The Great Educators
Edited by NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER
ARISTOTLE
AND
ANCIENT EDUCATIONAL IDEALS
BY
THOMAS DAVIDSON
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1892
COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
PREFACE
In undertaking to treat of Aristotle as the expounder of ancient
educational ideas, I might, with Kapp's _Aristoteles' Staatspaedagogik_
before me, have made my task an easy one. I might simply have presented
in an orderly way and with a little commentary, what is to be found on
the subject of education in his various works--Politics, Ethics,
Rhetoric, Poetics, etc. I had two reasons, however, for not adopting
this course: (1) that this work had been done, better than I could do
it, in the treatise referred to, and (2) that a mere restatement of what
Aristotle says on education would hardly have shown his relation to
ancient pedagogy as a whole. I therefore judged it better, by tracing
briefly the whole history of Greek education up to Aristotle and down
from Aristotle, to show the past which conditioned his theories and the
future which was conditioned by them. Only thus, it seemed to me, could
his teachings be seen in their proper light. And I have found that this
method has many advantages, of which I may mention one. It has enabled
me to show the close connection that existed at all times between Greek
education and Greek social and political life, and to present the one
as the reflection of the other. And this is no small advantage, since it
is just from its relation to the whole of life that Greek education
derives its chief interest for us. We can never, indeed, return to the
purely political education of the Greeks; they themselves had to abandon
that, and, since then,
A boundless hope has passed across the earth--
a hope which gives our education a meaning and a scope far wider than
any that the State aims at; but in these days, when the State and the
institution which embodies that hope are contending for the right to
educate, it cannot but aid us in settling their respective claims, to
follow the process by which they came to have distinct claims at all,
and to see just what these mean. This process, the method which I have
followed has, I hope, enabled me, in some degree, to bring into
clearness. This, at all events, has been one of my chief aims.
In treating of the details of Greek educational practice, I have been
guided by a desire to present only, or mainly, those which contribute to
make up the complete picture. For this reason I have omitted all
reference to the training for the Olympic and other games, this (so it
seems to me) being no essential part of the system.
It would have been easy for me to give my book a learned appearance, by
checkering its pages with references to ancient authors, or quotations,
in the original, from them; but this has seemed to me both unnecessary
and unprofitable in a work intended for the general public. I have,
therefore, preferred to place at the heads of the different chapters,
in English mostly, such quotations as seemed to express, in the most
striking way, the spirit of the different periods and theories of Greek
education. Taken together, I believe these quotations will be found to
present a fairly definite outline of the whole subject.
In conclusion, I would say that, though I have used a few modern works,
such as those of Kapp and Grasberger, I have done so almost solely for
the sake of finding references. In regard to every point I believe I
have turned to the original sources. If, therefore, my conclusions on
certain points differ from those of writers of note who have preceded
me, I can only say that I have tried to do my best with the original
materials before me. I am far from flattering myself that I have reached
the truth in every case, and shall be very grateful for corrections, in
whatever spirit they may be offered; but I trust that I have been able
to present in their essential features, the "ancient ideals of
education."
THOMAS DAVIDSON.
"Glenmore,"
Keene, Essex Co., N.Y.
October, 1891.
CONTENTS
BOOK I.
INTRODUCTORY.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
Character and Ideal of Greek Education 3
CHAPTER II.
Branches of Greek Education 6
CHAPTER III.
Conditions of Education 9
CHAPTER IV.
Subjects of Education 12
CHAPTER V.
Education as Influenced by Time, Place,
and Circumstances 15
CHAPTER VI.
Epochs in Greek Education 26
BOOK II.
THE HELLENIC PERIOD (B.C. 776-338).
PART I.
_THE "OLD EDUCATION"_ (B.C. 776-480).
CHAPTER I.
Education for Work and Leisure 33
CHAPTER II.
Æolian or Theban Education 38
CHAPTER III.
Dorian or Spartan Education 41
CHAPTER IV.
Pythagoras 52
CHAPTER V.
Ionian or Athenian Education 60
(1) Family Education 64
(2) School Education 67
(α) Musical (and Literary) Education 72
(β) Gymnastics, or Bodily Training 77
(γ) Dancing 82
(3) College Education 85
(4) University Education 90
PART II.
_THE "NEW EDUCATION"_ (B.C. 480-338).
CHAPTER I.
Individualism and Philosophy 93
CHAPTER II.
Xenophon 114
CHAPTER III.
Plato 133
BOOK III.
ARISTOTLE (B.C. 384-322).
CHAPTER I.
His Life and Works 153
CHAPTER II.
His Philosophy 161
CHAPTER III.
His Theory of the State 166
CHAPTER IV.
His Pedagogical State 172
CHAPTER V.
Education during the first Seven Years 184
CHAPTER VI.
Education from Seven To Twenty-one 188
CHAPTER VII.
Education after Twenty-one 200
BOOK IV.
THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD (B.C. 338-A.D. 313).
CHAPTER I.
From Ethnic to Cosmopolitan Life 205
CHAPTER II.
Quintilian and Rhetorical Education 214
CHAPTER III.
Plotinus and Philosophic Education 225
CHAPTER IV.
Conclusion 231
APPENDIX.
The Seven Liberal Arts 239
BIBLIOGRAPHY 249
INDEX 253
BOOK I
INTRODUCTORY
ERRATA.
Page 19, line 5 from below, insert 102.
53, " 6 " " " 133.
181, " 14 " " for "and" read "or."
250, " 11 " " " "Watsno" read "Watson."
ARISTOTLE
CHAPTER I
CHARACTER AND IDEAL OF GREEK EDUCATION
Nothing in excess!--Solon.
No citizen has a right to consider himself as belonging to himself;
but all ought to regard themselves as belonging to the State,
inasmuch as each is a part of the State; and care for the part
naturally looks to care for the whole.--Aristotle.
Greek life, in all its manifestations, was dominated by a single idea,
and that an æsthetic one. This idea, which worked sometimes consciously,
sometimes unconsciously, was PROPORTION. The Greek term for this
(_Logos_) not only came to designate the incarnate Word of Religion, but
has also supplied many modern languages with a name for the Science of
Manifested Reason--Logic. To the Greek, indeed, Reason always meant
ratio, proportion; and a rational life meant to him a life of which all
the parts, internal and external, stood to each other in just
proportion. Such proportion was threefold; _first_, between the
different parts of the individual human being; _second_, between the
individual and his fellows in a social whole; _third_, between the
human, as such, and the overruling divine. The realization of this
threefold harmony in the individual was called by the Greeks WORTH
(Ἀρετή, usually, but incorrectly, rendered Virtue). There has come down
to us, from the pen of Aristotle, in whom all that was implicit in
Hellenism became explicit, a portion of a pæan addressed to this ideal.
It may be fitly inserted here, in a literal translation.
TO WORTH.
O Worth! stern taskmistress of human kind,
Life's noblest prize:
O Virgin! for thy beauty's sake
It is an envied lot in Hellas even to die,
And suffer toils devouring, unassuaged--
So well dost thou direct the spirit
To fruit immortal, better than gold
And parents and soft-eyed sleep.
For thy cause Jove-born Hercules and Leda's sons
Much underwent, by deeds
Thy power proclaiming.
For love of thee Achilles and Ajax to Hades' halls went down.
For thy dear beauty's sake Atarneus' nursling too widowed the glances
of the sun.
Therefore, as one renowned for deeds and deathless, him the Muses
shall exalt,
The daughters of Memory, exalting so the glory of Stranger-guarding
Jove, and the honor of friendship firm.
With regard to this ideal, four things are especially noteworthy;
_first_, that it took an exhaustive survey of man's nature and
relations; _second_, that it called for strong, persistent, heroic
effort; _third_, that it tended to sink the individual in the social
whole and the universal order; _fourth_, that its aim was, on the whole,
a static perfection. The first two were merits; the second two,
demerits. The first merit prevented the Greeks from pursuing one-sided
systems of education; the second, from trying to turn education into a
means of amusement. Aristotle says distinctly, "Education ought
certainly not to be turned into a means of amusement; for young people
are not playing when they are learning, since all learning is
accompanied with pain." The first demerit was prejudicial to individual
liberty, and therefore obstructive of the highest human development; the
second encouraged Utopian dreams, which, being always of static
conditions, undisturbed by the toils and throes essential to progress,
tend to produce impatience of that slow advance whereby alone man
arrives at enduring results. To this tendency we owe such works as
Plato's _Republic_ and Xenophon's _Education of Cyrus_.
CHAPTER II
BRANCHES OF GREEK EDUCATION
With thee the aged car-borne Peleus sent me on the day whereon from
Phthia to Agamemnon he sent thee, a mere boy, not yet acquainted
with mutual war or councils, in which men rise to distinction--for
this end he sent me forth to teach thee all these things, to be a
speaker of words and a doer of deeds.--(_Phœnix in_) Homer.
Above all and by every means we provide that our citizens shall have
good souls and strong bodies.--Lucian.
Life is the original school--life, domestic and social. All other
schools merely exercise functions delegated by the family and by
society, and it is not until the latter has reached such a state of
complication as to necessitate a division of labor that special schools
exist. Among the Homeric Greeks we find no mention of schools, and the
only person recorded as having had a tutor is Achilles, who was sent
away from home so early in life as to be deprived of that education
which he would naturally have received from his father. In what that
education consisted, we learn from the first quotation at the head of
this chapter. It consisted in such training as would make the pupil "a
speaker of words and a doer of deeds"--a man eloquent and persuasive in
council, and brave and resolute on the field of battle. For these ends
he required, as Lucian says, a good soul and a strong body.
These expressions mark the two great divisions into which Greek
education at all periods fell--MENTAL EDUCATION and PHYSICAL
EDUCATION--as well as their original aims, viz. goodness (that is,
bravery) of soul and strength of body. As time went on, these aims
underwent considerable changes, and consequently the means for attaining
them considerable modifications and extensions. Physical education aimed
more and more at beauty and grace, instead of strength, while mental
education, in its effort to extend itself to all the powers of the mind,
divided itself into literary and musical education.
As we have seen, the Greeks aimed at developing all the powers of the
human being in due proportion and harmony. But, in course of time, they
discovered that the human creature comes into the world with his powers,
not only undeveloped, but already disordered and inharmonious; that not
only do the germs of manhood require to be carefully watched and tended,
but also that the ground in which they are to grow must be cleared from
an overgrowth of choking weeds, before education can be undertaken with
any hope of success. This clearing process was called by the later
Greeks _Katharsis_, or Purgation, and played an ever-increasing part in
their pedagogical systems. It was supposed to do for man's emotional
nature what Medicine undertook to do for his body. The means employed
were mainly music and the kindred arts, which the ancients believed to
exert what we should now call a dæmonic effect upon the soul, drawing
off the exciting causes of disturbing passion, and leaving it in
complete possession of itself. It would hardly be too much to say that
the power to exert this purgative influence on the soul was regarded by
the ancients as the chief function and end of the Fine Arts. Such was
certainly Aristotle's opinion.
When purgation and the twofold education of body and mind had produced
their perfect work, the result was what the Greeks called _Kalokagathia_
(καλοκἀγαθία) that is, Fair-and-Goodness. Either half of this ideal was
named ἀρετή (_aretê_), Worth or Excellence. We are expressly told by
Aristotle (_Categories_, chap. viii.) that the adjective to ἀρετή is
σπουδαῖος (_spoudaios_), a word which we usually render into English by
"earnest." And we do so with reason; for to the Greek, Excellence or
Worth meant, above all, earnestness, genuineness, truthfulness,
thoroughness, absence of frivolity.
CHAPTER III
CONDITIONS OF EDUCATION
Some hold that men become good by nature, others by training, others
by instruction. The part that is due to nature obviously does not
depend upon us, but is imparted through certain divine causes to the
truly fortunate.--Aristotle.
It is not merely begetting that makes the father, but also the
imparting of a noble education.--John Chrysostom.
There are two sorts of education, the one divine, the other human.
The divine is great and strong and easy; the human small and weak
and beset with many dangers and delusions. Nevertheless, the latter
must be added to the former, if a right result is to be
reached.--Dion Chrysostom.
The same thing that we are wont to assert regarding the arts and
sciences, may be asserted regarding moral worth, viz. that the
production of a completely just character demands three
conditions--nature, reason, and habit. By "reason" I mean
instruction, by "habit," training.... Nature without instruction is
blind; instruction without nature, helpless; exercise (training)
without both, aimless.--Plutarch.
To the realization of their ideal in any individual the Greeks conceived
three conditions to be necessary, (1) a noble nature, (2) persistent
exercise or training in right action, (3) careful instruction. If any
one of these was lacking, the highest result could not be attained.
(1) To be well or nobly born was regarded by the Greeks as one of the
best gifts of the gods. Aristotle defines noble birth as "ancient wealth
and worth," and this fairly enough expresses the Greek view generally.
Naturally enough, therefore, the Greek in marrying looked above all
things to the chances of a worthy offspring. Indeed, it may be fairly
said that the purpose of the Greek in marriage was, not so much to
secure a helpmeet for himself as to find a worthy mother for his
children. In Greece, as everywhere else in the ancient world, marriage
was looked upon solely as an arrangement for the procreation and rearing
of offspring. The romantic, pathological love-element, which plays so
important a part in modern match-making, was almost entirely absent
among the Greeks. What love there was, assumed either the noble form of
enthusiastic friendship or the base one of free lust. In spite of this,
and of the fact that woman was regarded as a means and not as an end,
the relations between Greek husbands and wives were very often such as
to render the family a school of virtue for the children. They were
noble, sweet, and strong,--all the more so, it should seem, that they
were based, not upon a delusive sentimentality, but upon reason and a
sense of reciprocal duty.
(2) The value of exercise, practice, habituation, seems to have been far
better understood by the ancients than by the moderns. Whatever a man
has to do, be it speaking, swimming, playing, or fighting, he can learn
only by doing it; this was a universally accepted maxim. The modern
habit of trying to teach languages and virtues by rules, not preceded by
extensive practice, would have seemed to the ancients as absurd as the
notion that a man could learn to swim before going into the water.
Practice first; theory afterwards: do the deed, and ye shall know of
the doctrine--so said ancient Wisdom, to which the notion that children
should not be called upon to perform any act, or submit to any
restriction, without having the grounds thereof explained to them, would
have seemed the complete inversion of all scientific method. It was by
insisting upon a certain practice in children, on the ground of simple
authority, that the ancients sought to inculcate the virtues of
reverence for experience and worth, and respect for law.
(3) The work begun by nature, and continued by habit or exercise, was
completed and crowned by instruction. This had, according to the Greek,
two functions, (_a_) to make action free, by making it rational, (_b_)
to make possible an advance to original action. Nature and habit left
men thralls, governed by instincts and prescriptions; instruction,
revelation of the grounds of action, set them free. Such freedom, based
on insight, was to the thinkers of Greece the realization of manhood, or
rather, of the divine in man. "The truth shall make you free"--no one
understood this better than they. Hence, with all their steady
insistence upon practice in education, they never regarded it as the
ultimate end, or as any end at all, except when guided by insight, the
fruit of instruction. A practicality leading to no widening of the
spiritual horizon, to no freeing insight, was to them illiberal,
slavish, paltry--"banausic," they said,--degrading both to body and
soul.
CHAPTER IV
SUBJECTS FOR EDUCATION
It is right that Greeks should rule over barbarians, but not
barbarians over Greeks; for those are slaves, but these are free
men.--Euripides.
Barbarian and slave are by nature the same.--Aristotle.
Nature endeavors to make the bodies of freemen and slaves different;
the latter strong for necessary use, the former erect and useless
for such operations, but useful for political life.... It is
evident, then, that by nature some men are free, others slaves, and
that, in the case of the latter, slavery is both beneficial and
just.--_Id._
Instruction, though it plainly has power to direct and stimulate the
generous among the young ... is as plainly powerless to turn the
mass of men to nobility and goodness (_Kalokagathia_). For it is not
in their nature to be guided by reverence, but by fear, nor to
abstain from low things because they are disgraceful, but (only)
because they entail punishment.--_Id._
In thinking of Greek education as furnishing a possible model for us
moderns, there is one point which it is important to bear in mind: Greek
education was intended only for the few, for the wealthy and well-born.
Upon all others, upon slaves, barbarians, the working and trading
classes, and generally upon all persons spending their lives in pursuit
of wealth or any private ends whatsoever, it would have seemed to be
thrown away. Even well-born women were generally excluded from most of
its benefits. The subjects of education were the sons of full citizens,
themselves preparing to be full citizens, and to exercise all the
functions of such. The duties of such persons were completely summed up
under two heads, duties to the family and duties to the State, or, as
the Greeks said, œconomic and political duties. The free citizen not
only acknowledged no other duties besides these, but he looked down upon
persons who sought occupation in any other sphere. Œconomy and Politics,
however, were very comprehensive terms. The former included the three
relations of husband to wife, father to children, and master to slaves
and property; the latter, three public functions, legislative,
administrative, and judiciary. All occupations not included under these
six heads the free citizen left to slaves or resident foreigners.
Money-making, in the modern sense, he despised, and, if he devoted
himself to art or philosophy, he did so only for the benefit of the
State. If he improved the patrimony which was the condition of his free
citizenship, he did so, not by chaffering or money-lending, but by
judicious management, and by kindly, but firm, treatment of his slaves.
If he performed any great artistic service to the State--for example, if
he wrote a tragedy for a State religious festival (and plays were never
written for any other purpose)--the only reward he looked forward to was
a crown of olive or laurel and the respect of his fellow-citizens.
The Greeks divided mankind, in all the relations of life, into two
distinct classes, a governing and a governed, and considered the former
alone as the subject of education; the latter being a mere instrument in
its hands. The governing class required education in order that it
might govern itself and the other class, in accordance with reason and
justice; that other, receiving its guidance from the governing class,
required no education, or only such as would enable it to obey. It
followed that the duty of the governing class was to govern; of the
governed, to obey. Only in this correlation of duties did each class
find its usefulness and satisfaction. Any attempt to disturb or invert
this correlation was a wilful running in the teeth of the laws of
nature, a rebellion against the divine order of things.
As husband, father, master in the family, and as legislator, officer,
judge in the State, each member of the governing class found his proper
range of activities; and he did wrong, degrading himself to the level of
the serving class, if he sought any other. This view, in a more or less
conscious form, pervades the whole ancient world, conditioning all its
notions and theories of education; and Paul the Apostle only echoed it
when he said to wives: "Wives, be in subjection to your own husbands as
to the Lord"; to children: "Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for
this is right"; and to slaves: "Slaves, be obedient unto them that
according to the flesh are your masters with fear and trembling, in
singleness of heart, as unto Christ."
CHAPTER V
EDUCATION AS INFLUENCED BY TIME, PLACE, AND CIRCUMSTANCES
The peculiar character of each form of government is what
establishes it at the beginning and what usually preserves it....
Since the whole State has but one end, it is plainly necessary that
there should be one education for all the citizens.--Aristotle.
Education among the Greeks, as among every other progressive people,
varied with times and circumstances. The education of the Homeric Greeks
was not that of the Athenians in the days of Aristotle, nor the latter
the same as the education of the contemporary Spartans or Thebans.
Moreover, the education actually imparted was not the same as that
demanded or recommended by philosophers and writers on pedagogics. It is
true that the aim was always the same; Worth, Excellence,
Fair-and-Goodness (ἀρετή, καλοκἀγαθία); but this was differently
conceived and differently striven after at different times and in
different places.
Among the Homeric Greeks, as we have seen, education, being purely
practical, aiming only at making its subject "a speaker of words and a
doer of deeds," was acquired in the actual intercourse and struggles of
life. The simple conditions of their existence demanded no other
education and, consequently, no special educational institutions. These
conditions, as described by Homer, though by no means barbarous, are
primitive. Nomadism has long been left behind and the later
village-communities have been mostly merged in walled towns, generally
situated at some distance from the shore, on or near a hill, whose
summit forms a citadel for refuge in cases of danger. Even in the most
advanced of these towns, however, the type of civilization is still
largely patriarchal. The government is in the hands of chiefs or kings
(βασιλῆες) claiming to be born and bred of Jove, as, indeed, in a sense,
they were, since they ruled quite as much by right of personal worth,
which more than anything is due to the grace of God, as by hereditary
title. Worth in those days consisted in physical strength, courage,
beauty, judgment, and power to address an assembly, and any king proving
deficient in these qualities would soon have found his position
insecure, or been compelled to fortify it by lawless tyranny. The
functions devolving upon the king were mainly three, those of judge,
military commander, and priest. The first required judgment and ready
speech; the second, strength and intelligent courage; the third,
personal beauty and dignity. Though the kings were allowed to exercise
great power, this was not irresponsible or arbitrary. On the contrary,
it was compatible with great public freedom in speech and action.
Slavery existed only to a limited extent and in a mild form. All free
heads of families, however poor, had a right to attend the popular
assembly, which the king consulted on all important matters, and at
which the freëst discussion was allowed. When the kings exercised
judicial power, they did so in accordance with certain _themistes_ or
laws, held to have originated with Zeus, and not according to their own
caprice. As there was little commerce in those days, the inhabitants of
the ancient cities, when not engaged in warfare, devoted themselves
chiefly to agriculture, cattle-raising, and the useful arts. In these
even the kings thought it no shame to engage. We find Paris helping to
build his own palace, Odysseus constructing his own bed, Lycaon cutting
wood to make chariot-rails, and so on. Similarly, we find Helen and
other princesses spinning and weaving, while Nausicaa, the daughter of
the Phæacian king, washes the clothes of the family.
In such a primitive society, unacquainted with letters, the higher
education found but few aspirants. The only persons of scientific
pretensions mentioned by Homer are the physicians (who are likewise
surgeons) and the soothsayers. The former are highly appreciated, and
are always chiefs. The soothsayers are the exponents of divine omens to
the community, and occupy a kind of official position, like the Hebrew
prophets. No artists, strictly speaking, are mentioned by Homer, except
the bard, and he is much honored, as historian, teacher, and inspirer.
We find, indeed, that Achilles and Paris are proficients in music; but
such cases seem exceptional. Of artisans, several are mentioned--the
worker in wood, the worker in horn and ivory, the potter (who uses the
wheel), and so on. The existence of others is implied--the weaver, the
mason, the metal-worker, etc.
If there were no special schools in the heroic age, life was so lived as
to be an excellent school. Then, as at all other times, it was
extremely social, far more so than our modern life. This was due chiefly
to three causes, (1) the smallness of the states, which made it possible
for every citizen to know, and to feel his solidarity with, every other,
(2) the absence of titles and formalities, which had not yet been
introduced from the East, (3) the fact that the people, especially the
men, spent the greater part of the day in the open air,--in the streets
and agora,--and so were continually rubbing against each other. This
sociality had much to do with the shaping of the Greek character, the
salient elements of which are thus enumerated by Zeller, the historian
of Greek philosophy: "A strong sense of freedom, combined with a rare
susceptibility to proportion, form, and order, a keen relish for
companionship in life and action, a social tendency which compelled the
individual to combine with others, to submit to the general will, to
follow the traditions of his family and his community."
Between the simple social condition described by Homer and that for
which Aristotle wrote, there intervened a period of at least six hundred
years. During that time many great changes took place in the social and
political life of the Greeks, demanding corresponding changes in
education. These changes were due to several causes, (1) the natural
human tendency toward freedom, (2) the influence of foreign nations, (3)
the development of commerce, (4) the introduction of letters, (5) the
rise of philosophy, (6) the Persian Wars. Though all these are closely
interwoven with each other, there can be no harm in treating them
separately.
(1) The tendency toward freedom, so essentially characteristic of human
nature, was especially so of the nature of the Greeks. Among them it
rapidly manifested itself in an ordered series of political forms,
beginning with patriarchalism, and ending variously in the various
states and races. There is, indeed, hardly a single form of political
life that was not realized among the Greeks at some time or place. It
was this that made it possible for Aristotle to write a work on Politics
which, in the words of a recent political writer, "has remained for two
thousand years one of the purest sources of political wisdom."
The varied and changeful political life of the Greeks was in itself a
great education. It made them aware of the principles, political and
ethical, upon which society rests, and rendered necessary a faculty of
clear and ready expression, which reacted most favorably upon their
intellectual and æsthetic faculties. It was in the school of practical
politics that the Greeks acquired their rhetoric; and Aristotle, in his
treatise on Poetry, tells us that, while "the older poets made their
characters talk like statesmen, the later ones made theirs talk like
rhetoricians." Not only, indeed, did political life react upon the
drama, but, in developing rhetoric, it drew attention to language and
led to the sciences of grammar and logic, both of which were thus called
into existence by real social needs (see p. 102).
(2) Greece, lying, as it did, between three continents, and in the
thoroughfare of the ancient nations, could hardly fail to be visited by
many different races, or, considering its beauty and commercial
advantages, to be coveted by them. From this followed two consequences,
(_a_) that the Greeks were a very mixed race, (_b_) that they were, from
the first and at all times, in manifold contact with foreign peoples.
