At seven years began the school time of the Athenian boy. An old superannuated slave was assigned to the work, and called in the Greek language pædagogos, pedagogue, (boy-driver) who accompanied him everywhere as supervisor. In the pedagogium the boy learned to read and write. Later came the music teacher, who taught him to play the Cithæra and sing. At last he took up gymnastics and continued it till his eighteenth year. Then he took up his trade selected by the father, and at the age of twenty his education was considered complete.
In the famous funeral oration which Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles he congratulates the Athenians on the fact that their fatherland was a great educational center, a sort of school for all Greece. Their temples and works of art were objects of study to all enterprising strangers. Their artists, and poets, and philosophers were sought for the education of all who aspired to culture. The Sophists formed a guild of professional teachers. After Plato and Aristotle, Athens remained a university for many hundred years, or until Justinian closed her schools because of their hostility to the State religion.
The period of the Sophists is of great interest. As teachers of dialectic and rhetoric, they endeavored to fit the Athenian youth for skillful and effective pleas in the courts or persuasive harangues before the people. They taught how to debate and how to make the worse appear the better reason. They pushed their speculations beyond rhetorical forms into the realms of philosophy, and in the end questioned all principles of conviction, and even the bases of morality. All faith was undermined. At this juncture rose Socrates, the greatest character of his age, who showed up by a keener dialectic the firm foundations of virtue and truth, under the shifting sands of opinion and prejudice. Plato has preserved for us in his dialogues the beautiful picture of Socrates in his knight-errant exploits against the Sophists, and finally his tragic but heroic end. Plato’s works have been for more than two thousand years a liberal education into sound and deep philosophy, and, with the works of Aristotle, his pupil and successor, form the canonical books of philosophy. They have furnished the philosophical forms used by the Christian fathers in building up the great structure of Christian theology.
The Greek people have given to the world the two great elements of art and science—the æsthetic and theoretic forms of culture. Their defect is found in their exclusive devotion to those two phases. We must find in the Roman civilization the forms of the will which civilization has needed in order to form political and social institutions—the Greeks were weak on this side.
Above all, the deep spirituality, the communion with God as the one Infinite Person, creator of heaven and earth, is not to be found in Greek education, although it is the most important, nay, the all-essential point in our modern education.
After the time of Aristotle the Greek intellect dissipated itself in Stoicism and skepticism, and a cloud of darkness settled down gradually over the country, when Rome conquered its last armies, and reduced it to obedience to an alien principle. At a few centers like Alexandria and Athens, art and science were cultivated to a very high degree, but Greece had nothing new to contribute to the world, and its labors henceforth were for Roman hire, or frequently the work of bondmen. The wealthy Roman owned Greek slaves, who acted as tutors to his children and producers of art for his amusement. But as nurses and tutors the Greek soon spread his Greek education over the mighty nation that had conquered the world.
[DAFFODILS AT SEA.]
By J. S. HOWSON.
Fair daffodils I took across the western sea away,