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

by Kenneth J. Freeman

INTRODUCTION

The meeting-place of two streams has always a curious fascination for the traveller. There is a strange charm in watching the two currents blend and lose their individuality in a new whole. The discoloured, foam-flecked torrent, swirling on remorselessly its pebbles and minuter particles of granite from the mountains, and the calm, translucent stream, bearing in invisible solution the clays and sands of the plains through which its slow coils have wound, melt into a single river, mightier than either, which has received and will carry onward the burdens of both and lay them side by side in some far-off delta, where they will form “the dust of continents to be.”

To the student of history or of psychology the meeting-place of two civilisations has a similar charm. To watch the immemorial culture of the East, slow-moving with the weight of years, dreamy with centuries of deep meditation, accept and assimilate, as in a moment of time, the science, the machinery, the restless energy and practical activity of the West is a fascinating employment; for the process is big with hope of some glorious product from this union of the two. Those who live while such a union is in progress cannot estimate its value or its probable result; they are but conscious of the discomforts and confusion arising from the ending of the old order that passes away, and can hardly presage the glories of the new, to which it is yielding place. It is in past history, not in the contemporary world, that such combinations must be studied.

The chief historical instance of two distinct civilisations blending into one is the Renaissance, that mighty union of the spirit of ancient Hellas and her pupil Rome with the spirit of medieval Europe, which has hardly been perfected even now. But it is often forgotten that there were at least two dress-rehearsals for the great drama of the Renaissance, in the course of which Hellenism learnt its own charm and adapted itself to the task of educating the world. Alexander carried the arts, the literature, and the spirit of Hellas far into the heart of Asia; and, though his great experiment of blending West with East was interrupted by his early death and the consequent disruption of his world-empire, yet, even so, something of his object was effected in the Hellenistic culture of Alexandria, Syria, and Asia Minor. Within a century of his death began the second dress-rehearsal, this time in the West. Conquered Hellas led her fierce conqueror captive, and the strength of Rome bowed before the intellect and imagination of the Hellene. Once more the great man who designed to unite the two currents into one stream without loss to either was cut off before his plans could be carried out, and the murder of Julius Cæsar caused incalculable damage to this earlier Renaissance, for the education of Rome, the second scholar of Hellas, was not too wisely conducted. Yet the schooling produced Virgil and Horace and that Greco-Roman civilisation in which the Teutonic nations of the North received their first lessons in culture. After several premature attempts, medieval Europe rediscovered ancient Hellas and her pupil Rome at the time of the Renaissance. Since that time the influence exerted by Hellenism upon modern civilisation has been continuous and incalculable. How much of that influence remains unassimilated, how far it is still needed, may perhaps be realised best by passing straight from the Elgin marbles or a play of Sophocles to a modern crowd or to modern literature.

Hellas has thus been the educator of the world to an extent of which not even Perikles ever dreamed. How then, it may naturally be asked, did the teacher of the nations teach her own sons and daughters? If so many peoples have been at school to learn the lessons of Hellenism, what was the nature of the schools of ancient Hellas? How did those wonderful city-states, which produced in the course of a few centuries a wealth of unsurpassed literature, philosophy and art, whose history is immortalised by the names of Thermopylae and Marathon, train their young citizens to be at once patriots and art-critics, statesmen and philosophers, money-makers and lovers of literature? They must have known not a little about education, those old Hellenes, it is natural to suppose. Have the schools, like the arts and literature and spirit, of Hellas any lesson for the modern world? These are the questions which the present work will attempt in some measure to answer.