That they were a mixed race, is attested alike by their language, their
mythology, and their legends. That they were in close and continual
communication with foreign peoples, is rendered evident by their
alphabet, their art, and the direct statements of their historians.
Although it is true that the Greeks, especially after the Persian Wars,
regarded themselves as a superior and chosen people, calling all others
"barbarians," and considering them as fit only to be slaves, it is not
the less true that hardly one of all the arts and sciences which they
ultimately carried to a high degree of perfection had its origin in
Greece proper. All appear first in the colonies settled among
"barbarians,"--in Egypt, Asia Minor, Thrace, Crete, Sicily, or Italy.
Architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry--epic, lyric, dramatic--music,
history, politics, philosophy, were all borrowed, transformed, and, with
the exception perhaps of tragedy and painting, carried to a high degree
of excellence in the colonies, before they were transplanted to the
mother-country. It is beyond any doubt that even the Homeric legends are
of "barbarian" origin, though from what people they were borrowed is
uncertain. It was the plasticity and versatility of their character, due
in part to their mixed blood, that, by enabling them to appropriate and
assimilate the arts and sciences of their neighbors, raised the Greeks
to a new plane of civilization and made them the initiators of a new
epoch in history, the epoch of life according to reason. Sir Henry
Sumner Maine says, "Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in
this world which is not Greek in its origin."
(3) It was chiefly through commerce that the arts and sciences borrowed
by the colonial Greeks found their way into Greece proper. That foreign
art-objects were introduced into it at an early period, is rendered
certain by the recent discoveries at Mycenæ, Sparta, and other places,
as well as by statements in the Homeric poems. That these were followed
later by artists, bringing with them foreign art-processes and
appliances, is equally certain. The earliest sculptors whose names are
known to us, Dipœnis and Scyllis, were natives of Crete, settled in
Sicyon; and the earliest poetic guild of which we have any mention is
that of the Homeridæ in the island of Chios. But, besides introducing
art and artists into Greece, commerce tended to educate the Greeks in
other ways. It made them acquainted with foreign manners and luxuries,
and forced them to learn the arts of navigation, ship-building and
exchange, which again rendered necessary an acquaintance with arithmetic
and the art of writing. And this leads us to
(4) The Introduction of Letters. This event, the date of which is
uncertain, not only exercised a most furthering influence on the arts
and sciences, but gave rise to a new branch of education. Letters were
probably first used for diplomatic and trade purposes, then for
inscriptions, and last of all for the perpetuation of literary
productions. So much of a change did they effect in Greek education that
even in the best times the whole of the literary and scientific
education was called simply "letters" (γράμματα). As late as the time of
Plato letters seem to have been considered a part of Music, and to have
been taught by the same teacher as the latter; but Aristotle already
distinguishes the two. It is extremely probable that the introduction of
letters was the immediate cause of the establishment of schools for
youth; for we find no mention of them prior to that event.
(5) The introduction of letters was closely followed by the rise of
Philosophy, or the reflective spirit. Up to about the year 600 B.C., the
Greeks, like the rest of the world, lived by habit, tradition, and
prescription, handed on, with little or no criticism, from generation to
generation. Their ideal world was shaped by the works of Homer and
Hesiod. "Hesiod is the teacher of most," says Heraclitus. About the date
named, however, society having advanced to a condition of organization
which made possible a leisure class, there begins to appear a new
spirit, destined to revolutionize, not only Greece, but the whole world.
Armed with a _what?_ a _which?_ a _why?_ and a _wherefore_? it no longer
blindly accepts the world of nature and man, but calls upon it to give
an account of itself. Science, philosophy, and art are the result.
At first the new spirit turns to nature with a _what?_; but, gradually
discovering that the answer to this brings no complete explanation of
the world, it propounds its other questions. It thus arrives at a
consciousness of four distinguishable elements in the constitution of
things,--four causes (αἴτια, αἰτίαι), as they were termed,--(1) matter,
(2) form, (3) efficiency, (4) end or aim. At the same time, and by the
same process, it is forced to a recognition of the presence of reason
(λόγος) and intelligence (νοῦς) in the world, since form, efficiency,
and aim all presuppose both. It is thus compelled to turn from nature to
man, and man's mind, as the highest known expression of reason and
intelligence, and to devote itself to the consideration of spirit, as
alone promising any true explanation of the world. The process is a slow
and difficult one, and the history of it is the history of Greek
science, philosophy, and art.
Before the rise of philosophy, the teacher of the people had been the
rhapsode, or public reciter; after that event he gradually gives place
to the sophist (σοφιστής, one who makes wise), or, as he later with more
modesty calls himself, the philosopher (φιλόσοφος, lover of wisdom). The
history of Greece for centuries is, on its inner side, a history of the
struggle between what the rhapsode represents and what the philosopher
represents, between popular tradition and common sense on the one hand,
and individual opinion and philosophy on the other. The transition from
the first to the second of these mental conditions was accomplished for
the world, once for all, by the Greeks, and the turning-point in the
process is marked by
(6) The Persian Wars (B.C. 490-479). The victories gained in these at
Marathon, Salamis, and Platææ, victories the most brilliant that history
records, exerted a most powerful influence upon the thought and life of
the Greeks. The consciousness of having, with their small numbers, over
and over again, both by land and by sea, discomfited and crushed the
countless hosts of an empire which for generations had threatened their
peace and liberty, made them at once feel the superiority of their own
characters and civil institutions to those of the Persians, and draw a
clear line of demarcation between Greek and barbarian. From this point
on, they felt themselves to be a chosen people, a nation destined by the
gods to rule all others. "The soul of Greece had conquered the bulk of
Persia." Persia was bulk and body; Greece was soul and spirit. This
conviction appears at once in all the departments of Greek life. In the
sphere of art we may instance the _Prometheia_ of Æschylus and the
Parthenon. In the former, what does the conflict between Zeus and
Prometheus mean but the conflict between Greek spirituality, intellect,
and freedom, on the one hand, and barbarian materiality, instinct, and
thraldom or necessity, on the other? And what is the latter but a
matchless pæan in stone to Divine Wisdom, as the conqueror of brute
force? In the sphere of thought, we find Parmenides, Anaxagoras and,
above all, Socrates (born ten years after the second Persian War),
turning consciously to the study of spirit. "To be and to think are the
same thing," says the first of these: "All things were confused; then
Mind came and reduced them to order," says the second; "Know thyself" is
the chosen motto of the third. In the political sphere we find the
Athenians trying to make the State an instrument of intelligence and
virtue, and insisting upon education as a means thereto. Other and less
desirable results followed from the Persian Wars; but these can be
better stated and estimated in another connection.
Such were the chief causes that contributed to transform the simple
patriarchal State of the Homeric Greeks, with its purely practical
education at home and in the field, into the free polity of the Greeks
of the days of Miltiades, Themistocles, and Æschylus, with its
complicated institutions and manifold education. It has seemed better to
enumerate these causes than to try to trace the steps of the
transformation itself. Indeed this would have been a hopeless task,
owing to the lack of historical data.
CHAPTER VI
EPOCHS IN GREEK EDUCATION
When they (our ancestors) began to enjoy leisure for thought, as the
result of easy circumstances, and to cherish more exalted ideas with
respect to worth, and especially when, in the period before and
after the Persian Wars, they came to entertain a high opinion of
themselves, on account of their achievements, they pursued all kinds
of education, making no distinction, but beating about
generally.--Aristotle.
In treating of Greek education subsequent to the introduction of letters
and the establishment of schools, we shall be obliged, in the interest
of clearness, to make three distinctions:--
(1) Between the educational systems of different periods.
(2) Between the educational systems of different peoples and states.
(3) Between the education actually imparted in the various states, and
that recommended by theorists or philosophers.
In pursuance of the first, it will be convenient first to distinguish
two main periods, the Hellenic, and the Hellenistic, and then to
subdivide these into minor periods.
I. _The Hellenic Period_ (776-338 B.C.). This includes, roughly
speaking, the whole historic life of free Greece, from the date of the
first Olympiad to that of the absorption of Greece into the Macedonian
Empire. It naturally subdivides itself into two periods, (_a_) 776-450;
(_b_) 450-338.
(_a_) That of the "Old Education," authoritative and puritanical, whose
aim was the training of good citizens, god-fearing, law-abiding,
patriotic, and brave.
(_b_) That of the "New Education," rationalistic and "liberal," whose
aim was the training of formidable individuals, self-centred,
law-despising, time-serving, and cunning.
It is in the struggle between the two systems, and in the practical
triumph of the latter, that Greece loses her moral fibre; so that her
citizens, weakened through sundering selfishness, fall an easy prey to
the foreign invader.
II. _The Hellenistic Period_ (338 B.C.-313 A.D.). This extends from the
Battle of Chæronea, in which Greece lost her independence, to the
definitive triumph of Christianity, which brought a new ideal and a new
spirit into life and education. It naturally subdivides itself into two
periods, (_a_) B.C. 338-146; (_b_) B.C. 146-A.D. 313.
(_a_) The Macedonian Period, during which Macedonian influence
prevailed, and Greek thought and education, absorbing foreign, chiefly
Oriental, elements, tended toward an encyclopædic cosmopolitanism.
During this period, Alexandria is the centre of Greek influence.
(_b_) The Roman Period, during which, as Horace says, "Captive Greece
took captive her rude conqueror," and Rome became, alongside Alexandria,
a diffusive centre of Greek thought, art, and education.
Between the two great periods, the Hellenic and the Hellenistic, stands
the man who draws up the testament of the former and outlines the
programme of the latter, the Macedonian Greek, Aristotle.
Our second distinction will lead us to treat separately, in the Hellenic
period, the educational system of the three Greek races, (1) the Æolic,
(2) the Doric, (3) the Ionic, the first having its chief centre at
Thebes, the second at Sparta, the third at Athens. For an account of the
education of the first our data are but meagre; with the main features
of Spartan and Athenian education we are well acquainted. In education,
as in everything, Sparta was conservative, socialistic, and
aristocratic, while Athens tended to liberalism, individualism, and
democracy. Hence Sparta clung desperately to the "Old Education," and
almost closed her doors against art, letters, and philosophy, while
Athens, dragged into the "New Education," became the home of all these.
It must always be borne in mind that, in favoring individualism and the
"New Education," Athens was abandoning the Hellenic ideal, and paving
the way for the cosmopolitanism of the Hellenistic period. In this
latter, we shall have to distinguish between the educational systems of
Athens, Alexandria, and Rome.
Our third distinction is that between individual theory and popular
practice. In all epochs of their history the Greek states produced men
who strove to realize in thought and imagination the ideal of their
people, and to exhibit it as an aim, an encouragement, and an
inspiration, in contrast with the imperfect actual. In more than one
case this ideal modified the education of the following periods. Of
course, such theories did not arise until practice was compelled to
defend itself by producing sanctions, either in religion or in reason,
and it may perhaps be affirmed that the aim of them all was to discover
such sanctions for the Greek ideal. Among the many educational theorists
of Greece, there are six who especially deserve to be considered: (1)
Pythagoras, who in Southern Italy sought to graft on the Doric ideal a
half-mystical, half-ethical theology, and a mathematical theory of the
physical world; (2) Xenophon, who sought to secure the same ideal by
connecting it with a monarchical form of government; (3) Plato, who
sought to elevate it, and find a sanction for it in his theory of
super-sensuous ideas; (4) ARISTOTLE, who presented in all its fulness
the Hellenic ideal, and sought to find sanctions for it in history,
social well-being, and the promise of a higher life; (5) Quintilian,
who, in Rome, embodies the rhetorical or worldly education of the
Hellenistic period; and (6) Plotinus, who presents an ideal of
philosophical or other-worldly education, and paves the way for the
triumph of Christian dogma.
BOOK II
THE HELLENIC PERIOD (B.C. 776-338)
PART I
THE "OLD EDUCATION" (B.C. 776-480)
CHAPTER I
EDUCATION FOR WORK AND FOR LEISURE
When we consider the different arts that have been discovered, and
distinguish between those which relate to the necessary conditions
of life and those which contribute to the free enjoyment of it
(διαγωγή), we always consider the man who is acquainted with the
latter wiser than him who is acquainted with the former, for the
reason that the sciences of the latter have no reference to use.
Hence it was only when all the necessary conditions of life had been
attained that those arts were discovered which have no reference
either to pleasure or to the common needs of life; and this took
place first in those countries where men enjoyed
leisure.--Aristotle.
The free life of God is such as are our brief best moments.--_Id._
It is not fitting that the free enjoyment of life should be
permitted to boys or to young persons; for the crown of perfection
belongs not to the imperfect.--_Id._
Obviously, the free enjoyment of life demands not only the noble but
also the pleasant; for happiness consists of these too.--_Id._
Among the Homeric Greeks, whose life was almost entirely devoted to
practical pursuits, education was mainly practical, aiming to produce "a
speaker of words and a doer of deeds." As civilization advanced, and
higher political forms were evolved, certain classes of men found
themselves blessed with leisure which they were not inclined to devote
to mere play. In order to make a worthy use of this leisure, they
required a certain training in those arts which were regarded as
befitting a free man. Education, accordingly, in some states, widened
its scope, to include those accomplishments, which enable men to fill
their hours of freedom with refined and gracious enjoyment--music and
letters. Music, indeed, had been cultivated long before, not only by
professional bards, but even by princes, like Achilles and Paris; this,
however, was for the sake of amusement and recreation rather than of the
free enjoyment of life. It had been regarded as a means, not as an end.
We must be careful, in our study of Greek life and education, not to
confound play and recreation, which are for the sake of work, with the
free enjoyment of life, which is an end in itself, and to which all work
is but a means. "Enjoyment is the end." We shall see, as we proceed, to
what momentous results this distinction leads, how it governs not only
all education but all the institutions of life, and how it finally
contributes to break up the whole civilization which it determines. It
may fairly be said that Greece perished because she placed the end of
life in individual æsthetic enjoyment, possible only for a few and
regarding only the few.
In historic Greece, music came to be an essential part of the education
of every free man. Even free women learnt it. Along with music went
poetry, and when this came to be written down, it was termed "letters."
As every free man came to be his own minstrel and his own rhapsode, the
professional minstrel and rhapsode disappeared, and the Homeric poems
even, in order to be preserved from oblivion, were committed to writing
by an enlightened tyrant--Pisistratus.
The first portion of the Greek people that attained a degree of
civilization demanding an education for hours of leisure, was the Æolian
race, and particularly the Asiatic portion of it. Accordingly we find
that all the earliest musicians and poets, didactic and lyric, are
Æolians--Hesiod, Terpander, Arion, Alcæus, Sappho, Pittacus, etc. Lesbos
seems to have taken the lead in this "higher education." The last five
names all belong to that island, which produced also the earliest Greek
historian and prose-writer--Hellanicus. But the Æolians, though earliest
in the field, were soon outstripped by the other two races, the Doric
and the Ionic. Æolian education and culture never advanced beyond music
and lyric poetry. It knew no drama, science, or philosophy.
The Æolians were followed, almost simultaneously, by the Dorians and
Ionians, who pursued two widely divergent directions. The former
borrowed the lyric education and culture of the Æolians, and produced
several lyric poets of distinguished merit--Tyrtæus, Alcman, Ibycus,
Stesichorus: nay, they even advanced far enough to take the first steps
in science, philosophy, and dramatic poetry. Pythagoras, Epicharmus,
Sophron, Xenarchus, and Susarion were all Dorians. But the progress of
the race was retarded and finally checked by rigid political
institutions of a socialistic character, which, by suppressing
individual initiative, reduced the whole to immobility.
The Ionians, on the contrary, borrowing freely from both Æolians and
Dorians, and evolving ever freer and freer institutions, carried
education and culture to a point which has never been passed, and
rarely, if ever, reached, in the history of our race. And when they
ceased to grow, and decay set in, this was due to exactly the opposite
cause to that which stunted them among the Dorians; namely, to excessive
individualism, misnamed liberty. Individualism ruined Athens.
Although education assumed different forms among different portions of
the Greek race, there are certain features that seem to have been common
to all these forms during the epoch of the "Old Education." Two of these
deserve attention.
_First._ Education was everywhere a branch of statecraft, and the State
itself was only the highest educational institution. This was equally
true whether the schools were public, as at Sparta, or private, as at
Athens. Everywhere citizenship was a degree, conferred only upon sons of
free citizens, after a satisfactory examination (δοκιμασία).
_Second._ The stages or grades of education were everywhere the same,
although their limits were not everywhere marked by the same number of
years. The first, extending usually from birth to the end of the seventh
year, was that of home education; the second, extending from the
beginning of the eighth year to the end of the sixteenth or, perhaps
oftener, the eighteenth year, was that of school education; the third,
extending from the beginning of the seventeenth or nineteenth year to
the end of the twentieth (in Sparta of the thirtieth), was that of
college education, or education for the duties of citizenship; the
fourth, including the remainder of life, was that of university
education, or education through the State, which then was the only
university. At the beginning of the third period, the young men took
their first State examination, and if they passed it successfully, they
received the degree of Cadet or Citizen-novice (ἔφηβος); but it was only
at the beginning of the fourth period, and after they had passed a
second examination (δοκιμασία εἰς ἄνδρας), that they received the degree
of Man and Citizen and were permitted to exercise all the functions of
freemen. The State then became, in a very real sense, their _Alma
Mater_.
In most states, this graded education fell only to the lot of males, the
education of females stopping short with the first grade, the family,
which was regarded as their only sphere. It was otherwise at Sparta,
Teos, and apparently among the Æolians generally. As a consequence it is
only among the Æolians and Dorians that any poetesses of note
appear--Sappho, Corinna, Telesilla, etc. Although, however, woman's
sphere was the family, and she was considered to have done her duty when
she worthily filled the place of wife, mother, and mistress, there was
nothing to prevent her from acquiring the higher education, if she chose
to do so. That she did not often so choose, seems true; still there are
examples of learned women even among the Athenians. The daughter of
Thucydides is said to have continued his history after his death, and,
whether the statement be true or not, the fact that it was made shows
that the ability to write history was not regarded as impossible or
surprising in a woman.
CHAPTER II
ÆOLIAN OR THEBAN EDUCATION
Hesiod is the teacher of most.--Heraclitus.
When thou art dead, thou shalt lie in the earth.
Not even the memory of thee shall be
Thenceforward nor forever; for thou hast
No share in the Pierian roses; but
Ev'n in the halls of Hades thou shalt flit,
A frightened shadow, with the shadowy dead.
--Sappho (_to an uneducated woman_).
What rustic hoyden ever charms the soul,
That round her ankles cannot kilt her coats?--_Id._
The Æolians appear to have been the earliest of the Greek races to make
any considerable advance in culture. Their claim to Homer can hardly be
sustained; but they certainly produced Hesiod, most of the greater lyric
poets and poetesses, and the first historian. For a time they bade fair
to lead the culture of Greece. But the promise was not fulfilled. During
the palmy period of Greek history, they were not only the most
uncultured and uncouth of the Greeks, but they even prided themselves
upon their boorishness of speech and manner, and derided culture. In the
glorious struggle in which Greece maintained the cause of culture and
freedom against Persia, Thebes, then the chief centre of Æolianism,
sided with the barbarian, as, indeed, was natural.
Theban education was, of course, a reflex of the character of the Theban
and, indeed, of the Bœotian, people. Its main divisions were those of
Greek education generally,--Gymnastics and Music; but the former was
learnt solely for athletic purposes, and the latter mainly for use at
banquets and drinking-bouts, in which the Bœotians found their chief
delight. Letters were studied as little as at Sparta (see p. 47), and
the language of the people remained harsh and unmusical. Of higher
education there was hardly a trace. The sophists passed Bœotia by. Even
Pindar, who was by birth a Theban, and a sincerely patriotic one, sought
and found recognition anywhere rather than among his own people. He did
not even write in their dialect.
The reason for this backwardness on the part of the Bœotian Æolians lay
in the fact that they lived, as a conquering race, in the midst of a
people superior to them in every respect save strength, and could
maintain their ascendency only by brute force. When this failed, and the
conquered race, which had never forgotten Cadmus and its ancient
traditions, came to the front, education and culture found their way
even to Thebes. It was due to this change in political conditions that a
Pindar could arise, and it was doubtless the demand for culture
consequent thereupon that induced certain members of the scattered
Pythagorean school (see p. 54) to seek refuge in Thebes and there devote
themselves to teaching. Among these were Philolaus[1] and Lysis, the
latter of whom was probably the author of the famous "Golden Words"
(see p. 57). But he has a better claim to fame than this; for he was the
teacher of the bravest and most lovable man that Greece ever
produced--Epaminondas.
If any enthusiastic believer in the power of education desire to fortify
his cause by means of a brilliant example, he will find none superior to
Epaminondas; for there can hardly be any question that it was the
earnest, systematic, religious, and moral Pythagorean training which he
received from the aged Lysis, whom he treated as a father, that made him
what he was, and enabled him to do what he did,--which was nothing less
than to place Thebes at the head of Greece. Thebes rose and fell with
Epaminondas. But that was not all. It was the example of Epaminondas
that kindled the ambition of Philip of Macedon, who was educated under
his eye, and of his far more famous son, Alexander, who made all Greece
a province of his empire. Pythagoras, Lysis, Epaminondas, Philip,
Alexander--in five brief generations an earnest teacher conquers a
world!
From the time of Epaminondas on, Thebes followed the ordinary course of
Greek education.
CHAPTER III
DORIAN OR SPARTAN EDUCATION
Go, tell at Sparta, thou that passest by,
That here, obedient to her laws, we lie.
--Simonides (_Epitaph on the Three Hundred who fell at Thermopylæ_).
This is a matter for which the Lacedæmonians deserve approbation:
they are extremely solicitous about the education of their youth and
make it a public function.--Aristotle.
The Lacedæmonians impart to their children the look of wild beasts,
through the severity of the exercises to which they subject them,
their notion being that such training is especially calculated to
heighten courage.--_Id._
These are so far behind in education and philosophy that they do not
learn even letters.--Isocrates.
OLD MEN. We _were_ once strong men (youths).
MEN. And we _are_; if you will, behold.
BOYS. And we _shall be_ far superior.--_Spartan Choric Anthem._
They asked no clarion's voice to fire
Their souls with an impulse high:
But the Dorian reed and the Spartan lyre
For the sons of liberty!
So moved they calmly to their field,
Thence never to return,
Save bearing back the Spartan shield,
Or on it proudly borne!--Hemans.
There was a law that the cadets should present themselves naked in
public before the ephors every ten days; and, if they were well knit
and strong, and looked as if they had been carved and hammered into
shape by gymnastics, they were praised; but if their limbs showed
any flabbiness or softness, any little swelling or suspicion of
adipose matter due to laziness, they were flogged and justiced there
and then. The ephors, moreover, subjected their clothing every day
to a strict examination, to see that everything was up to the mark.
No cooks were permitted in Lacedæmon but flesh-cooks. A cook who
knew anything else was driven out of Sparta, as physic for
invalids.--Ælian.
Every rational system of education is determined by some aim or ideal
more or less consciously set up. That of the Dorians, and particularly
of the Spartans, may be expressed in one word--STRENGTH, which, in the
individual, took the form of physical endurance, in the State, that of
self-sufficiency (αὐτάρκεια). A self-sufficient State, furnishing a
field for all the activities and aspirations of all its citizens, and
demanding their strongest and most devoted exertions--such is the Dorian
ideal. It is easy to see what virtues Dorian education would seek to
develop--physical strength, bravery, and obedience to the laws of the
State. Among the Dorians the human being is entirely absorbed in the
citizen. The State is all in all.
The Dorian ideal realized itself chiefly in two places, Crete and
Sparta. Both these were repeatedly held up in ancient times as models of
well-governed states, and even Plato puts the substance of his _Laws_
into the mouth of a Cretan.
About the details of Cretan education we are but poorly informed. Two
things, however, we know: (1) that Lycurgus, the reputed founder of
Spartan education, was held to have drawn many of his ideas from Crete,
and (2) that the final result of Cretan education--and the same is true
of all education that merges the man in the citizen--was, in spite of
its strictness, demoralizing. The character of the people was summed up
by their poet Epimenides, a contemporary of Solon's, in a famous line
quoted by St. Paul, "The Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy
bellies."
With regard to Spartan education our information is much greater, and we
may therefore select it as the type of Dorian education generally.
