he preferred deeds to words and thoughts, and the essence of a situation could always be expressed in a single sentence. This Spartan conception of citizenship fixed the aim of Spartan education. Daily hardships, endless physical training, perpetual tests of pluck and endurance, were the lot of the Spartan boy. He did not learn to read or write or count; he was trained to speak only in single words or in the shortest of sentences, for what need had a Spartan of letters or of chattering? His imagination had also to be subordinated to the national ideal: his dances, his songs, his very deities, were all military.

The Athenian's conception of the perfect citizen was much wider and much more difficult of attainment. Pluck and harmony of physical development did not satisfy him: there must be equal training of mind and imagination, without any sacrifice of bodily health. He demanded of the ideal citizen perfection of body, extensive mental activity and culture, and irreproachable taste. "We love and pursue wisdom, yet avoid bodily sloth; we love and pursue beauty, yet avoid bad taste and extravagance," proclaims Perikles in his summary of Athenian ideals. Consequently Athenian education was triple in its aims; its activities were divided between body, mind, and taste. The body of the young Athenian was symmetrically developed by the scientifically designed exercises of the palaistra. At eighteen the State imposed upon him two years of physical training at public cost. In after life he could exercise himself in the public gymnasia without any payment; there was no actual compulsion, except the perpetual imminence of military service, which, however, almost amounted to compulsion.

As to mental instruction, every boy had to learn reading, writing, arithmetic, and gain such acquaintance with the national literature as these studies involved. The other branch of primary education, playing and singing, intended to develop the musical ear and taste, was optional, but rarely neglected. The secondary education given by the Sophists, rhetors, and philosophers was only intended for the comparatively few who had wealth and leisure.

Taste and imagination were cultivated in the music and art schools, but the influences of the theater, the Akropolis, the temples and public monuments, and the dances which accompanied every festival and religious occasion, were still more potent, and were exercised upon all alike. This æsthetic aspect of education was regarded as particularly important in Hellas owing to the prevalent idea that art and music had a strong influence over character.

For the training of character was before all things the object of Hellenic education; it was this which Hellenic parents particularly demanded of the schoolmaster. So strongly did they believe that virtue could be taught, that they held the teacher responsible for any subsequent misdemeanour of his pupils. . . .

Since the main object of the schools of Hellas was to train and mould

the character of the young, it would be natural to suppose that the schoolmasters and every one else who was to come into contact with the boys were chosen with immense care, special attention being given to their reputation for virtue and conduct. At Sparta this principle was certainly observed. Education was controlled by a paidonomos, selected from the citizens of the highest position and reputation, and the teaching was given, not by hired foreigners or slaves, but by the citizens themselves under his supervision. But then the teaching at Sparta dealt mostly with the manners and customs of the State, or with bodily or military exercises, known to every grown man, and the citizens had plenty of leisure. The Athenians were in a more difficult position. There were more subjects for the boy to learn, and some of them the parents might have neither the capacity nor the time to teach. Owing also to the day-school system at Athens and the peculiarities of Hellenic manners, the boys needed some one always at hand to take them to and from school and palaistra. Thus both paid teachers and attendants were needed. But it was also necessary not to let education become too expensive lest the poor should be unable to afford it. Consequently the paidagogoi came often to be the cheapest and most worthless slaves, and the schoolmasters as a class to be regarded with supreme contempt. No doubt careful parents chose excellent paidagogoi, schoolmasters, and paidotribai for their sons, and made the choice a matter of much deliberation: the teachers at the best schools were often men of position and repute. But that the class as a whole was regarded with contempt there can be little doubt. The children went into school as they would have gone into any other shop, with a sense of superiority, bringing with them their pets, leopards and cats and dogs, and playing with them during lesson-times. Idlers and loungers came into the schools and palaistrai, as they came into the market-booths, to chatter and look on, seriously interrupting the work. The schoolmasters and paidotribai at Athens were, in fact, too dependent upon their public to take a strong line, and, in spite of their power, often exercised, of inflicting corporal punishment, they seem to have been distinctly at the mercy of the pupils and their friends. The paidagogoi too, though they seem to have kept their pupils in order, were often not the right people to control a boy's conduct; they were apt to have a villainous accent, and still more villainous habits. It must be confessed that the Athenians, in their desire to make education cheap, ran a very great risk of spoiling what in their opinion was its chief object, the training of character. . . .

It was the sense of duty to the State, the resolution to promote the happiness of the whole citizen-body, which made parents willing to undergo any sacrifice in order to have their sons educated in the way which would best minister to this ideal. The bills of the masters of letters and music and of the paidotribai, and the lengthy loss of the

son's services in the shop or on the farm in Attica, the break-up of family life at Sparta, must have been a sore trial to the parents and have involved many sacrifices. Yet there is no trace of grumbling. The Hellene felt that it was quite as much his duty to the State to educate her future citizens properly as it was to be ready to die in her cause, and he did both ungrudgingly. If the laws which made the teaching of letters compulsory at Athens fell into desuetude, it was only because the citizens needed no compulsion to make them do their duty. Nor had the State to pay the school bills; for every citizen, however poor, was ready to make the necessary sacrifices of personal luxuries and amusements in order to do his duty by having his children properly taught. The State only interfered to make schooling as cheap and as easy to obtain as possible.

