Schools of Hellas / An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 B. C.

by Kenneth J. Freeman

CHAPTER XI

CONCLUDING ESSAY: THE SCHOOLS OF HELLAS

The preceding chapters have sufficiently established, as it seems to me, that Hellenic education alike at Sparta and at Athens, in theory and in practice, aimed at producing the best possible citizen, not the best possible money-maker; it sought the good of the community, not the good of the individual. The methods and materials of education naturally differed with the conception of good citizenship held in each locality, but the ideal object was always the same.

The Spartan, with his schoolboy conception of life, believed that the whole duty of man was to be brave, to be indifferent to hardships and pain, to be a good soldier, and to be always in perfect physical condition; when his Hellenic instincts needed æsthetic satisfaction, he made his military drill into a musical dance and sang songs in honour of valour. Long speaking and lengthy meditation he regarded with contempt, for he preferred deeds to words or 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 theatre, 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. Alkibiades and Kritias had ruined Athens: they were Sokrates’ pupils: therefore execute Sokrates; this seemed perfectly logical to an Athenian. If a Sophist sued a defaulting pupil for an unpaid bill, he was regarded as ridiculous, for it was his business to teach justice, and if those who had learned under him behaved unjustly, it was clearly because his teaching had been worthless.

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 and 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 and palaistrai 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 a 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 for subsistence 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.

Otherwise, they sought this end whole-heartedly. The games, physical exercises, and hardships of a boy’s life were meant to develop his pluck, fortitude, and endurance. For, according to the Hellenic view, now too much neglected in many quarters, the condition and treatment of the body had a very important effect both upon mental activities and upon character. It was for this reason that physical training formed at least half of every system of education practised in Hellenic states or recommended by Hellenic philosophers. A National School which trained the minds only, and neglected the bodies of the pupils, would have been inconceivable to a Hellene. It was not merely that physical infirmities interrupted the free exercise of thought, or led to peevishness and lack of decision. Man was a whole to the Hellenes, and one part of him could not be sound if the other parts were not. So strongly did they hold this opinion, that they more than half believed that physical beauty was a sign of moral beauty; it was this latent idea which added an additional significance to the exercises of the palaistra with their symmetrical development of the body, and to the competitions for manly beauty which were prevalent throughout the country; it lent, moreover, a nobler aspect to that passion for the outward loveliness of youth which the vases, sculpture, and literature of ancient Hellas reveal so surprisingly. But, besides this vaguer and more doubtful connection with character, bodily exercise and development were supposed to have a special and indubitable effect in strengthening the resolution and will-power. The object of physical training was only in a minor degree to keep the body in good condition; its main aim was to develop strength of character, determination, fortitude, endurance, pluck, and energy. But, in accordance with that Hellenic canon of “moderation in all things,” which was worked out so thoroughly by Aristotle, there might be too much, as well as too little, of all these ethical qualities. Consequently physical exercise must be taken only in due moderation, and carefully balanced by artistic and musical training, which militated in an opposite direction, leading, if pursued in excess, to weakness of character, indecision, effeminacy, cowardice, and sloth. A scientifically arranged symmetry between the two would produce the perfect character.

In the literary and æsthetic schools there were two elements of the subjects taught, both with an ethical effect, matter and form. The literature studied in the schools was expected to be full of improving suggestions and life-histories of heroes worthy of imitation, couched in the form most attractive to young minds, in order that they might appreciate and love its teaching and examples. The music which the boys played or heard, the songs which they sang, the dances which they performed or watched, the art which they copied or observed, must be such as would influence their characters for good—mould them, that is, in accordance with the national ideal. For Hellenic morality was æsthetic; they followed the course which appealed to their imagination and sense of beauty. It was therefore the object of education to make the children see and feel beauty in virtue, and good art in good ethics, in order that they might find satisfaction for their æsthetic cravings—the dominant instinct of a Hellene—in living good and upright lives.

For the unanimous feeling of Hellas based ethics not upon duty, but upon happiness—upon the satisfaction, that is, of the instincts. But this eudæmonistic attitude was qualified by an important consideration which is often forgotten. Owing to the solidarity of Hellenic life, the happiness which was sought was primarily not that of the individual but that of the community. The readiness of the average Hellene, during the best period of the country, to sacrifice everything on behalf of his city is very remarkable. The real, if unformulated, basis of his ethics came thus to be not personal pleasure, but duty to the State. When the individualism of the Socratic age overthrew this basis, the Hellenes fell back from the happiness of the State to the happiness of the self, and both patriotism and personal morality suffered from the change.