The Peloponnesian Dorians having, through contact with the more
civilized peoples whom they conquered, lost much of that rigorous
discipline and unquestioning loyalty which made them formidable, were,
in the ninth century B.C., becoming disorganized, so that in two of the
Dorian states they were assimilated by the native population, the
Argives and the Messenians. The same process was rapidly going on in the
third state, Lacedæmon, when Lycurgus, fired with patriotic zeal,
resolved to put an end to it, by restoring among his people the old
Dorian military discipline. To prepare himself for this task, he visited
Crete and studied its institutions. On his return he persuaded his
countrymen to submit to a "Constitution," which ever afterwards went by
his name. This constitution included a scheme of education, whose aim
was a thorough training of the whole of the free citizens, both male and
female, (1) in physical endurance, and (2) in complete subordination to
the State. The former was sought to be imparted by means of a rigorous
and often cruel, system of gymnastics; the latter, through choric music
and dancing, including military drill. Spartan education, therefore, was
confined to two branches, Gymnastics and Music. Instruction in letters
was confined to the merest elements. Sparta accordingly never produced a
poet, an historian, an artist, or a philosopher of any note. Even the
arrangers of her choruses were foreigners--Tyrtæus, Terpander, Arion,
Alcman, Thaletas, Stesichorus.
As Spartan education was nothing more or less than a training for
Spartan citizenship, we must preface our account of it by a few words on
the Spartan State.
The government of Sparta was in the hands of a closed aristocracy, whose
sole aim was the maintenance of its own supremacy, as against (1)
foreign enemies, (2) _Perioikoi_, or disfranchised native citizens, (3)
Helots, or native serfs. To secure this, it formed itself into a
standing army, with a strict military organization. Sparta, its one
abode, was a camp; all free inhabitants were soldiers. Though they were
compelled to marry, the city contained no homes. The men and, from the
close of their seventh year, the boys, lived in barracks and ate at
public tables (_Phiditia_). The women had but one recognized function,
that of furnishing the State with citizens, and were educated solely
with a view to this. No other virtue was expected of them. Aristotle
tells us that "they lived in every kind of profligacy and in luxury."
Polyandry was common, and, when a woman lost all her husbands, she was
often compelled to enter into relations with slaves, in order that she
might not fail in her political duty.
Among a people organized on the basis of brute force, it were vain to
look for any of the finer traits of human nature--gentleness,
tenderness, sympathy, pity, mercy. The mercilessness and cruelty of the
Spartans were proverbial. Perioikoi and Helots incurring the displeasure
or suspicion of the authorities were secretly put to death, without even
the form of a trial. A striking instance of such cruelty is recorded by
Thucydides. The facts are thus stated by Grote (_History of Greece_,
vol. ii, pp. 376-7): "It was in the eighth year of the Peloponnesian
War, after the Helots had been called upon for signal military efforts
in various ways, ... that the ephors felt especially apprehensive of an
outbreak. Anxious to single out the most forward and daring Helots, as
men from whom they had most to dread, they issued proclamation that
every member of that class who had rendered distinguished services
should make his claim known at Sparta, promising liberty to the most
deserving. A large number of Helots came forward to claim the boon: not
less than two thousand of them were approved, formally manumitted, and
led in solemn procession round the temples, with garlands on their
heads, as an inauguration to their coming life of freedom. But the
treacherous garland only marked them out as victims for sacrifice: every
man of them forthwith disappeared; the manner of their death was an
untold mystery."
Spartan education was entirely conducted by the State, at the expense of
the State, and for the ends of the State. It differed in this respect
from nearly every other system of Greek education. It was divided into
four periods, corresponding respectively to childhood, boyhood, youth,
and manhood.
(_a_) CHILDHOOD.--As soon as the Spartan child came into the world, the
State, through officers appointed for that purpose, sent to examine it.
If it seemed vigorous, and showed no bodily defect, it was permitted to
live, and forthwith adopted by the State; otherwise it was carried to
the mountains and thrown over a precipice. The children accepted by the
State were for the next seven years left in charge of their mothers,
but, doubtless, still under State surveillance. Just how they were
trained during these years, we do not know. We can only guess that they
underwent very much the same process as other Greek children, any
difference being in the direction of rigor. As the details of Greek
education generally will be dealt with under the head of Athens, they
may be omitted here.
(_b_) BOYHOOD.--On completing his seventh year, the Spartan boy was
transferred from his mother's house and care to a public barracks and
the direct tuition of the State. Although the boys were in charge of a
special officer (παιδονόμος), who divided them into squads and
companies, and arranged their exercises for them, they were nevertheless
taught to regard every grown man as a teacher, and every such man was
expected to correct them promptly and rigorously, whenever he saw them
doing wrong. At the same time, every boy was expected to form an
intimate connection with some one man, who then, to a large extent,
became responsible for his conduct; and, though the choice in this
matter rested with the parties concerned, it was considered a disgrace
in a man, no less than in a boy, to be without such connection. Though
this arrangement, it is said, often led to lamentable abuses, there can
be no doubt that it admirably served the purposes of Sparta. It
furnished every boy with a tutor, who, under the circumstances, could
hardly fail to treat him kindly, and who was interested in making him
surpass all other boys in courage and endurance. This friendly influence
of teacher on pupil was something in which the Greeks at all times
strongly believed, and which formed an important force in all their
education. In Sparta, as in Crete and Thebes, it was legally recognized.
One of the duties of Spartan "inspirer" (εἰσπνήλας or εἴσπνηλος), as he
was called, was to teach his young friend (ἀΐτας) to demean himself
properly on all occasions, and to hold his tongue except when he had
something very important to say. In this way it was that the young
Spartans received their moral education, and acquired that effective
brevity of speech which to this day we call "laconic."
The formal education of Spartan boys consisted mainly of gymnastics,
music, choric dancing, and larceny. Their literary education was
confined to a little reading, writing, and finger-arithmetic; everything
beyond this was proscribed. And the reasons for this proscription are
not difficult to discover. Sparta staked everything upon her political
strength, and this involved two things, (1) equality among her free
citizens, and (2) absolute devotion on their part to her interest, both
of which the higher education would have rendered impossible. Education
establishes among men distinctions of worth quite other than military,
and gives them individual interests distinct from those of the State. It
was the same reason that induced Rome, during the best period of her
history, to exclude her citizens from all higher education, which is
essentially individual and cosmopolitan.
The education of the Spartan boys was conducted mostly in the open air
and in public, so that they were continually exposed to the cheers or
scoffs of critical spectators, to whom their performances were a
continual amusement of the nature of a cock-fight. Whether the different
"inspirers" betted on their own boys may be doubtful; but they certainly
used every effort to make them win in any and every contest, and the
"inspirer" of a "winning" boy was an envied man. The result was that
many boys lost their lives amid cheers, rather than incur the disgrace
of being beaten. Inasmuch as the sole purpose of gymnastics was strength
and endurance; of dancing, order; and of music, martial inspiration, it
is easy to see what forms these studies necessarily assumed; and we need
only stop to remark that Dorian music received the unqualified
approbation of all the great educational writers of antiquity,--even of
Aristotle, who had only words of condemnation for Spartan gymnastics.
There was only one branch of Spartan school-education that was not
conducted in public, and that was larceny. The purpose of this curious
discipline was to enable its subjects to act, on occasion, as detectives
and assassins among the ever discontented and rebellious Helots. How
successful it was, may be judged from the incident recorded on page 45.
Larceny, when successfully carried out under difficult circumstances,
was applauded; when discovered, it was severely punished. A story is
told of a boy who, rather than betray himself, allowed a stolen fox,
concealed under his clothes, to eat out his entrails.
In one respect Spartan education may claim superiority over that of most
other Greek states: it was not confined to one sex. Spartan girls,
though apparently permitted to live at home, were subjected to a course
of training differing from that of their brothers only in being less
severe. They had their own exercise-grounds, on which they learnt to
leap, run, cast the javelin, throw the discus, play ball, wrestle,
dance, and sing; and there is good evidence to show that their exercises
had an admirable effect upon their physical constitution. That the
breezy daughters of Sparta were handsomer and more attractive than the
hot-house maidens of Athens, is a well-attested fact. Many Spartan women
continued their athletic and musical exercises into ripe womanhood,
learning even to ride spirited horses and drive chariots. If we may
believe Aristotle, however, the effect of all this training upon their
moral nature was anything but desirable. They were neither virtuous nor
brave.
(_c_) YOUTH.--About the age of eighteen, Spartan boys passed into the
class of _epheboi_, or cadets, and began their professional training for
war. This was their business for the next twelve years, and no light
business it was. For the first two years they were called _melleirenes_,
and devoted themselves to learning the use of arms, and to light
skirmishing. They were under the charge of special officers called
_bideoi_, but had to undergo a rigid examination before the ephors every
ten days (see p. 41). Their endurance was put to severe tests. Speaking
of the altar of Artemis Orthia, Pausanias says: "An oracle commanded the
people to imbrue the altar with human blood, and hence arose the custom
of sacrificing on it a man chosen by lot. Lycurgus did away with this
practice, and ordained that, instead, the cadets should be scourged
before the altar, and thus the altar is covered with blood. While this
is going on, a priestess stands by, holding, in her arms the wooden
image (of Artemis). This image, being small, is, under ordinary
circumstances, light; but, if at any time the scourgers deal too lightly
with any youth, on account of his beauty or his rank, then the image
becomes so heavy that the priestess cannot support it; whereupon she
reproves the scourgers, and declares that she is burdened on their
account. Thus the image that came from the sacrifices in the Crimea has
always continued to enjoy human blood." This Artemis appears, with a
bundle of twigs in her arm, next to Ares, among the Spartan divinities,
on the frieze of the Parthenon. At twenty years of age, the young men
became _eirenes_, and entered upon a course of study closely resembling
actual warfare. They lived on the coarsest food, slept on reeds, and
rarely bathed or walked. They exercised themselves in heavy arms, in
shooting, riding, swimming, ball-playing, and in conflicts of the most
brutal kind. They took part in complicated and exhausting dances, the
most famous of which was the Pyrrhic, danced under arms. They manned
fortresses, assassinated Helots, and, in cases of need, even took the
field against an enemy.
(_d_) MANHOOD.--At the age of thirty, being supposed to have reached
their majority, they fell into the ranks of full citizens, and took
their share in all political functions. They were compelled to marry,
but were allowed to visit their wives only rarely and by stealth. They
sometimes had two or three children before they had ever seen their
wives by daylight. When not engaged in actual war, they spent much of
their time in watching the exercises of their juniors, and the rest in
hunting wild boars and similar game in the mountains. Like Xenophon,
they thought hunting the nearest approach to war.
Such was the education that Sparta gave her sons. That it produced
strong warriors and patriotic citizens, there can be no doubt. But that
is all: it produced no men. It was greatly admired by men like Xenophon
and Plato, who were sick of Athenian democracy; but Aristotle estimated
it at its true worth. He says: "As long as the Laconians were the only
people who devoted themselves to violent exercises, they were superior
to all others; but now they are inferior even in gymnastic contests and
in war. Their former superiority, indeed, was not due to their training
their young men in this way, but to the fact that they alone did so."
And even Xenophon, at the end of a long panegyric on the Spartan
constitution, is obliged to admit that already in his time it has fallen
from its old worth into feebleness and corruption, and this in spite of
the fact that he had his own sons educated at Sparta. When Sparta fell
before the heroic and cultured Epaminondas, she fell unpitied, leaving
to the world little or nothing but a warning example.
CHAPTER IV
PYTHAGORAS
Virtue and health and all good and God are a harmony.--Pythagoras.
One is the principle of all.--Philolaus the Pythagorean.
All things that are known have number.--_Id._
The principles of all virtue are three, knowledge, power, and
choice. Knowledge is like sight, whereby we contemplate and judge
things; power is like bodily strength, whereby we endure and adhere
to things; choice is like hands to the soul, whereby we stretch out
and lay hold of things.--Theages the Pythagorean.
The Doric discipline, even in Sparta, where it could exhibit its
character most freely, produced merely soldiers and not free citizens or
cultivated men. It was, nevertheless, in its essential features, the
Hellenic ideal, and numerous attempts were made to remedy its defects
and to give it permanence, by connecting it with higher than mere local
and aristocratic interests. One of the earliest and most noteworthy of
these was made by Pythagoras.
This extraordinary personage appears to have been born in the island of
Samos in the first quarter of the sixth century B.C. Though he was born
among Ionians, his family appears to have been Achaian and, to some
extent, Pelasgian (Tyrrhenian), having emigrated from Phlius in the
Argolid. After distinguishing himself in Ionia, he emigrated in middle
life to Magna Græcia, and took up his abode in the Achaian colony of
Croton, then a rich and flourishing city. The cause of his emigration
seems to have been the tyranny of Polycrates, which apparently imparted
to him a prejudice against Ionic tendencies in general. Whether he
derived any part of his famous learning from visits to Egypt, Phœnicia,
Babylonia, etc., as was asserted in later times, is not clear. It is not
improbable that he visited Egypt, and there is good reason for believing
that he became acquainted with Phœnician theology through Pherecydes of
Syros. That he was an omnivorous student is attested by his
contemporary, Heraclitus. He was undoubtedly affected by the physical
theories current in his time in Ionia, while he plainly drew his
political and ethical ideas from Sparta or Crete.
Of his activity in Ionia we know little; but we may perhaps conclude
that it was of the same nature as that which he afterwards displayed in
Italy. Here he appeared in the triple capacity of theologian, ethical
teacher, and scientist. His chief interest for us lies in the fact that
he was apparently the first man in Greece, and, indeed, in the western
world, who sought to establish an ethical institution apart from the
State. In this respect he bears a strong resemblance to the prophet
Isaiah, who may be said to have originated the idea of a Church (see p.
133). Pythagoras' aim seems to have been to gather round him a body of
disciples who should endeavor to lead a perfect life, based upon certain
theological or metaphysical notions, and guided by a rule of almost
monastic strictness. Like other men who have found themselves in the
midst of irreverence, selfishness, and democratic vulgarity and anarchy,
he believed that his time demanded moral discipline, based upon respect
for authority and character, with a firm belief in future retribution,
and inculcated by a careful study of the order and harmony of nature;
and such discipline he strove, with all his might, to impart. Having no
faith in the capacity of the State to be an instrument for his purpose,
he set to work independently of it, and seems to have met with very
marked success, drawing to him many of the best men and women of
Southern Italy. So numerous and powerful, indeed, did his followers
become that they held the balance of power in several cities, and were
able to use it for the enforcement of their own principles. As these
were exceedingly undemocratic, and opposed to the tendencies of the
time, they finally roused bitter opposition, so that the Pythagoreans
were persecuted and attempts made to exterminate them with fire and
sword. In this way their political influence was broken, and their
assemblies suppressed; but the effect of Pythagoras' teaching was not
lost. His followers, scattered abroad throughout the Hellenic world,
carried his precepts and his life-ideal with them. In the following
centuries they found many noble sympathizers--Pindar, Socrates, Plato,
Epicharmus, etc.--and underwent many modifications, until they finally
witnessed a resurrection, in the forms of Neo-Pythagoreanism and
Neo-Platonism, after the Christian era. In these later guises,
Pythagoreanism lost itself in mysticism and contemplation, turning its
followers into inactive ascetics; but in its original form it seems to
have been especially adapted to produce men of vigorous action and
far-sighted practicality. Milo of Croton, the inimitable wrestler;
Archytas of Tarentum, philosopher, mathematician, musician, inventor,
engineer, general, statesman; and Epaminondas, the greatest and noblest
of Theban generals, were professed Pythagoreans.
We might perhaps express the aim of Pythagoras' pedagogical efforts by
the one word HARMONY. Just as he found harmony everywhere in the
physical world, so he strove to introduce the same into the constitution
of the human individual, and into the relations of individuals with each
other. He may perhaps be regarded as the originator of that view of the
world, of men, and of society which makes all good consist in order and
proportion, a view which recommends itself strongly to idealists, and
has given birth to all those social Utopias, whose static perfection
seems to relieve the individual from the burden of responsibility, and
which have been dangled before the eyes of struggling humanity from his
days to ours. According to this view, which had its roots in Greek
thought generally, the aim of education is to find for each individual
his true place and to make him efficient therein. Man is made for order,
and not order for man. He is born into a world of order, as is shown by
the fact that number and proportion are found in everything that is
known. Pythagoras, in his enthusiasm for his principle, carried his
doctrine of numbers to absurd lengths, identifying them with real
things; but this enthusiasm was not without its valuable results, since
it is to Pythagoras and his school that we owe the sciences of geometry
and music. Moreover, experience must have taught him that it is one
thing to propound a theory, another to make it effective in regulating
human relations. In order to accomplish the latter object, he invoked
the aid of divine authority and of the doctrines of metempsychosis and
future retribution. Hence his educational system had a strong religious
cast, which showed itself even outwardly in the dignified demeanor and
quiet self-possession of his followers.
Harmony, then, to be attained by discipline, under religious sanctions,
was the aim of Pythagoras' teaching. Believing, however, that only a
limited number of persons were capable of such harmony, he selected his
pupils with great care, and subjected them to a long novitiate, in which
silence, self-examination, and absolute obedience played a prominent
part. The aim of this was to enable them to overcome impulse,
concentrate attention, and develop reverence, reflection, and
thoughtfulness, the first conditions of all moral and intellectual
excellence. While the first care was directed to their spiritual part,
their bodies were by no means forgotten. Food, clothing, and exercise
were all carefully regulated on hygienic and moral principles.
Regarding the details of Pythagoras' educational system we are not well
informed; but the spirit and tendency of it have been embalmed for us in
the so-called _Golden Words_, which, if not due to the pen of Pythagoras
himself, certainly reach back to very near his time, and contain nothing
at variance with what we otherwise know of his teaching. We insert a
literal version.
THE GOLDEN WORDS.
The Gods immortal, as by law disposed,
First venerate, and reverence the oath:
Then to the noble heroes, and the powers
Beneath the earth, do homage with just rites.
Thy parents honor and thy nearest kin,
And from the rest choose friends on virtue's scale.
To gentle words and kindly deeds give way,
Nor hate thy friend for any slight offence.
Bear all thou canst; for Can dwells nigh to Must.
These things thus know.
What follow learn to rule:
The belly first, then sleep and lust and wrath.
Do nothing base with others or alone:
But most of all thyself in reverence hold.
Then practise justice both in deed and word,
Nor let thyself wax thoughtless about aught:
But know that death's the common lot of all.
Be not untimely wasteful of thy wealth,
Like vulgar men, nor yet illiberal.
In all things moderation answers best.
Do things that profit thee: think ere thou act.
Let never sleep thy drowsy eyelids greet,
Till thou hast pondered each act of the day:
"Wherein have I transgressed? What have I done?
What duty shunned?"--beginning from the first,
Unto the last. Then grieve and fear for what
Was basely done; but in the good rejoice.
These things perform; these meditate; these love.
These in the path of godlike excellence
Will place thee, yea, by Him who gave our souls
The number Four, perennial nature's spring!
But, ere thou act, crave from the gods success.
These precepts having mastered, thou shalt know
The system of the never-dying gods
And dying men, and how from all the rest
Each thing is sunder'd, and how held in one:
And thou shalt know, as it is right thou shouldst,
That nature everywhere is uniform,
And so shalt neither hope for things that lie
Beyond all hope, nor fail of any truth.
But from such food abstain as we have named,
And, while thou seek'st to purge and free thy soul,
Use judgment, and reflect on everything,
Setting o'er all best Thought as charioteer.
Be glad to gather goods, nor less to lose.
Of human ills that spring from spirit-powers
Endure thy part nor peevishly complain.
Cure what thou canst: 'tis well, and then reflect:
"Fate never lays too much upon the good."
Words many, brave and base, assail men's ears.
Let these not disconcert or trammel thee;
But when untruth is spoken, meekly yield.
What next I say in every act observe:
Let none by word or deed prevail on thee
To do or say what were not best for thee.
Think ere thou act, lest foolish things be done;--
For thoughtless deeds and words the caitiff mark;--
But strongly do what will not bring regret.
Do naught thou dost not know; but duly learn.
So shall thy life with happiness o'erflow.
Be not neglectful of thy body's health;
But measure use in drink, food, exercise--
I mean by 'measure' what brings no distress.
Follow a cleanly, simple mode of life,
And guard against such acts as envy breed.
Then, if, when thou the body leav'st, thou mount
To the free ether, deathless shalt thou be,
A god immortal,--mortal never more!
In this system six things are noteworthy: (1) Its comprehensiveness, in
that it takes account of man's whole nature,--body, soul, and spirit;
affections, intellect, and will, and of all his relations--to gods and
men, to self and nature: (2) Its aimfulness, in that it promises
happiness here and blessedness hereafter, as the reward of right living:
(3) Its piety, in that it everywhere recognizes the need of divine
assistance: (4) Its appreciation of science, as insight into the nature
and grounds of multiplicity and unity: (5) Its stress laid on right
doing, as the condition of right knowing: (6) Its belief in man's
divinity and perfectibility. It is curious that the poem contains no
reference to the doctrine of metempsychosis, which might apparently have
been appealed to as a powerful moral sanction.
That a system like that of Pythagoras, combining the religious, the
mystical, the scientific, the ethical, and the social tendencies of the
Hellenic mind, should have exerted a deep and abiding influence, need
not surprise us. We find profound traces of it, not only in all
subsequent Greek thought, but even in foreign systems, such as Essenism,
whose elements were Hebrew Nazarenism and Greek Pythagoreanism. The
relations between Essenism and Christianity have not yet been
determined. Of the effect of Pythagoras' teaching on Epaminondas I have
already spoken.
CHAPTER V
IONIAN OR ATHENIAN EDUCATION
Let me now give an account of the Old Education, when I, uttering
words of justice, was in my prime, and self-control was held in
respect. In the first place, a child was not allowed to be heard
uttering a grumble. Then all the boys of the quarter were obliged to
march in a body, in an orderly way and with the scantest of
clothing, along the streets to the music master's, and this they did
even if it snowed like barley-groats. Then they were set to rehearse
a song, without compressing their thighs,--either "Pallas, mighty
city-stormer," or "A shout sounding far," putting energy into the
melody which their fathers handed down. And, if any one attempted
any fooling, or any of those trills like the difficult inflexions _à
la_ Phrynis now in vogue, he received a good threshing for his
pains, as having insulted the Muses. Again, at the physical
trainer's, the boys, while sitting, were obliged to keep their legs
in front of them.... And at dinner they were not allowed to pick out
the best radish-head, or to snatch away anise or celery from their
elders, or to gourmandize on fish and field-fares, or to sit with
their legs crossed.... Take courage, young man, and choose me, the
Better Reason, and you shall know how to hate the public square, to
avoid the bath-houses, to be ashamed of what is shameful, to show
temper when any one addresses you in ribald language, to rise from
your seat when your elders approach, and not to be a lubber to your
own parents, or to do any other unseemly thing to mar the image of
Modesty, or to rush to the house of the dancing-girl, and, while you
are gaping at her performances, get struck with an apple by a wench
and fall from your fair fame, or to talk back to your father, or,
addressing him as Japhet, to revile the old age which made the nest
for you.... Then, fresh and blooming, you will spend your time in
the gymnasia, and not go about the public square, mouthing monstrous
jokes, like the young men of to-day, or getting dragged into
slippery, gumshon-bamboozling disputes, but, going down to the
Academy, with some worthy companion of your own age, you will start
a running-match, crowned with white reed, smelling of smilax,
leisure and deciduous white poplar, rejoicing in the spring, when
the plane-tree whispers to the maple. If you do the things which I
enjoin, and give your mind to them, you will always have a
well-developed chest, a clear complexion, broad shoulders, and a
short tongue.--Aristophanes, _Clouds_ (_Speech of Right Reason_).
In their systems of education, some states strive to impart a
courageous habit to their people from their very childhood by a
painful and laborious training, whereas we, though living in a free
and natural way, are ready to meet them in a fair field with no
favor.--Pericles' _Funeral Oration_ (_Thucydides_).
I will never disgrace these sacred arms, nor desert my companion in
the ranks. I will fight for temples and public property, both alone
and with many. I will transmit my fatherland, not only not less, but
greater and better, than it was transmitted to me. I will obey the
magistrates who may at any time be in power. I will observe both the
existing laws and those which the people may unanimously hereafter
make, and, if any person seek to annul the laws or to set them at
nought, I will do my best to prevent him, and will defend them both
alone and with many (all?). I will honor the religion of my fathers.
And I call to witness Aglauros, Enyalios, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo,
and Hegemone.--_Oath of the Athenian Epheboi._
Consider, Men of Athens, what careful provision was made by Solon,
the ancient lawgiver, by Draco, and other lawgivers of that period,
for the cultivation of good morals. In the first place, they made
laws to secure a moral education for our children, and laid down, in
plain terms, just what the free-born boy should study and how he
should be nurtured; secondly, they made regulations regarding young
men; and, thirdly, with regard to the other periods of life in their
order, including both private persons and public speakers; and,
having recorded these laws, they left them in your keeping,
appointing you their guardians.--Æschines (_against Timarchus_).
