
taste and perfect choice of expression which cannot but be lost in a
translation or a photograph. In like manner, the secret of Hellenic
education cannot be reproduced by any mere accumulation of bald facts
and wiseacres’ deductions. It is easy for the modern theorist to give
an exact account of his ideal school; he has only to tabulate the
subjects which are to be studied, the books which are to be read, and
the hours at which his mechanical children are to be stuffed with the
required mass of facts. But the Hellenic schoolmaster held that
education dealt not with machines but with children, not with facts
but with character. His object was to mould the taste of his pupils,
to make them “love what is beautiful and hate what is ugly.” And
because he wished them to love what is beautiful in art and
literature, in nature and in human life, he sought to make his lessons
attractive, in order that the subjects learnt at school might not be
regarded with loathing in after life. Education had to be charming to
the young; its field was largely music and art and the literature
which appeals most to children, adventure and heroism and tales of
romance expressed in verse. The music is all but gone, and of the art
only a few fragments remain; the primary schools of Hellas have left
to modern research only portions of their literature. Their
attractiveness must be judged from the poems of Homer. But the charm
of education lies mainly in the methods of the teacher; and of these
posterity can know little. Scholars may piece together the books which
were read and the exercises which were practised, but of the method in
which they were taught, of their order and arrangement and respective
quantities, nothing can be known. There is the raw material, the human
boy, and of the tools wherewith the masters fashioned him, some relics
are left; but of the way in which the artist used those tools, of the
true inwardness of his handicraft and skill, not all the diligence of
Teutonic research can recover a trace. The young art-student will
learn little of Michel Angelo or Raphael, if he focusses his attention
simply on the materials and the tools which they employed: to grasp
their spirit he must go to the Sistine Chapel or to the Dresden
Gallery, and contemplate their masterpieces. In like manner the
student of Hellenic education ought to consider not its materials and
tools, but rather its results and ideals. He must look with his own
eyes and imagination upon the Aegina pediment or the “Hermes” of
Praxiteles, if he wishes to comprehend the objects of the Doric and
Ionic schools. This he must do for himself, since no book can do it
for him. All that this work can hope to do is to furnish some few
ideas about the tools wherewith the Hellenic schoolmasters tried to
fashion the boys at their disposal into the masterpieces bodied forth
in the “Hermes” and the Aeginetan figures: the skilled fingers and the
imaginative brains which used the tools are for ever beyond the reach
of the scholar and the archæologist.
The “Hermes,” with his physical perfection and his plenitude of
intellect, with the features of an artist and the brow of a thinker,
may be taken as the ideal of the fully developed Athenian education of
the early fourth century B.C. The Aeginetan figures stand in the same
relation to the Spartan and Cretan schools; these heroic figures have
the bodily harmoniousness, the narrow if deep thought, the hardness of
the Dorian temper. Perhaps it is not fanciful to see in the so-called
“Theseus” of the Parthenon an earlier ideal of Athenian training, when
it aimed at rather less of dreamy contemplation, at a less sensuous
and more strenuous mode of life. If this be so, that glorious figure
bodies forth the very ideal of Periclean and Imperial Athens at her
grandest moment, before the ruin caused by the long war with Sparta.
The stream of Hellenism ran in two currents. Underlying the local
diversity, which made every little town ethically and artistically
distinct from its neighbour, was the fundamental difference between
Dorian and Ionian. Clearly marked in every aspect of life, this
difference was most marked in the schools. Sparta and Crete on the one
hand, and Athens, followed closely by her Ionian and Aeolic allies and
at a greater distance by the rest of civilised Hellas, on the other,
develop totally different types of education. The young Spartan is
enrolled at a fixed age in a boarding-school: everything he learns or
does is under State-supervision. Perfect grace and harmony of body is
his sole object: he is hardly taught his letters or numbers. The young
Athenian goes to school when and where his parents like; learns,
within certain wide limits, what they please; ends his schooling when
they choose. He learns his letters and arithmetic, studies literature
and music, and, at a later date, painting, besides his athletic
exercises, at a day-school. When he grows older, he may add rhetoric
or philosophy or science or any subject he pleases to this earlier
course. The State interferes only to protect his morals, and to
enforce upon him two years of military training between the ages of
eighteen and twenty.
The superficial differences between the Athenian and the Spartan type
of school are so striking that at first sight they appear to have no
one principle in common. It will therefore be necessary to keep the
two types apart at first and discuss their details separately. But the
Hellenic thinkers recognised certain deep-seated similarities beneath
the superficial contradictions, and it became the object of
educational philosophy to blend the two types into a perfect system.
As soon as a deeper study has been made of the theory of education in
Hellas, the distinctions of practice begin to vanish away and the
similarities of ideal and aim become more and more apparent. When the
survey of both practice and theory, which is the object of this work,
has been completed, it should be possible to grasp and estimate the
common principles, which, amid much variety of detail, governed the
schools of Hellas.
PART I
THE PRACTICE OF EDUCATION
CHAPTER I
EDUCATION AT SPARTA AND IN CRETE
According to a current legend, which Herodotos, owing to his Ionian
patriotism, is eager to contradict, Anacharsis the Scythian, on his
return from his travels, declared that the Spartans seemed to him to
be the only Hellenic people with whom it was possible to converse
sensibly, for they alone had time to be wise.[1] The full Spartan
citizen certainly had abundant leisure. He was absolutely free from
the cares of money-making, for he was supported by an hereditary
allotment which was cultivated for him by State-serfs. He had no
profession or trade to occupy him. His whole time was spent in
educating himself and his younger countrymen in accordance with
Spartan ideas, and in practising the Spartan mode of life. The
Spartans divided their day between various gymnastic and military
exercises, hunting, public affairs, and “leschai” or conversation-clubs,
at which no talk of business was permitted; the members discussed only
what was honourable and noble, or blamed what was cowardly and
base.[2] They were on the whole a grave and silent people, but they
had a terse wit of their own, and there was a statue of Laughter in
their city. They were always in a state of perfect training, like the
“wiry dogs” of Plato’s Republic. They were strong conservatives;
innovation was strictly forbidden. The unfortunate who made a change
in the rules of the Ball-game was scourged. In the Skias or
Council-chamber still hung in Pausanias’ time the eleven-stringed lyre
which Timotheos had brought to Sparta, only to have it broken;[3] and
the nine-stringed lyre of Phrunis met the same fate. Having once
accepted the seven-stringed lyre from Terpander, the Spartans never
permitted it to be changed. They had also a talent for minute
organisation; both their army and their children were greatly
subdivided. Every one at Sparta was a part of a beautifully organised
machine, designed almost exclusively for military purposes.
In this strangely artificial State, it was essential that the future
citizens should be saturated with the spirit of the place at an early
age. There were practically no written laws. Judges and rulers acted
on their own discretion.[4] This was only possible if a particular
stamp of character, a particular outlook and attitude, were impressed
upon every citizen. Consequently, education was the most important
thing at Sparta. It was both regulated and enforced by the State. It
was exactly the same for all. The boys were taken away from home and
brought up in great boarding-schools, so that the individualising
tendencies of family life and hereditary instincts might be stamped
out, and a general type of character, the Spartan type, alone be left
in all the boys. For boarding-schools have admittedly this result,
that they impose a recognisable stamp, a certain similarity of manner
and attitude, upon all the boys who pass through them.
Therefore, as soon as a child was born at Sparta, it was taken before
the elders of the tribe to which its parents belonged.[5] If they
decided that it was likely to prove sickly, it was exposed on Mount
Taügetos, there to die or be brought up by Helots or Perioikoi. Sparta
was no place for invalids. If the infant was approved, it was taken
back to its home, to be brought up by its mother. Spartan women were
famous for their skill in bringing up children. Spartan nurses were in
great demand in Hellas. They were eagerly sought after for boys of
rank and wealth like Alkibiades. The songs which they sang to their
charges and the rules which they enforced made the children “not
afraid of the dark” or terrified if they were left alone; not addicted
“to daintiness or naughty tempers or screaming”; in fact, “little
gentlemen” in every way.
No doubt the discipline of the children was strict, but then the
parents lived just as strictly themselves. There were no luxuries for
any one at Sparta: the houses and furniture were as plain as the food.
But there is a charming picture of Agesilaos riding on a stick to
amuse his children; and the Spartan mothers, if stern towards
cowardice, seem to have been keenly interested in their children’s
development; they were by no means nonentities like Athenian ladies.
The children slept at home till they were seven; but at an early age
were taken by their fathers to the “Pheiditia” or clubs where the
grown men spent those hours during which they stayed indoors and took
their meals. About fifty men attended each of these clubs. The
children sat on the floor near their fathers. Each member contributed
monthly a “medimnos” of barley-meal, eight “choes” of wine, five
“mnai” of cheese, two and a half “mnai” of figs,[6] and some very
cheap relish; if he sacrificed to a god, he gave part of the victim to
his “mess,” and if he was successful in hunting (which was a frequent
occupation), he brought his spoils to the common table. There was also
the famous black broth, made by the hereditary guild of State cooks,
which only a life of Spartan training and cold baths in the Eurotas
could make appetising; yet elderly Spartans preferred it to meat.
Perhaps a fragment of Alkman represents a high-day at one of these
clubs: “Seven couches and as many tables, brimming full of
poppy-flavoured loaves, and linseed and sesamum, and in bowls honey
and linseed for the children.”[7]
A Spartan who became too poor to pay his contribution to his club lost
his rights as a citizen, and so could not have his children educated
in the State-system. But as long as the allotments were not alienated,
such cases were not common. The contribution was κατὰ κεφαλήν [kata
kephalên],[8] that is, the fixed quantity of provisions had to be
supplied for every member of the family who attended a club, _i.e._
for every male, since the women took their meals at home. There is no
reason whatever for supposing that the boys, either before or after
they went to the boarding-schools, were fed at the expense of the
State. It is expressly stated that the number of foster-children, who
accompanied their benefactors’ sons to school, varied according to the
extent of their patron’s means.[9] Parents must therefore have paid
something for their boys while they were at school. The teaching
involved no expenses; hence it must have been the food for which they
paid. Thus, only those boys could attend the Spartan schools whose
parents could afford to pay the customary subscription in kind for
their own and their children’s food at the common meals. Xenophon, the
admirer of all things Spartan, adopts the same system in his State,
since he makes the children of the poor drop out automatically from
the public schools. It must be remembered that at Sparta families were
always small, and the population tended to decrease steadily; the
number of males for whom subscriptions had to be paid by the head of
the family can rarely have been large.
Generally speaking, therefore, the Spartan schools were only for the
sons of “Peers” (ὅμοιοι [hómoioi]),[10] that is, those who paid the
subscriptions. But a certain number of other boys were admitted,
provided that their food was paid for. A rich Spartan might, if he
chose, select certain other boys to be educated with his own son or
sons, and pay their expenses meanwhile.[11] The number of these
school-companions depended on the number of contributions in kind
which he was capable of supplying. The school-companions could thus
attend the Spartan schools; but they did not become citizens when they
grew up, unless they revealed so much merit that the Spartan State
gave them the franchise.