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 to the community by having his children properly taught. The State only interfered to make schooling as cheap and as easy to obtain as possible.

The solidarity of Hellenic life, which converted eudæmonism into patriotism, was carefully encouraged by the educational system. Sparta, with this object, invented the boarding-school, where boys learnt from early years to sink their individualities in a community of character and interests. The Athenians and most of the other Hellenes, on the other hand, had day-schools. This fact might seem to militate against the principle which I have stated. But Hellenic custom qualified the system of day-schools in a particular way. There were no home-influences in Hellas. The men-folk lived out of doors. The young Athenian or Ephesian from his sixth year onwards spent his whole day away from home (excepting possibly for an interval for the mid-day meal), in the company of his contemporaries, at school or palaistra or in the streets. When he came home, there was no home-life. His father was hardly ever in the house. His mother was a nonentity, living in the women’s apartments; he probably saw little of her. His real home was the palaistra, his chief companions his contemporaries and his paidagogos. He learned to dissociate himself from his family and associate himself with his fellow-citizens. No doubt he lost much by this system, but the solidarity of the State gained.

The duties of citizenship were also impressed upon the boys in other and more direct ways, especially its supreme duty, at any rate in those days, of military service. The schools of Sparta and Crete were one long training for war. The other States set apart two years of the boy’s life, those from eighteen to twenty, as a period of conscription, during which he was at the service of his city and under the orders of the military authorities, learning tactics and the use of arms, and being practised in the life of camps and forts. The young recruit took a solemn oath of allegiance to his country and its constitution: the sacredness of his civic duties was impressed upon him from the first. The first function of his new officers was to take him on a personally conducted tour, so to speak, of the national temples, that he might realise something of the religious life and history of his country. His weapons were solemnly presented to him in the theatre of Dionusos, before the assembled people; they were sacred, and to lose them in battle or disgrace them by cowardice was not only dishonourable, it was impious. Nor were the boys allowed to grow up in ignorance of the constitution of their city: the ephebos of eighteen had to be acquainted with the laws, some of which he had probably learnt in the music-school, set to a tune. Every means was taken of making the boys realise that they were members of a community, to whose prosperity and happiness their own advantage or pleasure must be subordinated. In this way grew up the strong Hellenic sense of an obligation of utter self-sacrifice on behalf of the State.

But education had also to consult the happiness of the children as well as the happiness of the community, although in a lesser degree. This may seem a startling statement to make with regard to Spartan education. Nevertheless, I believe it to be strictly true. It must be remembered that all our accounts of the rigours and horrors of Spartan methods come from Athenian writers who in all probability had never been to Lakedaimon. Xenophon, who had his sons educated there, gives a much milder, and wholly eulogistic, account. The somewhat hedonistic Attic visitor must have watched Spartan games and exercises with much the feelings of a French visitor at an English public school; he found it difficult to realise that the boys underwent such hardships of their own free will. Then we must remember what the Spartan boys were. They were a picked breed of peculiar toughness, strength, and health; for centuries every invalid had been exposed at birth or rejected as incapable of the school-system. Generation after generation had been trained to be thick-skinned and stout-hearted; pluck and endurance were hereditary, and asceticism was a national characteristic. The whole system, with its perpetual fighting, its rough games, its hardships, its fagging and “roughing-it” in the woods, is just what boys of this sort might be expected to evolve for themselves because they liked it. I have already pointed out, in my account of the Spartan schools, how very similar are many of the customs which grew up at the older English public schools, mainly on the boys’ own initiative. If English boys, brought up on the whole much less roughly, evolved such customs of their own free will, the young Spartans may reasonably be supposed to have accepted them gladly. One significant token of this survives. The violent and sometimes fatal floggings of the epheboi at the altar of Artemis Orthia were entirely voluntary on the part of the victims; yet there was no lack of candidates even in Plutarch’s days. The Spartan school-system was, in fact, an exact expression of the national characteristics, and accordingly was entirely acceptable to the Spartan boys.

