"Go, tell at Sparta, thou that passest by,
That here, obedient to her laws, we lie."
(Epitaph on the three hundred who fell at Thermopylae.)
[10] An Athenian saying, of a man who was missing, was: "Either he is dead or has become a schoolmaster." To call a man a schoolmaster was to abuse him, according to Epicurus. Demosthenes, in his attack on Aeschines, ridicules him for the fact that his father was a schoolmaster in the lowest type of reading and writing school. "As a boy," he says, "you were reared in abject poverty, waiting with your father on the school, grinding the ink, sponging the benches, sweeping the room, and doing the duty of a menial rather than of a freeman's son." Lucian represents kings as being forced to maintain themselves in hell by teaching reading and writing.
[11] Women were not supposed to possess any of the privileges of citizenship, belonging rather to the alien class. They lived secluded lives, were not supposed to take any part in public affairs, and, if their husbands brought company to the house, they were expected to retire from view. In their attitude toward women the Greeks were an oriental rather than a modern or western people.
[12] "We learn first the names of the elements of speech, which are called grammata; then their shape and functions; then the syllables and their affections; lastly, the parts of speech, and the particular mutations connected with each, as inflection, number, contraction, accents, position in the sentence; then we begin to read and write, at first in syllables and slowly, but when we have attained the necessary certainty, easily and quickly." (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, De Compos. Verb, cap 25.)
[13] Fragments of a tile found in Attica have stamped upon them the syllables ar, bar, gar; er, ber, ger; etc. A bottle-shaped vase has also been found which, in addition to the alphabet, contains pronouncing exercises as follows:
bi-ba-bu-be zi-za-zu-ze pi-pa-pu-pe gi-ga-gu-ge mi-ma-mu-me etc.
[14] "Learning to read must have been a difficult business in Hellas, for books were written only in capitals at this time. There were no spaces between the words, and no stops were inserted. Thus the reader had to exercise his ingenuity before he could arrive at the meaning of a sentence." (Freeman, K. J., Schools of Hellas, p. 87.)
[15] The Greeks had no numbers, but only words for numbers, and used the letters of the Greek alphabet with accents over them to indicate the words they knew as numbers. Counting and bookkeeping would of course be very difficult with such a system.
[16] "These poems, especially Homer, Hesiod, and Theognis, served at the same time for drill in language and for recitation, whereby on the one hand the memory was developed and the imagination strengthened, and on the other the heroic forms of antiquity and healthy primitive utterances regarding morality, and full of homely common sense, were deeply engraved on the young mind. Homer was regarded not merely as a poet, but as an inspired moral teacher, and great portions of his poems were learned by heart. The Iliad and the Odyssey were in truth the Bible of the Greeks." (Laurie, S. S., Pre-Christian Education, p. 258.)
[17] Davidson, Thos., Aristotle, pp. 73-75.