From what classes were these school-companions drawn? Sometimes they
were foreigners, sons either of distinguished guest-friends of leading
Spartans, or of refugee-settlers in Laconia. Thus Xenophon’s two sons
were educated at Sparta. These foreign boys were called τρόφιμοι
[tróphimoi] or Foster-children. Xenophon mentions “foreigners from
among the τρόφιμοι [tróphimoi].”[12] If these Foster-children, when
grown up, remained in Sparta they possessed no civic rights. A passage
in Plato refers to the difficulty which was experienced in getting
these Foster-children to accept this humble position.[13] It is
interesting to note that Sparta thus precedes Athens as an educational
centre to which boys from foreign cities came to receive their
schooling.
More often Spartan parents chose Helots to be school-companions of
their sons. Thus Plutarch speaks of “two of the foster-brothers of
Kleomenes, whom they call Mothakes.”[14] The name Mothax was applied
to these educated Helots. They seem to have been notorious for the way
in which they presumed upon their position, if we may assume a
connection between Mothax and Mothon, a term which is used for the
patron deity of impudence in Aristophanes, and elsewhere is the name
of a vulgar dance.[15] They were not enfranchised when their
school-days were over, and had to settle down to slavish duties,
unless they showed peculiar merit. But several of the most
distinguished Spartans, including Lusandros, were enfranchised
Mothakes.
Xenophon, in a passage which has already been quoted, mentions
“gentlemen-volunteers of the Perioikoi and certain foreigners of the
so-called Foster-children and bastards of the Spartiatai, very goodly
men and not without share in the honourable things in the State.”[16]
If most of the authorities are right in regarding “the honourable
things”[17] as a Spartan phrase for their educational system――and
there is good ground for this view――then this passage shows that
illegitimate sons, and perhaps eminent Perioikoi, passed through the
public schools at Sparta although, however, neither were called
Foster-children, a name reserved for distinguished foreigners. The
Helots who shared the education were known as Mothakes, and sometimes
as σύντροφοι [syntrophoi], school-companions; but they do not seem to
have been called τρόφιμοι [trophimoi], “Foster-children.”
During the best period of Spartan history, none of these extra pupils,
τρόφιμοι [trophimoi], Mothakes, illegitimate children, and eminent
Perioikoi, were enfranchised unless they showed peculiar merit. At a
later date, perhaps, any one who passed through the schools became a
Spartan citizen. Plutarch makes this a part of Lukourgos’ system; but
that is improbable. Such a custom would only arise in the days of
Spartan decay and depopulation. On the other hand, any Spartan boys
who flinched before the hardships of their national education, lost
their status, and were disfranchised, if they did not persevere.[18]
Till they were seven, the boys were taken to their fathers’ clubs: the
girls had all their meals with their mothers at home, for the women
did not have dining-clubs. By seeing the hardships which their fathers
endured, and hearing their discussions on political subjects and their
terse humour, the boys were already being trained in the Spartan mode
of life; for the clubs served as an elementary school. There, too,
they learnt to play with their contemporaries, and to exchange rough
jests without flinching. To take a jest without annoyance was part of
the Spartan character; but if the jester went too far for endurance,
he might be asked to stop.
At seven the boys were taken away from home, and organised in a most
systematic way into “packs” and “divisions.” These were the “ilai,”
which probably contained sixty-four boys, and the “agelai,” whose
numbers are unknown.[19] These packs fed together, slept together on
bundles of reeds for bedding, and played together. The boys had to go
barefoot always, and wore only a single garment summer and winter
alike. They were all under the control of a “Paidonomos” or
“Superintendent of the boys,” a citizen of rank, repute, and position,
who might at any moment call them together, and punish them severely
if they had been idle: he had attendants who bore the ominous name of
Floggers.[20] So, as Xenophon grimly remarks, a spirit of discipline
and obedience prevailed at Sparta. In order that the boys might not be
left without control, even when the Paidonomos was absent, any citizen
who might be passing might order them to do anything which he liked,
and punish them for any faults which they committed. The most sensible
and plucky boy in each pack was made a Prefect over it, and called the
Bouâgor, or “Herd-leader”; the rest obeyed his orders and endured his
punishments.[21]
The elder men stirred up quarrels among the boys in order to see who
was plucky. Over every school was set one of the young men over twenty
who had a good reputation both for courage and for morality.[22] He
was called the Eiren. He kept an eye on their battles, and used them
as servants at home for his supper; he ordered the bigger boys to
bring him firewood, and the smaller to collect vegetables. The only
way by which such supplies could be obtained was by stealing them from
the gardens and the men’s dining-clubs. Apparently, then, the boys
dined with him in his house;[23] they were supplied with a scanty meal
by their parents to eat there, and were encouraged to make up the
deficiency by stealing. “When the Eiren had finished supper, he
ordered one of the boys to sing, and to another he propounded some
question which needed a thoughtful answer, such as, ‘Who is the best
of the grown-ups?’ For such particular questions are more stimulating
than generalities like ‘What is virtue?’ or ‘What is a good citizen?’
The answer had to be accompanied by a concise reason; failure was
punished by a bite on the hand. Elder men watched, saying nothing at
the time, but rebuking the Eiren severely afterwards if he was too
strict or too lenient.”
Thus we find at Sparta a prefect-system and fagging. But the sense of
responsibility produced in the elder boys at English public schools
and the practice which they acquire in exercising authority were
prevented at Sparta by the perpetual presence of grown men, which made
Laconian schools more like French Lycées. There is no class of
professional schoolmasters; the Eiren, the Paidonomos, and any elder
who chooses, give the instruction freely and gratuitously. Education,
being so simple, cost nothing at Sparta.
From Plutarch’s mention of stealing from the _men’s_ dining-clubs it
may safely be inferred that boys of this age dined apart. Whether it
was always in the Eiren’s house cannot be ascertained. After the age
of sixteen they must have come into the men’s syssitia; for Xenophon
implies that the visitor to Sparta could see lads of that age at
dinner and ask them questions: and a visitor would certainly not have
dined in a dining-room meant only for boys. Whether the election of
members took place at that age, or whether they still went to their
fathers’ clubs, is unknown.
The education was almost entirely physical. Plutarch, it is true, says
that they learnt “letters, because they were useful.”[24] This may
have been a later introduction, or perhaps the amount learnt was so
little as to justify Isokrates in saying that the Spartans “do not
even learn their letters, which are the means to a knowledge of the
past, as well as of contemporary events”;[25] he also thought it
highly improbable that even “the most intelligent of them would hear
of his speeches, unless they found some one to read them aloud.”[26]
They had, indeed, little reason to learn to read. Their written laws
were very few, and these they learnt by heart, set to a tune. They had
nothing to do with commerce or even with accounts; very few of them
knew how to count.[27] Hippias, the Sophist, found that all they cared
to listen to, were “genealogies of men and heroes, foundations of
cities, and archæology generally.” Probably, like the Dorian
philosopher Pythagoras, and like Plato, the admirer of all things
Dorian, they held that memory was all-important, and that the use of
writing weakened it.[28] Besides the State-laws set to music there
were songs which praised dead heroes and derided cowards: the diction
was plain and simple, the subjects grave and moral; many of them were
war-marches; all were incentive to pluck and energy.
Rhetoric was, of course, utterly forbidden: a young man who learnt it
abroad and brought it home was punished by the Ephors.[28] Spartans
learned to be silent as a rule; when they spoke, their remarks were
short and much to the point, for they thought it wrong to waste a
word.[29] This was definitely taught to the boys, as has been shown
above. “If you converse with quite an ordinary Laconian,” says
Plato,[30] “at first he seems a mere fool; then suddenly, at the
critical point, he flings forth a pithy saying, and his companions
seem no better than children compared with him.” This epigrammatic
wisdom Plato ironically ascribes to the fact that Laconians really
attend Sophists on the sly, and are greater philosophers than any one
knows. Many echoes of their terse and grim humour have come down to
modern times: such as Leonidas’ remark to his troops at Thermopylae,
“Breakfast here: supper in Hades”; and the Spartan’s description of
Athens, “All things noble there,” by which he meant that nothing,
however base, was counted ignoble.
The Spartans must not be regarded as wholly averse to literature. They
knew Homer, and thought him the best poet of his class, although the
manner of life he inculcated was Ionic, not Doric.[31] Alkman spent
his life at Sparta, and has left one splendid song for a chorus of
Laconian girls. Aristophanes could put a fine chorus into the mouths
of Laconians, though its subject is noticeably warlike. For it was
war-poems that the Spartans liked. “They care naught for the other
poets,” says the Athenian orator, Lukourgos, “but for Turtaios they
care so exceedingly that they made a law to summon every one to the
king’s tent, when they are on a campaign, to hear the poems of
Turtaios, considering that this would make them most ready to die for
their country.”[32]
After all, the objects of the Spartan education were not intellectual
acuteness and the accumulation of knowledge, but discipline,
endurance, and victory in war. Discipline was taught by the perpetual
presence of authority, and by very severe punishments. Spartan boys
were practically never left to their own devices: perhaps that is the
secret of the moral failure of nearly every Spartan who was given a
position of authority outside Lakedaimon; for responsibility requires
practice. Endurance was taught by their whole mode of life. They went
barefooted, with a single garment, played and danced naked under the
hot Laconian sun;[33] there were no ointments or luxurious baths for
their bodies, only the Eurotas for a swim, and a bundle of reeds for a
bed. The food which the boys received was very scanty: often they were
turned out into the country in the early morning to provide food for
themselves for the whole day by stealing.
This organised stealing was a feature of Spartan education. At an
early age, as we have seen, the small boys were sent out to steal
firewood and vegetables for the Eiren who had charge of them. Later
they were driven out into the country, to forage for themselves at the
expense of the farms. There was a definite age at which it was
customary to begin stealing.[34] The articles which might be stolen
were fixed by law, and the legal limits might not be transgressed.[35]
It must be remembered that much property in Laconia was held in
common. Any one, for instance, who was belated while hunting might
take what food he pleased from a country house, and even break open
seals to get at provisions. The Spartans also used one another’s dogs
and horses freely, without permission. It is therefore absurd to say
that the system taught the boys to be dishonest. If the State agrees
to declare certain articles to be common property, it is no longer
stealing if one citizen removes them from the house of another: he is
no more dishonest than a man who picks blackberries or buttercups in
England. At one of the English public schools, tooth-mugs used to be a
recognised article of plunder. The small fags were expected to keep
their particular dormitory supplied with them, at the expense of
others. They were punished by the wronged dormitory if caught in the
act of removing them: but ingenuity in such thefts was regarded as
praiseworthy. There was a certain number of these mugs belonging to
the whole house; they were common property, and could therefore be
purloined without dishonesty.