If systems of education are to be classified according to their
results--and these are perhaps the fairest test--then the "Old
Education" of Athens must be assigned a very high place. The character
which she displayed, and the exploits which she performed, in the early
decades of the fifth century B.C., bear unequivocal testimony to the
value of the training to which her citizens had previously been
subjected. This training could perhaps hardly be better characterized
than by the word "puritanical." The men who fought at Marathon, Salamis,
and Platææ were puritans, trained, in a hard school, to fear the gods,
to respect the laws, their neighbors, and themselves, to reverence the
wisdom of experience, to despise comfort and vice, and to do honest
work. They were not enfeebled by æsthetic culture, paralyzed by abstract
thinking, or hardened by professional training. They were educated to be
men, friends, and citizens, not to be mere thinkers, critics, soldiers,
or money-makers. It was against a small band of such men that the hosts
of Persia fought in vain.
It is natural that this "Old Education" of Athens should have a special
interest for us, inasmuch as it seems, in great measure, to have solved
the problem that must be uppermost with every true educator and friend
of education, viz. How can strong, wise, and good men be produced? For
this reason, as also because we are the better informed regarding the
educational system of Athens than that of any other Greek state, it
seems proper to devote special attention to it, treating it as
preëminently Greek education. Indeed, whatever is permanently valuable
in Greek education is to be found in that of Athens, other systems
having mainly but an historical interest for us.
In comparing the education of Athens with that of Sparta, we are at once
struck with two great distinctions: (1) While Spartan education is
public, Athenian education is mainly private; (2) While Sparta educates
for war, Athens educates for peace. As to the former of these, it is not
a little remarkable that, while many of the first thinkers of Greece,
including Plato and Aristotle, advocated an entirely public education,
Athens never adopted it, or even took any steps in that direction. It
seems as if the Athenians felt instinctively that socialistic education,
by relieving parents of the responsibility of providing for the
education of their own children, was removing a strong moral influence,
undermining the family, and jeopardizing liberty. Perhaps the example of
Sparta was not without its influence. No liberty-loving people, such as
the Athenians were, would consent to merge the family in the State, or
to sacrifice private life to public order. As to the second distinction,
which was all-pervasive, it divides the two peoples by an impassable
gulf and assigns them to two different grades of civilization. And it
was one of which both peoples were entirely conscious. While Sparta
represented her ideal by a chained Ares, Athens found hers in a Wingless
Victory, a form of Athena, the divinity of political and industrial
wisdom. As the aim of Sparta was strength, so that of Athens was
WISDOM--the wise man in the wise state. By the "wise man," was meant he
whose entire faculties of body, soul, and mind were proportionately and
coördinately developed; by the "wise state," that in which each class of
the population performed its proper function, and occupied its proper
relation toward the rest, and this without any excessive exercise of
authority. If the Spartan, like the artificially tamed barbarian,
submitted to living by rule and command, the Athenian, like the
naturally civilized man, delighted to live in a free and natural way
(ἀνειμένως διαιτᾶσθαι) governed from within, and not from without. To
make possible such life was the aim of Athenian education, which,
instead of seeking to merge the man in the State, or to rend the two
asunder, treated them as necessary correlates and strove to balance
their claims.
The endeavor on the part of Athens to steer a middle course between
socialism and individualism, is manifest in the fact that, though she
had no public system of education, she took great care to see that her
citizens were thoroughly educated in the spirit of her institutions,
and, indeed, made such education a condition of citizenship, which was
thus an academic degree, conferred only after careful examination. By a
law of Solon's, parents who had failed to give their sons a proper
education lost all claim upon them for support in their old age.
Furthermore, Athens subjected all her male citizens to a systematic
preparation for civil and military functions, before she allowed them to
exercise these.
Athenian education comprised four grades corresponding to four
institutions, (1) the family, (2) the school, (3) the gymnasium or
college, (4) the State. We may consider these in their order.
(1) FAMILY EDUCATION.
The birth of a child was regarded by the Athenians as a joyful event, as
something calling for gratitude to the gods. This expressed itself in a
family festival, called the Amphidromia, celebrated usually on the
seventh day after the birth. On this occasion, the child was carried
rapidly round the family altar and received its name. A sacrifice was
then offered to the gods, the mother was purified, and christening
presents were displayed. The child was now a member of the family and
under the protection of its gods. For the next seven years, it was
wholly in the hands of parents and nurses, the latter being usually
slaves. During this time its body was the chief object of care, and
everything seems to have been done to render it healthy and hardy.
Cradles do not seem to have been in use, and the child was sung to sleep
on the nurse's knee. While it was being weaned, it was fed on milk and
soft food sweetened with honey. As soon as it was able to move about and
direct attention to external objects, it received playthings, such as
rattles, dolls of clay or wax, hobby-horses, etc., and was allowed to
roll and dig in the sand. Such were the simple gymnastics of this early
period. As to the other branch of education, it consisted mostly in
being sung to and in listening to stories about gods and heroes,
monsters and robbers, of which Greek mythology was full. By means of
these the child's imagination was roused and developed, and certain
æsthetic, ethical, and national prepossessions awakened. Though children
were often frightened from certain acts and habits by threats of bogles
coming to carry them off, yet the chief ethical agency employed was
evidently strict discipline. To secure good behavior in his children was
the first care of the Athenian parent. Though disinclined to harshness,
he never doubted that "he who spareth the rod hateth the child."
Children were never placed upon exhibition or applauded for their
precocious or irreverent sayings. They were kept as much as possible out
of the way of older people, and, when necessity brought them into the
presence of these, they were taught to behave themselves quietly and
modestly. No Greek author has preserved for us a collection of the smart
sayings or roguish doings of Athenian children.
Though the Kindergarten did not exist in those old days, yet its place
was, in great measure, filled by the numerous games in which the
children engaged, in part at least under their nurses' superintendence.
Games played so important a part in the whole life of the Greek people,
and especially of the Athenians, that their importance in the education
of children was fully recognized and much attention devoted to them.
During play, character both displays itself more fully, and is more
easily and deeply affected, than at any other time; and, since the whole
of the waking life of the child in its earliest years is devoted to
play, this is the time when character is formed, and therefore the time
which calls for most sedulous care. In playing games, children not only
exercise their bodies and their wits; they also learn to act with
fairness, and come to feel something of the joy that arises from
companionship and friendly rivalry in a common occupation. Moreover, as
games have no end beyond themselves, they are admirable exercises in
free, disinterested activity and a protection against selfish and sordid
habits. Of all this the Athenians were fully aware.
There are probably few games played by children in our day that were not
known in ancient Athens. It seems, however, that games were there
conducted with more system, and a deeper sense of their pedagogical
value, than they are with us. We hear of running, leaping, hopping,
catching, hitting, and throwing games, gymnastic games, and games of
chance. The ball, the top, the hoop, the swing, the see-saw, the
skipping rope, the knuckle-bones were as much in use in ancient, as in
modern, times. Cards, of course, there were not; and, indeed, games of
chance, though well known, seem rarely to have been indulged in by
children. It hardly seems necessary to remark that there were some games
peculiar to boys and others to girls, and that the latter were less rude
than the former. Doubtless, too, the games played in the city, where the
children would have few chances of going beyond their homes, were
different from those played in the country, where almost complete
freedom to roam in the open air was enjoyed. We must always bear in mind
that well-to-do Athenian families spent the greater part of the year at
their country-houses, which, with few exceptions, were so near the city
that they could be reached even on foot in a single day. This country
life had a marked effect upon the education of Athenian children.
(2) SCHOOL EDUCATION.
About the age of seven, the Athenian boy, after being entered on the
roll of prospective citizens in the temple of Apollo Patroös, and made a
member of a phratria, went to school, or, rather, he went to two
schools, that of the music-master, and that of the physical trainer. He
was always accompanied thither and back by a _pedagogue_, who was
usually a slave, who carried his writing-materials, his lyre, etc.
(there being no school-books to carry), and whom he was expected
implicitly to obey. The boys of each quarter of the city collected every
morning at some appointed place and walked to school, like little
soldiers, in rank and file. They wore next to no clothing, even in the
coldest weather, and were obliged to conduct themselves very demurely in
the streets. The school hours were very long, beginning early in the
morning and continuing till late in the evening. Solon found it
necessary to introduce a law forbidding schoolmasters to have their
schools open before sunrise or after sunset. It thus appears that boys,
after the age of seven, spent their whole day at school, and were thus
early withdrawn from the influence of their mothers and sisters, a fact
which was not without its bearing upon morals.
There are several interesting points in connection with Athenian school
life about which our information is so scanty that we are left in some
doubt respecting them. For example, though it is quite plain that Athens
had no system of public instruction, it is not so clear that she did not
own the school buildings. Again, it is not certain whether music
(including letters) and gymnastics were, or were not, taught in the same
locality. Thirdly, there is some doubt about the number and order of the
hours devoted to each of the two branches of study. In regard to these
points I can state only what seems to me most probable.
As to school buildings, we are expressly told by the author of the
fragmentary tract on _The Athenian State_, currently attributed to
Xenophon, but probably written as early as B.C. 424, that "the people
(δῆμος) builds itself many palæstras, dressing-rooms, baths, and the
masses have more enjoyment of these than the few that are well-to-do."
If we assume that some of these palæstras were for boys, as we
apparently have a right to do, we must conclude that some, at least, if
not all, of the schools for bodily training were public edifices, let
out by the State to teachers. Like all the great gymnasia, some, and
possibly all, of them were situated outside the city walls and had
gardens attached to them. Whether the music-schools were so likewise, is
doubtful, and this brings us to our second question--whether the two
branches of education were taught in the same place. That they were not
taught in the same room, or by the same person, is clear enough; but it
does not follow from this that they were not taught in the same
building, or at any rate in the same enclosed space. Though there seems
to be no explicit statement in any ancient author on this point, I think
there are sufficient reasons for concluding that, generally at least,
they were so taught. If we find that Antisthenes, Plato, and Aristotle,
who may be said to have introduced a systematic "higher education" into
Athens, opened their schools in the great public gymnasia, frequented by
youths and men, we may surely conclude that the lower mental education
was not separated from the physical. In the _Lysis_ of Plato, we find
some young men coming out of a palæstra outside the city walls, and
inviting Socrates to enter, telling him that their occupation (διατριβή)
consists _mostly_ in discussions (τὰ πολλὰ ἐν λόγοις), and that their
teacher is a certain Miccus, an admirer of his. Socrates recognizes the
man as a capable "sophist," a term never used of physical trainers. On
entering, Socrates finds a number of boys and youths (νεανίσκοι) playing
together, the former having just finished a sacrifice. It seems to
follow directly from this that intellectual education was imparted in
the palæstras. If this be true, we may, I think, conclude that in Athens
the schools generally were outside the city walls, though the case was
certainly different in some other cities.
In regard to our third question, it is clear that, if boys spent their
whole day in one place, it would be more easy to divide it profitably
between musical instruction and gymnastics than if they spent one part
of it in one place, and another in another. Just how it was divided, we
do not know, and I have little doubt that much depended upon the notions
of parents and the tendencies of different periods. It is quite clear,
from certain complaints of Aristotle's, that in Athens parents enjoyed
great liberty in this matter. In any case, since, as we know, the
institutions of education were open all day, it seems more than probable
that one class of boys took their gymnastic lesson at one hour, another
at another, and so with other branches of study. It cannot be that the
physical training-schools were deserted when the music-schools were in
session. I think there is sufficient reason for believing that,
generally, the younger boys took their physical exercises in the
morning, and their intellectual instruction in the afternoon, the order
being reversed in the case of the older boys. How much of the time spent
at school was given up to lessons and how much to play, is not at all
clear; but I am inclined to think that the playtime was at least as long
as the worktime. The schools were for boys what the agora and the
gymnasium were for grown men--the place where their lives were spent.
Before we consider separately the two divisions of Athenian education, a
few facts common to them may be mentioned. In the first place, they had
a common end, which was, to produce men independent but respectful,
freedom-loving but law-abiding, healthy in mind and body, clear in
thought, ready in action, and devoted to their families, their
fatherland, and their gods. Contrary to the practice of the Romans, the
Athenians sought to prepare their sons for independent citizenship at as
early an age as possible. In the second place, the motives employed in
both divisions were the same, viz. fear of punishment and hope of
reward. As we have seen, the Athenian boy, if he behaved badly, was not
spared the rod. As an offset against this, when he did well, he received
unstinted praise, not to speak of more substantial things. Education,
like everything else in Greece, took the form of competition. The
Homeric line (_Il._, vi, 208; xi, 784),
"See that thou ever be best, and above all others distinguished,"
was the motto of the Athenian in everything. In the third place, in both
divisions the chief aim was the realization of capacity, not the
furthering of acquisition. Mere learning and execution were almost
universally despised in the old time, while intelligence and capacity
were universally admired. In the fourth place, in both divisions the
utmost care was directed to the conduct of the pupils, so that it might
be gentle, dignified, and rational. In the fifth place, education in
both its branches was intended to enable men to occupy worthily and
sociably their leisure time, quite as much as to prepare them for what
might be called their practical duties in family, society, and State.
The fine arts, according to the Greeks, furnished the proper amusements
for educated men (πεπαιδευμένοι).
(α) _Musical (and Literary) Instruction_.
Though the Greek word _music_ (μουσική) came in later times to have an
extended meaning, in the epoch of which we are treating, it included
only music in our sense, and poetry, two things which were not then
separated. Aristophanes, as late as B.C. 422, can still count upon an
audience ready to laugh at the idea of giving instruction in astronomy
and geometry, as things too remote from human interests (_Clouds_, vv
220 sqq.). The poetry consisted chiefly of the epics of Homer and
Hesiod, the elegiacs of Tyrtæus, Solon, Theognis, etc., the iambics of
Archilochus, Simonides, etc., and the songs of the numerous lyrists,
Terpander, Arion, Alcæus, Alcman, Sappho, Simonides, etc. The music was
simple, meant to "sweeten" (ἡδύνειν) the words and bring out their
meaning. In fact, the music and the poetry were always composed
together, so that the poet was necessarily also a musician. What we call
"harmony" was unknown in Greek music at all times, and instrumental
music was almost entirely confined to solo-playing.
In treating of Athenian, and, indeed, of all Greek, education, it is of
the utmost importance to realize that the intellectual and moral part of
it has music and poetry for its starting-point. This is the core round
which everything else gathers; this is what determines its character,
influence, and ideal. Culture, as distinguished from nature, is the
material of Athenian intellectual and moral education; and by this is
meant, not the history or theory of culture, as it might be set forth in
prose, but culture itself, as embodied in the ideals and forms of
music-wedded poetry, appealing to the emotions that stir the will, as
well as to the intelligence that guides it.
By making the works of the great poets of the Greek people the material
of their education, the Athenians attained a variety of objects
difficult of attainment by any other one means. The fact is, the ancient
poetry of Greece, with its finished form, its heroic tales and
characters, its accounts of peoples far removed in time and space, its
manliness and pathos, its directness and simplicity, its piety and
wisdom, its respect for law and order, combined with its admiration for
personal initiative and worth, furnished, in the hands of a careful and
genial teacher, a material for a complete education such as could not
well be matched even in our own day. What instruction in ethics,
politics, social life, and manly bearing could not find a fitting
vehicle in the Homeric poems, not to speak of the geography, the
grammar, the literary criticism, and the history which the comprehension
of them involved? Into what a wholesome, unsentimental, free world did
these poems introduce the imaginative Greek boy! What splendid ideals of
manhood and womanhood did they hold up for his admiration and imitation!
From Hesiod he would learn all that he needed to know about his gods and
their relation to him and his people. From the elegiac poets he would
derive a fund of political and social wisdom, and an impetus to
patriotism, which would go far to make him a good man and a good
citizen. From the iambic poets he would learn to express with energy his
indignation at meanness, feebleness, wrong, and tyranny, while from the
lyric poets he would learn the language suitable to every genial feeling
and impulse of the human heart. And in reciting or singing all these,
how would his power of terse, idiomatic expression, his sense of poetic
beauty and his ear for rhythm and music be developed! With what a
treasure of examples of every virtue and vice, and with what a fund of
epigrammatic expression would his memory be furnished! How familiar he
would be with the character and ideals of his nation, how deeply in
sympathy with them! And all this was possible even before the
introduction of letters. With this event a new era in education begins.
The boy now not only learns and declaims his Homer, and sings his
Simonides or Sappho, he learns also to write down their verses from
dictation, and so at once to read and to write. This, indeed, was the
way in which these two (to us) fundamental arts were acquired. As soon
as the boy could trace with his finger in sand, or scratch with a stylus
on wax, the forms of the letters, and combine them into syllables and
words, he began to write poetry from his master's dictation. The
writing-lesson of to-day was the reading, recitation, or singing-lesson
of to-morrow. Every boy made his own reading-book, and, if he found it
illegible, and stumbled in reading, he had only himself to blame. The
Greeks, and especially the Athenians, laid the greatest stress upon
reading well, reciting well, and singing well, and the youth who could
not do all the three was looked upon as uncultured. Nor could he hide
his want of culture, since young men were continually called upon, both
at home and at more or less public gatherings, to perform their part in
the social entertainment.
The strictly musical instruction of this period was almost entirely
confined to simple, strong Doric airs, sung to an accompaniment which
was played on an instrument closely resembling the modern guitar (λύρα,
κίθαρις). Complicated and wind instruments were unpopular, and the
softer or more thrilling kinds of music, Lydian, Phrygian, etc., had not
yet been introduced, at least into schools. Anything like the skill and
execution demanded of professional players, who were usually slaves or
foreigners, was considered altogether unworthy of a free man and a
citizen, and was therefore not aimed at. Fond as the Athenians were of
the fine arts, they always held professional skill in any of them,
except poetry and musical composition, to be incompatible with that
dignity and virtue which they demanded of the free citizen. A
respectable Athenian would no more have allowed his son to be a
professional musician than he would have allowed him to be a
professional acrobat.
It is difficult for us to understand the way in which the Greeks
regarded music. Inferior as their music was to ours in all technical
ways, it exerted an influence upon their lives of which we can form but
a faint conception. To them it was a dæmonic power, capable of rousing
or assuaging the passions, and hence of being used for infinite good or
evil. No wonder, then, that in their education they sought to employ
those kinds which tended to "purgation" (κάθαρσις), and to avoid those
that were exciting, sentimental, or effeminate! No wonder that they
disapproved of divorcing music from the intellectual element contained
in the words, and allowing it to degenerate into a mere emotional or
sensual luxury! Music the Greeks regarded, not indeed as a moral force
(a phrase that to them, who regarded morality as a matter of the will,
would have conveyed no meaning), but as a force whose office it was, by
purging and harmonizing the human being, to make him a fit subject for
moral instruction. Music, they held, brought harmony, first into the
human being himself, by putting an end to the conflict between his
passions and his intelligent will, and then, as a consequence, into his
relations with his fellows. Harmony within was held to be the condition
of harmony without.
In the period of which I am speaking, no distinction was yet made
between music and literature (γράμματα), both being taught by the
_citharist_ (κιθαριστής). Indeed, the term for teacher of literature
(γραμματιστής) was not then invented. But the citharist not only taught
literature: he also taught the elements of arithmetic, a matter of no
small difficulty, considering the clumsy notation then in use. This was
done by means of pebbles, a box of sand, or an abacus similar in
principle to that now used by billiard players to keep count of their
strokes.
As to the schoolrooms in ancient Athens, they were apparently simple in
the extreme; indeed, rather porches open to sun and wind than rooms in
the modern sense. They contained little or no furniture. The boys sat
upon the ground or upon low benches, like steps (βάθρα), while the
teacher occupied a high chair (θρόνος). The benches were washed,
apparently every day, with sponges. The only decorations permitted in
the schoolrooms, it seems, were statues or statuettes of the Muses and
Apollo, and the school festivals or exhibitions were regarded as
festivals in honor of these. Indeed, in Greece every sort of festival
was regarded as an act of worship to some divinity. The chief school
festival seems to have been the _Musēa_ (μουσεῖα), at which the boys
recited and sang.
(β) _Gymnastics or Bodily Training_.
Under the term _Gymnastics_ (γυμναστική), the Greeks generally included
everything relating to the culture of the body. The ends which the
Athenians sought to reach through this branch of education were health,
strength, adroitness, ease, self-possession, and firm, dignified
bearing. A certain number of boys, intending to take part in the Olympic
and other great games, were allowed to train as athletes under a gymnast
(γυμναστής, ἀλείπτης) in the public gymnasia, and under the direction of
the State; but these were exceptions. The athlete was not an ideal
person at Athens, as he was at Thebes and Sparta.
Gymnastic exercises were conducted partly in the palæstras, or wrestling
schools, partly on the race-courses, both of which were under the
direction of professional trainers (παιδοτρίβαι). In early times, the
palæstra and race-course were simply an open space covered with sand and
probably connected with the school (διδασκαλεῖον), thus corresponding to
our playground. Later, this space was partly covered over and furnished
with dressing-rooms, a bath, seats for spectators, an altar for
sacrifices, statues, etc. Of the five gymnastic exercises in which boys
were trained, all except wrestling seem to have been conducted on the
race-course, so that the palæstra was reserved for what its name
implied. It is by no means certain that every palæstra had a race-course
connected with it, at least in the time of which we are speaking, and
possibly in many cases the boys took part of their exercises in the
public race-course running from the agora to beyond the walls. Just as
the schoolroom was decorated with images of Apollo and the Muses, so the
palæstra was decorated with images of Hermes, Heracles, and Eros,
symbolizing, respectively, adroitness, human strength, and youthful
friendship. The special patron of the palæstra was Hermes, and the
gymnastic exhibition took the form of a festival to him, the Hermæa, at
which a sacrifice was offered and the boys were allowed the use of the
building to play games in, the victors wearing crowns.
It would be impossible, in a work of this compass, to enter into a
minute description of all the exercises of the Athenian palæstra. We
must be content with a general statement, which may be prefaced with the
remark that these exercises were at first light, increasing gradually in
rigor and difficulty as the strength and skill of the growing child
permitted.
The chief gymnastic exercises were five, named in this order in a famous
line of Simonides: (1) leaping, (2) running, (3) discus-throwing, (4)
javelin-casting, (5) wrestling (πάλη), which last gave the name to the
palæstra. We shall not strictly follow this order, but begin with
(1) _Running._--This was the simplest, lightest, most natural, and,
therefore, the most easily taught of exercises. It was probably also the
oldest. We find even Homer making his ideal Phæacians begin their games
with it, and this practice seems to have been general throughout
antiquity. In taking this exercise, the boys divested themselves of all
clothing and had their bodies rubbed with oil. The running appears to
have been of the simplest kind. Hurdle-races, sack-races, etc., were
apparently excluded from education. At the same time, the running was
rendered difficult by the soft sand with which the course was covered to
the depth of several inches. The races were distinguished according to
their length in furlongs or stadia: (1) the furlong-race, (2) the
double-furlong race, (3) the horse (four-furlong) race, (4) the long
race, whose length seems to have been twenty-four furlongs, or about
three miles. The stadion was = 202¼ yards English. The shorter races
called for brief concentration of energy, the longer for persistence and
endurance; all were exercises in agility; all tended to develop
lung-power.
(2) _Leaping or Jumping._--This exercise seems, in the main, to have
confined itself to the long leap. Though the high leap and the pole-jump
can hardly have been unknown, we have no evidence that they were ever
employed in the gymnastic training of boys. There may have been hygienic
reasons which forbade their use. On the other hand, boys were taught to
lengthen their leap by means of weights, somewhat similar to our
dumb-bells, carried in their hands, and swung forward in the act of
leaping. Such leaping would be an exercise for the arms, as well as for
the legs and the rest of the body. But, just as there were two exercises
intended chiefly for the legs, so there were two intended chiefly for
the arms--discus-throwing and javelin-casting.
(3) _Discus-throwing._--The modern world has been rendered very familiar
with the method of this exercise by the copies of the _discobolus_ of
Myron, preserved in Rome and extensively engraved and photographed, and
that of the _discobolus_ of Alcamenes which now stands in the Vatican
(see Overbeck, _Griech. Plastik_ vol. i, p. 276). The discus was
generally a flat, round piece of stone or metal, a sort of large quoit
with no hole in the middle, which the user sought to throw as far as he
could. The discobolus of Alcamenes shows us a youth balancing the discus
in his left hand, and taking the measure of his throw with his eye; that
of Myron shows us another in the act of throwing. He swings the discus
backward in his right hand, and bends his body forward to balance it.
His right foot, the toes contracted with effort, rests firmly on the
ground; the left is slightly lifted; the whole body is like a bent bow.
In the next instant the left foot will advance, the left hand, now
resting on the right knee, will swing backwards, the body will resume
its erect position, and the discus will be shot forward from the right
hand like an arrow. Nothing could show more clearly than does this
statue the perfect organization, symmetry, and balance which were the
aim of Greek gymnastics. Not one limb could be moved without affecting
all the rest,--which shows that the exercise extended to the whole body.
