THE MUSICAL SIDE--SCHOOLS AND THEIR APPOINTMENTS.
§ 30. The school was generally distinguished by the term
διδασκαλεῖον[24] from the palæstra. We know that every Greek town
possessed one or more, and in early times Herodotus[25] mentions one
existing at Chios as early as 500 B.C., of which the roof fell in
and killed one hundred and nineteen out of one hundred and twenty
children at work within it at the time. Pausanias tells of another at
Astypalæa, into which a madman rushed and pulled down the supporting
pillar, so that sixty boys were buried under the ruins. The sad affair
of Mycalessus is told by Thucydides, and extorts from him a most
ungrammatical grimace of pity, when Thracian mercenaries murdered all
the children assembled in school. These cases show how it was evidently
regarded as an essential in every town. So the Trœzenians, when
they received the fugitive Athenians during the invasion of Xerxes,
took care, even in that great and sudden crisis, to provide for the
teaching of the Attic children.[26] Of course, in early days and in
poor towns, the place of teaching was not well appointed; nay, even in
many places teaching in the open air prevailed. The oldest legends
speak of Cheiron teaching in his grotto on Pelion; in the latest Greek
χαμαιδιδάσκαλος (_teacher on the ground_) is a word for a low class of
teacher. This was, again, like the old hedge schools of Ireland, and,
no doubt, of Scotland too. They also took advantage, especially in hot
weather, of colonnades, or shady corners among public buildings; as at
Winchester the summer term was called _cloister-time_, from a similar
practice, even in that wealthy foundation, of instructing in the
cloisters.
On the other hand, properly appointed schools in respectable towns were
furnished with some taste, and according to traditional notions. As in
gymnasia and palæstras, there was a shrine of the Muses or of Hermes,
and the head of the institution was regarded as the priest of this
shrine, at which offerings were made, so in the schools also there were
statues of tutelary gods set up, and busts of heroes and other eminent
men, by way of ornament as well as reminder to the boys.
We hear that the master sat on a high seat, from which he taught; the
scholars often sat on the ground, as they still do in many countries,
or else they stood or occupied benches round him. The pictures and
descriptions extant do not point to the schools being so crowded, as
appears from the accidents above cited; but this is probably a mere
chance, or an omission for the artist’s convenience. For though the
laws quoted in Æschines’ speech forbid any one save the master and
boys to be present, we know that in later days this was not strictly
observed, and in Theophrastus’s “Characters,” the Chatterbox, among
other mistakes in tact, is represented going into the schools and
interrupting lessons with his idle talk. We may be sure that there were
no tables or desks, such furniture being unusual in Greek houses; it
was the universal custom, while reading or writing, to hold the book or
roll on the knee--to us an inconvenient thing to do, but still common
in the East.
There are some interesting sentences, given for exercise in Greek
and Latin, in the little-known “Interpretamenta” of Dositheus, now
edited and explained by German scholars. The entry of the boy is thus
described, in parallel Greek and Latin: “First I salute the master, who
returns my salute: good-morning, master; good-morning, school-fellows.
Give me my place, my seat, my stool. Sit closer. Move up that way. This
is my place, I took it first.” This mixture of politeness and wrangling
is amusing, and, no doubt, to be found in all ages. It seems that the
seats were movable. A scholium on Æschines tells us that there was a
supply of water close at hand, lest the boys might suffer from thirst.
The extant pictures show that along the walls were hung up various
vessels of which the use is not always plain to us. But we can clearly
distinguish the necessary implements for the teaching of reading and
writing, boxes for book-rolls, writing-boards, reckoning-boards with
parallel grooves, and pebbles fixed in them, geometrical figures,
flute-cases, and lyres. There is also late authority to show that there
were notice-boards on which regulations were posted. We hear from
Lucian of a notice over a sophist’s door, “No philosophy to-day.” The
notice-board was called “the white board,” being covered with chalk. We
are not told how this was written on; but if the ground was black, then
mere writing with the finger across the chalked surface would produce
distinct characters.