Moreover, this system of legalised robbery had a valuable educational
object at Sparta. It was excellent training in scouting, laying
ambushes, and foraging, all of which it is very important that a
future soldier should learn. Xenophon, a soldier himself, notices
this, and in the _Anabasis_, when he needs a clever strategist, he
selects a Spartan because he has been educated in this way. Since this
was the object of the system, the boys, if caught, were flogged, not
for stealing, but for stealing clumsily. Isokrates declares that skill
in robbery was the road to the highest offices at Sparta. “If any one
can show that this is not the branch of education which the
Lacedaemonians regard as the most important,” he adds, “I admit that I
have not spoken a word of truth in my life.”[36]
These foraging expeditions of the boys prepared them for the similar,
if more arduous, duties of “Secret Service”[37] which awaited them
between eighteen and twenty. Young men of this age were sent in bands
to the different districts of Laconia for long periods, during which
they hid in the woods, slept on the ground, attended to their own
wants without a servant, and wandered about the country by day and
night.[38] When it appeared good to them or their chiefs they made
sudden attacks on the Helots, and slaughtered those who seemed
ambitious enough to be dangerous, the Ephors declaring war on their
serfs yearly in order that there might be no blood-guiltiness attached
to these assassinations.[39] There was a regular officer set over this
secret police, who no doubt directed where the particular youths
should go.[40] At a critical moment of the Peloponnesian War, 2000 of
the bravest and most ambitious Helots suddenly “disappeared,” probably
by this means.[41] But Plato recognised the educational value of such
a system, if the murders were omitted. In his _Laws_[42] he institutes
a force of κρυπτοί [kryptoi], 720 in number, who patrol the whole
country, taking the twelve districts in turn, so as to gain a complete
acquaintance with it. They have all the farm-servants and beasts at
their disposal, for digging trenches, making fortifications, roads,
embankments, and reservoirs, for irrigation works and the like. The
similarity of name suggests similarity of functions, but how much of
this the κρυπτοί [kryptoi] at Sparta did cannot be fixed. Probably
their chief work was to keep watch over the subject populations,
Perioikoi and Helots, who were otherwise left almost entirely to their
own devices.
In their institutions of the foraging parties and Secret Service, the
Spartans show a clear appreciation of boy-nature, as well as a keen
eye for methods of military training. Moderns are beginning to realise
that the average boy has so much of the primitive and natural man in
him that, unless he is permitted to “go wild” and live the savage life
at intervals, he is apt to become riotous and lawless. Hence in recent
days the institution of camps for boys in England and “Seton Indians”
in America. The Spartans, alone of Hellenes, fully recognised this
peculiarity of boys, and met it with the foraging expeditions and
secret service. The Athenian boy was not thus provided for until he
became an ephebos; hence the Athenian streets were full of young
Hooligans, while the aristocratic lads developed more refined, if more
vicious, methods of giving vent to their instincts. In these
country-expeditions alone the Spartan boys had an opportunity of
escaping from the presence of their elders and developing habits of
self-reliance and responsibility. Had Sparta made better use of these
opportunities, the fate of her Empire after Aigospotamoi might have
been different.
A frequent occupation of all ages at Sparta was hunting. This, too,
they recognised to be an excellent training for soldiers, since it
involved courage in meeting wild beasts, skill and ingenuity in
tracking them, and hardships of all sorts in the forests and on the
mountains. Laconia was full of game, and Laconian hounds were famous.
The successful huntsman gave what he had killed to enrich the meals of
his dining-club, and so won much popularity.
Spartan boys must also have learnt to ride, for they had to go in
procession on horseback at the festival of Huakinthos.[43] They were
taught to swim, too, by their daily plunge in the Eurotas. A great
part of their time was spent in gymnastics, under the close inspection
of their elders. Boxing and the pankration were forbidden to the young
Spartan, probably because they developed a few particular muscles at
the expense of the others.[44] For wrestling no scientific trainers
were allowed; the Spartan type depended solely on strength and
activity, not on technical skill; so a Spartan, when beaten by a
wrestler from another country, said his opponent was not a better man,
but only a cleverer wrestler.[45] Gladiators, such as those mentioned
in Plato’s _Laches_ as teaching the use of arms, were not permitted at
Sparta; these, however, seem to have been unpractical theorists, quite
useless in battle, as General Laches shows by a funny anecdote about
one of them.[46] No lounging spectators were permitted in Spartan
gymnasia; the rule was “strip or withdraw.”[47] The eldest man in each
gymnasium had to see that every one took sufficient exercise to work
off his food and prevent him from becoming puffy.[48] The physical
condition of the boys was inspected every ten days by the Ephors,[49]
while the competitions of the epheboi seem to have been controlled by
a special board, the Bidiaioi, who figure in inscriptions.[50]
Aristotle says of the whole Spartan discipline that it made the boys
“beast-like,”[51] but admits that it did not produce the one-sided
athlete, so common in Hellas, who looked solely to athletics, and was
too much specialised to be good for anything else. Xenophon[52] says
that it would be hard to find anywhere men with more healthy or more
serviceable bodies than the Spartiatai. The most beautiful man in the
Hellenic army at Plataea was a Spartan.[53] The Spartan boys’ manners
were in some ways surprisingly maidenlike. When they went along the
highway, they kept their hands under their coat, and walked in
silence, keeping their eyes fixed on the ground before their feet.
They spoke as rarely as a statue and looked about them less than a
bronze figure: they were as modest as a girl. When they came into the
mess-room, you could rarely hear them even answer a question.[54]
Fighting was encouraged at all ages; there were organised battles,
somewhat resembling football matches, for the epheboi, in a shady
playing-field surrounded by rows of plane trees and encircled by
streams, access to it being given by two bridges. After a night spent
in sacrifice, two teams of epheboi proceeded to this field. When they
came near it, they drew lots, and the winners had the choice of
bridges by which to enter the ground, selecting no doubt in accordance
with the direction of sun and wind, as a modern football captain, who
has won the toss, selects the end of the ground from which he will
start playing. The epheboi fought with their hands, kicked, bit, and
even tore out one another’s eyes, in the endeavour to drive the
opposing team back into the water.[55]
The grown men were also encouraged to fight by the following device.
The Ephors selected three of them, who were called Hippagretai. Each
of these three selected one hundred companions, giving a public
explanation in each case why he chose one man and rejected the others.
So those who had been rejected became foes to those who were selected,
and kept a close watch over them for the slightest breach of the
accepted code of honour. Each party was always trying to increase its
strength or perform some signal service to the State, in order to
strengthen its own claims. The rivals also fought with their fists
whenever they met.[56]
This systematised pugnaciousness at Sparta presents an interesting
parallel to the German University duels and to the fights which used
to be almost daily occurrences in the life of an English schoolboy.
Most of the older English public schools can still show the special
ground which was the recognised scene of these battles.
Floggings were exceedingly common at Sparta. Any elder man might flog
any boy. It was not etiquette for boys to complain to their parents in
these cases; if they did so, they received a second thrashing. But the
triumph of this system was the flogging of the “epheboi” yearly at the
altar of Artemis Orthia, in substitute for human sacrifice. Entrance
for the competition was quite voluntary, but competitors seem always
to have been forthcoming even down to Plutarch’s days. They began by
practice of some sort in the country.[57] The altar was covered with
blood; if the floggers were too lenient to some “ephebos” owing to his
beauty or reputation, the statue, according to the legend, performed a
miracle in order to show its displeasure.[58] The competitors were
often killed on the spot; but they never uttered a groan.[59] The
winner was called the “altar-victor” (βωμονίκης [bômonikês]) and an
inscription still records such a victory.[60]
The girls at Sparta were also organised into agelai or “packs.”[61]
They took their meals at home, but otherwise lived a thoroughly
outdoor life. They had to train their bodies no less than the boys, in
order that they might bear strong children, so they took part in
contests of strength as well as of speed.[62] They shared in the
gymnasia and in the musical training. Among their sports were
wrestling, running, and swimming; they were exposed to sun and dust
and toil.[63] They learned to throw the diskos and the javelin;[64]
they wore only the short Doric “chiton” with split sides.[65] They
went in procession at festivals like the boys; at certain festivals
they danced and sang in the presence of the young men, praising the
brave among them and jeering at the cowards. At the Huakinthia the
maidens raced on horseback. Theokritos makes a band of 240 maidens,
“all playmates together, anoint themselves like men and race beside
the Eurotas.”[66] That passage also gives wool-work to Laconian
maidens (which is probably untrue, being contradicted by Plato),[67]
and lyre-playing, which is contradicted by a Laconian in Plutarch, who
says that “such rubbish is not Laconian.” The result of all this
outdoor training was great physical perfection: Lampito, the Spartan
woman in Aristophanes’ _Lusistrata_, is greatly admired by the women
from other cities for her beauty, her complexion, and her bodily
condition: “she looks as though she could throttle a bull.” She
ascribes it to her gymnastics and vigorous dancing.[68] The girls till
they married wore no veil, and mixed freely with the young men; in
fact, there was one dance where they met in modern fashion; first the
youth danced some military steps, and then the maiden danced some of a
suitable sort.[69] Consequently love-matches were far more possible at
Sparta than elsewhere in Hellas. After marriage the women had to wear
veils, and remained at home; gymnastics, dances, and races ceased.
The Spartans were intensely fond of dancing, but it must be remembered
that they often called dancing what moderns would call drill. For war
was almost a form of dance; they marched or charged into battle to the
notes of the flute, crowned and wearing red cloaks. The march tunes
were in frequent use in Sparta, no doubt at military exercises. Every
day the epheboi were drawn up in ranks, one behind the other, and went
through military evolutions and dancing figures alternately, while a
flutist played to them and beat time with his foot.[70] This is simply
musical drill. The great national festival of the Gumnopaidia was very
similar. Three great battalions, consisting respectively of old men,
young men, and boys, drawn up in rank and file, exhibited various
movements, chiefly of a gymnastic sort, singing the songs of Thaletas
and Alkman and Dionusodotos the while and indulging in impromptu
jesting at one another’s expense, after the fashion of a rustic
revel-chorus in Attica. Sometimes the battalions appeared one by one,
and were “led out” like an army, by the Ephors.[71] On other occasions
all three were drawn up in crescent formation side by side, with the
boys in the middle. The festival must have closely resembled the
public parades of the gymnastic clubs in Switzerland. There were posts
of honour and dishonour, as in battle, cowards usually receiving the
latter. But Agesilaos, the king, once received an inferior station
after his victory at Corinth, and turned the insult by a jest, “Well
thought of, chorus-leader: that’s the way to give honour to the
post.”[72] Then there was the war-dance, imitating all the actions of
battle, a sort of manual and bayonet exercise, but accompanied by much
acting and by music. Every Spartan boy began to learn this as soon as
he was five.[73] It was done in quick time, if we may judge by the
“Pyrrhic” or war-dance foot ( ˘ ˘ ). There was also a wrestling-dance,[74]
and most gymnastics were done to the accompaniment of the flute. In
fact, chorus-dancing was a regular part of the education of Spartans
and Cretans: the only experience of singing which most of them
possessed was acquired in this way.[75] It is true that elegiacs were
sung as solos before the king’s tent on campaigns, and at meals, when
the victor got a particularly good slice of meat; but probably this
accomplishment was confined to a few. Aristotle asserts that the
Laconians did not learn songs, but claimed nevertheless to be able to
distinguish good from bad.
* * * * *
Such was the Spartan system of education. To an Englishman their
schools have a greater interest than those of any other ancient State.
Sparta produced the only true boarding-schools of antiquity. The
“packs” of the Spartan boys, like the English public schools, formed
miniature States, to whose corporate interests and honour each boy
learned to make his own wishes subservient. Spartan boys, too, like
our own, had the smaller traits of individuality rubbed off them by
the publicity and perpetual intercourse with others involved in the
boarding-school system, in order that the racial characteristics might
the more emerge in them. They, too, learnt endurance by hardship, and
were early trained both to rule and to obey by means of the
institution of prefects and fagging. But here the resemblance stops
short. The Spartans, like most other nations, were not prepared to pay
the price at which alone an education in responsibility can be
obtained, the price which lies in the possible ruin of all the boys
who are not strong enough to be a law to themselves. They very rarely
left the boys to themselves without grown men to look after them. They
were always interfering and supervising, instead of leaving the
prefects to exercise their authority. And so, when Spartans were sent
abroad to govern cities or command armies, having had no practice in
responsibility, they failed shamefully and ignominiously. But this is
equally true of the Athenians and of other Hellenes. The Spartans
deserve all credit for their experiments with the boarding-school
system.