(4) _Javelin-casting._--The aim of this exercise was to develop skill
and precision of eye and hand, rather than strength of muscle. The
instrument employed was a short dagger or lance, which was aimed at a
mark. He who could hit the mark from the greatest distance was the most
proficient scholar. The spear, before being thrown, was balanced in the
right hand at the height of the ear.
(5) _Wrestling._--This very complicated exercise was evidently the
principal one in the gymnastic course, the one to which the others were
merely preparatory. It was the only one which a boy could not practice
by himself. It exercised not only the whole body, but the patience and
temper as well. The aim of the wrestler was to throw (καταβλλειν) his
antagonist. Those who took part in this exercise had their bodies rubbed
with oil and strewn with fine sand. It seems that the wrestler was
allowed to do anything he chose to his antagonist except to bite,
strike, or kick him. Before he could claim the victory he had to throw
him three times. After the contest the wrestlers scraped from their
bodies, with a strigil, the oil and dust,[2] bathed, were again rubbed
with oil, exposed their bodies to the sun, in order to dry and tan them,
and dressed. The bathing was done in cold water, and both the bathing
and the sunning were in part intended to inure the body to sudden cold
and heat, which inurement was considered a very essential part of
physical training.
Such were the chief exercises employed in the gymnastic training of the
Athenians. Thus far, we have considered the two branches of education as
conducted separately, and as not coming at any point in contact with
each other. But it would have been very unlike the Greek, and especially
the Athenian, to leave the two divisions of education unrelated and
unharmonized. And, indeed, he did not so leave them, but brought them
together in the most admirable way in what he called _orchesis_, a word
for which we have no better equivalent than
(γ) _Dancing_ (ὄρχησις, χορός).
"Dancers," says Aristotle, "by means of plastic rhythms (rhythms
reproduced in plastic forms) imitate characters, feelings, and
actions." Xenophon, in his _Anabasis_, describing a banquet that took
place in the wilds of Paphlagonia, says: "After the treaty was ratified
and the pæan sung, there first rose up two Thracians and danced in armor
to the flute, leaping high and lightly, and using their swords. Finally
one of them struck the other, so that everybody thought he had wounded
him; but he fell in an artificial way. Then the Paphlagonians raised a
shout; but the assailant, having despoiled the fallen man of his armor,
went out singing the Sitalcas. Then others of the Thracians carried out
the other as if he had been dead; but he was none the worse. Next, some
Ænianes and Magnesians stood up and danced the so-called Carpæa in
armor. The manner of the dance was this: one man, putting his arms
within reach, sows and drives a team, frequently turning round as if
afraid. Then a robber makes his appearance. As soon as the other espies
him, he seizes his arms, advances to him, and fights in front of the
team. And the two did this keeping time to the flute. Finally the
robber, having bound the other, carries off both him and the team;
sometimes, on the contrary, the ploughman binds the robber, in which
case he yokes him, with his hands bound behind his back, to his oxen and
drives off." Several other dances, performed by persons of different
nationalities, follow; but enough has been quoted to show that the Greek
ὄρχησις was something very different from our dancing. It was, indeed, a
pantomimic ballet, interspersed with _tableaux vivans_.
In the dances here mentioned, the flute is the instrument employed, and
this the player could not accompany with his voice. But in the Athenian
schools, in the old time, the flute, and all music without words, were
tabooed. There can be no doubt, therefore, that in these the orchestic
performances were accompanied by the lyre, the player on which sang in
words what the dancers danced. It is obvious that in such performances
the musical (literary) and gymnastic branches of education came in for
about equal shares. Dancing exercised the whole human being, body and
soul, and exercised them in a completely harmonious way. It is this
harmony, this rhythmic movement of the body in consonance with the
emotions of the soul and the purposes of the intelligence, that is
_grace_ (χάρις). Hence, while the Greeks relied upon gymnastics to
impart strength and firmness to the body, they looked to dancing for
courtliness and grace. Plato places the two on the same footing, as
parts of a single discipline.
The fact that the two divisions of education met in dancing seems to
prove what I surmised above, viz. that they were conducted within the
same precincts; in which case we may suppose that, while the dancing
exercises took place in the palæstra, the music was supplied by the
music master. We know that the chorus-leader was a public officer,
appointed by the demos, and had to be over forty years old. In any case,
it is curious enough to think that Athenian, and, generally, Greek,
education culminated in dancing. But this was a perfectly logical
result; for the chorus is the type of Greek social life, as we see most
clearly in the _Republic_ of Plato. It hardly needs to be pointed out
that the supreme form of Greek art, the drama, was but a development of
the Bacchic or Dionysiac chorus. This development consisted in the
separation of the music from the pantomime, and the assignment of the
former to the chorus, which no longer danced, but walked, and of the
latter to the actors, who added the dialogue to it. Greek life was
divided into three parts--civil, military, religious. Music and letters
were a preparation for the first, gymnastics for the second, and dancing
for the third. Dancing formed a prominent part in Greek worship, and it
may be doubted whether free Athenians ever danced except "before the
gods "--ἐν ταῖς πρὸς τοὺς θεοὺς προσόδοις, as Xenophon says.
Two things still remain to be considered with regard to Athenian
schools, (1) grading, (2) holidays. With respect to the former, the
practice probably differed at different times; but we seem to be
justified in assuming that, at the time of which I am speaking, there
were but two grades, boys (παῖδες) and youths (νεανίσκοι). These are
mentioned by Plato, in the _Lysis_, as celebrating the Hermæa together
in a palæstra. The first grade would include the boys from seven to
eleven years of age; the second, those from eleven to fifteen. As to
holidays, they seem to have been simply the feast-days of the greater
gods, when business of every sort was suspended. Such days amounted to
about ninety annually.
(3) COLLEGE EDUCATION.
About the time when he was blossoming into manhood, that is, some time
between his fourteenth and his sixteenth year, the Athenian boy of the
olden time was transferred from the private school and palæstra, which
belonged to the family side of life, to the gymnasium, which belonged to
the State, and in which he received the education calculated to fit him
for the duties of a citizen. Having, in the family and the school, been
trained to be a gentleman (καλοκἀγαθός), he must now be trained to be a
citizen, capable of exercising legislative, judicial, and military
functions. The State saw to it that he received this training, if his
parents chose and could afford it.
In the time of Solon, about B.C. 590, two great gymnasia, the Academy
and Cynosarges, were erected in the midst of extensive groves outside
the city walls. These groves were afterwards surrounded with high walls,
furnished with seats and other conveniences, and turned into city parks.
The Academy, which lay to the northwest of the city, in the valley of
the Cephisus, and was under the patronage of Athena, was the resort of
the full-blooded citizens, while Cynosarges, situated to the east of the
city, near the foot of Lycabettus, was assigned to those who had foreign
blood in their veins, that is, who had only one parent of pure Athenian
stock. This gymnasium was under the patronage of Heracles, whose worship
always implies the presence of a foreign and vanquished element. These
were the only two gymnasia belonging to Athens before the time of
Pericles. They were, probably, destroyed by the Persians in 480, and had
afterwards to be rebuilt, and the groves replanted.
While the children of nearly all the free citizens of Athens attended
the school and the palæstra, it is clear that only the youth of the
wealthier classes attended the gymnasium. One result of this was that
the government and offices of the State fell exclusively into the hands
of those classes; and it was perhaps just in order to make this
division, without introducing any class-law, that the shrewd Solon
established the gymnasia, which thus became a bulwark against democracy.
As soon as the Athenian youth was transferred to the gymnasium, he
passed from under the charge of the pedagogue, who represented the
family, and came under the direct surveillance of the State. He was now
free to go where he would, to frequent the agora and the street, to
attend the theatre, in which he had his appointed place, and to make
himself directly acquainted with all the details of public life. In the
gymnasium he passed into the hands of a gymnast or scientific trainer,
and for the next two or three years was subjected to the severer
exercises, wrestling, boxing, etc. No special provision, beyond the fact
that he had to learn the laws, was made for his intellectual and moral
instruction. He was expected to acquire this from contact with the older
citizens whom he met in the agora, the street, or the public park. Thus,
at what is justly regarded as the most critical age, he was almost
compelled to live a free, breezy, outdoor life, full of activity and
stirring incident, his thoughts and feelings directed outwards into acts
of will, and not turned back upon himself or his own states. At the same
time he was acquiring just that practical knowledge of ethical laws and
of real life which could best fit him for active citizenship. He now
learnt to ride, to drive, to row, to swim, to attend banquets, to
sustain a conversation, to discuss the weightiest questions of
statesmanship, to sing and dance in public choruses, and to ride or walk
in public processions. If he abused his liberty and behaved in a lawless
or unseemly way, he was called to account by the severe Court of the
Areopagus, which attended to public morals. He saw little of girls of
his own age, except his sisters, unless it was at public festivals, when
there was little opportunity of becoming acquainted with them. His
affectionate nature therefore expressed itself mostly in the form of
devoted friendships to other youths of his own, or nearly his own, age,
a fact which enables us to understand why friendship fills so large a
space, not only in the life, but also in the ethical treatises of the
Greeks,--Plato, Aristotle, etc.,--and why love, in the modern sense,
plays so insignificant a part. The truth is that, even in Athens, the
State encroached upon the family. Plato's _Republic_ was only the
logical carrying out of principles that were latent long before in the
social life of the Athenian people.
It would be impossible to treat in detail the exercises to which the
Athenian youth was subjected during the years in which he attended the
public gymnasium as a pupil. The old exercises of the palæstra were
continued, running and wrestling especially; but the former was now done
in armor, and the latter became more violent, and was supplemented by
boxing. In fact, the physical exercises were now systematized into the
_pentathlon_--running, leaping, discus-throwing, wrestling,
boxing--which formed the programme of nearly all gymnastic exhibitions.
During these years, the youth was still regarded as a minor, and his
father or guardian was responsible for his good behavior. But when he
reached the age of eighteen, a change took place, and he passed under
the direct control of the State. His father now brought him before the
reeve of his _demos_ (ward or village), as a candidate for independent
citizenship. If he proved to be the lawful child of free citizens, and
came up to the moral and physical requirements of the law, his name was
entered upon the register of the demos, and he became a member of it. He
was now prepared to be presented to the whole people, and to pass the
State examination. He shore his long hair for the first time, and donned
the black garment of the citizen. In this guise he presented himself to
the king-archon of the State, who, at a public assembly, introduced him,
along with others, to the whole people. He was then and there armed with
spear and shield (supplied by the State if his father had fallen in
war), and thence proceeded to the shrine of Aglauros, where, looking
down on the agora, the city, and the Attic plain, he took the Solonian
oath of citizenship (see p. 61). He was now technically an _ephēbos_,
cadet, or citizen-novice, ready to undergo those two years of severe
discipline which at once formed his introduction to practical affairs,
and constituted the State examination. During the first year he remained
in the neighborhood of Athens, drilling in arms, and acquiring a
knowledge of military tactics. His life was now the hard life of a
soldier. He slept in the open air, or in the guard-houses (φρούρια)
that surrounded the city, and was liable to be called upon at any time
by the government to give aid in an emergency. He also took part in the
public festivals. At the end of the year, all the _ephēboi_ of one
year's standing passed an examination in military drill before the
assembled people (ἀπεδείξαντο τῷ δήμῳ περὶ τὰς τάξεις[3]), after which
they were employed as militia to man the frontier guard-houses, and as
rural _gendarmerie_ (περίπολοι), scouring the country in all directions.
They now lived like soldiers in war-time, and learnt two important
things, (1) the topography of Attica, its roads, passes, brooks,
springs, etc., (2) the art of enforcing law and order. Their life,
indeed, closely resembled that of the Alpine corps (_Alpini_) of the
Italian army at the present day. These spend the summer in making
themselves acquainted with every height, valley, pass, stream, and
covert in the Italian Alps, often bivouacking for days together at great
heights. That during this time the _ephēboi_ should have taken any part
in the legislative or judicial duties of citizens, seems in the highest
degree improbable. At the end of their second year, however, they passed
a second examination, called the citizenship or manhood examination
(δοκιμασία εἰς ἄνδρας), after which they were full members of the State.
(4) UNIVERSITY EDUCATION.
The Greek university was the State, and the Greek State was a
university--a _Cultur-Staat_, as the Germans say. That the State is a
school of virtue, was a view generally entertained in the ancient world,
which, until it began to decay, completely identified the man with the
citizen. The influence of this view upon the attitude of the individual
to the State, and of the State to the individual, can hardly be
overestimated. The State claimed, and the individual accorded to it, a
disciplinary right which extended to every sphere and action of life.
Thus the sphere of morality coincided exactly with the sphere of
legality, or, to put it the other way, the sphere of legality extended
to the whole sphere of morality, and this was considered true, whatever
form the State or government might assume--monarchy, aristocracy,
democracy, etc.
To give a full account of the university education of old Athens would
be to write her social and political history up to the time of the
Persian Wars. This is, of course, out of the question. All I can do is
to point out those elements in the State which enabled it to produce
that splendid array of noble men, and accomplish those great deeds and
works, which make her brief career seem the brightest spot in the
world's history.
The chief of these elements, and the one which included all the rest,
was the Greek ideal of harmony. Athens was great as a State and as a
school so long as she embodied that ideal, so long as she distributed
power and honor in accordance with worth (ἀρετή) intellectual, moral,
practical; in a word, so long as the State was governed by the best
citizens (ἄριστοι), and the rest acknowledged their right to do so.
Notwithstanding the contention of Grote and others, it is strictly true
that Athens was great because, and so long as, she was aristocratic (in
the ancient sense), and perished when she abandoned her fundamental
ideal by becoming democratic. This assertion must not be construed as
any slur upon democracy as such, or as denying that Athens in perishing
paved the way for a higher ideal than her own. It simply states a fact,
which may be easily generalized without losing its truth: An institution
perishes when it abandons the principle on which it was founded and
built up. Unless we bear this in mind, we shall utterly fail to
understand the lesson of Athenian history. If it be maintained that some
of Athens' noblest work was done under the democracy, the sufficient
answer is, that it was nearly all done by men who retained the spirit of
the old aristocracy, and bitterly opposed the democracy. We need name
only Æschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes.
PART II
THE "NEW EDUCATION" (B.C. 480-338)
CHAPTER I
INDIVIDUALISM AND PHILOSOPHY
Homer ought to be driven from the lists and whipt, and Archilochus
likewise.--Heraclitus.
Thou needs must have knowledge of all things,
First of the steadfast core of the Truth that forceth conviction,
Then of the notions of mortals, where true conviction abides not.
--Parmenides.
All things were undistinguished: then Intellect came and brought
them into order.--Anaxagoras.
Man is the measure of all things.
In regard to the Gods, I am unable to know whether they are or are
not.--Protagoras.
STREPSIADES. Don't you see what a good thing it is to have learning?
There isn't any Zeus, Phidippides!
PHIDIPPIDES. Who is there then?
STREPS. Vortex rules, having dethroned Zeus.
PHID. Pshaw! what nonsense!
STREPS. You may count it true, all the same.
PHID. Who says so?
STREPS. Socrates the Melian, and Chærephon, who knows the footprints
of fleas.--Aristophanes, _Clouds_.
There is an old-fashioned saw, current of yore among mortals, that a
man's happiness, when full-grown, gives birth and dies not
childless, and that from Fortune there springs insatiate woe for all
his race. But I, dissenting from all others, am alone of different
mind. It is the Irreverent Deed that begets after it more of its
kind. For to righteous homes belongs a fair-childrened lot forever;
but old Irreverence is sure to beget Irreverence, springing up fresh
among evil men, when the numbered hour arrives. And the new
Irreverence begets Surfeit of Wealth, and a power beyond all battle,
beyond all war, unholy Daring, twin curses, black to homes, like to
their parents. But Justice shines in smoky homes, and honors the
righteous life, and, leaving, with averted eyes, foundations gilded
with impurity of hands, she draws nigh to holy things, honoring not
the power of wealth, with its counterfeit stamp of praise. And her
will is done.--Æschylus
From the time they are children to the day of their death, we teach
them and admonish them. As soon as the child understands what is
said to him, his nurse and his mother and his pedagogue and even his
father vie with each other in trying to make the best of him that
can be made, at every word and deed instructing him and warning him,
"This is right," "This is wrong," "This is beautiful," "This is
ugly," "This is righteous," "This is sinful," "Do this," "Don't do
that." And if the child readily obeys, well and good; if he does
not, then they treat him like a bent and twisted stick,
straightening him out with threats and blows. Later on, they send
him to school, and then they lay their injunctions upon the masters
to pay much more attention to the good behavior of their sons than
to their letters and music (κιθάρισις); and the teachers act upon
these injunctions. Later yet, when they have learnt to read, and are
proceeding to understand the meaning of what is written, just as
formerly they understood what was said to them, they put before them
on the benches to read the works of good poets, and insist upon
their learning them by heart--works which contain many admonitions,
and many narratives, noble deeds, and eulogies of the worthy men of
old--their purpose being to awaken the boy's ambition, so that he
may imitate these men and strive to be worthy likewise. The
music-teachers also, pursuing the same line, try to inculcate
self-control (σωφροσύνη) and to prevent the boys from falling into
mischief. In addition to this, when they have learnt to play on the
lyre, their masters teach them other poems, written by great lyric
poets, making them sing them and play the accompaniments to them,
and compelling them to work into their souls the rhythms and
melodies of them, so that they may grow in gentleness, and, having
their natures timed and tuned, may be fitted to speak and act. The
truth is, the whole life of man needs timing and tuning.
Furthermore, in addition to all this, parents send their sons to the
physical trainer, in order that their bodies may be improved and
rendered capable of seconding a noble intent, and they themselves
not be forced, from physical deterioration, to play the coward in
war or other (serious) matters. And those who can best afford to
give this education, give most of it, and these are the richest
people. Their sons go earliest to school and leave it latest. And
when the boys leave school, the State insists that they shall learn
the laws and live according to them, and not according to their own
caprice ... And if any one transgresses these laws, the State
punishes him ... Seeing that so much attention is devoted to virtue,
both in the family and in the State, do you wonder, Socrates, and
question whether virtue be something that can be taught? Surely you
ought not to wonder at this, but rather to wonder if it could _not_
be taught.--Plato, _Protagoras_ (_words of Protagoras_).
"Isn't it true, Lysis," said I, "that your parents love you very
much?"--"To be sure," said he.--"Then they would wish you to be as
happy as possible?"--"Of course," said he.--"And do you think a
person is happy who is a slave, and is not allowed to do anything he
desires?"--"I don't, indeed," said he.--"Then, if your father and
mother love you and wish you to be happy, they endeavor by every
means in their power to make you happy."--"To be sure they do," said
he.--"Then they allow you to do anything you please, and never chide
you, or prevent you from doing what you desire."--"By Jove! they do,
Socrates: they prevent me from doing a great many things."--"What do
you mean," said I; "they wish you to be happy, and yet prevent you
from doing what you wish? Let us take an example: If you want to
ride in one of your father's chariots, and to hold the reins, when
it is competing in a race, won't they allow you, or will they
prevent you?"--"By Jove! no: they would not allow me," said he. "But
why should they? There is a charioteer, who is hired by my
father."--"What do you mean? They allow a hired man, rather than
you, to do what he likes with the horses, and pay him a salary
besides?"--"And why not?" said he.--"Well then, I suppose they allow
you to manage the mule-team, and if you wanted to take the whip and
whip it, they would permit you."--"How could they?" said
he.--"What?" said I: "is nobody allowed to whip it?"--"Of course,"
he said; "the muleteer."--"A slave or a free man?"--"A slave," said
he.--"And so it seems they think more of a slave than of their son,
and entrust their property to him rather than to you, and allow him
to do what he pleases, whereas they prevent you. But, farther, tell
me this. Do they allow you to manage yourself, or do they not even
trust you to that extent?"--"How trust me?" said he.--"Then does
some one manage you?"--"Yes, my pedagogue here," said he.--"But he
is surely not a slave?"--"Of course he is, our slave," said he.--"Is
it not strange," said I, "that a freeman should be governed by a
slave? But, to continue, what is this pedagogue doing when he
governs you?"--"Taking me to a teacher, or something of the kind,"
he said.--"And these teachers, it cannot be that they too govern
you?"--"To any extent."--"So then your father likes to set over you
a host of masters and managers; but, of course, when you go home to
your mother, she lets you do what you like, in order to make you
happy, either with the threads or the loom, when she is
weaving--does she not? She surely doesn't in the least prevent you
from handling the batten, or the comb, or any of the instruments
used in spinning."--And he, laughing, said: "By Jove, Socrates; she
not only prevents me, but I should be beaten if I touched
them."--"By Hercules," said I, "isn't it true that you have done
some wrong to your father and mother?"--"By Jove, not I," he
said.--"But for what reason, then, do they so anxiously prevent you
from being happy, and doing what you please, and maintain you the
whole day in servitude to some one or another, and without power to
do almost anything you like. It seems, indeed, that you derive no
advantage from all this wealth, but anybody manages it rather than
you, nor from your body, nobly born as it is, but some one else
shepherds it and takes care of it. But you govern nothing, Lysis,
and do nothing that you desire."--"The reason, Socrates," he said,
"is, that I am not of age."--Plato, _Lysis_.
The present state of the constitution is as follows: Citizenship is
a right of children whose parents are both of them citizens.
Registration as member of a deme or township takes place when
eighteen years of age are completed. Before it takes place the
townsmen of the deme find a verdict on oath, firstly, whether they
believe the youth to be as old as the law requires, and if the
verdict is in the negative he returns to the ranks of the boys.
Secondly, the jury find whether he is freeborn and legitimate. If
the verdict is against him he appeals to the Heliæa, and the
municipality delegate five of their body to accuse him of
illegitimacy. If he is found by the jurors to have been illegally
proposed for the register, the State sells him for a slave; if the
judgment is given in his favor, he must be registered as one of the
municipality. Those on the register are afterwards examined by the
senate, and if anyone is found not to be eighteen years old, a fine
is imposed on the municipality by which he was registered. After
approbation, they are called _epheboi_, or cadets, and the parents
of all who belong to a single tribe hold a meeting and, after being
sworn, choose three men of the tribe above forty years of age, whom
they believe to be of stainless character and fittest for the
superintendence of youth, and out of these the commons in ecclesia
select one superintendent for all of each tribe, and a governor of
the whole body of youths from the general body of the Athenians.
These take them in charge, and after visiting with them all the
temples, march down to Piræus, where they garrison the north and
south harbors, Munychia and Acte. The commons also elect two
gymnastic trainers for them, and persons who teach them to fight in
heavy armor, to draw the bow, to throw the javelin, and to handle
artillery. Each of the ten commanders receives as pay a drachma
[about 20 cts.] per diem, and each of the cadets four obols [about
13 cts.]. Each commander draws the pay of the cadets of his own
tribe, buys with it the necessaries of life for the whole band (for
they mess together by tribes), and purveys for all their wants. The
first year is spent in military exercises. The second year the
commons meet in the theatre and the cadets, after displaying before
them their mastery in warlike evolutions, are each presented with a
shield and spear, and become mounted patrols of the frontier and
garrison the fortresses. They perform this service for two years,
wearing the equestrian cloak and enjoying immunity from civic
functions. During this period, to guard their military duties from
interruption, they can be parties to no action either as defendant
or plaintiff, except in suits respecting inheritance, or heiresses,
or successions to hereditary priesthoods. When the three years are
completed they fall into the ordinary body of citizens.--Aristotle,
_Constitution of Athens_ (_Poste's Version, with slight
alterations_).
That perfect harmony between power and worth at which the Athenian State
aimed, was something not easily attained or preserved. As far back as
its recorded history reaches, we find a struggle for power going on
between a party which possessed more power than its worth justified, and
a party which possessed less; that is, between a party which, having
once been worthy, strove to hold power in virtue of its past history,
and one that claimed power in virtue of the worth into which it was
growing: in a word, a struggle between declining aristocracy and growing
democracy. To the party in power, of course, this seemed a rebellion
against lawful authority and privilege, and it did its best to suppress
it. Hence came the rigorous legislation of Draco; later the more
conciliatory, less out-spoken, but equally aristocratic legislation of
Solon; then the tyranny of Pisistratus, lasting as long as he could hold
the balance of power between the contending parties; then the
constitution of Clisthenes, with the breaking up of the old Athenian
aristocratic system, the remodelling of the tribes, the degradation of
the Areopagus, and the definite triumph of democracy. To complete the
movement and, as it were, to consecrate it, came the Persian Wars, which
mark the turning-point, the _peripeteia_, in Athenian history and
education. Whatever efforts aristocracy makes to maintain itself after
this, are made in the name of, and under cover of a zeal for, democracy.
