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
oo C
ooooX
oooo

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

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.