But the system which they adopted had many faults, besides that which
has already been noticed. There was no individual attention for the
boys. The hardships were excessive and brutalising. While the boys’
bodies were developed and trained almost to perfection, their minds
were almost entirely neglected: hence the stupidities of Spartan
policy and the lack of imagination which their statesmen showed. It
was impossible to over-eat or over-drink under the Spartan system, so
the young Spartan had no experience in self-restraint.[76] The
gymnasia and dining-clubs caused a great deal of quarrelling (which
the Spartan authorities welcomed), and of immorality (which was very
strictly forbidden); the Spartan gymnasia erred less, however, in this
latter respect than the Athenian. In war the Spartans were only
invincible so long as they were the only trained troops in Hellas; the
rise of professional armies ruined them, for they could not adapt
themselves to new circumstances. They produced no art and very little
literature, if any. But their whole State was as much a work of art as
a Doric temple, and of very much the same order, with its symmetry and
regularity, its sacrifice of detail to the whole, its strength and
restraint. It was also the inspiration of at least one great piece of
literature, Plato’s _Republic_.
If courage was their sole object, as perhaps it was, they succeeded in
obtaining it. The coward was a rare, and a most unhappy bird at
Sparta. Mothers on several occasions killed sons who returned home
from a campaign disgraced. “No one would mess with a coward, or
consort with him. When rival teams were chosen for the game of ball,
he was omitted. In dances he received the post of dishonour. He was
avoided in the streets. No one would sit next to him. He could not
find a husband for his daughters or a wife for himself,” and was
punished for these offences. “He was beaten if he imitated his betters
in any way.”[77] If the Hellenes were a nation of children, as the old
Egyptian called them, the Spartans were at least a manly sort of
schoolboy. They deified the schoolboy virtues, pluck and endurance. If
we wish to see how far their education, in its best days, enabled them
to prove true to their ideals, let us consider those 300 at
Thermopylae waiting, with jests on their lips, for the onset of
Oriental myriads, and remember that finest of all epitaphs, of which
English can give no rendering, written upon their memorial in the pass
in honour of their obedience unto death――
Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
* * * * *
The Cretan system of education was very similar in many ways to the
Spartan. In both localities the teaching was given by any elder member
of the community who chose, not by a professional and paid class of
masters. But in Crete education cost the parent even less than at
Sparta; for the boys were fed largely at public cost.[78] But so was
every other Cretan, male and female alike. Each community possessed
large public estates, cultivated by public serfs.[79] The revenues
thus accruing to the State were applied to the expenses of government,
which were small, and to the food-supply of all citizens. Thus men,
women, and children were all fed mainly at public cost. It may be
noted, however, that there is no question of providing the children of
improvident parents with meals at the expense of more provident
citizens. Moreover, the heads of families, who each possessed an
allotment, as at Sparta, had to contribute a tenth of the produce of
their estates.
The women-folk took their meals at home,[80] although the cost of
their food was mainly defrayed by the public revenues. The men took
their meals in dining-clubs (ἀνδρεῖα [andreia]). The whole population
of each community was divided into clubs of this sort, apparently on
the family basis, so that two or three families made up a club between
them, to which their children and descendants would in turn belong.
All the males of the family attended these meals; small children,
boys, and young men as well as elders are all mentioned as being
present at the same dinners.[81] The club is only an enlarged family
party. The small children sat on the ground behind their fathers; they
waited on themselves and on their elders, but the general
superintendence of cooking and attendance was in the hands of a woman
with three or four public slaves and some underlings in her
control.[82] As they grew older, the sons sat beside their fathers.
Boys ordinarily received half what their parents had; but orphans were
allowed the full quantity at their dead father’s club.
Thus the Cretan club was an amalgamation of several families into a
sort of clan, whose male members all dined together. All the boys of
the clan formed one boarding-school. They all slept in one room,
perhaps attached to the dining-hall; there was always a dormitory
attached to each of these buildings for visitors from other cities, so
it would be natural to expect a dormitory for the children also. The
boys took their meals in the club dining-hall, in the presence of
their elders, by whose improving conversations upon politics and
morals they were supposed to be educated. These elder members elected
one of their number to serve as παιδονόμος [paidonomos] or
“Superintendent of the boys” of their club.[83] Under his directions
the boys learned letters “in moderation”: they were constantly
practised in gymnastics, in the use of arms, especially the bow, which
was a great Cretan weapon, and in the war-dances, the Kuretic and
Pyrrhic, both indigenous in Crete. They learned the laws of their
country set to a sort of tune, in order that their souls might be
drawn by the music, and also, that they might more easily remember
them. In this way, if they did anything which was forbidden, they had
not the excuse of ignorance.[84] Besides this, they were taught hymns
to the gods, and praises of good men. The favourite metre for these
purposes was the Cretic ( ― ˘ ― ), which was regarded as “severe”
and so suitable for teaching courage and restraint.[85] The Pæan was
their chief national form of song. Cretan boys were also practised in
that terse and somewhat humorous style of speaking which we have
already seen at Sparta.[86]
Cretan boys were always fighting either single combats or combined
battles against the boys of another club-school. They were taught
endurance by many hardships. They wore only a short coat in summer and
winter alike. They learnt to despise heat and cold and mountain paths
and the blows which they received in gymnasia and in fighting.
They remained in the club-schools till their seventeenth year,[87]
when they became epheboi and celebrated their escape from the garb of
childhood by a special festival.[88] Like their contemporaries at
Athens, the epheboi took a special oath of allegiance to the State and
hatred towards its enemies. A fragment still survives of the oath
taken by the epheboi of Dreros, near Knossos.[89] At seventeen the
epheboi were collected into “packs” (ἀγέλαι [agelai]) by private
enterprise. A rich and distinguished young ephebos would gather round
him as large a pack of his contemporaries as he could; their numbers
no doubt depended partly on his wealth, and still more on his personal
popularity. The aristocratic element in this arrangement is very
noticeable, as in all the institutions of Crete as contrasted with
Sparta. The father of this young chief usually acted as leader of the
pack (ἀγελάτης [agelatês]); he possessed full authority over them and
could punish them as he pleased. He led them out on hunting
expeditions and to the “Runs” (δρόμοι [dromoi]), that is, the gymnasia
of the epheboi. Cretans who had not yet entered a pack of epheboi were
excluded from these runs (ἀπόδρομοι [apodromoi]); when they entered,
they were called “members of packs” (ἀγέλαστοι [agelastoi]).[90] The
pack-leader could collect his followers where he pleased;[91] very
possibly the epheboi did not attend the club dinners ordinarily, but
fed or slept either at their patron’s house (whence the need of a rich
pack-leader) or in some special room. They thus corresponded closely
to the Spartan boys of a younger age under their Eiren. Their food was
supplied, like that of all Cretans, largely out of the public
revenues. On certain fixed days “pack” joined battle with “pack” to
the sound of the lyre and flutes and in regular time, as was the
custom in war; fists, clubs, and even weapons of iron might be used.
It was a regular institution, half dance, half field-day, with fixed
rules and imposed by law. These battles must have closely resembled
the contests of the Spartan epheboi in the shady playing-fields. The
life of the boys was surrounded with a military atmosphere throughout.
They wore military dress and counted their weapons their most valuable
possessions. Young Cretans remained in the packs till after marriage.
Then they returned to their homes and the clubs.
Of the practical results of Cretan education nothing can be said. From
the day when Idomeneus sets sail from Troy, Crete almost disappears
from Hellenic history. Too strong to be attacked by their neighbours,
too much weakened by intestine feuds to assume the aggressive, the
Cretans remained aloof from their compatriots on the mainland and in
the archipelago till the close of the period of Hellenic independence.
APPENDIX A
SPARTAN SYSSITIA
These dining-clubs were organised like “diminutive states.”[92] It was
enacted who was to recline in the most important place, who in the
second, and so on, and who was to sit on the footstool, which was the
place of dishonour, usually assigned only to children. “Each man is
given a portion to himself, which he does not share with any one. They
have as much barley bread as they like, and there is an earthenware
cup of wine standing by each man, for him to put his lips to when he
feels disposed. The chief dish is always the same for all, boiled
pork. There is plenty of Spartan broth, and some olives, cheese, and
figs.[93]
“Each contributes to his mess about 18 gallons of barley meal, 60 or
70 pints of wine, and a small quantity of figs and cheese, and 10
Aeginetan obols for extras.” This contribution no doubt covered
expenses, for the quantity sent by an absentee king, probably
representing the average consumption of an individual, falls well
within this estimate (cf. Herod. vi. 57). After the regular meal[94]
an ἔπαικλον [epaiklon] or extra meal might be served. It would be
provided by a member of the mess, consisting either of the results of
hunting or the produce of his farm, for nothing might be bought. The
ordinary components of such a meal were pigeons, geese, fieldfares,
blackbirds, hares, lambs, and kids, and wheaten bread, a welcome
change from the usual barley loaves. The cooks proclaimed the name of
the giver, so that he might get the credit. ἔπαικλα [epaikla] were
often exacted as fines for offences from rich members; the poor had to
pay laurel leaves or reeds. There was also a special sort of ἔπαικλον
[epaiklon] designed for the children, barley meal soaked in olive
oil――a sort of porridge, in fact. According to Nicocles the Laconian,
this was swallowed in laurel leaves――which does not sound very
inviting.
There were also banquets independent of the messes. These were called
κοπίδες [kopides].[95] Tents were set up in the sacred enclosure round
the temple of the deity in whose honour the feast was given. Heaps of
brushwood covered with carpets served for couches. The food consisted
of slices of meat, round buns, cheese, slices of sausage, and for
dessert dried figs and various beans.
At the Tithenidia, or Nurses’ Feast, a κοπίς [kopis] was given at the
temple of Artemis Koruthalia by the stream Tiassos.[96] The nurses
brought the boy-babies to it. The sacrifice was a sucking pig, and
baked loaves were served. The κοπίδες [kopides] were evidently a
feature of Spartan life: Epilukos makes his “laddie” (κωράλισκος
[kôraliskos]) remark, “I will go to the κοπίς [kopis] in Amuklai at
Appellas’ house, where will be buns and loaves and jolly good broth”:
which shows that the children’s parties at Sparta were regarded as
attractive.
The Karneia, the great Spartan festival, was an imitation of
camp-life.[97] The sacrificial meal was served in tents, each
containing nine men, and everything was done to the word of command.
APPENDIX B
CRETAN SYSSITIA
The chief authorities for the attendance at these meals are the two
historians, Dosiades and Purgion, quoted in Athenaeus (143). Dosiades
states that an equal portion is set before each man present, but to
the younger members is given a half portion of meat, and they do not
touch any of the other things. Purgion says: “To the sons, who sit on
lower seats by their fathers’ chairs, they give a half portion of what
is supplied to the men; orphans receive a full share.” The comparison
of the two passages shows that the “younger members” mentioned by
Dosiades are what Purgion calls the orphans, and that they are not yet
full-grown men. Thus they must be either the boys or the epheboi. It
is not, however, at all likely that the epheboi, who were of military
age and engaged in violent exercises, would be given only half
rations, so these younger members are the boys not yet included in the
ἀγέλαι [agelai]. Dosiades continues: “On each table is set a drinking
vessel, of weak wine. This all who sit at the common table share
equally. The children have a bowl to themselves,” that is, the boys
who sat beside their fathers but not at the table. “After supper first
they discuss the political situation, and then recall feats in battle,
and praise those who have distinguished themselves, encouraging the
youngers to heroism.” The quotation shows that not merely the small
children are in question, but boys of an age to understand politics
and war.