§ 31. What is far more interesting is the remnant now discovered of
the pictorial teaching of children, by hanging up in the schoolroom
illustrations of the Trojan and other legends. By the researches of
Böttiger and O. Jahn,[27] it appears that we still have the fragments
of such a table in the _tabula Iliaca_ of Theodorus, preserved at the
Capitoline Museum in Rome. These were large pictures, in a series,
with names or words of explanation attached to them. Thus we have one
picture (from “Iliad” Α) of Chryses praying Agamemnon to restore his
daughter, beside him a wagon loaded with ransom, and under each figure,
and under the wagon respectively, _Agamemnon_, _Chryses_, _the ransom_.
Other extant pictures illustrate the third and twenty-fourth books of
the “Iliad.” The “Odyssey” was similarly treated, so that there seems
to have been a traditional and widely circulated pictorial compendium
of the Homeric poems used, at all events, in later Greek and in Roman
schools. There are also chronological and historical fragments of the
same kind still extant, so that it is more than probable that even in
classical days Greek boys were not without the benefit of illustrated
school-books, or at least school-sheets, as the elegiac distich on the
back of one of them suggests.[28] The use of these pictures on the
walls explains the constant appearance of a long wand in the master’s
hand, which is more characteristic of him than the rod of punishment,
though this, too, was not missing.
THE SUBJECTS AND METHOD OF EDUCATION--THE THREE R’S.
§ 32. The usual subdivision of education was into three parts:
_letters_ (γράμματα), including reading, writing, counting, and
learning of the poets; _music_ in the stricter sense, including singing
and playing on the lyre; and lastly _gymnastic_, which included
dancing. These were under the special direction of three classes of
masters, the _grammatists_ (to be distinguished from γραμματικός,
used in a higher sense), the _citharistes_, and the _pædotribes_. It
is said that at Sparta the education in reading and writing was not
thought necessary, and there have been long discussions among the
learned whether the ordinary Spartan in classical days was able to
read. We find that Aristotle adds a fourth subject to the three above
named--drawing, which he thinks requisite, like music, to enable the
educated man to judge rightly of works of art. But there is no evidence
of a wide diffusion of drawing or painting among the Greeks, as among
us; and the same may be said of swimming on the gymnastic side, though
the oft-quoted proverb, μηδὲ νεῖν μηδὲ γράμματα--_he can neither
swim nor read_--has led the learned to assert a general knowledge of
swimming, at least at Athens.
Later on, under the learned influences of Alexandria and the paid
professoriate of Roman days, subjects multiplied with the decline of
mental vigor and spontaneity of the age, and children began to be
pestered, as they now are, with a quantity of subjects, all thought
necessary to a proper education, and accordingly all imperfectly
acquired. This was called the _encyclical education_, which is
preserved in our _encyclopædia_ of knowledge. It included (1) grammar,
(2) rhetoric, (3) dialectic, (4) arithmetic, (5) music, (6) geometry,
(7) astronomy, and these were divided into the earlier _Trivium_ and
the later _Quadrivium_. But fortunately this debasement of classical
education is far beyond our present scope.
§ 33. The boys started very early for school, attended by their
pædagogue, and appear to have returned for late breakfast. We may
conclude from the Roman custom, though we have no positive evidence,
that the afternoons were devoted to recreation or the lighter gymnastic
exercises. The later theorists speak much of pauses and of variation
in study; but though we know there were a good many isolated holidays,
we hear of no period of rest for both masters and boys, such as there
must have been in the Roman dog-days. There is something humane and
affecting in the dying bequest of Anaxagoras, who gave his native
city, Clazomenæ, a property on the condition that the anniversary of
his death should be kept as a general school holiday. There were also
special days of school feasts, such as the _Hermæa_ and _Museia_, so
elegantly described at the opening of Plato’s “Lysis.”
