1. By Grammar was meant the study of literature.[10] In its original sense of the art of reading and writing, it began as early as that art begins among ourselves. “We are given over to Grammar,” says Sextus Empiricus,[11] “from childhood, and almost from our baby-clothes.” But this elementary part of it was usually designated by another name,[12] and Grammar itself had come to include all that in later times has been designated Belles Lettres. This comprehensive view of it was of slow growth; consequently, the art is variously defined and divided. The division which Sextus Empiricus[13] speaks of as most free from objection, and which will sufficiently indicate the general limits of the subject, is into the technical, the historical, and the exegetical elements. The first of these was the study of diction, the laying down of canons of correctness, the distinction between Hellenisms and Barbarisms. Upon this as much stress was laid as was laid upon academic French in the age of Boileau. “I owe to Alexander,” says Marcus Aurelius,[14] “my habit of not finding fault, and of not using abusive language to those who utter a barbarous or awkward or unmusical phrase.” “I must apologize for the style of this letter,” says the Christian Father Basil two centuries afterwards, in writing to his old teacher Libanius; “the truth is, I have been in the company of Moses and Elias, and men of that kind, who tell us no doubt what is true, but in a barbarous dialect, so that your instructions have quite gone out of my head.”[15] The second element of Grammar was the study of the antiquities of an author: the explanation of the names of the gods and heroes, the legends and histories, which were mentioned. It is continued to this day in most notes upon classical authors. The third element was partly critical, the distinguishing between true and spurious treatises, or between true and false readings; but chiefly exegetical, the explanation of an author’s meaning. It is spoken of as the prophetess of the poets,[16] standing to them in the same relation as the Delphian priestess to her inspiring god.
The main subject-matter of this literary education was the poets. They were read, not only for their literary, but also for their moral value.[17] They were read as we read the Bible. They were committed to memory. The minds of men were saturated with them. A quotation from Homer or from a tragic poet was apposite on all occasions and in every kind of society. Dio Chrysostom, in an account of his travels, tells how he came to the Greek colony of the Borysthenitæ, on the farthest borders of the empire, and found that even in those remote settlements almost all the inhabitants knew the Iliad by heart, and that they did not care to hear about anything else.[18]
2. Grammar was succeeded by Rhetoric—the study of literature by the study of literary expression and quasi-forensic argument. The two were not sharply distinguished in practice, and had some elements in common. The conception of the one no less than of the other had widened with time, and Rhetoric, like Grammar, was variously defined and divided. It was taught partly by precept, partly by example, and partly by practice. The professor either dictated rules and gave lists of selected passages of ancient authors, or he read such passages with comments upon the style, or he delivered model speeches of his own. The first of these methods has its literary monument in the hand-books which remain.[19] The second survives as an institution in modern times, and on a large scale, in the University “lecture,” and it has also left important literary monuments in the Scholia upon Homer and other great writers. The third method gave birth to an institution which also survives in modern times. Each of these methods was followed by the student. He began by committing to memory both the professor’s rules and also selected passages of good authors: the latter he recited, with appropriate modulations and gestures, in the presence of the professor. In the next stage, he made his comments upon them. Here is a short example which is embedded in Epictetus:[20] the student reads the first sentence of Xenophon’s Memorabilia, and makes his criticism upon it:
“‘I have often wondered what in the world were the grounds on which....’
Rather ... ‘the ground on which....’ It is neater.”
From this, or concurrently with this, the student proceeded to compositions of his own. Beginning with mere imitation of style, he was gradually led to invent the structure as well as the style of what he wrote, and to vary both the style and the subject-matter. Sometimes he had the use of the professor’s library;[21] and though writing in his native language, he had to construct his periods according to rules of art, and to avoid all words for which an authority could not be quoted, just as if he were an English undergraduate writing his Greek prose. The crown of all was the acquisition of the art of speaking extempore. A student’s education in Rhetoric was finished when he had the power to talk off-hand on any subject that might be proposed. But whether he recited a prepared speech or spoke off-hand, he was expected to show the same artificiality of structure and the same pedantry of diction. “You must strip off all that boundless length of sentences that is wrapped round you,” says Charon to the rhetorician who is just stepping into his boat, “and those antitheses of yours, and balancings of clauses, and strange expressions, and all the other heavy weights of speech (or you will make my boat too heavy).”[22]
To a considerable extent there prevailed, in addition to Belles Lettres and Rhetoric, a teaching of Philosophy. It was the highest element in the education of the average Greek of the period. Logic, in the form of Dialectic, was common to Philosophy and Rhetoric. Every one learnt to argue: a large number learnt, in addition, the technical terms of Philosophy and the outlines of its history. Lucian[23] tells a tale of a country gentleman of the old school, whose nephew went home from lecture night after night, and regaled his mother and himself with fallacies and dilemmas, talking about “relations” and “comprehensions” and “mental presentations,” and jargon of that sort; nay, worse than that, saying, “that God does not live in heaven, but goes about among stocks and stones and such-like.” As far as Logic was concerned, it was almost natural to a Greek mind: Dialectic was but the conversation of a sharp-witted people conducted under recognized rules. But it was a comparatively new phase of Philosophy that it should have a literary side. It had shared in the common degeneracy. It had come to take wisdom at second-hand. It was not the evolution of a man’s own thoughts, but an acquaintance with the recorded thoughts of others. It was divorced from practice. It was degraded to a system of lectures and disputations. It was taught in the same general way as the studies which preceded it. But lectures had a more important place. Sometimes the professor read a passage from a philosopher, and gave his interpretation of it; sometimes he gave a discourse of his own. Sometimes a student read an essay of his own, or interpreted a passage of a philosopher, in the presence of the professor, and the professor afterwards pronounced his opinion upon the correctness of the reasoning or the interpretation.[24] The Discourses of Epictetus have a singular interest in this respect, apart from their contents; for they are in great measure notes of such lectures, and form, as it were, a photograph of a philosopher’s lecture-room.