[1] Herodotos, 4. 77.
[2] Plutarch, _Lukourgos_, 25. Kratinos (Athen. 138)
ridicules these clubs and says that the attraction of them
was that sausages hung there on pegs to be nibbled.
[3] Pausanias, 3. 12. A similar event happened at Argos.
Plutarch, _On Music_, 37.
[4] Aristot. _Pol._ ii. 9, 10.
[5] Plutarch, _Luk._ 16.
[6] Say, 1½ bushels of meal, 5 gallons of wine, 5 lbs. of
cheese, and 2½ lbs. of figs.
[7] Smyth, _Melic Poets_, “Alkman,” 26, if the emendation
παίδεσσι [paidessi] be correct.
[8] Aristot. _Pol._ ii. 9.
[9] Phularchos (Athen. vi. 271).
[10] Xen. _Anab._ iv. 6. 14; Aristot. _Pol._ ii. 9. 31.
[11] Phularchos (Athen. vi. 271 e).
[12] Xen. _Hellen._ v. 3. 9.
[13] Plato, _Rep._ 520 D.
[14] Plut. _Kleom._ 8.
[15] Aristoph. _Knights_, 635, 695 (with Schol. on 697,
φορτικὸν ὀρχήσεως εῖδος [phortikon orchêseôs eidos]); Eurip.
_Bacch._ 1060.
[16] Xen. _Hellen._ v. 3. 9.
[17] Xen. _Constit. of Lak._ iii. 3; _Hellen._ v. 4. 32.
[18] Xen. _Constit. of Lak._ iii. 3.
[19] “Agelai” of young men are mentioned by inscriptions at
Miletos and Smurna [Böckh, 2892, 3326]; there may have been
boarding-schools somewhat resembling those of Sparta at
these towns for young men.
[20] μαστιγόφοροι [mastigophoroi]. Xen. _Constit. of Lak._
ii. 2. Aristotle calls Paidonomoi an aristocratic
institution. They existed in Crete, and inscriptions mention
them in Karia, Teos, and many other places.
[21] Plut. _Lukourgos_, 16. Hesychius declares that the
Bouâgor was a boy, so the word cannot mean the Eiren, who
was over twenty.
[22] Plut. _Lukourgos_, 17; Xen. _Constit. of Lak._ ii. 11.
[23] In which case the Eiren corresponds closely to the
Cretan Agelates.
[24] _Lukourgos_, 16; _Lac. Institutions_, 247.
[25] Isok. _Panath._ 276 D.
[26] _Panath._ 285 C.
[27] Plato, _Hippias Maj._ 285 C.
[28] Sext. Empir. _Mathem._ 2, § 21.
[29] Plut. _Lukourgos_, 19-20.
[30] Plato, _Protag._ 342 E.
[31] Plato, _Laws_, 680 D. Crete repudiated Homer
altogether.
[32] Luk. _against Leokrates_, 107. The Polemarchos was
judge in these singing competitions, and the winner received
a bit of meat (Philochoros in Athen. 630 f.).
[33] Plato, _Laws_, 633 E.
[34] Plut. _Apoph._
[35] Xen. _Anab._ iv. 6. 14.
[36] Isok. _Panath._ 277.
[37] κρυπτεία, κρυπτή [krypteia, kryptê].
[38] Plato, _Laws_, 633 C.
[39] Plut. _Lukourgos_, 28. Isokrates merely mentions that
the Ephors could kill as many Helots as they liked
(_Panath._ 271 B).
[40] Plut. _Kleom._ 28.
[41] Thuc. iv. 80.
[42] Plato, _Laws_, 763 B. Some have supposed that κρυπτοί
[kryptoi] is an interpolation. If so, the resemblance must
have been close enough to strike a commentator who knew
Lakedaimon, in spite of the fact that the ages in the two
systems are different.
[43] Polukrates (in Athen. 139 e).
[44] Aristot. _Pol._ viii. 4; Plut. _Luk._ 19.
[45] Plut. _Apoph._ 233 E. Plato adopts the Spartan views
about wrestling in the _Laws_.
[46] Plato, _Laches_, 183 D, E.
[47] Plato, _Theait_. 162 B and 169 B.
[48] Xen. _Constit. of Lak._ v. 8.
[49] Athen. xii. 550 d. Their dress and bedding was
inspected at the same time.
[50] Pausan. iii. 11. 2. βίδεος [bideos], Böckh, 1241, 1242;
βίδυος [bidyos], 1254.
[51] Aristot. _Pol._ viii. 4. 1.
[52] Xen. _Constit. of Lak._ v. 9.
[53] Herod. ix. 72.
[54] Xen. _Constit. of Lak._ ii. 4.
[55] Paus. iii. 14. 2.
[56] Xen. _Constit. of Lak._ iv.
[57] Hesychius, Φούαξιρ [Phouaxir].
[58] Paus. iii. 16. 11.
[59] Plut. _Lukourgos_, 18; Cicero, _Tusc. Disp._ v. 27.
[60] Böckh, 1364.
[61] Pindar, _Frag. Hyporch._ 8 Λάκαινα παρθένων ἀγέλα
[Lakaina parthenôn agela].
[62] Xen. _Constit. of Lak._ i. 4.
[63] Cicero, _Tusc. Disp._ ii. 15.
[64] Plut. _Lukourgos_, 14.
[65] Whence they were called φαινομήριδες [phainomêrides].
This chiton may be seen in the conventional statues of
Artemis.
[66] Theok. _Idyll_ 18. 23.
[67] _Laws_, 806 A.
[68] _Lusistrata_, l. 80 onwards. In the play Lampito is
married. Aristophanes has either made a mistake or the
gymnastics are meant to be in the past only.
[69] The ὄρμος [ormos] dance. Compare the dance at the end
of the _Lusistrata_, where “man stands by woman, and woman
by man.”
[70] Lucian, _Dancing_, 274.
[71] Xen. _Hellen._ vi. 4. 16.
[72] Xen. _Ag._ ii. 17.
[73] Athen. 630 a.
[74] Athen. 678 b.
[75] Plato, _Laws_, 666 D.
[76] _Laws_, 634-635.
[77] Xen. _Constit. of Lak._ ix. 5.
[78] Aristot. _Pol._ ii. 10. 8.
[79] Additional revenues for the same objects were derived
from the taxes paid by Perioikoi and serfs (Athen. 143 a,
b).
[80] Plato, _Laws_, 781 A.
[81] Historians quoted by Athen. 143 e.
[82] _Ibid._
[83] Strabo, x. 4. 483 (on authority of Ephoros), and
Herakleides Pont. iii. (who provide most of the details
about Crete).
[84] Aelian, _True History_, ii. 39.
[85] Strabo, x. 4. 480.
[86] Sosikrates (in Athen. 261 e), speaking of Phaistos.
[87] Hesychius, ἀπάγελος [apagelos].
[88] ἐκδύσια [ekdysia], Antoninus Liberalis, 18.
[89] Mahaffy, p. 81; Grasberger, iii. 61.
[90] Eustathius on _Il._ ix. 518.
[91] Herakl. Pont. iii. 3.
[92] Persaeus _ap._ Athen. 140 f.
[93] Dicaearchus _ap._ Athen. 141 a.
[94] Sphaerus _ap._ Athen. 141 c, d.; and Molpis, _ibid._
[95] Polemon _ap._ Athen. 56 a, and 138-139.
[96] Cp. the crèche temples in Plato’s _Laws_, 794 A.
[97] Demetrius of Scepsis (_ap._ Athen. 141 e).
CHAPTER II
ATHENS AND THE REST OF HELLAS: GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Laconia and Crete were mainly agricultural countries that had little
concern with trade or manufactures. Their citizens comprised a landed
aristocracy, supported by estates which were cultivated for them by a
subject population; there was no necessity, therefore, for them to
prepare their boys for any profession or trade, or even to instruct
them in the principles of agriculture. The young Spartan or Cretan no
more needed professional or technical instruction of any sort than the
richer absentee Irish landlords of the present day. He could give the
whole of his school-time, without any sacrifice of his financial
prospects, to the training of his body and of his character.
But the rest of Hellas was for the most part the scene of busy
manufactures and extensive trade. It would be natural to expect that
great commercial peoples, like the Athenians or the Ionians of Asia
Minor, would have set great store by the commercial elements of
education, and to assume that business methods and utilitarian
branches of study would have occupied a large place in their schools.
But this was very far from being the case. To a Hellene education
meant the training of character and taste, and the symmetrical
development of body, mind, and imagination. He would not have included
under so honourable a name either any course of instruction in which
the pupils mastered their future trade or profession, or any
accumulation of knowledge undertaken with the object of making
money. Consequently technical training of all sorts was excluded
from Hellenic schools and passed over in silence by Hellenic
educationalists. Information concerning it must be pieced together
from stray facts and casual allusions, and the whole idea of
“utilitarian” instruction, in the modern sense of the word, must be
carefully put aside during any consideration of Hellenic schools.
For the Hellenes as a nation regarded all forms of handicraft as
_bourgeois_ (βάναυσος [banausos]) and contemptible. Herodotos says
that they derived this view from the surrounding peoples, who all held
it.[98] To do anything in order to extract money from some one else
was, in their opinion, vulgar and ungentlemanly. The lyric poets and
the Sophists were alike blamed for taking fees. The cheapness and
abundance of serf- or slave-labour made it possible for a large
proportion of the free population to live in idleness, and devote
their time to the development of the body by physical exercises, of
the mind by perpetual discussions, and of the imagination by art and
music. Citizenship required leisure, in the days before representative
government came into vogue. It was owing to this principle that the
Athenian received pay for a day’s attendance in the Law Courts or the
Assembly, for by this means the poorest citizen obtained an artificial
leisure for the performance of his duties. Otherwise true citizenship
was impossible. Plato regards a tradesman as unfit to be an acting
citizen.[99] Aristotle rejects as unworthy of a free man all trades
which interfere with bodily development or take time which ought to be
devoted to mental improvement.[100] Xenophon explains the reason of
this attitude. The discredit which attaches to the _bourgeois_
occupations is quite natural; for they ruin the physical condition of
those who practise them, compelling them to sit down and live in the
shade, and in some cases to spend their day by the fire. The body thus
becomes effeminate, and the character is weakened at the same time.
Tradesmen, too, have less leisure for serving their friends and the
State. In some communities, especially the most warlike, the citizens
are not allowed to practise sedentary trades.[101] The owner of a
factory or a farm worked by slave-labour was exempt from corrupting
influences: it was only actual work which was degrading.