§ 34. From the accounts we have of the teaching of the alphabet, as
implied in Plato’s “Cratylus,” and described by Dionysius (the rhetor)
in illustrating Demosthenes’ eloquence, it was not carried on in an
analytical, but a synthetical, way. Children were not taught words
first and then to analyze them, but started with individual letters,
then learned their simplest combinations, and so on. Nor is this method
ever likely to be supplanted by the other, at least in the case of
stupid children. But we do hear of one curious attempt to make the
alphabet an agreeable study in the so-called _grammatical tragedy_
of Callias, about 400 B.C. This was the time when (in the archonship
of Eucleides) the newer Ionic alphabet of twenty-four letters was
introduced, and apparently ordered to be used in schools. The work
of Callias was, accordingly, a poetical kind of A B C book, in which
the single letters in turn spoke the prologue. The choral parts seem
to have been refrains working out the simpler combinations of vowels
with each consonant. The seven vowels were also introduced before the
schoolmaster as female characters. But more we do not know, and it is
probable that the book was only called _tragedy_ from its external
form, not from any plot.[29] The use of mnemonic verses to help
children was, no doubt, as old as education; but we should have been
glad to know the divisions of letters followed by Callias; for up to
the times of the Sophists there was no proper analysis of the alphabet,
and it is to them that we owe such studies as Plato’s “Cratylus,”
which, though sound as to the alphabet, is wonderfully childish as to
etymology. Still, the popular knowledge of 400 B.C. must have been a
long way behind the “Cratylus.”
From the acquisition of letters, the child passed to the study of
_syllables_, and we find _syllabizing_ used generally by the Greeks
for elementary instruction in reading. But while the Greek child was
not afflicted, like English children, with the absurd conundrums of
a perfectly irrational spelling; while he had a fair guarantee that
the individual letters reproduced the sound of the whole word, there
were other difficulties in his way. He had not, indeed, to burden his
memory with the sounds to be attached to symbols like _though_ and
_tough_, _plague_ and _ague_, but he must, on the other hand, study
with peculiar care the separation of words--interpunction--and also
punctuation and accent. Accent, indeed, and the subtle use of the
numerous particles, were given, and could only be given, by familiarity
with Greek as a mother tongue. As Aristotle remarks, one could
always know a foreigner, however well he spoke Greek, by the use of
the particles. I heard Ernest Renan make the very same remark about
foreigners’ French a few years ago. But in classical days, accents
were not even written, and words were not separated, neither were
clauses distinguished by stops. Hence the difficulties of reading were
considerably increased, as any one may prove for himself by taking
up a mediæval Greek MS. There, indeed, the accents are a guide, but
even with them the separation of words is a difficulty, and has led to
endless mistakes in our printed texts. We know, too, that the Greeks
were particular about melodious intonation and rhythmical balance of
clauses even in prose: all this gave the _grammatist_ ample scope for
patience. There is even a special teacher--φωνασκός--mentioned in early
days as regulating and training the singing voice of children. Indeed,
we are surprised at the general assumption among their educators that
every one had both natural voice and ear.[30]
Thus reading aloud and recitations from the great poets attained a
double object: the schoolboy was taught to enounce accurately and read
rhythmically; he was made familiar at the same time with the choicest
extracts of the best masters in the older literature. I have already
spoken of Homer; but the lyric poets, like Tyrtæus, and the gnomic,
like Theognis, were also largely used at school. Indeed, it is not a
little remarkable how many of these old poets were themselves called
schoolmasters. This school use gave rise to _chrestomathies_, or
selections of suitable passages; and there are many critics who think
that our present texts of Theognis represent such a selection. The
“Golden Verses” of Pythagoras, the many collections of proverbs, or
ὑποθῆκαι, point to the same practice. Written books were still scarce,
libraries very exceptional, and thus the boy’s education was far more
prosecuted by dictation and by conversation than nowadays. Without
doubt this made them less learned, but more intelligent and ready, than
we are; and there are even in the days of Hellenic decay complaints
of the increase of books, of the lust after much reading and various
lore.[31] We are told that in Sparta and Crete all children learned
hymns to the gods, and metrical statements of the laws, to be sung to
fixed melodies; and this (if a fact) has justly been called a political
as well as religious catechism.