That the Athenian system was designed to suit the wishes of the Athenian children is less difficult to establish. It is only necessary to think what the primary schools were like. When once the letters and rudiments of reading and writing had been mastered, the process perhaps being aided by metrical alphabets and dramatised spelling, the boys began to read, learn by heart, and write down the fascinating stories of adventure and the romantic tales of Homer. There was no grammar to be studied; that, when invented, came at a later age as a voluntary subject. There were no years wasted over “Primary Readers” consisting of dull and second-rate stories. The boys began at once upon the best and most attractive literature in their language, and it remained their study for many years, and was still remembered and loved in after life. Nor can it be doubted that the music- and art-schools were attractive to Athenian boys, sons of a people who filled their whole city with art, and made their year a round of musical festivals. A large part, too, of Athenian schooling was what now would be called play; for the Hellene recognised the importance of physical exercise in the upbringing of the young, and included it in his conception of education.

The effect upon Hellenic culture of thus making education attractive was far-reaching. Instead of regarding with aversion or a bored indifference the subjects which they had studied at school, the Hellenes had an affection for them and continued to practise and improve themselves in them. Throughout their lives they were eager to hear recitations of Homer. At banquets they sang the songs and played the music on the lyre which they had learnt at school. Elderly men would return to a music-master, to improve their style, or rush off to hear a Sophist lecture on geography or astronomy. The exercises of the palaistra were pursued till old age made them impossible. Grown citizens retained throughout an affection for education, and went on educating themselves all their lives. Thus an Hellenic city formed a centre of widely diffused culture, a home where literature and art and music and research could flourish surrounded by appreciation and capable criticism. Children, too, seeing how much their elders were preoccupied with education, found it even more attractive than its designers had made it, since they were not constrained by nursery-logic to see in it one of the plagues of youth from which “grown-ups” were set free. No doubt the Hellenic schoolmaster was much assisted in his endeavour to make education attractive by the intellectual curiosity which was a feature of all those States where the intellect was systematically trained. The young Athenian or young Chian was exceedingly eager to learn. In fact, his eagerness was excessive; he was too much in a hurry; he desired to have his information given to him ready-made, not having the patience to think or to undertake researches on his own account. Hence the phenomenal success and educational unsoundness of those prototypes of the modern “crammer,” the Sophists, who supplied their pupils with a superficial knowledge of many subjects ready-made, and already dressed in striking phraseology. This intellectual appetite for the accumulation of facts made secondary education at Athens attractive without much effort on the part of the teachers, but it was not allowed to influence the primary schools; a sound and symmetrical development of mind and body, artistic taste and moral character, had to precede the accumulation of facts. This latter stage too was universally treated as optional. In unintellectual districts it found no place, and even in Athens it was only for those who felt a desire for it; it was not forced upon the unwilling and incapable. For education was regarded as the development of the latent powers of the individual personality, it was no vain attempt to excite or implant non-existent faculties. Every one had a body, which he must make as efficient as possible, for the service of the State; every one, in an æsthetic people, had a taste which could be developed; every one had enough intellect to learn his letters; and every one, above all, had a character to be formed. But not every one could be an international athlete or a first-class artist or musician, and not every one had sufficient mental gifts to combine the accumulation of facts with profit or enjoyment.

In fact, Hellenic sentiment was distinctly adverse to great development in any one direction: the Hellenes had a reasonable horror of undue specialisation at school. The object of education was to make symmetrical, all-round men, sound alike in body, mind, character, and taste, not professional athletes who were mentally vacuous and without any appreciation of art, nor great thinkers of stunted physique, nor celebrated musicians who lacked brains. Opponents of the Spartan system tried to condemn it on this ground, as a specialisation intended only to produce good soldiers; but the pro-Spartans seemed to have claimed in return that it developed both character and good taste in judging art and music, even if it produced small capacity for painting or playing, while Laconian terseness involved a greater depth of mental exercise than Athenian verbosity.

Thus Hellenic education was not intended to produce professional knowledge of a single subject; such technical instruction was deemed unworthy of the name of education, and was excluded from the schools. The subjects studied were for the most part a means, not an end. Just as a walk is sometimes taken not for the sake of reaching any particular place, but in order to keep the muscles of the body in good condition, so education in Hellas was meant to develop and exercise the muscles of mind, imagination, and character, not to inculcate so-called “useful” information. The literature read at school was imaginative poetry, like that of Homer or Simonides, not the practical prose treatises upon Agriculture and Economics which utilitarian motives would have demanded. For the poetry was both attractive to the boys and improving for their characters, while the handbooks, however excellent, only enhanced their financial prospects. The immediate future of the individual boy may, it is true, depend somewhat largely upon the utilitarian knowledge which he has learnt at school, although a sound education in the Hellenic sense of the word will prove more advantageous to him in the long run; but the future of a State depends upon the character of its citizens. Thus a truly national education like that of Sparta or of Athens seeks to train the characters of the future citizens; having formed their characters, it leaves them with well-justified confidence to gain what technical instruction they need for themselves. At a national crisis it was not skill in trade or profession, not good cobbling, nor good weaving, that Athens required of her citizens; but pluck, energy, self-sacrifice, obedience, and loyalty. Money was, it is true, required for building the triremes and for fortifying the city: it was therefore well that Athenian trade and manufactures should prosper. But Athens recognised, and rightly, that her financial resources would be better served if she trained her boys to be industrious and thrifty and ascetic, if she made it repugnant to their taste to fling their money away upon luxury and self-indulgence, than if she founded the finest system of technical instruction possible.