Against this degradation of Philosophy, not only the Cynics, but almost all the more serious philosophers protested. Though Epictetus himself was a professor, and though he followed the current usages of professorial teaching, his life and teaching alike were in rebellion against it. “If I study Philosophy,” he says, “with a view only to its literature, I am not a philosopher, but a littérateur; the only difference is, that I interpret Chrysippus instead of Homer.”[25] They sometimes protested not only against the degradation of Philosophy, but also against the whole conception of literary education. “There are two kinds of education,” says Dio Chrysostom,[26] “the one divine, the other human; the divine is great and powerful and easy; the human is mean and weak, and has many dangers and no small deceitfulness. The mass of people call it education (παιδείαν), as being, I suppose, an amusement (παιδίαν), and think that a man who knows most literature—Persian and Greek and Syrian and Phœenician—is the wisest and best-educated man; and then, on the other hand, when they find a man of this sort to be vicious and cowardly and fond of money, they think the education to be as worthless as the man himself. The other kind they call sometimes education, and sometimes manliness and high-mindedness. It was thus that the men of old used to call those who had this good kind of education—men with manly souls, and educated as Herakles was—sons of God.” And not less significant as an indication not only of the reaction against this kind of education but also of its prevalence, is the deprecation of it by Marcus Aurelius: “I owe it to Rusticus,” he says,[27] “that I formed the idea of the need of moral reformation, and that I was not diverted to literary ambition, or to write treatises on philosophical subjects, or to make rhetorical exhortations ... and that I kept away from rhetoric and poetry and foppery of speech.”
II. I pass from the forms of education to its extent. The general diffusion of it, and the hold which it had upon the mass of men, are shown by many kinds of evidence.
1. They are shown by the large amount of literary evidence as to scholars and the modes of obtaining education. The exclusiveness of the old aristocracy had broken down. Education was no longer in the hands of “private tutors” in the houses of the great families. It entered public life, and in doing so left a record behind it. It may be inferred from the extant evidence that there were grammar-schools in almost every town. At these all youths received the first part of their education. But it became a common practice for youths to supplement this by attending the lectures of an eminent professor elsewhere. They went, as we might say, from school to a University.[28] The students who so went away from home were drawn from all classes of the community. Some of them were very poor, and, like the “bettelstudenten” of the mediæval Universities, had sometimes to beg their bread.[29] “You are a miserable race,” says Epictetus[30] to some students of this kind; “when you have eaten your fill to-day, you sit down whining about to-morrow, where to-morrow’s dinner will come from.” Some of them went because it was the fashion. The young sybarites of Rome or Athens complained bitterly that at Nicopolis, where they had gone to listen to Epictetus, lodgings were bad, and the baths were bad, and the gymnasium was bad, and “society” hardly existed.[31] Then, as now, there were home-sick students, and mothers weeping over their absence, and letters that were looked for but never came, and letters that brought bad news; and young men of promise who were expected to return home as living encyclopædias, but who only raised doubts when they did return home whether their education had done them any good.[32] Then, as now, they went from the lecture-room to athletic sports or the theatre; “and the consequence is,” says Epictetus,[33] “that you don’t get out of your old habits or make moral progress.” Then, as now, some students went, not for the sake of learning, but in order to be able to show off. Epictetus draws a picture of one who looked forward to airing his logic at a city dinner, astonishing the “alderman” who sat next to him with the puzzles of hypothetical syllogisms.[34] And then, as now, those who had followed the fashion by attending lectures showed by their manner that they were there against their will. “You should sit upright,” says Plutarch,[35] in his advice to hearers in general, “not lolling, or whispering, or smiling, or yawning as if you were asleep, or fixing your eyes on the ground instead of on the speaker.” In a similar way Philo,[36] also speaking of hearers in general, says: “Many persons who come to a lecture do not bring their minds inside with them, but go wandering about outside, thinking ten thousand things about ten thousand different subjects—family affairs, other people’s affairs, private affairs, ... and the professor talks to an audience, as it were, not of men but of statues, which have ears but hear not.”