§ 35. It was very late in the history of Hellenism that any mention of
the learning of foreign languages meets us. Even in the wide studies
pursued at Alexandria, no systematic course in languages is ever
mentioned; and people still had recourse in international business
to those who happened to be born of mixed marriages, or by some
other accident had been compelled to acquire a second tongue. There
is, indeed, much curious evidence that the Greeks, being really bad
linguists, found great difficulty in acquiring the Latin tongue, even
when it became the language of the rulers of the world.[32] Strabo[33]
notes that whenever historical treatises were composed in foreign
languages, they were inaccessible to the Greeks, while the Romans did
nothing but copy partially and imperfectly what the Greeks had said--a
remark which might now be sarcastically applied to the relations
of German and English philology. This Greek inability to learn, or
contempt of, foreign languages reminds us of the French of to-day,
whose language, until lately, held the place in Europe which Greek held
in the Roman Empire, when every respectable person knew Greek, and when
the Senate were able to receive and treat with foreign ambassadors
speaking in Greek.[34] We have above noted the danger actually
threatening that children might learn Greek so early and exclusively as
to speak their native tongue with a foreign accent--a state of things
which the Romans would have resented strongly in their rulers--in that
respect widely different from the English people of to-day. Thus the
Romans attained, what the Greeks missed, the opportunity of learning
grammar through the forms of a foreign language.[35]
§ 36. When the children came to writing, we must not imagine them using
ink and paper, which was far too expensive. Instead of our slate,
they used tablets covered with wax, on which the pointed stylus drew
a sharp line, which could be smoothed out again with the flat reverse
end. There were double lines drawn on the tablets, and the master
wrote words for the boys to copy. We are told that he at times held the
hands of beginners in forming letters. Quintilian suggests that the
letters should be cut deep in a wooden tablet, so that the child could
follow them without having his hand held; and it was in this way that
the Ostrogoth Theodoric managed to sign his name, by having a metal
plate pierced with it, which he then laid on the paper, and stencilled
out the letters. There are on the walls of Pompeii many scribblings
of boys, evidently repeating their school exercises; and in Egypt
was found a tomb with a set of wax tablets, all containing the same
verses of Menander; but one of them a model, the rest copies varying in
excellence; and under some of them the approving judgment _diligent_
(φιλοπόνως). This curious set of relics, in the possession of Dr.
Abbott, of New York, is apparently the school furniture of a master
buried with him.
§ 37. There is no reason to think that the average Greek attained
anything like the fluency in writing which we now consider necessary.
Plato[36] says it is only necessary so far as to be able to write or
read; to write fast or elegantly must not be attempted within the range
of ordinary education, except in rare cases and with peculiar natural
gifts. Indeed, as slaves did all the copying work, and as published
books were always in their handwriting, there may have been the same
sort of prejudice against a very good, clear hand which many people
now feel against an _office hand_. At Athens there was a special
officer, γραμματεύς, to write out, or direct the writing-out of, public
documents; there was also a ὑπογραφεύς, a secretary to take minutes
(ὑπογράφεσθαι) at public meetings. Besides the formal writing in
separate capital letters, which we have on so many inscriptions, and
which was probably the hand taught to children, there was a cursive
hand, which we see in the Greek papyri of the second century B.C. found
in Egypt. In later MSS. we even find a regular shorthand, exceedingly
difficult to decipher.[37] The lines were drawn, especially on wax,
with a little coin-shaped piece of lead (μόλυβδος), and the drawing of
lines appears to be called παραγράφειν. Instead of the sharp metal or
bone stylus, a reed (κάλαμος), like our pens, was used on papyrus or
parchment with ink. Quintilian prefers the wax and stylus, because the
constant dipping in the ink distracts and checks thinking--a curious
objection, and worth quoting to show the difference between his age and
ours. But when the new stylograph has been used for some time, we will,
no doubt, find men asserting this of the old-fashioned pen and ink.