But whether Sparta and Athens could have ignored technical and utilitarian subjects so wholly in their schools, if they had been educating the whole population of the State, is another question. It must be remembered that the Spartan and Athenian citizens who attended the schools were only a fraction of the inhabitants of Laconia and Attica. They corresponded pretty closely to the upper classes, the aristocracy and gentlemen, of a modern State. The bulk of the middle and lower classes in a Hellenic State were either foreign immigrants, who possessed no civic rights and did not usually attend the schools, or serfs and slaves. Athens, like mediæval Florence, was only a democracy in the very limited sense that her full citizens—a governing class, that is, and a mere fraction of the population—had equality of civic rights among themselves: the rest had no rights at all. Sparta was a “mixed constitution”; but that did not mean that the middle and lower classes, the Perioikoi and Helots, had any share in it whatever.

Consequently education in Hellas is the education of a small upper class, not of the whole population of the State. The schools of Hellas were not necessarily for the wealthiest inhabitants of the country, for there were plenty of rich Metoikoi and poor citizens at Athens; not necessarily for the boys who had most leisure, for the sausage-seller goes to school as well as a Nikias or Alkibiades; but for a hereditary aristocracy of birth, for that is what Hellenic “citizenship” means. The boys who attended the lessons of Dionusios or Elpias were the sons and grandsons of a cultured class, no matter how humble their circumstances might be; their families had lived in Attica, they believed, from time immemorial, and were probably descended from the local deities. They had the views of an hereditary caste, including a certain preoccupation with physical and military activities, and a contempt for trade.

For the duties of such an aristocracy did not consist in heaping up riches; their position was comparatively independent of their financial successes. Their work was, in brief, to govern and to fight. They composed the electorate of the State, which chose the magistrates; they alone were members of the public Assembly; they alone were eligible for office. They sat as dikastai—jurymen and justices in one—in the law-courts; they made the laws and they administered them. The national honour and morality lay in their hands, for they controlled alike the foreign and the home policy of the State. They formed, too, the cultured circle which governed natural taste; it was their criticism which shaped the art of the vase-painters, the architects, the sculptors, the bronze-makers, and the countless other artistic tradesmen, the style of the orators, the literature of dramatists and dithyrambists, the music of the choric composers. When governors and administrators were needed for the outlying districts of the Athenian or Spartan Empires, or if officers were required to lead local levies to battle, any citizen, rich or poor, might be sent. The citizens, too, formed the core of the fleets and armies in the best days of Hellas. The object of Hellenic education was to produce this type of citizen—a man capable of governing, of fighting, and of setting the taste and standards of his country.

Thus the schools of Hellas correspond in England not to the national schools, but to the “public schools.” I do not mean to assert that the English public-school boy stands, in after life, in the position of the Hellenic citizen to the bulk of the population. English democracy rests on a wider basis than Athenian or Florentine, and, in theory at any rate, the exclusive power of the “upper classes” is at an end. None the less it is true that from among the boys educated at the public schools comes a very considerable part of the generals and military officers, of the clergy, of the squires, of the Justices of the Peace and other administrators of the law, of the governors and officials required by the Indian Empire and the various dependencies and Crown Colonies, of the members of Parliament and statesmen at home. If the influence of the public schools of England upon the governing and fighting of the nation is less than that which the schools of Hellas were able to exercise, their influence upon national taste and standards in art and culture and literature is probably in no way inferior. It is therefore their duty to train their pupils’ characters, that they may be fit and able administrators, governors, and justices; and their tastes, that their criticism and demands may rightly direct the culture of the nation. In striving after these ends, the public schools of England may, I think, take not a few hints from the like-motived schools of Hellas.