Thus, then, about the beginning of the third century before Christ, in consequence of the Macedonian campaign, which had brought the Greeks into contact with the ancient civilization of Asia, a great degree of intellectual activity was manifested in Egypt. On the site of the village of Rhacotis, once held as an Egyptian post to prevent the ingress of strangers, the Macedonians erected that city which was to be the entrepôt of the commerce of the East and West, and to transmit an illustrious name to the latest generations. Her long career of commercial prosperity, her commanding position as respects the material interests of the world, justified the statesmanship of her founder, and the intellectual glory which has gathered round her has given an enduring lustre to his name. 11. What We Owe to the Greeks (Butcher, S. H., Some Aspects of the Greek Genius, Essay I. London, 1891) In the first Essay in the above-cited volume, entitled "What We owe to Greece," Professor Butcher gives a very interesting picture of the Greek contribution to the life of the modern world. From it the following selections have been taken. The Greeks, before any other people of antiquity, possessed the love of knowledge for its own sake. To see things as they really are, to discern their meanings and adjust their relations, was with them an instinct and a passion. Their methods in science and philosophy might be very faulty, and their conclusions often absurd, but they had that fearlessness of intellect which is the first condition of seeing truly. Poets and philosophers alike looked with unflinching eyes on all that met them, on man and the world, on life and death. They interrogated Nature, and sought to wrest her secret from her, without misgiving and without afterthought. Greece, first smitten with the passion for truth, had the courage to put faith in reason, and in following its guidance to take no count of consequences.. At the moment when Greece first comes into the main current of the world's history, we find a quickened and stirring sense of personality, and a free play of intellect and imagination. The oppressive silence with which Nature and her unexplained forces had brooded over man is broken. Not that the Greek temper is irreverent, or strips the universe of mystery. The mystery is still there and felt, and has left many undertones of sadness in the bright and heroic records of Greece; but the sense of mystery has not yet become mysticism. . . . Greek thinkers are not afraid that they may be guilty of prying into the hidden things of the gods. They hold frank companionship with thoughts that had paralysed Eastern nations into dumbness or inactivity, and in their clear gaze there is no ignoble terror. Inroads, indeed, there were at times from the East of strange gods and fanatical rites; and half-lit spaces always remained in which forms of faith or ritual, lower as well as higher than the popular creed, took shelter; but, on the whole, we are henceforth in an upper and a serener air in which man's spiritual and intellectual freedom is assured. . . . It was the privilege of the Greeks to discover the sovereign efficacy of reason. They entered on the pursuit of knowledge with a sure and joyous instinct. Baffled and puzzled they might be, but they never grew weary of the quest. The speculative faculty which reached its height in Plato and Aristotle, was, when we make due allowance for time and circumstance, scarcely less eminent in the Ionian philosophers; and it was Ionia that gave birth to an idea, which was foreign to the East, but has become the starting-point of modern science - the idea that Nature works by fixed laws. . . . The early poet-philosophers of Ionia gave the impulse which has carried the human intellect forward across the line which separates empirical from scientific knowledge; and the Greek precocity of mind in this direction, unlike that of the Orientals, had in it the promise of uninterrupted advance in the future of great discoveries in mathematics, geometry, experimental physics, in medicine also and physiology.... Again, the Greeks set themselves to discover a rational basis for conduct. Rigorously they brought their actions to the test of reason, and that not only by the mouth of philosophers, but through their poets, historians, and orators. Thinking and doing, "the spirit of counsel and might" - clear thought and noble action - did not to the Greek mind stand opposed. . . . The East did not attempt to reconcile the claims of the state and the individual. The pliant genius of Greece first made the effort. In Greece first the idea of the public good, of the free devotion of the citizen to the state, of government in the interests of the governed, of the rights of the individual, took shape. The problem of the relation between the state and the individual was, indeed, very imperfectly solved in Greece. The demands, for instance, of the state were pitched too high, and implied a virtue almost heroic in its members. Even in Athens, where individual liberty was most regarded, certain urgent public needs were supplied mainly by the precarious method of private generosity instead of by state organisation. But though the Greeks may not have solved the political problem, they saw that there was a problem to solve, and set about it rationally; and they were the first to do so. They were gifted with a power, peculiarly Western, of delicate adjustment, of combining principles apparently opposite, of harmonising conflicting claims; they possessed a sense of measure, a flexibility, a faculty of compromise, opposed to the fatal simplicity with which Eastern politics had been stricken. Not tyranny, not anarchy, satisfied the Greek, but ordered liberty. . . . This brief sketch may serve to indicate the qualities most distinctive of the Greek genius - the love of knowledge, the love of rational beauty, the love of freedom. In their first contact with the East with Egypt and Assyria - during the period known as the GræcoPhoenician period of art, the Greeks had a trying ordeal to pass through. They came out of it, as we have seen, in a characteristic fashion. 