§ 38. The school commentary, or explanation of the poems or other
literature thus written out, was probably quite elementary. Grammar
only began to be understood by the Sophists, and we have specimens of
exercises on the use of the article, and on the question of genders,
in a very comic dialogue in Aristophanes’ “Clouds,” where the pupil
of the new school ridicules the ignorance of old Strepsiades. It is
likely Protagoras’s work _on the correct use of language_ (ὀρθοέπεια)
gave a great stimulus to this branch of education. But we cannot
argue that these studies of the mother tongue which make our use of
it more conscious than before, had any better effect on prose-writing
or on conversation than the very parallel studies of English which
have of late years invaded or infested all our schools. Good-breeding
and natural refinement seem the natural (and are probably the only)
safeguards of a mother tongue in its ordinary use, and there is even
great danger that a conscious analysis of idioms may banish from the
writing of a language many valuable and characteristic turns which
are based upon a more subtle propriety than that of school logic.
Fortunately, local dialects have a great power of resistance. The
Warwick or the Galway peasant will speak his own accents, and even use
his idioms, in spite of all compulsory teaching of English grammar in
the schools; but the reducing of all written English to one standard
(both in spelling and in idiom) is like the reducing of all written
Greek to the _common dialect_--a very great loss and damage.[38]
§ 39. We pass to the teaching of elementary science. Geometry was
still an advanced study, and, though in high esteem among the Greeks
as one of the most elegant and perfect, seems not to have been taught
in schools. Arithmetic was regarded either as the abstract science
of numbers (ἀριθμητική), and as such one of the most difficult of
sciences, or as the art of reckoning (λογιστική) to be employed in the
ordinary affairs of life. Mercantile Greeks, like the Athenians and
Ionians generally, among whom banking was well developed, must have
early found this a necessity; but even in Greek art, architectural
perfection was attained by a very subtle and evidently conscious
application of arithmetical proportions. This was first shown in the
accurate measurements of the Parthenon by Penrose, and was, no doubt,
expounded in the treatise written on this building by its architect,
Ictinus. In the great temple of Zeus at Olympia, the use of multiples
of 7 and 5 has been shown so curiously applied by an American scholar
that he suspects the application of Pythagorean symbolism by the
architect Libon. But of course this was ἀριθμητική in the strict sense,
and is only here mentioned to show how the Greeks must have been led
to appreciate the value of the science of numbers. Ordinary schoolboys
were taught to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, as they now are,
but without the advantage of our admirable system of notation.
Starting from the natural suggestion of the fingers--a suggestion
preserved all through later history by such words as πεμπάζεσθαι
(literally, _to count by fives_, but used of counting generally)--the
Greeks represented numbers by straight strokes, but soon replaced
||||| either by a rude picture of a hand, V (as we find in Roman
numbers), and made two such symbols joined together to represent 10
(X), or else the higher numbers were marked by the first letter of
their name--viz., M and C, in Latin _mille_ and _centum_. So in Greek,
Χ (χίλιοι), Μ (μυρίοι), etc. The smaller numbers were represented in
ordinary counting by the fingers of the hand, not merely as _digits_
(a suggestive word, in itself a survival of the process), but,
according as they were bent or placed, fingers represented multiples
of 5, and so were sufficient for ordinary sums. Aristophanes even
contrasts[39] this sort of reckoning, as clearer and more intelligible,
with reckoning on the abacus, or arithmetical board, which has still
survived in our ball-frames. We are told that the fingers were
sufficient to express all figures up to thousands, which is indeed
strange to us; but both the finger signs and the abacus failed in the
great invention we have gained from Arabic numerals, the supplying of
the symbol ○. The abacus used in Greek schools appears to have had
several straight furrows in which pebbles or plugs were set, and at the
left side there was a special division where each unit meant 5. Thus,
648 (DCXXXXVIII) was represented in the following way:
+------+---------+
| | | M
+------+---------+
| o | o | C
+------+---------+
| | o o o o | X
+------+---------+
| o | o o o |
+------+---------+
+------+---------+
This abacus was ascribed to Pythagoras, but was in all probability
older, and derived from Egypt, where elementary science was well and
widely taught from very early times. When initial letters were used
for numbers, as Π for πέντε, and Δ for δέκα, combinations such as
IΔI meant 50. Last of all, we find in our MSS. a system of using the
letters of the alphabet for numbers, preserving ϛ (ἐπίσημον) for 6, and
thus reaching 10 with ι, proceeding by tens through κ (20), λ (30),
etc., to ρ (100), σ (200), and for 900 using Ϡ. This notation must not
be confused with the marking of the twenty-four books of the Homeric
epics by the simple letters of the alphabet.