A large number, however, from among the poorer classes were compelled
to work with their own hands; so these, as well as the slaves,
required technical instruction. Some indications survive as to the
manner in which this was imparted. Trades were mostly hereditary; “the
sons of the craftsmen learn their fathers’ trade, so far as their
fathers and their friends of the same trade can teach it.”[102] But
others might also learn. Xenophon mentions such cases. “When you
apprentice a boy to a trade,” he says, “you draw up a statement of
what you mean him to be taught,”[103] and the fees were not paid
unless this agreement was carried out. The _Kleitophon_[104] mentions
as the two functions of the builder or the doctor the practising of
their profession and the teaching of pupils. The _Republic_[105] says:
“If owing to poverty a craftsman is unable to provide the books and
other requisites of his calling, his work will suffer, and his sons
and any others whom he may be teaching will not learn their trade so
well.” The teaching of building is mentioned in the _Gorgias_.[106] In
the _Republic_[107] Plato states that the παῖδες [paides] of the
potters――a word which will include both sons and apprentices――act as
servants and look on for a long time before they are allowed to try
their hands themselves at making pots. “To learn pot-making on a
wine-jar” was a proverb for beginning with the most difficult part of
a subject. The pupils of a doctor named Pittalos are mentioned in the
_Acharnians_ of Aristophanes.[108] The comic poets of the early third
century contain several references to cookery-schools. Sosipater makes
one cook say that his pupils must learn astrology, architecture, and
strategy before they come to him, just as Plato had exacted a
preliminary knowledge of mathematics from his disciples. Euphron gives
ten months as the minimum length of a course of cookery. Aristotle
mentions a man at Syracuse who taught slaves how to wait at table, and
perform their household duties: perhaps the play of Pherekrates[109]
entitled _The Slave-Teacher_ may have dealt with a similar case. From
these fragments a picture can be drawn of a regular system of
apprenticeship by which the knowledge of the trades was handed down.
Solon, wishing to encourage Athenian manufactures, had enacted that if
a father did not have his son taught some trade, he could not legally
demand to be supported in his old age.[110] But the general opinion of
Hellas still maintained that “technical instruction and all teaching
which aimed only at money-making was vulgar and did not deserve the
name of education. True education aimed solely at virtue, making the
child yearn to be a good citizen, skilled to rule and to obey.”[111]
For all the gold on the earth and under it, according to Plato, could
not pay the price of virtue, or deserve to be given in exchange for a
man’s soul. Thus the Spartans and Cretans did not stand alone, but had
the support of all Hellas, in banishing from their schools any idea of
technical or professional instruction.
* * * * *
But in one notable point their idea of education differed from that
which was prevalent in most of the Hellenic States. The regular course
of education in Athens and in most Hellenic States was for boys
alone: no girls need apply. The women lived in almost Oriental
seclusion;[112] the duty of an Athenian mother was, according to
Perikles,[113] to live so retired a life that her name should never be
mentioned among the men either for praise or blame. Listen to the
description which an Athenian country gentleman gives of his
wife.[114] “What was she likely to know when I married her? Why, she
was not yet fifteen when I introduced her to my house, and she had
been brought up always under the strictest supervision; as far as
could be managed, she had not been allowed to see anything, hear
anything, or ask any questions. Don’t you think that it was all that
could be expected of her, if she knew how to take raw wool and make it
into a cloak, and had seen how wool-work is served out to
handmaidens?” Sokrates, however, to whom this question is addressed,
seems to think that she might have learnt “from her father and mother
the duties which would belong to her in after life.” These, however,
in this case her husband had to teach her. He explains to her that she
must see that everything has a place to itself and is always put
there; she must also give out the stores, teach the slaves their
duties and nurse them when they are ill, and tend the young children.
The summary of the explanation is that Heaven has appointed a fair
division of labour between husband and wife: the wife manages
everything indoors and the husband everything out of doors. A
stay-at-home husband or a gad-about wife equally offend against
respectability. As a rule, apparently, the women simply sat in the
house, “like slaves,” as it seemed to the ordinary athletic Hellene.
Xenophon’s model husband suggests that his wife should take exercise
by walking about the house to see how the supplies were given out, to
inspect the arrangements of the cupboards, and to watch the washing
and the wringing-out of the clothes: this exercise will give her
health and an appetite. But Xenophon was an admirer of Spartan customs
and the athletic Spartan women: probably these ideas would not have
occurred to the ordinary Athenian husband.
Another picture may be quoted from Hellenic literature to show the
extent of education which an ordinary woman received.[115] A certain
Aristarchos comes to Sokrates in great distress. A number of female
relatives, quite destitute, have been thrown upon his hands owing to
various circumstances, and he must support them; but he has not the
requisite means. Sokrates naturally suggests that he should make them
work for their living. But they do not know how to, says Aristarchos.
However, by dint of questioning, Sokrates elicits the fact that they
can make men’s and women’s garments, and also pastry and bread. These,
then, were apparently the accomplishments which an ordinary girl in
Hellas, brought up without any idea of having to earn her own living,
would acquire. Plato also mentions weaving and cooking as the
provinces in which women excel,[116] and describes the women of Attika
as “living indoors, managing the household and superintending the loom
and wool-work generally.”[117]
Thus the Athenian girl spent her time indoors, learning to be a
regular “Hausfrau,” skilled in weaving, cooking, and household
management. She had her special maid to wait on her,[118] as her
brothers had their paidagogos. She would, as a rule, be married young,
and would naturally be very shy after such an upbringing; the marriage
was arranged between the bridegroom and the parents, and, owing to the
seclusion of the women at Athens, love-matches were well-nigh
impossible. The match was mainly a question of the dowry.
Xenophon[119] gives a vivid picture of one of these girl-wives
gradually “growing accustomed to her husband and becoming sufficiently
tame to hold conversation with him.” To keep their beauty under such
conditions they employed rouge and white, and high-heeled shoes. Such
mothers would be quite incapable of giving any literary or musical
education to their children; hence the boys went away to school as
soon as possible. Their school-life usually began when they were about
six years old, the exact age being left to the parents’ choice.[120]
Before this, they learnt in the nursery the various current fables and
ballads, and the national mythology.[121] “As soon as the child
understands what is said, the nurse and the mother and the paidogogos,
yes, and the father himself, strive with one another in improving its
character, in every word and deed showing it what is just and what is
unjust, what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is holy and what is
unholy. It is always ‘Do this’ and ‘Don’t do that.’ If a child is
disobedient, it is corrected with threats and blows.”[122] Besides
this purely moral training there might, no doubt, be a certain amount
of technical or of literary instruction at home,[123] and bits of
poetry might be learnt. Up to this age boys and girls lived together.
The sons of rich parents apparently went to school earliest: their
poorer fellow-citizens went later.[124] This was natural. The poor
could not keep their sons at school for a long time, for they wanted
their services in the shop or on the farm, and the fees were a burden:
so they did not send them till they were old enough to pick up
instruction quickly. The rich, on the other hand, to whom money was no
object, sent their boys to school at an early age, when they could do
little more than look on, while their elders worked. Aristotle
commends this custom, and imposes two years of such “playing at
school” upon the boys of his ideal State.[125]
The ordinary system of primary education at Athens consisted of three
parts, presided over respectively by the “grammatistes,”
“kitharistes,” and “paidotribes.”[126] The grammatistes taught
reading, writing, and some arithmetic, and made his pupils read and
learn by heart the great poets, Homer and Hesiod and others. The
kitharistes taught the boys how to play the seven-stringed lyre and
sing to it the works of the lyric poets, which they would incidentally
have to learn. The paidotribes presided over their physical
development in a scientific way; he taught them wrestling, boxing, the
pankration, running, jumping, throwing the diskos and javelin, and
various other exercises; his school-room was the palaistra. To this
triple system some boys added drawing and painting;[127] but this
subject seems to have been an extra till late in the fourth century.
Literature, music, and athletics composed the ordinary course at
Athens.
Which of the three branches of education began first? Probably they
were all taught simultaneously. The order in which they are usually
mentioned does not point to a fixed sequence. Letters were naturally
mentioned first, because all citizens alike learned this subject.
Gymnastics were put last, because, owing to the public gymnasia, these
exercises were carried on long after the other schooling had ceased.
Moreover, most of the recognised exercises of the palaistra were not
taught to small boys; from the nature of the exercises and from the
pictures on the vases it may be deduced that the average boy did not
learn them till his twelfth year at the earliest. But physical
training of an easier sort of course commenced much earlier, and boys
seem to have attended a palaistra from their sixth year onwards to
receive it. Both Plato and Aristotle demand that it should begin
several years before any intellectual instruction; and Plato, making
athletics such as shooting and riding begin at six, defers letters
till ten and lyre-playing till thirteen. Gymnastics would naturally
occupy a part of the day for a healthy young Hellene during the whole
time from his sixth year till manhood. It is thus that the _Charmides_
mentions “quite tiny boys” as present in the palaistra, as well as
older lads and young men.
Lyre-playing may have been deferred, as a harder subject, till the boy
had learned letters for several years; but the seven-stringed lyre,
with the simple old Hellenic music, was probably not a very difficult
instrument to master. The chief factor which determined the
arrangement of subjects in an ordinary family was no doubt the
paidagogos. If there was only one son, he could go to whatever school
his parents pleased; but if there were several, elders and youngers
had all to go to the same school at the same time, for there was only
one paidagogos to a whole family as a rule, and he could never allow
any of his charges to go out of his sight.
That the three subjects were usually taught simultaneously may be
inferred from a passage of Xenophon. “In every part of Hellas except
Sparta,” he says, “those who claim to give their sons the best
education, as soon as ever the child understands what is said to him,
at once make one of their servants his paidagogos, and at once send
him off to school to learn letters and music and the exercises of the
Palaistra.”[128] The emphasis upon the word “at once” certainly
implies that the three subjects began simultaneously.
On the vases letters and music are seen being taught side by side in
the same school; this was a convenient and natural arrangement.
Writing-tablets and rulers are also seen suspended on the walls
of music-schools and palaistrai, and lyres on the walls of
letter-schools[129]; which suggests that the boys went from one
building to another in the day, taking their property with them. Plato
states that three years apiece was a reasonable time for learning
letters and the lyre.[130] The eight years between six and fourteen,
the ordinary time devoted at Athens in the fourth century to the
primary triple course, would give space for these six years, with two
years to spare for elaboration. Gymnastics are meant to go on during
the whole period in Plato, and so do not require a special allowance
of time to themselves.
This system of primary education at Athens may reasonably be traced
back to the beginning of the sixth century. Solon is credited with a
regulation which made letters compulsory, and with certain moral
enactments dealing with existing schools and palaistrai. The
much-disputed popularisation of Homer at Athens by Peisistratos was
probably connected with the growth of the Schools of Letters. Of the
existence of music-schools at this date there is evidence from a
sixth-century vase in the British Museum,[131] which represents a
youth amusing himself with a dog, behind a seated man who is playing a
lyre. This might not seem very conclusive in itself; but now compare
it with the two “amphorai” of the fifth century,[132] which
undoubtedly represent scenes in a music-school. The situation is
almost identical; each alike shows the boy playing with the animal
behind his master’s chair. Curiously enough, all three vases come from
Kameiros in Rhodes, although they are of Athenian manufacture. Thus
the music-school may also be traced back well into the sixth century,
in company with the school of letters and the palaistra; and the
antiquity of the system of Primary Education is thus established.
[Illustration: PLATE I. A.
THE FLUTE LESSON, THE WRITING LESSON (ABOVE A WRITING-ROLL, A FOLDED
TABLET, A RULING SQUARE, ETC.)
From the Kulix of Douris, now at Berlin (No. 2285).
_Monumenti dell’ Instituto_, ix. Plate 54.]
[Illustration: PLATE I. B.
THE LYRE LESSON, AND THE POETRY LESSON (ABOVE IS AN ORNAMENTAL
MANUSCRIPT BASKET)
From a Kulix by Douris, now in Berlin (No. 2285).