6. Athenian Education summarized

(Thucydides, book II, ¶ 40)

An excellent summary of the higher aims and accomplishments of Athenian education, at its best, is given by Thucydides (471400 B.C.), the Athenian historian, when he puts into the mouth of Pericles the following words:

"If, then, we prefer to meet danger with a light heart but without laborious training, and with a courage which is gained by habit and not enforced by law, are we not greatly the gainers? Since we do not anticipate the pain, although, when the hour comes, we can be as brave as those who never allow themselves to rest; and thus, too, our city is equally admirable in peace and in war. For we are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness. Wealth we employ, not for talk and ostentation, but when there is real use for it. To avow poverty with us is no disgrace; the true disgrace is in doing nothing to avoid it. An Athenian citizen does not neglect the state because he takes care of his own household; and even those of us who are engaged in business have a very fair idea of politics. We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion, but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act and of acting too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection. And they are surely to be esteemed the bravest spirits who, having the clearest sense both of the pains and pleasures of life, do not on that account shrink from danger."

CHAPTER II

LATER GREEK EDUCATION

THE Readings in this chapter deal with Greek education and Greek educational influence in the period following the Persian Wars. The long-standing menace of Persian domination had been ended, and little democratic Attica, as well as Greece as a whole, was now free to develop according to its ability and native genius. In Attica a wonderful development took place almost at once, and Athens soon became the first city in the world in the arts of peace. The picture of Athens at the height of the Golden Age of Greece given by Wilkins (7) reveals something of her marvelous achievements in art and literature.

Such a development, together with the great expansion of Greek life and commerce and political relationships throughout the eastern Mediterranean world, naturally subjected the old education of the Ephebic class to serious strain, and remodeling had to take place. In the absence of any state educational system, all kinds of teachers opened schools of the newer type, offering to train for public speaking and eloquence and often making extravagant claims as to what they could accomplish. In time these new teachers organized and reduced their work to system, Isocrates being a leader in this work. In the selection given from his oration against these new-type teachers (8) we get some conception as to their pretensions, and also of his ideas as to the necessities for such training.

With the breakdown of the old training as a basis for developing virtue in the State, and the rise of the new teachers aiming to train for personal success without any basis of morality underlying their work, Athens faced a serious educational crisis. This Socrates attempted to solve by founding morality on personal knowledge as to right and wrong. His practice, well illustrated by the long dialogues in The Republic of Plato, which see, and by the selection given (9), was to lead men to correct ideas by asking them questions, and by a questioning method to draw men from unconscious ignorance to conscious ignorance, and from conscious ignorance to clear and reasoned truth. Knowledge of the

right, he claimed, would be followed by doing the right. That such a sharp questioner would not be popular anywhere is easily understood, and the task of reforming education on a new philosophical and ethical basis naturally proved too large for any one

man.

Of the two final selections, the first pictures Greek higher learning at Alexandria (10) and shows how Greek thought permeated the eastern Mediterranean world, though Greece politically was dead; while the second (11) gives a good idea of our great debt to the Greeks.

7. Athens in the Time of Pericles

(Wilkins, A. S., National Education in Greece in the Fourth Century B.C.

London, 1873; selected)

A brilliant picture of Athens in the days of her greatest glory the Golden Age of Greece. The many non-school educational forces of the city are here well set forth.

But above all things the Athenian of the time of Pericles was living in an atmosphere of unequalled genius and culture. He took his way past the temples where the friezes of Phidias seemed to breathe and struggle, under the shadow of the colonnades reared by the craft of Ictinus or Callicrates and glowing with the hues of Polygnotus, to the agora where, like his Aryan forefathers by the shores of the Caspian, or his Teutonic cousins in the forests of Germany, he was to take his part as a free man in fixing the fortunes of his country. There he would listen, with the eagerness of one who knew that all he held most dear was trembling in the balance, to the pregnant eloquence of Pericles. Or, in later times, he would measure the sober prudence of Nicias against the boisterous turbulence of Cleon, or the daring brilliance of Alcibiades. Then, as the great Dionysia came round once more with the spring-time, and the sea was open again for traffic, and from every quarter of Hellas the strangers flocked for pleasure or business, he would take his place betimes in the theater of Dionysus, and gaze from sunrise to sunset on the successive tragedies in which Sophocles, and Euripides, and Ion of Chios, were contending for the prize of poetry. Or, at the lesser festivals, he would listen to the wonderful comedies of Eupolis, Aristophanes, or the old Cratinus, with their rollicking fun and snatches of sweetest melody, their savage attacks on personal enemies and merry jeers at well-known cowards or wantons, and, underlying all, their weighty allusions and earnest political purpose. he passed through the market-place, or looked in at one of the tling schools, he may have chanced to come upon a group of r nen in eager conversation, or hanging with breathless interest on the words of

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