Further details as to the technical terms for arithmetical operations,
and the amount to be attributed to a nation using so clumsy a notation,
must be sought in professed hand-books of antiquity.[40]
As regards geometry, all we can say is that in the days of Plato and
Aristotle both these philosophers recognize not only its extraordinary
value as a mental training, but also the fact that it can be taught to
young boys as yet unfit for political and metaphysical studies.
§ 40. Having thus disposed of the severer side of school education, we
will turn to the artistic side, one very important to the Greeks, and
suggestive to us of many instructive problems.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Διδασκάλιον is the thing learned.
[25] vi. 27.
[26] The Greek form of our word school, though in common use, meant
_leisure_, and only passed through its application to the leisurely
discussions of philosophers into its new and opposite sense. There is
some difficulty about the word παιδαγωγεῖον, which some have imagined
to be a waiting-room for the pædagogue slaves--absurdly enough. It is
probably a mere synonym for the schoolroom.
[27] Grasberger, ii. 224.
[28]
[ὦ φίλε παῖ] Θεωδώρηον μάθε τάξιν Ὁμήρου
ὄφρα δαεὶς πάσης μέτρον ἔχῃς σοφίας.
[29] All our evidence, with every possible surmise about it, may be
found in Welcker’s “Kleine Schriften,” vol. i. p. 371 sq.
[30] This assumption may perhaps hardly seem surprising when it still
prevails among the English public as regards girls. Accordingly, a vast
amount of time and brain power is wasted in the endeavor to make them
play and sing, though nature has peremptorily precluded it in most
cases.
[31] The objections of the Eleatics and Platonists to the moral side of
Homer and the other epic poets will be discussed in connection with the
philosophic attempts at reform in higher education.
[32] Plutarch (“Life of Demosth.,” 2) laments his inability to master
Latin, and the difficulties it presents when not acquired very early.
[33] iii. 4, 19.
[34] Up to the mission of Carneades and his fellows (155 B.C.) an
interpreter had been necessary.
[35] This seems to me a very important point, and I do not know how
our training of boys in the strict and clear Latin grammar can ever be
supplied adequately by any other means, though I have one great and
recognized authority--Mr. Thring--against me, who thinks that boys
should learn the logic of grammar through English analysis.
[36] “Laws,” 810--if the “Laws” be, indeed, Plato’s.
[37] Cf. Wattenbach’s specimens in his plates of Greek MSS.
[38] If we had phonetic spelling, our dialects would be preserved,
as the various Greek dialects were, or as the Italian now are, and
thus the history of our language in the present day might become
possible to ourselves and our descendants. As it is, we are concealing
from all inquiry this most interesting subject--I mean the varying
pronunciation--by our absurd artificial spelling, and we are banishing
local idioms by stamping them with the mark of vulgarity. This latter
is the natural and right consequence of having classical models. But
had we possessed the older dialects in phonetic writing, our standard
would have been widened, like that of the Greeks, to include important
provincial varieties.
[39] “Wasps,” 656 sq.
[40] These are the ordinary terms: adding = συντιθέναι, προστιθέναι;
subtracting = ἀφαιρεῖν, ὑπεξαιρεῖν, Latin _deducere_; multiplying =
πολλαπλασιάζειν, and the factors πλευρά, a geometrical conception, as
in the second book of Euclid; dividing = μερίζειν: no general word for
_quotient_ is found.