_Monumenti dell’ Instituto_, ix. Plate 54.]
In earlier days this primary course had no doubt sometimes lasted till
the boy was eighteen: but towards the end of the fifth century a
secondary stage of education arose, occupying the years immediately
preceding eighteen. This secondary stage is recognised in the
pseudo-Platonic _Axiochos_ and in the fragment of Teles quoted by
Stobaeus. More important evidence is supplied by Plato. In the
_Republic_ he assigns an elaborate system of mathematics to the age
just before ἐφηβεία [ephêbeia], which he sets at seventeen or
eighteen, the natural age varying with the individual, while the legal
age remained fixed.
When did this Secondary Education begin? Aristotle, counting back from
ἐφηβεία [ephêbeia], assigns three years to it.[133] He has just
commended the arrangement of education, not on hard and fast lines,
but in accordance with the natural growth of the individual: so he
must mean his ἐφηβεία [ephêbeia] to vary from seventeen to
eighteen.[134] Thus he puts the beginning of secondary education at
fourteen or fifteen, the average age of ἥβη [hêbê] in Hellas, as in
Rome. From ἥβη [hêbê] till twenty-one the young Athenian was a
μειράκιον [meirakion]. Thus in point of age the παῖς [pais] of the
primary schools corresponds to the Roman “impubes,” and the μειράκιον
[meirakion] to the “adolescens”; but μειράκιον [meirakion] and παῖς
[pais] are used very loosely, and the former word is often replaced by
νεανίσκος [neaniskos]. We shall, as a rule, call the pupils of the
primary schools boys, and those of the secondary lads.
Fourteen did not, however, represent an exact point at which it was
compulsory to leave the primary school. Sons of the poor left earlier;
rich or unoccupied Athenians might remain later: Sokrates even
attended a lyre-school among the boys when he was middle-aged. The
primary schoolmasters started advanced classes in astronomy and
mathematics to suit elder pupils.[135] In the palaistrai there were
separate classes of boys and lads, who were only supposed to meet on
feast-days;[136] in the _Charmides_, however, grown men, lads, boys,
and quite tiny boys are all exercising together.
Many lads, especially in earlier times, did not attend the schools at
all, but gave their time to gymnastics and whatever else they
pleased.[137] Xenophon relates this as one of the demerits of the
Athenian system.[138]
The mental attainments of a lad who is apparently but little over
fourteen are sketched in Plato’s _Lusis_. The lad Lusis knows how to
read and write, and how to string and play the lyre. He recognises a
quotation from Homer, and has even come across the “prose treatises of
the very wise, who say that like must always be friendly to like;
these are the men who reason and write about the Universe and
Nature.”[139]
This secondary education, beginning soon after fourteen, was only for
the rich: the poor could not afford to keep their sons away from the
farm or trade any longer. It might be scattered over the whole of the
next six or seven years; but there was a serious interruption, which
usually terminated it. At eighteen the young Athenian became in the
eye of the law an ephebos and was called out to undergo two years of
military training. During this period of conscription it was no doubt
possible, especially in the laxer days of the fourth century, to do
some intellectual work; but Plato is probably only accepting the usual
custom when he frees the epheboi of his State from all mental studies
and makes them give their whole energies to military and gymnastic
training. And when the ephebos returned to civil life, he was a full
citizen and was hardly likely to return to school; he might attend an
occasional lecture or so, but that was all.
Thus secondary education usually occupied the years between fourteen
and eighteen, although the latter limit was in no way definitely
fixed, and the same subjects might be studied at any age. In earlier
days no doubt lads spent their time in continuing their musical
studies: primary education could be conducted in a more leisurely
fashion when there was still little to be learnt, and the lyre may
have been deferred till this age, as Plato in similar circumstances
defers it in the _Laws_. But in the days of Perikles knowledge began
to increase and boys had more to learn. So the lyre was crowded into
the first period of education, and a new series of secondary subjects
arose. It was these years which were usually devoted to the four
years’ course which was customary in the school of Isokrates. Before
this date the time was, as a rule, spent in attending the lectures of
the wandering Sophists or in picking up a smattering of philosophy.
Among the subjects which thus formed a part of secondary education
were mathematics of various kinds, more advanced literary criticism, a
certain amount of natural history and science, a knowledge of the laws
and constitution of Athens, a small quantity of philosophy, ethical,
political, and metaphysical, and above all, rhetoric. Plato in his
_Republic_, developing this Athenian system of secondary education,
assigns to the years immediately preceding eighteen the theory of
numbers, geometry, plane and solid, kinetics and harmonics, and
expressly excludes dialectic as more suitable to a later age;[140] in
the _Laws_, prescribing for the whole population, not for a few
selected intellects, he orders practical arithmetic, geometry,
and enough astronomy to make the calendar intelligible. The
pseudo-Platonic _Axiochos_[141] ascribes to Prodikos the statement
that “when a child grows older, he endures the tyranny of
mathematicians, teachers of tactics, and ‘critics.’” These last are
the professors of that curious criticism of poetry which is found, for
instance, in the _Protagoras_ as a subject of the lectures of that
Sophist as well as of Hippias.
At eighteen the young Athenian partially came of age. He then had to
submit to a two years’ course of military training, of which the first
year was spent in Athens and the second in the frontier forts and in
camp. During this period he probably had little time for intellectual
occupations. But when the military power of Athens collapsed under the
Macedonian dominion, the military duties of the epheboi became
voluntary, and their training was replaced by regular courses of
philosophy and literature. The military system became a University,
attended by a few young men of wealth and position and a good many
foreigners. As the forerunner of the first University, the two years’
training of the epheboi may fitly receive the name of Tertiary
Education, in spite of the fact that till the third century it
involved only military instruction.
Thus we have Athenian education divided into three stages: Primary
from six to fourteen, Secondary from fourteen to eighteen, and
Tertiary from eighteen to twenty; while gymnastic training extended
over the whole period.
* * * * *
Of these three stages the third alone was compulsory and provided by
the State. The second was entirely voluntary, and only the richest and
most leisured boys applied themselves to it. Gymnastics of some sort
were rendered almost obligatory by the liability of every citizen to
military and naval service at a moment’s notice; but they needed
little encouragement. Of the primary subjects, letters were probably
compulsory by law, and music was almost invariably taught. An old law,
ascribed to Solon,[142] enacted that every boy should learn swimming
and his letters; after which, the poorer might turn their attention to
trade or farming, while the richer passed on to learn music, riding,
gymnastics, hunting, and philosophy. In the _Kriton_ of Plato the
personified Laws of Athens, recounting to Sokrates the many services
which they had done him, mention that they had “charged his father to
educate him in Music and Letters.”[143] But the Laws in Hellas include
the customs, as well as the constitution, of a State. It was certainly
customary for nearly every citizen at Athens to learn some music; but
it was not compulsory. We meet no Athenian in literature who is
ignorant of his letters; we meet several who know no music. In
Aristophanes, Demosthenes and Nikias are on the lookout for the most
vulgar and low-class man in Athens, in order that he may oust Kleon
from popular favour, by outdoing him in vulgarity. They find a
sausage-seller. But even this man knows his letters, though not very
well.[144] Of music, however, he is ignorant, and he has never
attended the lessons of a paidotribes,[145] though Kleon seems to
expect him to have done so. Kleon, who is represented as an utter
boor, is yet said to have attended a lyre-school.[146] In the
_Theages_[147] literature and lyre-playing and athletics are mentioned
as the ordinary education of a gentleman. In fiercely democratic
Athens every parent was eager to bring up his sons as gentlemen, and
no doubt sent them through the whole course if he could possibly
afford it. But the State attitude towards education, as distinct from
the voluntary customs of the citizens, may be summarised in the words
of Sokrates to Alkibiades: “No one, so to speak, cares a straw how you
or any other Athenian is brought up.”[148]
The schoolmasters opened their schools as private enterprises, fixing
for themselves the fees and the subjects taught. The parents chose
what they thought a suitable school, according to their means and the
subjects which they wished their sons to learn. Thus Sokrates says to
his eldest son, Lamprokles,[149] “When boys seem old enough to learn
anything, their parents teach them whatever they themselves know that
is likely to be useful to them; subjects which they think others
better qualified to teach they send them to school to learn, spending
money upon this object.” This suggests that the poor may frequently
have passed on their own knowledge of letters to their sons without
the expense of a school. But all this was a private transaction
between parent and teacher. The State interfered with the matter only
so far as to impose certain moral regulations on the schools and the
gymnasia, to fix the hours of opening and closing, and so forth, and
to suggest that every boy should be taught his letters.
The teaching of the elementary stages of Letters, that is, the three
R’s, was, as will be shown later on, cheaply obtained, and was within
the reach of the poorest. Music and athletics would naturally be more
expensive, for they required much greater study and talents upon the
part of their teachers. The State did take some steps to make these
branches of education cheaper, and so throw them open to a larger
number.
Gymnasia and palaistrai were built at public expense,[150] that any
one might go and exercise himself without charge. These buildings were
also open to spectators, so that any one could acquire at any rate a
rudimentary knowledge of boxing, wrestling, and the other branches of
athletics, by watching his more proficient fellow-citizens practising
them. The epheboi received instruction in athletic exercises at the
cost of the State. But the children, so far as they received physical
training in schools, must have received it in private palaistrai;
their lessons are described as taking place “in the house of the
paidotribes,” ἐν παιδοτρίβου [en paidotribou]――an idiom which always
implies ownership or special rights; and the majority of palaistrai
were private buildings, called by their owners’ names. Thus we hear of
the palaistrai of Siburtios, of Taureas,[151] and so forth: Siburtios
and Taureas were no doubt the paidotribai who taught there. In a later
age, when the boys of different palaistrai ran torch races against one
another, the palaistra of Timeas is victorious on two occasions, that
of Antigenes once.[152]
By the system of leitourgiai rich citizens were made chargeable for
the expenses of the epheboi of their tribe who were training for the
torch races. These races seem to have been the only branch of
athletics which was thus endowed; however, they were numerous, even in
the smaller country districts, so that many epheboi must have profited
by this free training.[153] “Leitourgiai” also provided free
instruction in chorus-dancing (which included singing as well as
dancing) for such boys as were selected for competition. The rich
“choregos” appointed for the year had to produce a chorus of boys
belonging to his tribe for some festival, paying all the expenses of
teaching and training them himself.[154] It is to this free school
that the Solonic law refers when it mentions the “joint attendance of
the boys and the dithyrambic choruses”; for it goes on to state that
the ordinance with regard to this matter was that the “choregos”
should be over forty.[155] In Demosthenes,[156] a certain Mantitheos,
who had not been acknowledged by his father at the usual time,
“attended school among the boys of the Hippothontid tribe to learn
chorus-dancing”: had he been acknowledged, he would have gone to the
Acamantid, his father’s tribe. No doubt, if the choregos was keen
about gaining a victory, he would give a trial to more than the fifty
boys required for a dithyrambic contest. In any case, provided that
all the tribes competed, this one contest (and there were several in
the course of a year) gave a free education to 500 boys. Xenophon
notices that it was the “demos,” the poor majority, who mainly got the
advantage of free training under gumnasiarchoi and choregoi:[157] the
rich naturally preferred to send their boys to more select
schools.[158]
Thus the more elementary stages of letters alone were compulsory at
Athens, but music and gymnastics were almost universally taught, and
the cost of instruction in these subjects was reduced in various ways
by State action: the greater part might be learned for nothing. But
parents needed little compulsion or encouragement to get their
children taught. So much did the Hellenes regard education as a
necessity for their boys, that when the Athenians were driven from
their homes by Xerxes, and their women and children crossed over to
Troizen, the hospitable Troizenians provided their guests with
schoolmasters, so that not even in such a crisis might the boys be
forced to take a holiday.[159] And when Mitulene wished to punish her
revolted allies in the most severe way possible, she prevented them
from teaching their children letters and music.[160]
Of State action with regard to education in Hellas elsewhere than in
Sparta, Crete, and Athens, little is known. But the Chalcidian cities
in Sicily and Italy are said to have provided literary education at
public expense and under public supervision.[161] The law enacting
this is ascribed to the great lawgiver, Charondas, and, although he is
a somewhat shadowy figure,[162] there must have been some foundation
for the story, at any rate at a later date. During the Macedonian
period kings and other rich men often bequeathed large sums of money
to their favourite cities, in order to endow the educational system.