The aristocratic Athenian State was based upon land-ownership, slavery,
and the entire freedom of the land-owning class from all but family and
State duties, from all need of engaging in productive industry. So long
as the chief wealth of the State consisted in land and its produce, so
long the population was divided into two classes, the rich and the poor,
and so long the former had little difficulty in keeping all power in
its own hands. But no sooner did the growth of commerce throw wealth
into the hands of a class that owned no land, and was not above engaging
in industry, than this class began to claim a share in political power.
There were now two wealthy classes, standing opposed to each other, a
proud, conservative one, with "old wealth and worth," and a vain,
radical one, with new wealth and wants, both bidding for the favor of
the class that had little wealth, little worth, and many wants, and thus
making it feel its importance. Such is the origin of Athenian democracy.
It is the child of trade and productive industry. It owed its final
consecration to the Persian Wars, and especially to the battle of
Salamis, in which Athens was saved by her fleet, manned chiefly by
marines (ἐπιβάται) from the lower classes, the upper classes, as we have
seen, being trained only for land-service. Thus the battle of Salamis
was not only a victory of Greece over Persia, but of foreign trade over
home agriculture, of democracy over aristocracy.
The fact that the Athenian democracy owed its origin to trade
determined, in great measure, its history and tendencies. One of its
many results was that it opened Athens to the influx of foreign men,
foreign ideas, and foreign habits, not to speak of foreign gods, all of
which tended to break up the old self-contained, carefully organized
life of the people. In no department were their effects sooner or more
clearly felt than in that of education. From about the date of the
battle of Salamis, when the youthful Ionian, Anaxagoras, came to Athens,
a succession of men of "advanced" ideas in art and science sought a
field of action within her borders. Such a field, indeed, seemed
purposely to have been left open for them by the State, which had
provided no means of intellectual or moral education for its young
citizens, after they passed under its care (see p. 87). Nothing was
easier or more profitable than for these wise foreigners to constitute
themselves public teachers, and fill the place which the State had left
vacant. The State might occasionally object, and seek to punish one or
another of them for corrupting of the youth by the promulgation of
impious or otherwise dangerous ideas, as it did in the case of
Anaxagoras; but their activity was too much in harmony with a tendency
of the time,--a radical and individualistic tendency inseparable from
democracy,--to be dispensed with altogether. Hence it was that, within a
few years after the battle of Salamis, there flourished in Athens a
class of men unknown before within her boundaries, a class of private
professors, or "sophists," as they called themselves, who undertook to
teach theoretically what the State had assumed could be taught only
practically and by herself, viz., virtue and wisdom. Their ideas were
novel, striking, and radical, hence congenial to a newly emancipated
populace, vain of its recent achievements, and contemptuous of all that
savored of the narrow, pious puritanism of the old time; their premises
were magnificent, and their fees high enough to impose upon a class that
always measures the value of a thing by what it is asked to pay for it;
their method of teaching was such as to flatter the vanity, and secure
the favor, of both pupils and parents. No wonder that their success was
immediate and their influence enormous.
From the days of Socrates to our own, 'sophist' has been a term of
reproach, and not altogether unjustly so. Hegel, Grote, and Zeller have,
indeed, shown that the sophists did not deserve all the obloquy which
has attached itself to their name, inasmuch as they were neither much
better nor much worse than any class of men who set up to teach new
doctrines for money, and, as wise economists, suit supply to demand;
nevertheless, it may be fairly enough said that they largely contributed
to demoralize Athens, by encouraging irreverence for the very
conceptions upon which her polity was built, and by pandering to some of
the most selfish and individualistic tendencies of democracy. If it be
said that they have their place in the history of human evolution, as
the heralds of that higher view of life which allows the individual a
sphere of activities and interests outside of that occupied by the
State, this may at once and without difficulty be admitted, without our
being thereby forced to regard them as noble men. The truth is, they
represented, in practice and in theory, the spirit of individualism,
which was then everywhere asserting itself against the spirit of
nationalism or polity, and which perhaps had to assert itself in an
exaggerated and destructive way, before the rightful claims of the two
could be manifested and harmonized. It is the incorporation of this
spirit of individualism into education that constitutes the "New
Education."
This spirit, as manifested in the sophists and their teaching, directed
itself against the old political spirit in all the departments of
life--in religion, in politics, in education. It discredited the old
popular gods, upon loyalty to whom the existence of the State had been
supposed to depend, substituting for them some crude fancy like Vortex,
or some bald abstraction like Intellect. It encouraged the individual to
seek his end in his own pleasure, and to regard the State as but a means
to that end. It championed an education in which these ideas occupied a
prominent place. What the sophists actually taught the ambitious young
men who sought their instruction, was self-assertion, unscrupulousness,
and a showy rhetoric, in whose triumphal procession facts, fancies, and
falsehoods marched together in brilliant array. It is but fair to them
to say that, in their endeavor to instruct young men in the art of
specious oratory, they laid the foundations of the art of rhetoric and
the science of grammar. So much, at least, the world owes to them.
Since it was to the young men, who, freed from the discipline of home,
pedagogue, school, and palæstra, could be met with anywhere, in the
street, the agora, the gymnasium, that the sophists directed their chief
attention, it was of course these who first showed the effects of their
teaching. But their influence, falling in, as it did, with the
pronounced radical tendencies of the time, soon made itself felt in all
grades of education, from the family to the university, in the form of
an irreverent, flippant, conceited rationalism, before whose
self-erected and self-corrupted tribunal every institution in heaven and
earth was to be tried. In the schools this influence showed itself in
various ways: (1) in an increased attention to literature, and
especially to the formal side of it, (2) in the tendency to substitute
for the works of the old epic and lyric poets the works of more recent
writers tinged with the new spirit, (3) in the introduction of new and
complicated instruments and kinds of music, (4) in an increasing
departure from the severe physical and moral discipline of the old days.
We now, for the first time, hear of a teacher of literature, distinct
from the music master, of teachers who possessed no copy of Homer
(Alcibiades is said to have chastised such a one), of flutes, citharas,
and the like in use in schools, of wildness and lewdness among boys of
tender age. In the palæstra the new spirit showed itself in a tendency
to substitute showy and unsystematic exercises for the vigorous and
graded exercises of the older time, to sacrifice education to execution.
But, as already remarked, the new spirit showed itself most clearly and
hurtfully in the higher education. The young men, instead of spending
their time in vigorous physical exercise in the gymnasia and open
country, began now to hang about the streets and public places,
listening to sophistic discussions, and to attend the schools of the
sophists, exercising their tongues more than any other part of their
bodies. The effect of this soon showed itself in a decline of physical
power, of endurance, courage, and manliness, and in a strong tendency to
luxury and other physical sins. They now began to imagine for themselves
a private life, very far from coincident with that demanded of a
citizen, and to look upon the old citizen-life, and its ideals,
sanctions, and duties, with contempt or pity, as something which they
had learnt to rise above. The glory and well-being of their country
were no longer their chief object of ambition. The dry rot of
individualism, which always seems to those affected by it an evidence of
health and manly vigor, was corrupting their moral nature, and preparing
the way for the destruction of the State. For it was but too natural
that these young men, when they came to be members of the State, should
neglect its lessons and claims, and, following the new teachings, live
to themselves. Thus, just as the character of the "Old Education" of
Athens showed itself in the behavior of her sons in the Persian Wars, so
that of her "New Education" showed itself fifty years later in the
Peloponnesian War, that long and disastrous struggle which wrecked
Athens and Greece.
Yet Athens and her education were not allowed to go to ruin without a
struggle. The aristocratic party long stuck to the old principles and
tried to give them effect; but, failing to understand the new
circumstances and to take account of them, it erred in the application
of them, by seeking simply to restore the old conditions. Individuals
also exerted their best efforts for the same end. Æschylus, who had
fought at Marathon, and who, more than any other Greek, was endowed with
the spirit of religion, interpreted the old mythology in an ethical
sense, and in this form worked it into a series of dramas, whereby the
history and institutions of the Greek people were shown to be due to a
guiding Providence of inexorable justice, rewarding each man according
to his works, abhorring proud homes "gilded with impurity of hands," and
dwelling with the pure and righteous, though housed in the meanest cot.
Æschylus thus became, not only the father of Greek tragedy, but also the
sublimest moral teacher Greece ever possessed. For moral grandeur there
is but one work in all literature that can stand by the side of
Æschylus' _Oresteia_, and that is the _Divine Comedy_. Yet Æschylus was
driven from Athens on a charge of impiety, and died in exile.
But it was not the tragic drama alone that was inspired and made a
preacher of righteousness: in the hands of Aristophanes, the comic drama
exerted all its power for the same end. For over thirty years this
inimitable humorist used the public theatre to lash the follies, and
hold up to contempt the wretched leaders, of the Athenian populace,
pointing out to his countrymen the abyss of destruction that was yawning
before them. The world has never seen such earnest comedy, not even in
the works of Molière or Beaumarchais. Yet it was all in vain. Long
before his death, Aristophanes was forbidden to hold up to public scorn
the degradation of his people.
Among the individual citizens who labored with all their might to bring
back Athens to her old worth were two of very different character,
endowments, and position, the one laboring in the world of action, the
other in the world of thought. The first was Pericles, who, seeing that
democracy was the order of the day, accepted it, and, by his personal
character and position, strove to guide it to worthy ends. In order to
encourage gymnastic exercises, particularly among the sons of the newer
families, he built the Lyceum, in a grove sacred to Apollo, between
Cynosarges and the city walls, as a gymnasium for them. With a view to
encouraging among them the study of music, he built an odeon, or
music-hall, under the southeast end of the Acropolis. Both were
magnificent structures. What he did towards the completion of the great
theatre for the encouragement of dancing, we do not know; that this
entered into his plan, there can hardly be any doubt. But Pericles was
too wise a man to suppose that he could induce his pleasure-seeking
countrymen to subject themselves to the old discipline, without offering
them an object calculated to rouse their ambition and call forth their
energy. This object was nothing less than a united Greece, with Athens
as its capital. How hard he tried to make this object familiar to them,
and to render Athens worthy of the place he desired her to occupy, is
pathetically attested to this day by the Propylæa and the Parthenon. On
the frieze of the latter is represented the solemn sacrifice that was to
cement the union of the Hellenic people, and place it at the head of
civilization. When degenerate Greece resisted all his efforts to make
her become one peaceably, he tried to make her do so by force, and the
Peloponnesian War, started on a mere frivolous pretext, was the result.
He did not live long enough to learn the outcome of this desperate
attempt to wake his countrymen to new moral and political life, and it
was well. If he had, he might have been forced to recognize that he had
been attempting an impossible task,--trying to erect a strong structure
with rotten timber, to make a noble State out of ignoble, selfish men.
Unfortunately, the example of his own private life, in which he openly
defied one of the laws of the State, and tried to make concubinage
(ἑταίρησις) respectable, more than undid all the good he sought to
accomplish. The truth is, Pericles was himself too deeply imbued with
the three vices of his time--rationalism, self-indulgence, and love of
show--to be able to see any true remedy for the evils that sprang from
them. What was needed was not letters, music, gymnastics, dancing, or
dream of empire, but something entirely different--a new moral
inspiration and ideal.
This, the second of the men to whom reference has been made, Socrates,
sought to supply. In the midst of self-indulgence, he lived a life of
poverty and privation; in the midst of splendor and the worship of
outward beauty, he pursued simplicity and took pleasure in his ugliness;
in the midst of self-assertive rationalism and all-knowing sophistry, he
professed ignorance and submission to the gods. The problem of how to
restore the moral life of Athens and Greece presented itself to Socrates
in this form: _The old ethical social sanctions, divine and human,
having, under the influence of rationalism and individualism, lost their
power, where and how shall we find other sanctions to take their place?_
To answer this one question was the aim of Socrates' whole life. He was
not long in seeing that any true answer must rest upon a comprehension
of man's entire nature and relations, and that the sophists were able to
impose upon his countrymen only because no such comprehension was
theirs. He saw that the old moral life, based upon naïve tradition and
prescription, sanctioned by gods of the imagination, would have to give
place to a moral life resting upon self-understanding and reflection.
He accordingly adopted as his motto the command of the Delphic oracle,
_Know Thyself_ (γνῶθι σεαυτóν), and set to work with all his might to
obey it.
He now, therefore, went to meet the sophists on their own ground and
with their own methods, and he did this so well as to be considered by
many, Aristophanes among them, as the best possible representative of
the class. What is true is, that he was the first Athenian who undertook
to do what the sophists had for some time considered their special
function,--to impart a "higher education" to the youth and men of
Athens. He went about the streets, shops, walks, schools, and gymnasia
of the city, drawing all sorts of persons into conversation, and trying
to elicit truth for himself and them (for he pretended to know nothing).
He was never so pleased as when he met a real sophist, who professed to
have knowledge, and never so much in his element as when, in the
presence of a knot of young men, he could, by his ironical, subtle
questions, force said sophist to admit that he too knew nothing. The
fact was, Socrates, studying Heraclitus, had become convinced that the
reason why men fell into error was because they did not know themselves,
or their own thoughts, because what they called thoughts were mere
opinions, mere fragments of thoughts. He concluded that, if men were
ever to be redeemed from error, intellectual and moral, they must be
made to think whole thoughts. Accordingly, he took the ordinary opinions
of men and, by a series of well-directed questions, tried to bring out
their implications, that is, the wholes of which they were parts. Such
is the Socratic or dialectic (= conversational) method. It does not
pretend to impart any new knowledge, but merely, as Socrates said, to
deliver the mind of the thoughts with which it is pregnant. And Socrates
not only held that saving truth consisted of whole thoughts; he held
also that all such thoughts were universally and necessarily true; that,
while there might be many opinions about a thing, there could be but one
truth, the same for all men, and therefore independent of any man. This
was the exact opposite of what Protagoras the sophist had taught, the
opposite of the gospel of individualism (see p. 93). Man is so far from
being the measure of all things, that there is in all things a measure
to which he must conform, if he is not to sink into error. This measure,
this system of whole truths, implying an eternal mind to which it is
present, and by which it is manifested in the world, is just what man
arrives at, if he will but think out his thoughts in their completeness.
In doing so, he at once learns the laws by which the universe is
governed and finds a guide and sanction for his own conduct--a sanction
no longer external and imposed by the State, but internal and imposed by
the mind. A system like this involved a complete reversal of the old
view of the relation between man and the State, and at the same time
took the feet from under individualism. "It is true," said Socrates in
effect, "that the individual, and not the State, is the source of all
authority, the measure of all things; but he is so, not as individual,
but as endowed with the universal reason by which the world, including
the State, is governed." This is the sum and substance of Socrates'
teaching, this is what he believed to be true self-knowledge. This is
the truth whose application to life begins a new epoch in human history,
and separates the modern from the ancient world; this is the truth that,
reiterated and vivified by Christianity, forms the very life of our life
to-day.
In adopting this view, Socrates necessarily formed "a party by himself,"
a party which could hope for no sympathy from either of the other two
into which his countrymen were divided. The party of tradition charged
him with denying the gods of his country and corrupting her youth; the
radical party hated him because he convicted its champions of vanity,
superficiality, and ignorance. Between them, they compassed his death,
and Athens learnt, only when it was too late, that she had slain her
prophet. But Socrates, though slain, was not dead. His spirit lived on,
and the work which he had begun grew and prospered. Yet it could not
save Athens, except upon a condition which she neither would nor could
accept, that of remodelling her polity and the life of her citizens in
accordance with divine truth and justice. Indeed, though he discovered a
great truth, Socrates did not present it in a form in which it could be
accepted under the given conditions. He himself even did not by any
means see all the stupendous implications of his own principle, which,
in fact, was nothing less than the ground of all true ethics, all
liberty, and all science. It is doubtful whether any one sees them now,
and certain that they have been nowhere realized. Still his truth and
his life were not without their immediate effect upon Athens and
Athenian education. Men, working in his spirit, and inspired with his
truth, more or less clearly understood, almost immediately replaced the
sophists in Athens, and drew the attention of her citizens, old and
young, to the serious search for truth. In fact, from this time on, the
intellectual tendency began to prevail over the gymnastic and musical,
and this continued until, finally, it absorbed the whole life of the
people, and Athens, from being a university-State, became a
State-university. Such it was in the days of Cicero, Paul, Plutarch,
Lucian, and Proclus. That this one-sided tendency was fatal to the
political life of Athens, and therefore, in some degree, to its moral
life, is clear enough; and, though we cannot hold Socrates personally
responsible for this result, we must still admit that it was one which
flowed from his system of thought. Personally, indeed, Socrates was a
moral hero, and "five righteous" men like him, had they appeared, would
have gone far to save Athens; but this very heroism, this inborn
enthusiasm for righteousness, blinded him so far as to make him believe
that men had only to know the right in order to be ready to follow it.
Hence that exaggerated importance attached to right knowing, and that
comparative neglect of right feeling and right doing, which in the
sequel proved so paralyzing. Hence the failure of Socrates' teaching to
stem the tide of corruption in Athens, and restore her people to heroism
and worth.
Socrates left behind him many disciples, some of whom distinguished
themselves in practical ways, others as founders of philosophic
schools, emphasizing different sides of his teaching. He was but a few
years in his grave when two of these were teaching regularly in the two
old gymnasia of Athens. Plato, a full-blooded Athenian, was teaching in
the Academy the intellectual and moral theories of his master, while
Antisthenes, a half-breed (his mother being a Thracian), was inculcating
the lesson of his heroic life in Cynosarges. Their followers were
called, respectively, Academics and Cynics. Thus, by these two men, was
the higher education for the first time introduced into the public
institutions of Athens.
Socrates' aim, as we have seen, had been purely a moral one, and this
fact was not lost sight of by his immediate followers. The chief
question with them all was still: How can the people be brought back to
moral life? But, thanks partly to the vagueness in which he had left the
details of his doctrine, they were divided with respect to the means
whereby this was to be accomplished. One party, best represented by
Plato, and following most closely in the footsteps of the master, held
that, man being essentially a social being, and morality a relation in
society, it was only in and through a social order, a State, that virtue
could be realized. Another party, represented by Antisthenes, maintained
that virtue was a purely personal matter, and that the wise man stood
high above any and all social institutions. These two views maintained
themselves, side by side, in nearly all subsequent Greek thought, and at
last found expression in the State and Church of the Christian world.
Two of Socrates' followers, believers in institutional morality, left
behind them treatises which have come down to us, giving their views as
to the manner in which virtue might be cultivated. These are the
practical Xenophon and the theoretic Plato, both men of pure Athenian
stock. Nothing will better enable us to comprehend the evils of the "New
Education" than a consideration of the means by which these worthy men
proposed to remedy them. Both are idealists and Utopians; but the former
is conservative and reactionary, while the latter is speculative and
progressive. Both are aiming at one thing--a virtuous and happy State,
to replace the vicious and wretched one in which they found their lot
cast; but they differed in their views regarding the nature of such a
State, and the means of realizing it.
CHAPTER II
XENOPHON
Never a good is the rule of the many; let one be the ruler.--Homer
Wealth without Worth is no harmless housemate.--Sappho
One to me is ten thousand, if he be best.
All the Ephesians, from youth up, ought to be hanged and the State
left to the boys, because they cast out Hermodorus, the worthiest
man amongst them, saying: 'No one of us shall be worthiest, else let
him be so elsewhere and among others.'--Heraclitus
Reflecting once that, of the very small states, Sparta appeared to
be the most powerful and the most renowned in Greece, I began to
wonder in what way this had come about. But when I reflected upon
the manners of the Spartans, I ceased to wonder. As to Lycurgus, who
drew up for them the laws, by obedience to which they have
prospered, I admire him and hold him to be, in the highest degree, a
wise man. For he, instead of imitating other states, reached
conclusions opposite to those of most, and thereby rendered his
country conspicuous for prosperity.--Xenophon
Xenophon was in no sense a philosopher or a practical teacher, but he
was a man of sterling worth, of knightly courage, of wide and varied
experience, of strong sagacity, and of genial disposition, a keen
observer, and a charming writer. He was a true old Athenian puritan,
broadened and softened by study and contact with the world. He hated
democracy so cordially that he would not live in Athens to witness its
vulgarity and disorder; but he loved his country, and desired to see
its people restored to their ancient worth. He believed that this could
be done only by some great, royal personality, like Lycurgus or Cyrus,
enforcing a rigid discipline, and once more reducing the man to the
citizen. Unwilling, probably, to hold up hated Sparta as a model to his
beaten and smarting countrymen, he laid the scene of his pedagogical
romance in far-off Persia.
In the _Education of Cyrus_ (Κύρου παιδεία) we have Xenophon's scheme
for a perfect education. Despite the scene in which it is laid, it is
purely Hellenic, made up of Athenian and Spartan elements in about equal
proportions. For this reason also it has a special interest for us. As
the portion of the treatise dealing directly with public education is
brief, we can hardly do better than transcribe it in a translation.
"Cyrus is still celebrated in legend and song by the barbarians as a man
of extraordinary personal beauty, and as of a most gentle, studious, and
honor-loving disposition, which made him ready to undergo any labor, and
brave any danger, for the sake of praise. Such is the account that has
been handed down of his appearance and disposition. He was, of course,
educated in accordance with the laws of the Persians. These laws seem to
begin their efforts for the public weal at a different point from those
of most other states; for most states, after allowing parents to educate
their children as they please, and the older people even to spend their
time according to their own preference, lay down such laws as: Thou
shalt not steal, Thou shalt not rob, Thou shalt not commit burglary,
Thou shalt not commit assault, Thou shalt not commit adultery, Thou
shalt not disobey a magistrate, etc.; and if any one transgresses any of
these laws, they inflict punishment on him. The Persian laws, on the
contrary, provide beforehand that the citizens shall never, from the
very first, have any disposition to commit a wicked or base act. And
they do so in this way. They have what they call a Freemen's Square,
where the royal palace and the other public buildings stand. From this
square are removed all wares and chafferers, with their cries and
vulgarities, to another place, so that their din and disorder may not
interfere with the decorum of the cultivated class. This square in the
neighborhood of the public buildings is divided into four parts, one for
boys, one for youths (ἔφηβοι), one for mature men, and one for men
beyond the military age. The hour when these shall appear in their
places is settled by law. The boys and mature men come at daybreak, the
older men when they think fit, except on the special days when they are
bound to appear. The youths pass the night by the public buildings in
light armor, only those who are married being excused. These are not
hunted up, unless they have been ordered beforehand to appear; but it is
not thought decent to be often absent. Each of these divisions is under
the charge of twelve governors, one from each of the twelve tribes into
which the Persians are divided. The governors of the boys are chosen
from among the elderly men, with special view to their fitness for
making the most of boys, while those of the youths are chosen from among
the mature men upon a similar principle. Those of the mature men are
selected with a view to their ability to hold these to their regular
duties, and to the special commands of the supreme authority. Even the
old men have presidents appointed over them, who see that they perform
their duty. What the duties of each are we shall now state, in order to
show just how provision is made for securing the highest worth on the
part of the citizens.
"First, then, the boys, when they go to school, spend their time in
learning justice. They say they go for that purpose, just as our boys go
to learn letters. Their governors spend the greater part of the day in
acting as judges among them. It is needless to say that boys, as well as
men, bring charges against each other of theft and robbery and violence
and deceit and slander, and similar things, and those whom the judges
find guilty of any of these they punish. But they also punish those whom
they find bringing false charges. They pronounce judgment likewise on a
charge which, more than anything else, makes men hate each other, and
for which they are judged less than for any other, namely, ingratitude.
If the judges find a boy in a position to return a favor and not doing
it, they punish him severely, believing that persons who are ungrateful
will, more than any others, be undutiful to the gods, to parents,
country, and friends. It is generally held that ingratitude, more than
aught else, leads to irreverence, and we need not add that _it_ is the
prime mover in every form of baseness. They teach the boys also
self-denial, and these are greatly aided in learning this virtue from
seeing it daily practised by their elders. Another thing they teach them
is obedience to those placed in authority over them; and they are
greatly aided in learning this, by seeing their elders strictly obeying
their governors. Another thing yet which they teach them is
self-discipline in matters of eating and drinking; and they are greatly
aided in this by seeing that their elders never absent themselves for
the purpose of eating, until they are permitted to do so by their
governors, as well as by the fact that they (the boys) do not eat with
their mothers, but with their teachers, and at a signal from their
governors. As food, they bring with them from home bread, as a relish,
nasturtium, and in order to drink, if they are thirsty, they bring an
earthen cup to draw water from the river with. In addition to all these
things, the boys learn to shoot with the bow and to throw the javelin.
Up to the age of sixteen or seventeen years, these are the studies in
which the boys engage; after that they are transferred to the class of
cadets (ἔφηβοι).