In some measure only; for the spirit of Hellas cannot be caught at second hand: it consists in just those subtler elements of refined taste and perfect choice of expression which cannot but be lost in a translation or a photograph. In like manner, the secret of Hellenic education cannot be reproduced by any mere accumulation of bald facts and wiseacres’ deductions. It is easy for the modern theorist to give an exact account of his ideal school; he has only to tabulate the subjects which are to be studied, the books which are to be read, and the hours at which his mechanical children are to be stuffed with the required mass of facts. But the Hellenic schoolmaster held that education dealt not with machines but with children, not with facts but with character. His object was to mould the taste of his pupils, to make them “love what is beautiful and hate what is ugly.” And because he wished them to love what is beautiful in art and literature, in nature and in human life, he sought to make his lessons attractive, in order that the subjects learnt at school might not be regarded with loathing in after life. Education had to be charming to the young; its field was largely music and art and the literature which appeals most to children, adventure and heroism and tales of romance expressed in verse. The music is all but gone, and of the art only a few fragments remain; the primary schools of Hellas have left to modern research only portions of their literature. Their attractiveness must be judged from the poems of Homer. But the charm of education lies mainly in the methods of the teacher; and of these posterity can know little. Scholars may piece together the books which were read and the exercises which were practised, but of the method in which they were taught, of their order and arrangement and respective quantities, nothing can be known. There is the raw material, the human boy, and of the tools wherewith the masters fashioned him, some relics are left; but of the way in which the artist used those tools, of the true inwardness of his handicraft and skill, not all the diligence of Teutonic research can recover a trace. The young art-student will learn little of Michel Angelo or Raphael, if he focusses his attention simply on the materials and the tools which they employed: to grasp their spirit he must go to the Sistine Chapel or to the Dresden Gallery, and contemplate their masterpieces. In like manner the student of Hellenic education ought to consider not its materials and tools, but rather its results and ideals. He must look with his own eyes and imagination upon the Aegina pediment or the “Hermes” of Praxiteles, if he wishes to comprehend the objects of the Doric and Ionic schools. This he must do for himself, since no book can do it for him. All that this work can hope to do is to furnish some few ideas about the tools wherewith the Hellenic schoolmasters tried to fashion the boys at their disposal into the masterpieces bodied forth in the “Hermes” and the Aeginetan figures: the skilled fingers and the imaginative brains which used the tools are for ever beyond the reach of the scholar and the archæologist.

The “Hermes,” with his physical perfection and his plenitude of intellect, with the features of an artist and the brow of a thinker, may be taken as the ideal of the fully developed Athenian education of the early fourth century B.C. The Aeginetan figures stand in the same relation to the Spartan and Cretan schools; these heroic figures have the bodily harmoniousness, the narrow if deep thought, the hardness of the Dorian temper. Perhaps it is not fanciful to see in the so-called “Theseus” of the Parthenon an earlier ideal of Athenian training, when it aimed at rather less of dreamy contemplation, at a less sensuous and more strenuous mode of life. If this be so, that glorious figure bodies forth the very ideal of Periclean and Imperial Athens at her grandest moment, before the ruin caused by the long war with Sparta.

The stream of Hellenism ran in two currents. Underlying the local diversity, which made every little town ethically and artistically distinct from its neighbour, was the fundamental difference between Dorian and Ionian. Clearly marked in every aspect of life, this difference was most marked in the schools. Sparta and Crete on the one hand, and Athens, followed closely by her Ionian and Aeolic allies and at a greater distance by the rest of civilised Hellas, on the other, develop totally different types of education. The young Spartan is enrolled at a fixed age in a boarding-school: everything he learns or does is under State-supervision. Perfect grace and harmony of body is his sole object: he is hardly taught his letters or numbers. The young Athenian goes to school when and where his parents like; learns, within certain wide limits, what they please; ends his schooling when they choose. He learns his letters and arithmetic, studies literature and music, and, at a later date, painting, besides his athletic exercises, at a day-school. When he grows older, he may add rhetoric or philosophy or science or any subject he pleases to this earlier course. The State interferes only to protect his morals, and to enforce upon him two years of military training between the ages of eighteen and twenty.

The superficial differences between the Athenian and the Spartan type of school are so striking that at first sight they appear to have no one principle in common. It will therefore be necessary to keep the two types apart at first and discuss their details separately. But the Hellenic thinkers recognised certain deep-seated similarities beneath the superficial contradictions, and it became the object of educational philosophy to blend the two types into a perfect system. As soon as a deeper study has been made of the theory of education in Hellas, the distinctions of practice begin to vanish away and the similarities of ideal and aim become more and more apparent. When the survey of both practice and theory, which is the object of this work, has been completed, it should be possible to grasp and estimate the common principles, which, amid much variety of detail, governed the schools of Hellas.