We hear of this happening in Teos and at Delphi: in these places the
parents, if they paid any fees at all, cannot have paid much. But
there is no authority for any such endowments during the period which
we are considering.
* * * * *
But if education was neither enforced nor assisted to any considerable
degree by the State, it was certainly encouraged by the prizes which
were offered. Every city, and probably most villages, had local
competitions annually, and in many cases more frequently still, in
which some of the “events” were reserved for citizens, while others
were open to all comers. There were separate prizes for different
ages; the ordinary division was into boys and grown men, an
intermediate class of “the beardless” being sometimes added. But in
some Attic inscriptions the boys are divided into three groups, and in
Chios the epheboi were so distributed.
These competitions were no doubt largely athletic. But music was
usually provided for as well, and in many places there were literary
competitions also. At Athens the different φρατρίαι [phratriai] seem
to have offered prizes annually on the Koureotis day of the Apatouria
to the boys who recited best, the piece for recitation being chosen by
each competitor. Kritias took part in the competition when ten years
old.[163] From Teos we have a list of prizemen, belonging, it is true,
to a later date; but it may be quoted, to give some idea of what the
subjects might be.[164]
_Senior Class_ (_by age_).
For rhapsody, Zoïlos, son of Zoïlos.
For reading, Zoïlos, son of Zoïlos.
_Middle Class._
For rhapsody, Metrodoros, son of Attalos.
For reading, Dionusikles, son of Metrodoros.
For general knowledge, Athenaios, son of Apollodoros.
For painting, Dionusios, son of Dionusios.
_Junior Class._
For rhapsody, Herakles.
For reading.
For caligraphy.
For torch race.
For playing lyre with fingers.
For playing lyre with plektron.
For singing to lyre.
For reciting tragic verse (tragedy).
For reciting comedy.
For reciting lyric verse.
From Chios we have the following[165]:――
When Hermesileos, Dinos, and Nikias were gumnasiarchoi, the
following boys and epheboi were victorious in the competitions
and offered libations to the Muses and Herakles from the
sums which were given to them in accordance with the decree
of the people, when Lusias was taster of the offerings:――
For reading, Agathokles.
For rhapsody, Miltiades.
For playing lyre with fingers, Xenon.
For playing lyre, Kleoites.
_Long Distance Race_ (varied from 2¼ miles to about ¾ mile).
Boys Asklepiades.
Junior epheboi Dionusios.
Middle ” Timokles.
Senior ” Moschion.
Men ” Aischrion.
_Stadion_ (200 yards).
Boys _Athenikon_.
Junior epheboi Hestiaios.
Middle ” _Apollonios_.
Senior ” Artemon.
Men ” Metrodoros.
_Diaulos_ (400 yards).
Boys _Athenikon_.
Junior epheboi Hubristos.
Middle ” Melantes.
Senior ” _Apollonios_.
Men ” Menis.
(Apollonios seems to have been so
good that, though a middle ephebos,
he competed in and won the
senior ephebos’ race here, unless
there were two boys of the same
name.)
_Wrestling._
Boys _Athenikon_.
Junior epheboi Demetrios.
Middle ” Moschos.
Senior ” Theodotos.
Men ” Apellas.
_Boxing._
Boys Herakleides.
(The rest is wanting.)
(Notice the three victories of the boy Athenikon.)
At Thespiai in Boiotia[166] there were prizes for senior and junior
boys in the various races, and in boxing, wrestling, pankration, and
pentathlon, besides open prizes for poetry and music of all kinds.
Attic inscriptions arrange the events thus[167]:――
_Stadion._
Junior Boys.
Middle Boys.
Senior Boys.
Boys Open.
Men.
_Diaulos._
Junior Boys.
Middle Boys.
Senior Boys.
Boys Open.
Men.
_Fighting in Heavy Arms._
Junior Boys.
Middle Boys.
Senior Boys.
Epheboi.
The Olympian and Pythian festivals, however, had only a single series
of contests for boys:――
_Olympia._
Boys. Stadion (Pind. _Ol._ xiv.).
Boxing (Pind. _Ol._ x., xi.).
Wrestling (Pind. _Ol._ viii.).
(only in 628 B.C.) Pentathlon.
(not till 200 B.C.) Pankration.
_Pythia._
Boys. Long Distance Race.
Diaulos (400 yards) (Pind. _Puth_. x.).
Stadion (200 yards) (Pind. _Puth._ xi.).
Boxing.
Wrestling (Bacchul. xi.).
Pankration (not till 346 B.C.).
But at Nemea both pentathlon[168] and pankration[169] for boys had
already been established by Pindar’s time, as well as the more usual
contests.[170]
How far individual schoolmasters, as distinct from the State, gave
prizes to their pupils, is little known; an epigram in the _Anthology_
supplies the only evidence, by narrating that “Konnaros received
eighty knucklebones because he wrote beautifully, better than the
other boys.”[171] But probably as a general rule the task of rewarding
merit was left to the public contests.
* * * * *
Thus the State did much to encourage, if it did little to assist or
enforce, education. With such splendid rewards before them, boys were
probably quite eager to attend school, or at any rate the palaistra.
As soon as they were old enough to go to school,[172] they were
entrusted to an elderly slave,[173] who had to follow his master’s
boys about wherever they went and never let them go out of his
sight.[174] This was the paidagogos――a mixture of nurse, footman,
chaperon, and tutor――who is so prominent a figure on the vases and in
the literature of classical Hellas. There was only one for the family,
so that all the boys had to go about together and to attend the same
schools and the same palaistrai at the same time.[175] He waited on
them in the house, carried their books or lyres to school, sat and
watched them in the schoolroom, and kept a strict eye upon their
manners and morality in the streets and the gymnasia. Thus, for
instance, in Plato, Lusis and Menexenos have their paidagogoi in
attendance at the palaistra, who come and force them away from the
absorbing conversation of Sokrates, when it is time for them to go
home.[176] On a vase these attendants may be seen sitting on stools
behind their charges, in the schools of letters and music, with long
and suggestive canes in their hands.[177] A careful parent would, of
course, see that a slave who was to occupy so responsible a position
was worthy of it: but great carelessness seems often to have been
shown in this matter. The paidagogoi of Lusis and Menexenos, boys of
rank and position, had a bad accent, and on a festival day, it is
true, were slightly intoxicated.[178] Plutarch notices that in his
time parents often selected for this office slaves who were of no use
for any other purpose.[179] Xenophon, feeling the demerits of the
Athenian custom, commends the Spartans, who entrust the boys not to
slaves, but to public officials of the highest rank.[180] But in
well-regulated households the paidagogos was often a most worthy and
valuable servant. Sikinnos, who attended the children of Themistokles
in this capacity, was entrusted by his master with the famous message
to Xerxes, which brought on the battle of Salamis; he was afterwards
rewarded with his freedom, the citizenship of Thespiai, and a
substantial sum of money.[181] The custom of employing these
male-nurses dated back to early times at Athens: for Solon made
regulations about them.[182]
Boys were entrusted to paidagogoi as soon as they went to school at
six. This tutelage might last till the boy was eighteen[183] and came
of age; but more frequently it stopped earlier. Xenophon,[184] in his
wish to disparage everything not Spartan, declares that in all other
States the boys were set free from paidagogoi and schoolmasters as
soon as they became μειράκια [meirakia], _i.e._ at about fourteen or
fifteen. The conjunction of schoolmasters suggests the explanation of
the variations in age. When an elder brother ceased to attend school,
and his younger brothers were still pursuing their studies, there
being only one paidagogos, he had to be left unattended. But in cases
where there was only one son, or where the eldest of several stayed on
at school until he came of age, he would have the paidagogos to attend
him until he was his own master.
The life of such an attendant must have been an anxious one in many
cases. Plato compares his relations towards his charges with the
relations of an invalid towards his health: “He has to follow the
disease wherever it leads, being unable to cure it, and he spends his
life in perpetual anxiety with no time for anything else.”[185] With
unruly boys of different ages, and consequently of different tastes
and desires, the slave must have been often in a difficult position.
He had, however, the right of inflicting corporal punishment.
The chief object of the paidagogos was to safeguard the morals of his
charges. Boys were expected to be as modest and quiet in their whole
behaviour, and as carefully chaperoned, as young girls. Parents told
the schoolmasters to bestow much more attention upon the boy’s
behaviour than upon his letters and music.[186] This attitude was
characteristic of Athens from the first. The school laws of Solon, as
quoted by Aischines, deal wholly with morality. He gives the following
account of them[187]:――
“The old lawgivers stated expressly what sort of life the
free boy ought to lead and how he ought to be brought up;
they also dealt with the manners of lads and men of other
ages.” “In the case of the schoolmasters, to whom we are
compelled to entrust our children, although their livelihood
depends upon their good character, and bad behaviour is
ruinous to them, yet the lawgiver obviously distrusts them.
For he expressly states, first, the hour at which the free
boy ought to go to school; secondly, how many other boys are
to be present in the school; and then at what hour he is to
leave. He forbids the schoolmasters to open their schools
and the paidotribai their palaistrai before sunrise, and
orders them to close before sunset, being very suspicious of
the empty streets and of the darkness. Then he dealt with
the boys who attended schools, as to who they should be and
of what ages; and with the official who is to oversee these
matters. He dealt too with the regulation of the paidagogoi,
and with the festival of the Muses in the schools and of
Hermes in the palaistrai. Finally, he laid down regulations
about the joint attendance of the boys and the round of
dithyrambic dances; for he directed that the Choregos should
be over forty.”
“No one over the age of boyhood might enter while the boys
were in school, except the son, brother, or son-in-law of
the master: the penalty of infringing this regulation was
death. At the festival of Hermes the person in charge of the
gymnasium[188] was not to allow any one over age to
accompany the boys in any way: unless he excluded such
persons from the gymnasium, he was to come under the law of
corrupting free boys.”
It will be noticed that these regulations are entirely concerned with
morality: they safeguard an existing system. They prescribe neither
the methods nor the subjects of education; for with such matters the
Athenian government did not interfere. But over the question of morals
it becomes unexpectedly tyrannous, and makes the most minute
regulations worthy of the strictest bureaucracy. It interfered on this
point in other ways also. The solemn council on the Areiopagos had a
special supervision over the young, from Solon’s time onward; this was
partially taken away from it by Ephialtes and Perikles, but the
_Axiochos_ shows that, though in abeyance, it continued to exist; in
the middle of the fourth century, however, Isokrates laments that it
had fallen into disuse.