"These cadets spend their time in this way: For ten years from the time
when they graduate from the boys' class, they sleep, as we have already
said, in the precincts of the public buildings, acting at once as a
guard to the city and practising self-denial. It is generally agreed,
indeed, that this is the age which especially requires attention. During
the day they are at the disposal of their governors, and ready to
perform any public service required. If no such service is demanded,
they remain in the neighborhood of the public buildings. When the king
goes out to hunt, which he does many times a month, he takes with him
one-half of the tribes, and leaves the other behind. Those youths who
accompany him must carry with them bows and, in a sheath alongside
their quivers, a bill or scimitar; also a light shield, and two javelins
apiece, one to throw, the other to use, if necessary, at close quarters.
For this reason they make hunting a matter of public concern, and the
king, as in war, acts as their leader, hunts himself, and sees that the
others hunt, the Persians being of opinion that this is the best of all
preparations for war. And, indeed, it accustoms them to rise early, and
to bear heat and cold; it affords them exercise in marching and running,
and compels them to use their bows or their javelins upon wild animals,
wherever they happen to come upon them. They are often forced, moreover,
to sharpen their courage, when they find themselves face to face with
some powerful animal. They must, of course, wound the one that comes to
close quarters, and hold at bay the one that attacks them. Hence it is
difficult to find in war anything that is absent from the chase. When
they go out to hunt, the young men, of course, take with them a larger
luncheon than the boys are allowed to have; but this is the only
difference between the two. And while they are hunting, they sometimes
do not lunch at all; but, if they have to remain beyond their time on
account of some game, or otherwise, if they wish to prolong the chase,
they make a dinner of this lunch, and on the following day continue the
hunt till dinner-time, counting the two days one, because they consume
only one day's food. And they do this for the sake of practice, so that,
if ever they should run short of provisions in war, they may be able to
do the same thing. These youths have as a relish what game they capture
in the chase, otherwise they have nasturtium. And if any one thinks
that they eat without pleasure, when they have only nasturtium with
their food, or drink without pleasure, when they drink water, let him
remember how sweet barley-cake and wheaten bread are when he is hungry,
and how sweet water is when he is thirsty. The tribes that remain
behind, when the king goes hunting, spend their time in the same studies
which they pursued as boys, including shooting and javelin-casting, and
in these continual contests are going on. There are likewise public
exhibitions in them, at which prizes are offered; and whichever tribe
contains most young men exceptionally proficient, manly, and steady, is
commended by the citizens, who likewise honor, not only their present
governor, but also the governor who had charge of them as boys. The
young men who are left behind are also employed by the authorities, if
any such service is required as manning a guard-house, tracking out
malefactors, running down robbers, or anything demanding strength and
swiftness. Such are the studies of the young men. And when they have
passed ten years in these, they graduate into the class of mature men.
"From the date of this graduation, they spend five and twenty years more
in the following manner: In the first place, like the young men, they
place themselves at the disposal of the authorities for any public
service requiring at once sagacity and unimpaired strength. If they are
required to take the field in war, men proficient as they are go armed,
no longer with bows and javelins, but with what are called hand-to-hand
weapons, breast-plates, shields in their left hands, such as we see in
pictures of the Persians, and a sword or bill in their right. And all
the officials are drawn from this class, except the boys' teachers. And
when they have passed twenty-five years in this class, they are
something more than fifty years of age. At that age they graduate into
the class of elders, as, indeed, they are called.
"These elders no longer serve in war outside their own country, but,
remaining at home, act as judges in public and private cases. They do so
even in capital cases. They likewise choose all the officials, and if
any person belonging to either of the classes of young and mature men
neglects any of his lawful duties, the governor of his tribe, or any one
else who pleases, may report him to the elders, and these, if they find
the fact to be as reported, expel him from his tribe, and he who is
expelled remains dishonored all his life.
"To give a clearer notion of the polity of the Persians as a whole, I
will retrace my steps a little. After what has been said, this may be
done in a very few words: The Persians, then, are said to number about
one hundred and twenty thousand. Of these, none is excluded by law from
honors or offices; but all Persians are allowed to send their sons to
the public schools of justice. However, it is only those who are able to
maintain their sons without employment that send them there: the rest do
not. On the other hand, those that are educated by the public teachers
are permitted to spend their youth among the _ephēboi_, while those who
have not completed this education are not. Again those that pass their
youth among the _ephēboi_, and come up to the legal requirements, are
allowed to graduate into the class of mature men, and to participate in
honors and offices; whereas those who do not pass through the grade of
the _ephēboi_ do not rise to the class of mature men. Finally, those who
complete the curriculum of the mature men without reproach, pass into
the class of elders. Thus it is that this class of elders is composed of
men who have passed through all the grades of culture. Such is the
polity of the Persians, and such is the system of training whereby they
endeavor to secure the highest worth."
This Utopian scheme of education has a peculiar interest, because it is
nothing more or less than the old ideal of Greek education become fully
conscious of itself, under the influence of the new ideal. Let us call
attention to the main points of it. (1) The education here set forth is
purely political: men are regarded simply and solely as citizens; all
honors are civic honors. (2) No provision is made for the education of
women, their range of activity being entirely confined to the family.
(3) Distinction is made to rest upon education and conduct. (4) The
poorer classes of the population, though not legally excluded from
education, position, and power, are virtually excluded by their poverty,
so that the government is altogether in the hands of the rich, and is,
in fact, an aristocracy, while pretending to be a democracy: hence, (5)
Social distinctions are distinctions of worth, which is just the Greek
ideal.
There is, however, one point in the scheme which shows that it is
reactionary, directed against prevailing tendencies. Not one word is
said of the intellectual side of education, of music or letters. It is
evident that Xenophon, himself a man of no mean literary attainments,
clearly saw the dangers to Greek life and liberty involved in that
exaggerated devotion to literary and intellectual pursuits which
followed the teaching of the sophists and Socrates, and that, in order
to check this perilous tendency, he drew up a scheme of education from
which intellectual and literary pursuits are altogether excluded, in
which justice takes the place of letters, and music is not mentioned.
This suggests a curious inquiry in respect to his _Memoirs of Socrates_.
This work has generally been regarded as giving us a more correct notion
of the real, living Socrates than the manifestly idealizing works of
Plato. But was not Xenophon, who could not fail to see the future power
of Socrates' influence, as anxious as Plato to claim the prophet as the
champion of his own views, and does not this fact determine the whole
character of his work? Is it not a romance, in the same sense that the
_Cyropædia_ is, with only this difference, that the facts of Socrates'
life, being fairly well known to those for whom Xenophon was writing,
could not be treated with the same freedom and disregard as those of
Cyrus' life?
Before we part with Xenophon, we must call attention to another treatise
of his, in which he deals with a subject that was then pressing for
consideration--the education of women. While, as we have seen, the
Æolian states and even Dorian Sparta provided, in some degree, for
women's education, Athens apparently, conceiving that woman had no
duties outside of the family, left her education entirely to the care of
that institution. The conservative Xenophon does not depart from this
view; but, seeing the moral evils that were springing from the neglect
of women and their inability to be, in any sense, companions to their
cultured, or over-cultured, husbands, he lays down in his _Œconomics_ a
scheme for the education of the young wife _by her husband_. As this
affords us an admirable insight into the lives of Athenian girls and
women, better, indeed, than can be found elsewhere, we cannot do better
than transcribe the first part of it. It takes the form of a
conversation between Socrates and a young husband, named Ischomachus
(Strong Fighter), and is reported by the former. Socrates tells how,
seeing Ischomachus sitting at leisure in a certain portico, he entered
into conversation with him, paid him an acceptable compliment, and
inquired how he came to be nearly always busy out of doors, seeing that
he evidently spent little time in the house. Ischomachus replies:--
"'As to your inquiry, Socrates, it is true that I never remain indoors.
Nor need I; for my wife is fully able by herself to manage everything in
the house.' 'This again, Ischomachus,' said I, 'is something that I
should like to ask you about, whether it was you who taught your wife to
be a good wife, or whether she knew all her household duties when you
received her from her father and mother.' 'Well, Socrates,' said he,
'what do you suppose she knew when I took her, since she was hardly
fifteen when she came to me, and, during the whole of her life before
that, special care had been taken that she should see, hear, and ask as
little as possible. Indeed, don't you think I ought to have been
satisfied if, when she came to me, she knew nothing but how to take wool
and turn it into a garment, and had seen nothing but how tasks in
spinning are assigned to maids? As regards matters connected with eating
and drinking, of course she was extremely well educated when she came,
and this seems to me the chief education, whether for a man or a woman.'
'In all other matters, Ischomachus,' said I, 'you yourself instructed
your wife, so as to make her an excellent housewife.' 'To be sure,' said
he, 'but not until I had first sacrificed, and prayed that I might
succeed in teaching her, and she might succeed in learning, what was
best for both of us.' 'Then,' said I, 'your wife took part in your
sacrifice and in these prayers, did she not?' 'Certainly she did,' said
Ischomachus, 'and solemnly promised to the gods that she would be what
she ought to be, and showed every evidence of a disposition not to
neglect what was taught her.' 'But do, I beseech you, Ischomachus,
explain to me,' said I, 'what was the first thing you set about teaching
her? I shall be more interested in hearing you tell that, than if you
told me all about the finest gymnastic or equestrian exhibition.' And
Ischomachus replied: 'What _should_ I teach her? As soon as she could be
handled, and was tame enough to converse, I spoke to her in some such
way as this: Tell me, my dear, have you ever considered why I took _you_
as my wife, and why your parents gave you to me? That it was not because
I could not find any one else to share my bed, you know as well as I.
No, but because I was anxious to find for myself, and your parents were
anxious to find for you, the most suitable partner in home and
offspring, I selected you, and your parents, it seems, selected me, out
of all possible matches. If, then, God shall ever bless us with
children, then we will take the greatest care of them, and try to give
them the best possible education; for it will prove a blessing to both
of us to have the very best of helpers and supports in our old age. But
at present we have this as our common home. And all that I have, I pass
over to the common stock, and all that you have brought with you, you
have added to the same. Nor must we begin to count which of us has
contributed the larger number of things, but must realize that whichever
of us is the better partner contributes the more valuable things. Then,
Socrates, my wife replied, and said: In what way can I coöperate with
you? What power have I? Everything rests with you. My mother told me
that my only duty was to be dutiful. Assuredly, my dear, said I, and my
father told me the same thing. But it is surely the duty of a dutiful
husband and a dutiful wife to act so that what they have may be improved
to the utmost, and by every fair and lawful means increased to the
utmost. And what do you find, said my wife, that I can do towards
helping you to build up our house? Dear me! said I, whatever things the
gods have endowed you with the power to do, and the law permits, try to
do these to the best of your ability. And what _are_ these? said she. It
strikes me, said I, that they are by no means the least important
things, unless it be true that in the hive the queen-bee is entrusted
with the least important functions. Indeed, it seems to me, my dear, I
continued, that the very gods have yoked together this couple called
male and female with a very definite purpose, viz. to be the source of
the greatest mutual good to the yoke-fellows. In the first place, this
union exists in order that living species may not die out, but be
preserved by propagation; in the second, the partners in this union, at
least in the case of human beings, obtain through it the supports of
their old age. Moreover, human beings do not live, like animals, in the
open air, but obviously require roofs. And I am sure, people who are
going to have anything to bring under a roof must have some one to do
outdoor duties; for, you see, ploughing, sowing, planting, herding, are
all outdoor employments, and it is from them that we obtain all our
supplies. On the other hand, when the supplies have all been brought
under cover, there is needed some one to take care of them, and to
perform those duties which must be done indoors. Among these are the
rearing of children and the preparation of food from the produce of the
earth; likewise the making of cloth out of wool. And, since both these
classes of duties, the outdoor and the indoor, require labor and care,
it seems to me, I said, that God has constructed the nature of woman
with a special view to indoor employments and cares, and that of man
with a view to outdoor employments and cares. For he has made both the
body and the soul of the man better able than those of the woman to bear
cold, heat, travelling, military service, and so has assigned to him
the outdoor employments. And, since he has made the body of woman less
able to endure these things, he seems to me to have assigned to her the
indoor employments. Considering, moreover, that he had made it woman's
nature and duty to nourish young children, he imparted to her a greater
love for babies than he did to man. And, inasmuch as he had made it part
of woman's duty to take care of the income of the family, God, knowing
that for care-taking the soul is none the worse for being ready to fear,
bestowed upon woman a greater share of fear than upon a man. On the
other hand, knowing that he who attends to the outdoor employments will
have to protect the family from wrong-doers, he endowed him with a
greater share of courage. And, since both have to give and receive, he
divided memory and carefulness between them, so that it would be
difficult to determine which of the sexes, the male or the female, is
the better equipped with these. And the necessary self-denial he divided
between them, and made a decree that, whichever of the two, the husband
or the wife, was the superior, should be rewarded with the larger share
of this blessing. And just because the nature of man and the nature of
woman are not both equally fitted for all tasks, the two are the more
dependent upon each other, and their union is the more beneficial to
them, because the one is able to supply what the other lacks. And now,
said I, my dear, that we know the duties which God has assigned to us
respectively, it becomes each of us to do our best, in order to perform
these duties. And the law, I continued, coincides with the divine
intention, and unites man and woman. And, just as God has made them
partners in offspring, so the law makes them partners in the household.
And the law sets its approval upon that difference of function which God
has signified by the difference of ability which marks the sexes. For it
is more respectable for a woman to remain indoors than to spend her time
out of doors, and less respectable for a man to remain indoors than to
attend to outdoor concerns. And, if any one acts in a manner at variance
with this divine ordination, it may be that his transgression does not
escape the notice of the gods, and that he is punished for neglecting
his own duties or performing those of his wife. It appears to me, said
I, that the queen-bee also performs duties that are assigned to her by
God. And what duties, said my wife, does the queen-bee perform, that
have any resemblance to those incumbent upon me? This, said I, that she
remains in the hive and does not allow the other bees to be idle, but
sends out those that have to work to their business, and knows and
receives what each brings in, and takes care of it till it is needed for
use. And when the time for using comes, she distributes to each her just
share. Besides this, she attends to the construction of the honey-combs
that goes on indoors, and sees that it is done properly and rapidly, and
carefully sees that the young swarm is properly reared. And when it is
old enough, and the young bees are fit for work, she sends them out, as
a colony, under the leadership of one of the old ones. And will it be my
duty, said my wife, to do these things? Exactly so, said I, it will be
your duty to remain indoors, to send out together to their work those
whose duties lie out of doors, and to superintend those who have to work
indoors, to receive whatever is brought in, to dispense whatever has to
be paid out, while the necessary surplus you must provide for, and take
care that the year's allowance be not spent in a month. When wool is
brought in to you, you must see that it is turned into cloth; and when
dried grain comes, that it is properly prepared for food. There is,
however, one of your duties, said I, that will perhaps seem somewhat
disagreeable to you. Whenever any one of the slaves is sick, you will
have to see that he is properly nursed, no matter who he is. Indeed,
said my wife, that will be a most pleasant duty, if those who have been
carefully nursed are going to be grateful and kindlier than they were
before. And I,' said Ischomachus, 'admiring her answer, continued: Don't
you suppose, my dear, that by such examples of care on the part of the
queen of the hive the bees are so disposed to her that, when she leaves,
none of them are willing to remain behind, but all follow her? And my
wife replied: I should be surprised if the duties of headship did not
fall to you rather than to me. For my guardianship and disposal of
things in the house would be ridiculous, unless you saw to it that
something was brought in from without. And my bringing-in would be
ridiculous, said I, if there were no one to take care of what I brought?
Don't you see, I said, how those who pour water into a leaky barrel, as
the expression is, are pitied, as wasting their labour? And indeed, said
my wife, they are to be pitied, if they do that. There are other
special duties, said I, that are sure to become pleasant to you; for
example, when you take a raw hand at weaving and turn her into an adept,
and so double her value to you, or when you take a raw hand at managing
and waiting and make her capable, reliable, and serviceable, so that she
acquires untold value, or when you have it in your power to reward those
male slaves that are dutiful and useful to your family, or to punish one
who proves the opposite of this. But the pleasantest thing of all will
be, if you prove superior to me, and make me your knight, and if you
need not fear that, as you advance in years, you will forfeit respect in
the house, but are sure that, as you grow older, the better a partner
you are to me, and the better a mother to the children, the more highly
you will be respected in the house. For all that is fair and good, said
I, increases for men, as life advances, not through beauties, but
through virtues. Such, Socrates, to the best of my recollection, was the
first conversation I had with my wife.'"
Ischomachus goes on and tells how, in subsequent conversations, he
taught his wife the value of order, "how to have a place for everything,
and everything in its place," how to train a servant, and how to make
herself attractive without the use of cosmetics or fine clothes. But
enough has been quoted to show what the ideal family relation among the
Athenians was, and what education was thought fitting for girls and
women. Just as the man was merged in the citizen, so the woman was
merged in the housewife, and they each received the education and
training demanded by their respective duties. If Athenian husbands had
all been like Ischomachus, it is clear that the lives of wives might
have been very happy and useful, and that harmony might have reigned in
the family. But, unfortunately, that was not very often the case. Wives,
being neglected, became lazy, wasteful, self-indulgent, shrewish, and
useless, while their husbands, finding them so, sought in immoral
relations with brilliant and cultivated _hetæræ_, or in worse relations
still, a coarse substitute for that satisfaction which they ought to
have sought and found in their own homes. Thus there grew up a condition
of things which could not fail to sap the moral foundations of society,
and which made thoughtful men turn their attention to the question of
woman's education and sphere of duty.
CHAPTER III
PLATO
All human laws are nourished by the one divine law; for it
prevaileth as far as it listeth, and sufficeth for all and surviveth
all.--Heraclitus
Though reason is universal, the mass of men live as if they had each
a private wisdom of his own.--_Id._
ANTIGONE. ... But him will I inter;
And sweet 'twill be to die in such a deed,
And sweet will be my rest with him, the sweet,
When I have righteously offended here.
For longer time, methinks, have I to please
The dwellers in yon world than those in this;
For I shall rest forever there. But thou,
Dishonor still what's honored of the gods.
--Sophocles, _Antigone_.
The circle that gathered round Isaiah and his household in these
evil days, holding themselves apart from their countrymen,
treasuring the word of revelation, and waiting for Jehovah, were
indeed, as Isaiah describes them, "signs and tokens in Israel from
Jehovah of hosts that dwelleth in Mount Zion." The formation of this
little community was a new thing in the history of religion. Till
then no one had dreamed of a fellowship of faith dissociated from
all national forms, maintained without the exercise of ritual
services, bound together by faith in the divine word alone. It was
the birth of a new era in the Old Testament religion, for it was the
birth of the conception of the _Church_, the first step in the
emancipation of spiritual religion from the forms of political
life,--a step not less significant that all its consequences were
not seen till centuries had passed away.--W. Robertson Smith,
_Prophets of Israel_.
Still at the prophets' feet the nations sit.--Lowell.
That which is to be known I shall declare, knowing which a man
attains immortality--the beginningless Supreme Brahma that is said
to be neither Aught nor Naught.--_Bhagavad Gîtâ._
The only Metaphysics which really and immediately sustains Ethics is
one which is itself primarily ethical, and made of the staff of
Ethics.--Schopenhauer.
In answer to the burning question, How can Athens be brought back to
moral life and strength? Socrates had answered, "By finding a new moral
sanction." He had even gone further, and said: "This sanction is to be
found in correct thinking, in thinking whole thoughts, which, because
they are whole, are absolutely true, being the very principles according
to which God governs the world." This is, obviously, a mere formal
answer. If it was to be of any real service, three further questions had
to be answered: (1) How can whole thoughts be reached? (2) What do they
prove to be when they are reached? (3) How can they be applied to the
moral reorganization of human life? Plato's philosophy is but an attempt
to answer these questions. It therefore naturally falls into three
divisions, (1) _Dialectics_, including Logic and Theory of Knowledge,
(2) _Theoretics_, including Metaphysics and Physics, (3) _Practics_,
including Ethics and Politics.
It is obvious that any attempt to reform society on Socratic principles
must proceed, not from society itself, but from some person or persons
in whom these principles are realized, and who act upon it from without.
These persons will be the philosophers or, rather, the sages. Two
distinct questions, therefore, present themselves at the outset: (1) How
does a man become a sage? (2) How can the sage organize human life, and
secure a succession of sages to continue his work after him? To the
first of these questions, dialectics gives the answer; to the second,
practics; while theoretics exhibits to us at once the origin and the
end, that is, the meaning, of all existence, the human included. In the
teaching of Plato we find, for the first time recognized and exhibited,
the extra-civic or super-civic man, the man who is not a mere fragment
of a social whole, completely subordinated to it, but who, standing
above society, moulds it in accordance with ideas derived from a higher
source. Forecasts of this man, indeed, we find in all Greek literature
from Homer down,--in Heraclitus, Sophocles, etc., and especially, as we
have seen, in Pythagoras;--but it is now for the first time that he
finds full expression, and tries to play a conscious part. In him we
have the promise of the future Church.
But to return to the first of our two questions, How does a man become a
sage? We found the answer to be, By the dialectic method. Of this,
however, not all men have the inclination to avail themselves, but only
a chosen few, to whom the gods have granted the inspiration of Love
(ἔρως)--a longing akin to madness (μανία), kindled by physical beauty,
but tending to the Supreme Good. This good, as we shall see, consists in
the vision (θεωρία) of eternal truth, of being, as it is. The few men
who are blessed with this love are the divinely appointed reformers and
guides of mankind, the well-being of which depends upon submission to
them. The dialectic method is the process by which the inspired mind
rises from the beauty of physical things, which are always particulars,
to the beauty of spiritual things, which are always universals, and
finally to the beauty of the Supreme Good, which is _The Universal_. The
man who has reached this last, and who sees its relation to all other
universals, so that they form together a correlated whole, sees all
truth, and is the sage. What we call universals Plato called "ideas"
(ἰδέαι = forms or species). These ideas he regards as genera, as
numbers, as active powers, and as substances, the highest of which is
God.
Two things are especially notable in connection with this theory: (1)
that it involves that Oriental ascetic view of life which makes men turn
away from the sensible world, and seek their end and happiness in the
colorless world of thought; (2) that it suggests a view of the nature of
God which comes perilously near to Oriental pantheism. Plato, indeed,
nowhere denies personality of God; but neither does he affirm it, and he
certainly leaves the impression that the Supreme Being is a force acting
according to a numerical ratio or law. It would be difficult to
overestimate the influence of these two views upon the subsequent course
of Greek education and life. The former suggested to the super-civic man
a sphere of activity which he could flatter himself was superior to the
civic, viz. a sphere of contemplation; while the second, by blurring, or
rather ignoring, the essential elements of personality in God, viz.
consciousness, choice, and will, left no place for a truly religious or
moral life. This explains why Platonism, while it has inspired no great
civic movement, has played such a determining part in ecclesiasticism,
and why, nevertheless, the Church for ages was compelled to fight the
tendencies of it, which it did in great measure under the ægis of
Plato's stern critic, Aristotle.
We are now ready to take up our second question: How can the sage
organize human life, and secure a succession of sages to continue his
work after him? Plato has given two widely different answers to this
question, in his two most extensive works, (1) the _Republic_, written
in his earlier life, when he was under the influence of Heraclitus,
Parmenides, and Socrates, and stood in a negative attitude toward the
real world of history, (2) the _Laws_, written toward the end of his
life, when he became reconciled, in part at least, to the real world and
its traditional beliefs, and found satisfaction and inspiration in the
teachings of Pythagoras. His change of allegiance is shown by the fact
that in the _Laws_, and in them alone, Socrates does not appear as a
character. We shall speak first of the _Republic_, and then point out
wherein the _Laws_ differs from it.
When Plato wrote his _Republic_, he was deeply impressed with the evils
and dangers of the social order in which he lived. This impression,
which was that of every serious man of the time, had in his case
probably been deepened by the teaching and the tragic death of Socrates.
The dangers were, obviously, the demoralization of Athenian men and
women, and the consequent weakening and dissolution of the social bonds.