1. Their political instinct was alien to Assyrian despotism. 2. Their lay instinct rose up against Egyptian priestcraft. 3. Their instinct for beauty and reason combined rejected in both in Assyrian and Egyptian alike what was monstrous and arts lifeless. 4. Their instinct for knowledge, their curiosity, their cosmopolitanism, led them to adopt the foreign technique, and to absorb all that was fruitful in the foreigners' ideas. They borrowed from every source, but all that they borrowed they made their own. The Phoenicians, it has been said, taught the Greeks writing, but it was the Greeks who wrote. In every department the principle holds good. They stamped their genius upon each imported product, which was to them but the raw material of their art. . . . Such, briefly, is our debt to Greece. And when we speak of Greece we think first of Athens. . . . To Greece, then, we owe the love of Science, the love of Art, the love of Freedom: not Science alone, Art alone, or Freedom alone, but these vitally correlated with one another and brought into organic union. And in this union we recognise the distinctive features of the West. The Greek genius is the European genius in its first and brightest bloom. From a vivifying contact with the Greek spirit Europe derived that new and mighty impulse which we call Progress. . ... From Greece came that first mighty impulse whose far-off workings are felt by us to-day, and which has brought it about that progress has been accepted as the law and goal of human endeavour. Greece first took up the task of equipping man with all that fits him for civil life and promotes his secular well-being; of unfolding and expanding every inborn faculty and energy, bodily and mental; of striving restlessly after the perfection of the whole, and finding in this effort after an unattainable ideal that by which man becomes like to the gods. . . . CHAPTER III THE EDUCATION AND WORK OF ROME THE Readings in this chapter trace the education of a Roman boy from the earlier times, when the training given was simple and very practical, through the change in national ideals to the later period, when oratory had become the chief aim of Roman educational effort. The principal early schoolbook was the Laws of the Twelve Tables. These have been lost in their original form, but the digest (12) gives an idea as to their nature, while Cicero tells us (13) of their importance in the education of youth. The Roman farmer's calendar (14) shows the farmer's duties and sacrifices, and from it one gets some idea of the simple rural life of the early Romans. The extracts from Polybius (15) and Mommsen (16) give us good pictures of the Roman citizen of the old school. The epitaph for a Roman matron (17) describes briefly the education of a girl in this same earlier period. After Rome had expanded and had come to embrace all the Italian peninsula, and the State was being brought into increasing contact with the Hellenic world to the eastward, the need became manifest for a more extended education and a broader culture than the old education had afforded. Within two centuries the transition was accomplished, and the old educational training had been superseded by new types of schooling. At first Hellenic schools were set up, and the Hellenic school system was adopted at Rome; later a Roman modification of these schools was worked out, as better adapted to Roman life and more expressive of Roman character. That the change was resisted by the older and more conservative members of Roman society might naturally be supposed. Not only was much written against the new and in praise of the old education, of which the extracts from Marcus Aurelius (18) and Tacitus (19) were among the more temperate, but it was even attempted to prohibit the introduction of Greek teachers and schools by official edicts (20 a-b). Horace (22) gives a good picture of the solicitude of his father, in the transition period, to secure the best teachers of the time for his son. The position of a schoolmaster at Rome, as in Greece, was that of a menial, and Martial (23 a-b) gives no very attractive picture of a Roman primary school. Teaching, unenlivened by any ideas as to psychological procedure, was one long grind. Both the teacher and the boy had a hard time. The difficulties a boy faced in learning to read Latin, as had been the case with the Greek boy as well, are shown in the page reproduced from Vergil (21). Cicero (24) and Quintilian (25) set forth the aim of the new education as finally evolved oratory. Though the position of the primary teacher always remained low, the teachers in the higher schools, under the later Empire, came to occupy an important social position, as is shown by the grant of privileges to physicians and teachers by Constantine (26). The Roman system of instruction as finally evolved spread to all the provincial cities, and passed over to the Middle Ages as the basis for the Christian schools which later arose in the cathedral cities. The Seven Liberal Arts of the Middle Ages were a direct descendant of the instruction in the Roman secondary schools. 12. The Laws of the Twelve Tables What the laws of Moses were to the early Hebrews, the laws of Lycurgus to Sparta, the laws of Solon and the Homeric poems to Attica, the Laws of the Twelve Tables were to the early Romans. These were adopted in 451 and 450 B.C., being in part a codification of previous practices, and made in part as a concession to the plebes. The first ten were adopted in 451, and the last two in 450. For several centuries these Laws formed the basis of instruction in reading and writing, and every boy was expected to know them and be able to explain their meaning. They express both the spirit and the ideals of the old life and education at Rome. The following is an analysis of their contents, as reconstructed by scholars, the originals being lost. I. Related to the Summons before a Magistrate. II. Described Judicial Proceedings. III. Execution, following Confession or Judgment. V. Related to Inheritance and Tutelage. VI. Related to Dominion and Possession. VII. The Law Concerning Real Property. VIII. The Law of Wrongs and Injuries (Torts). |