[18] Plutarch later expressed well the Greek conception of musical education in these words: "Whoever be he that shall give his mind to the study of music in his youth, if he meet with a musical education proper for the forming and regulating his inclinations, he will be sure to applaud and embrace that which is noble and generous, and to rebuke and blame the contrary, as well in other things as in what belongs to music. And by that means he will become clear from all reproachful actions, for now having reaped the noblest fruit of music, he may be of great use, not only to himself, but to the commonwealth; while music teaches him to abstain from everything that is indecent, both in word and deed, and to observe decorum, temperance, and regularity." (Monroe, Paul, History of Education, p. 92.)
[19] A flat circle of polished bronze, or other metal, eight or nine inches in diameter.
[20] "There were no home influences in Hellas. The men-folk lived out of doors. The young Athenian from his sixth year onward spent his whole day away from home, in the company of his contemporaries, at school or palaestra, or in the streets. When he came home there was no home life. His mother was a nonentity, living in the woman's apartments; he probably saw little of her. His real home was the palaestra, his companions his contemporaries and his paidagogos. He learned to disassociate 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." (Freeman, K. J., Schools of Hellas, p. 282.)
[21] "No doubt the Athenian public was by no means so learned as we moderns are; they were ignorant of many sciences, of much history,—in short of a thousand results of civilization which have since accrued. But in civilization itself, in mental power, in quickness of comprehension, in correctness of taste, in accuracy of judgment, no modern nation, however well instructed, has been able to equal by labored acquirements the inborn genius of the Greeks." (Mahaffy, J. P., Old Greek Education.)
[22] The great institutions of the Greek City-State were in themselves highly educative. The chief of these were:
1. The Assembly, where the laws were proposed, debated, and made.
2. The Juries, on which citizens sat and where the laws were applied.
3. The Theater, where the great masterpieces of Greek literature were
performed.
4. The Olympian and other Games, which were great religious ceremonies
of a literary as well as an athletic and artistic character, and to
which Greeks from all over Hellas came.
5. The city life itself, among an inquisitive, imaginative, and
disputatious people.
CHAPTER II
[1] The culmination came in what is known as the Age of Pericles, who was the master mind at Athens from 459 to 431 B.C. During the fifth century B.C. such names as Themistocles and Pericles in government, Phidias and Myron in art, Herodotus and Thucydides in historical narrative, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides in tragic drama, and Aristophanes in comedy, graced Athens.
[2] With the Greeks, morality and the future life never had any connection.
[3] The early Greek philosophers tried to explain the physical world about them by trying to discover what they called the "first principle," from which all else had been derived. Thales (c. 624-548 B.C.), the father of Greek science, had concluded that water was the original source of all matter; Anaximenes (c. 588-524 B.C.), that air was the first principle; Heraclites (c. 525-475 B.C.), fire; and Pythagoras (c. 580-500 B.C.), number.