The evils, as he saw them, were (1) the defective education of children,
(2) the neglect of women, (3) the general disorganization of the State
through individualism, which placed power in the hands of ignorance and
rapacity, instead of in those of wisdom and worth. The _Republic_ is a
scheme for removing these evils and averting the consequent dangers. It
is the Platonic sage's recipe for the healing of society, and it is but
fair to say that, of all the Utopian and æsthetic schemes ever proposed
for this end, it is incomparably the best. It proposes nothing less than
the complete transformation of society, without offering any hint as to
how a selfish and degraded people is to be induced to submit thereto. In
the transformed society, the State is all in all; the family is
abolished; women are emancipated and share in the education and duties
of men; the State attends to the procreation and education of children;
private property is forbidden. The State is but the individual writ
large, and the individual has three faculties, in the proper development
and coördination of which consists his well-being: the same, therefore,
must be true of the State. These faculties are (1) intellect or reason,
(λογιστικόν, λόγος, νοῦς, etc.), (2) spirit or courage (θυμός,
θυμοειδές), (3) desire or appetite (ἐπιθυμία, ἐπιθυμετικόν,
φιλοχρήματον). The first resides in the head, the second in the heart,
the third in the abdomen. The first is peculiar to man, the second he
shares with the animals, and the third with both animals and plants. The
proper relation of these faculties exists when reason, with clear
insight, rules the whole man (Prudence); when spirit takes its
directions from reason in its attitude toward pleasure and pain
(Fortitude); when spirit and appetite together come to an understanding
with reason as to when the one, and when the other, shall act
(Temperance); and, finally, when each of the three strictly confines
itself to its proper function (Justice). Thus we obtain the four
"cardinal virtues." As existing in the individual, they are relations
between his own faculties. It is only in the State that they are
relations between the individual and his fellows. Rather we ought to
say, they are relations between different classes of society; for
society is divided into three classes, marked by the predominance of one
or other of the three faculties of the soul. _First_, there is the
intelligent class,--the philosophers or sages; _second_, the spirited
class,--the military men or soldiers; _third_, the covetous class,--men
devoted to industry, trade, and money-making. The well-being of the
State, as of the individual, is secure only when the relations between
these classes are the four cardinal virtues; when the sages rule, and
the soldiers and money-makers accept this rule, and when each class
strictly confines itself to its own function, so, for example, that the
sages do not attempt to fight, the soldiers to make money, or the
money-makers to fight or rule. In the Platonic ideal State, accordingly,
the three classes dwell apart and have distinct functions. All the power
is in the hands of the philosophers, who dwell in lofty isolation,
devoted to the contemplation of divine ideas, and descending only
through grace to mingle with human affairs, as teachers and absolute
rulers, ruling without laws. Their will is enforced by the military
class, composed of both sexes, which lives outside the city, devoting
itself to physical exercises and the defence of the State. These two
classes together constitute the guardians (φύλακες) of the State, and
stand to each other in the relation of head and hand. They produce
nothing, own nothing, live sparingly, and, indeed, cherish a sovereign
contempt for all producing and owning, as well as for those who produce
and own. They find their satisfaction in the performance of their
functions, and the maintenance of virtue in the State. What small amount
of material good they require is supplied to them by the industrial
class, which they protect in the enjoyment of the only good it strives
after or can appreciate, the good of the appetites. This class, of
course, has no power, either directive or executive, being incapable of
any. It is, nevertheless, entirely happy in its condition of tutelage,
and, as far as virtue can be predicated of sensuality, virtuous, the
excesses of sensuality being repressed by the other two classes. Indeed,
the great merit which Plato claims for his scheme is, that it secures
harmony, and therefore happiness, for all, by placing every individual
citizen in the class to which by nature he belongs, that is, in which
his nature can find the fullest and freëst expression compatible with
the well-being of the whole. Such is Plato's political scheme, marked by
the two notorious Greek characteristics, love of harmony and contempt
for labor. It is curious to think that it foreshadowed three modern
institutions--the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the standing army, and the
industrial community, in which, however, the relations of power demanded
by Plato are almost reversed, with (it is only fair to say) the result
which he foresaw.
In trying to answer the question, By what means shall these classes be
sundered? Plato calmly assumes that his scheme is already in full
operation among grown people, so that the only difficulty remaining is
with regard to the children. And this is completely met by his scheme of
education. The State or, let us say at once, the philosophic class,
having abolished the family, and assumed its functions, determines what
number and kind of children it requires at any given time, and provides
for them as it would for sheep or kine. It brings together at festivals
the vigorous males and females, and allows them to choose their mates
for the occasion. As soon as the children are born, they are removed
from their mothers and taken charge of in State institutions, where the
feeble and deformed are at once destroyed. Any children begotten without
the authority of the State share the same fate, either before or after
birth. Those whose birth is authorized, and who prove vigorous, are
reared by the State, none of them knowing, or being known by, their
parents. But they by no means suffer any diminution of parentage on that
account; for every mature man regards himself as the father, and every
mature woman regards herself as the mother, of all the children born
within a certain time, so that every child has thousands of fathers and
mothers, all interested in his welfare; and the mothers, being relieved
from nearly all the duties of maternity, share equally with the men in
all the functions of the State.
The system of education to which the children of the State are subjected
is, to a large extent, modelled after that of Sparta, especially in
respect to its rigor and its absolutely political character. It
contains, however, a strong Ionic or Athenian element, notably on the
intellectual and æsthetic side. It may fairly claim to be intensely
Hellenic. It accepts the time-honored division of education into Music
and Gymnastics, making no distinct place for Letters, but including them
under Music. It demands that these two branches shall be pursued as
parts of a whole, calculated to develop, as far as may be, the
harmonious human being, and fit him to become part of the harmonious
State. I have said "as far as may be," because Plato believes that only
a small number of persons at any given time can be reduced to complete
harmony. These are the born philosophers, who, when their nature is
fully realized, no longer require the State, but stand, as gods, above
it. In truth, the State is needed just because the mass of mankind
cannot attain inner harmony, but would perish, were it not for the outer
harmony imposed by the philosophers. This is a sad fact, and would be
altogether disheartening, were it not for the belief, which Plato seems
to have derived from Pythagoras and the Egyptians, that those human
beings who fail to attain harmony in one life, will have opportunities
to do so in other lives, so long as they do not, by some awful and
malignant crime or crimes, show that they are utterly incapable of
harmony. Plato's scheme of political education, therefore, requires, as
its complement, the doctrines of individual immortality, of probation
continued through as many lives as may be necessary, and of the
possibility of final and eternal blessedness or misery. In fact, Plato
has a fully-developed eschatology, with an "other world," consisting of
three well-defined parts,--Elysium, Acheron, and
Tartarus,--corresponding to the Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell of
Catholic Christianity; with one important difference, however, due to
the doctrine of metempsychosis. While the Christian purgatory is a place
or state of purgation for souls whose probation is over forever, Acheron
is merely a place where imperfect souls remain till the end of a
world-period, or æon, of ten thousand years, when they are again allowed
to return to life and renew their struggle for that complete harmony
which is the condition of admission to the society of the gods.
It is from this eschatology that Plato derives the moral sanctions which
he employs in his State. It is true that no one has insisted with
greater force than he upon the truth that virtue is, in and for itself,
the highest human good; he believed, however, that this could be
appreciated only by the philosopher, who had experience of it, and that
for the lower orders of men a more powerful, though less noble, sanction
was necessary. Accordingly, he depicts the joys of Elysium in images
that could not but appeal to the Hellenic imagination, and paints
Tartarus in gruesome colors that would do honor to a St. Ignatius.
In order fully to understand the method of Plato's political education,
we must revert to Chapter III of Book I. There we saw that, according to
the Greeks, a complete education demanded three things, (1) a noble
nature, (2) training through habit, (3) instruction. For the first Plato
would do what can be done by artificial selection of parents; for the
second, he would depend upon music and gymnastics; for the third, upon
philosophy. In these last two divisions we have the root of the mediæval
_trivium_ and _quadrivium_. The Platonic pedagogical system seeks to
separate the ignoble from the noble natures, and to place the former in
the lowest class. It then trains the noble natures in music and
gymnastics, and, while this is going on, it tries to distinguish those
natures which are capable of rising above mere training to reflective or
philosophic thought, from those which are not. The latter it assigns to
the military class, which always remains at the stage of training, while
the former are instructed in philosophy, and, if they prove themselves
adepts, are finally admitted to the ruling class, as sages. Any member
of either of the higher classes who proves himself unworthy of that
class, may at any time be degraded into the next below.
As soon as the children are accepted by the State, their education under
State nurses begins. The chief efforts of these for some time are
directed to the bodies of the children, to seeing that they are healthy
and strong. As soon as the young creatures can stand and walk, they are
taught to exert themselves in an orderly way and to play little games;
and as soon as they understand what is said to them, they are told
stories and sung to. Such is their first introduction to gymnastics and
music. What games are to be taught, what stories told, and what airs
sung to the children, the State determines, and indeed, since the
character of human beings depends, in great measure, upon the first
impression made upon them, this is one of its most sacred duties. Plato
altogether disapproves of leaving children without guidance to seek
exercise and amusement in their own way, and demands that their games
shall be such as call forth, in a gentle and harmonious way, all the
latent powers of body and mind, and develop the sense of order, beauty,
and fitness. He is still more earnest in insisting that the stories told
to children shall be exemplifications of the loftiest morality, and the
airs sung to them such as settle, strengthen, and solemnize the soul. He
follows Heraclitus in demanding that the Homeric poems, so long the
storehouse for children's stories, shall be entirely proscribed, on
account of the false ideals which they hold up both of gods and heroes,
and the intimidating descriptions which they give of the other world.
Virtue, he holds, cannot be furthered by fear, which is characteristic
only of slaves. He thinks that all early intellectual training should be
a sort of play. The truth is, the infant-school of Plato's _Republic_
comes as near as can well be imagined to the ideal of the modern
kindergarten.
While this elementary education is going on, the officers of the State
have abundant opportunity for observing the different characters of the
children, and distinguishing the noble from the ignoble. As soon as a
child shows plainly that it belongs by nature to the lowest class, they
consign it to that class, and its education by the State practically
ceases. Of course these officers know from what class each child came,
and they make use of this knowledge in determining its future destiny.
At the same time, they are not to be entirely guided by it, but to act
impartially. The education of the lowest class after childhood the
State leaves to take care of itself, persuaded that appetite will always
find means for its own satisfaction. The nobler natures it continues to
educate, without any break, until they reach the age of twenty. And this
education is distinctly a military training. As time goes on, the
gymnastic exercises become more violent, more complex, and more
sustained, but always have for their subject the soul, rather than the
body, and never degenerate into mere athletic brutality. Special
attention is directed to the musical and literary exercises, as the
means whereby the soul is directly trained and harmonized. Plato holds
that no change can be made in the "music" of a State, without a
corresponding change in the whole organization; in other words, that the
social and political condition of a people is determined by the
literature and music which it produces and enjoys. He virtually says,
Let me make the songs of a people, and he who will may make their laws.
Of the character of the music which he recommends we have already
spoken. From literature he would exclude all that we are in the habit of
calling by that name, all that is mimetic, poetic, or creative, and
confine the term to what is scientific, didactic, and edifying. He sends
the poets out of the State with mock-reverent politeness, as creatures
too divine for human use. He is particularly severe upon the dramatists,
not sparing even the sublime Æschylus. In fact, he would banish from his
State all art not directly edifying. The literature which he recommends
is plainly of the nature of Æsop's _Fables_, the Pythagorean _Golden
Words_, and the Parmenidean or Heraclitean work _On Nature_. If we
wished to express his intent in strictly modern language, we should have
to say that he desired to replace literary training by ethical and
scientific, and the poetical mode of presenting ideals by the prosaic.
The true music, he held, is in the human being. "If we find," he says,
"a man who perfectly combines gymnastics with music, and in exact
proportion applies them to the soul, we shall be entirely justified in
calling him the perfect musician and the perfect trainer, far superior
to the man who arranges strings alongside each other."
There are many matters of detail in Plato's scheme of military training
that well deserve consideration, but cannot be even touched upon here.
Before we leave it, however, we may give the dates at which the
different branches of education are to begin. Care of the body begins at
birth, story-telling with the third year, gymnastics with the seventh,
writing and reading with the tenth, letters and music with the
fourteenth, mathematics with the sixteenth, military drill, which for
the time supplants all other training, with the eighteenth. When the
young people reach the age of twenty, those who show no great capacity
for science, but are manly and courageous, are assigned to the soldier
class, and start on a course of higher education in military training,
while those who evince great intellectual ability become novices in the
ruling class, and begin a curriculum in science, which lasts till the
close of their thirtieth year. This course includes arithmetic,
geometry, and astronomy, the only sciences at that time cultivated, and
aims at impressing upon the youthful mind the unity and harmony of the
physical or phenomenal universe. At the age of thirty, those students
who do not show any particular aptitude for higher studies are drafted
off into the lower public offices, while those who do, pass five years
in the study of dialectics, whereby they rise to pure ideas. They are
then, from their thirty-fifth to their fiftieth year, made to fill the
higher public offices, in which they take their orders directly from the
sages. During this period they put their acquirements to a practical
test, and so come really and fully into possession of them. At the end
of their fiftieth year, after half a century of continuous education of
body, mind, and will, they are reckoned to have reached the vision of
the supreme good, and therefore to be fit to enter the contemplative
ruling class. They are now free men; they have reached the goal of
existence; their life is hidden with God; they are free from the prison
of the body, and only remain in it voluntarily, and out of gratitude to
the State which has educated them, in order to direct it, in accordance
with absolute truth and right, toward the Supreme Good.
Such, in its outlines, is Plato's theory of education, as set forth in
the _Republic_. It is easy to point out its defects and its errors,
which are neither small nor few, but fundamental and all-pervasive. But
it is equally easy to see how it came to have these defects and errors,
since they are simply those of every æsthetic social scheme which
ignores the nature of the material with which it presumes to deal, and
takes no account of the actual history of social institutions or of the
forces by which they are evolved. It is emphatically the product of a
youthful intellect, carried away by an artistic ideal. It was, however,
the intellect of a Plato, who, when he became more mature, saw, without
"irreverence for the dreams of youth," the feebleness of ideas for the
conflict with human frailties, and strove to correct his exaggerated
estimate of their power.
This he did in the _Laws_, whose very title suggests, in a way almost
obtrusive, the change of attitude and allegiance. While in the
_Republic_ the State is governed by sages, almost entirely without laws,
in the later work, the sages almost disappear and the laws assume an
all-important place. In writing the _Laws_, moreover, he exchanges
allegiance to Socrates and ideas for allegiance to Pythagoras and the
gods. In saying this, I have marked the fundamental difference between
the _Republic_ and the _Laws_. While in the former Plato finds the moral
sanctions, in the last resort, in the ideas of the pure intellect,
trained in mathematics, astronomy, and dialectics, in the latter he
derives them from the content of the popular consciousness, with its
gods, its ethical notions, its traditions. In these, as embodied in
institutions, he finds the most serviceable, if not the most exalted,
revelation of divine truth. Trusting to this, he no longer seeks to
abolish the family and private property, but merely to have them
regulated; he no longer banishes strangers and poets from his State, but
merely subjects them to State supervision; he no longer demands a
philosophical training for the rulers, but only practical insight; he no
longer divides his citizens into sages, soldiers, and wealth-producers,
but into freemen (corresponding to his previous military class) and
slaves. His government is no longer an aristocracy of intellect, but a
compound of aristocracy, oligarchy, and democracy, representing,
respectively, worth, wealth, and will. His plan of education is modified
to suit these altered conditions. The children, as in Sparta, do not
begin the State course of education until about their seventh year,
after which their training is very much the same as that demanded in the
_Republic_, with the omission, of course, of dialectics. Though women
are no longer to be relieved of their home duties, they are still to
share in the education and occupations of men, an arrangement which is
facilitated by the law ordaining that both men and women shall eat at
public tables. In making these changes, Plato believed that he was
falling from a lofty, but unrealizable, ideal, and making concessions to
human weakness; in reality, he was approaching truth and right.
BOOK III
ARISTOTLE (B.C. 384-322)
CHAPTER I
ARISTOTLE--LIFE AND WORKS
Aristotle, in my opinion, stands almost alone in
philosophy.--Cicero.
Aristotle, Nature's private secretary, dipping his pen in
intellect.--Eusebius.
Wherever the divine wisdom of Aristotle has opened its mouth, the
wisdom of others, it seems to me, is to be disregarded.--Dante.
I could soon get over Aristotle's _prestige_, if I could only get
over his reasons.--Lessing.
If, now in my quiet days, I had youthful faculties at my command, I
should devote myself to Greek, in spite of all the difficulties I
know. Nature and Aristotle should be my sole study. It is beyond all
conception what that man espied, saw, beheld, remarked, observed. To
be sure he was sometimes hasty in his explanations; but are we not
so, even to the present day?--Goethe (at 78).
If the proper earnestness prevailed in philosophy, nothing would be
more worthy of establishing than a foundation for a special
lectureship on Aristotle; for he is, of all the ancients, the most
worthy of study.--Hegel.
Aristotle was one of the richest and most comprehensive geniuses
that ever appeared--a man beside whom no age has an equal to
place.--_Id._
Physical philosophy occupies itself with the general qualities of
matter. It is an abstraction from the dynamic manifestations of the
different kinds of matter; and even where its foundations were first
laid, in the eight books of Aristotle's _Physical Lectures_, all the
phenomena of nature are represented as the motive vital activity of
a universal world-force.--Alexander von Humboldt.
It was characteristic of this extraordinary genius to work at both
ends of the scientific process. He was alike a devotee to facts and
a master of the highest abstractions.--Alexander Bain.
Aristotle is the _Father of the Inductive Method_, and he is so for
two reasons: First, he theoretically recognized its essential
principles with a clearness, and exhibited them with a conviction,
which strike the modern man with amazement; and then he made the
first comprehensive attempt to apply them to all the science of the
Greeks.--Wilhelm Oncken.
Aristotle, for whose political philosophy our admiration rises, the
more we consider the work of his successors, is less guided by
imagination than Plato, examines reality more carefully, and
recognizes more acutely, the needs of man.--Bluntschli.
It appears to me that there can be no question, that Aristotle
stands forth, not only as the greatest figure in antiquity, but as
the greatest intellect that has ever appeared upon the face of this
earth.--George J. Romanes.
Aristotle, with all the wisdom of Plato before him, which he was
well able to appropriate, could find no better definition of the
true good of man than the full exercise or realization of the soul's
faculties in accordance with its proper excellence, which was
excellence of thought, speculative and practical.--Thomas Hill
Green.
It is pretty definitely settled, among men competent to form a judgment,
that Aristotle was the best educated man that ever walked on the surface
of this earth. He is still, as he was in Dante's time, the "master of
those that know." It is, therefore, not without reason that we look to
him, not only as the best exponent of ancient education, but as one of
the worthiest guides and ensamples in education generally. That we may
not lose the advantage of his example, it will be well, before we
consider his educational theories, to cast a glance at his life, the
process of his development, and his work.
Aristotle was born about B.C. 384, in the Greek colony of Stagira in
Thrace, near the borders of Macedonia. His father, Nicomachus, was a
physician of good standing, the author of several medical works, and the
trusted friend of Amyntas, the Macedonian King. His mother, Phæstis, was
descended from the early settlers of the place. It was doubtless under
his father's guidance that the boy Aristotle first became interested in
those physical studies in which he was destined to do such wonderful
work. Losing, however, both his parents at an early age, he came under
the charge of Proxenus, of Atarneus, who appears to have done his duty
by him. At the age of eighteen he came to Athens for his higher
education, and entered the school of Plato in the Academy. Here he
remained for nearly twenty years, listening to Plato, and acquiring
those vast stores of information which in later life he worked up into
lectures and scientific treatises. Nothing escaped him, neither art,
science, religion, philosophy, nor politics. He seems, being well off,
to have begun early to collect a library, and to aim at encyclopædic
knowledge. About his methods of study we know very little; but we hear
that at times he assisted Plato in his work and was very careful of his
own attire. It is clear that, in course of time, he rose in thought
above the teachings of his master, and even rejected the most
fundamental of them, the doctrine of self-existent ideas. But he never
lost respect for that master, and when the latter died, he retired with
Xenocrates, son of the new head of the Academy, to Atarneus, the home
of his old guardian Proxenus, and of his fellow-Academic, Hermias, now
king or tyrant of the place. Here he remained for three years, in the
closest intimacy with his friend, until the latter was treacherously
murdered by the Persians. He then crossed over to Mytilene, taking with
him Pythias, Hermias' sister or niece, whom he had married, and to whom
he was deeply devoted. He erected in Delphi a statue to his dead friend,
and dedicated to him a poem, of which we shall hear more in the sequel.
About B.C. 343, when he was over forty years old, he was called to
Macedonia, as tutor to Alexander, the thirteen-year-old son of King
Philip, and grandson of his own father's old patron, Amyntas. This
office he filled for about three years with distinguished success, and
it may be safely said that never had so great a tutor so great a pupil.
During the latter part of the time, at least, Aristotle and Alexander
seem to have lived at Stagira. This town had been captured and destroyed
by Philip, and its inhabitants scattered. With the permission of the
conqueror, Aristotle reassembled the inhabitants, rebuilt the town, drew
up its laws, and laid out near it, at Mieza, in imitation of the
Academy, a gymnasium and park, which he called the _Nymphæum_. Hither he
appears to have retired with his royal pupil and several other youths
who were receiving education along with him, among them Theophrastus and
the ill-fated Callisthenes. It was probably here that Aristotle adopted
the habit of walking while imparting instruction, a habit which
afterwards gave the name to his school. When Alexander, at sixteen,
entered his father's army, Aristotle still continued to teach in the
Nymphæum, which existed even in Plutarch's time, more than four hundred
years afterwards. But this lasted only for about five years; for in 335,
when Alexander, who in the previous year had succeeded his murdered
father, was preparing to invade Persia, Aristotle moved to Athens.
Finding that his old friend, Xenocrates, was director of the school in
the Academy, he established himself, as a public teacher or professor,
in the Lyceum, the Periclean gymnasium, used chiefly, it should seem, by
the lower classes and by foreign residents, of whom he himself was one.
As an alien, as the friend of the victorious Macedonians, who three
years before had broken the power of Greece at Chæronea, and taken away
her autonomy forever, as a rival of the Platonists, and as a wealthy,
well-dressed gentleman, he had many enemies and detractors; but his
conduct seems to have been so unobjectionable that no formal charge
could be brought against him. His very numerous pupils were mostly
foreigners, a fact not without its influence on the subsequent course of
thought. He divided his days between writing and teaching, taking his
physical exercise while engaged in the latter occupation. In the
mornings he gave lectures to a narrow circle, in a strictly formal and
scientific way, upon the higher branches of science; while in the
afternoons he conducted conversations upon more popular themes with a
less select audience. The former were called his esoteric, the latter
his exoteric, discourses.
It was during his second residence in Athens, in the twelve years from
B.C. 335 to 323, that Aristotle composed most of those great works in
which he sought to sum up, in an encyclopædic way, the results of a
life of all-embracing study and thought. He had been in no haste to put
himself on record, and it was not until he had reached a consistent view
of the world that he ventured to treat, in a definitive way, any aspect
of it. Thus it was that each of his treatises formed part of one great
whole of thought. Had he succeeded in completing his plan, he would have
left to the world a body of science such as, even in our own day, would
look in vain for a peer among the works of any one man. Unfortunately,
his plan was not completed, and even of the works which he did write
only a portion has come down to us. But that portion is sufficient to
place their author at the head of all scientific men. Some of his works,
for example, his _Logic_, _Metaphysics_, _Ethics_, and _Politics_, still
occupy the first place in the literature of these subjects. How a single
man could have done all that he did, and in so many different
departments, is almost inconceivable. No doubt he had helpers, in the
shape of secretaries, learned slaves, and disciples; and it is certain
that he received from his royal pupil munificent aid, which enabled him
to do much, especially in the directions of physical and political
research, that would have been impossible for a poor man; but, after all
allowances have been made, his achievement still seems almost
miraculous.
During all the years in which Aristotle was thus engaged, his position
at Athens was becoming more and more insecure. The anti-Macedonian party
were waiting for the first opportunity to rid the city of him, and were
prevented from open attempts at this only by dread of Alexander's
displeasure. Even when it was known that Aristotle had incurred disfavor
with his old pupil, they did not venture to attack him; but in 323, when
the news of Alexander's sudden death made all Greece feel that now the
time had come to get rid forever of the hated Macedonians, and recover
its liberty, they at once gave vent to their long-cherished hatred. How
hard it was to find matter for an accusation against him, is shown by
the fact that they had to go back to his old poem on _Worth_, written in
memory of Hermias (see p. 4), and to base thereon a charge of impiety--a
charge always easily made, and always sure to arouse strong popular
prejudice. According to Athenian law, the defendant in any such case
might, if he chose, escape punishment by leaving the city any time
before the trial; and Aristotle, not being, like Socrates, a citizen,
could have no ground for refusing to take advantage of this liberty.
Accordingly, with the remark that he would not voluntarily allow the
Athenians to sin a second time against philosophy, he withdrew to his
country residence at Chalcis in Eubœa, the old home of his mother's
family, to wait till affairs should take another turn, as, indeed, they
soon afterwards did, when Athens had to open her gates to Antipater.
But, ere that happened, Aristotle was in his grave, having died in 322,
shortly before Demosthenes, of disease of the stomach, from which he had
long suffered. His remains are said to have been carried to Stagira,
where the grateful inhabitants erected an altar over them and paid
divine honors to his memory. His library and the manuscripts of his
works he left in the hands of Theophrastus, who succeeded him in the
Lyceum. His will, the text of which has come down to us, bears
testimony, along with all else that we know of him, to the nobility,
kindliness, and justice of his nature.