Greek Athletics

by F. A. Wright

Of dance games too, which give exercise both to mind and body, they had an abundant variety; some simple like ‘The Wine-skin and Hatchet,’ which could be played upon the stomach of a complaisant guest, others more elaborate in their dramatic ritual, such as ‘The Swallow’ procession, of which our ‘Jack in the Green’ is a reminiscence.

At the beginning of their lives then children were treated in much the same way at Sparta and at Athens; but in the next stage of education, after the period of early childhood was past, there was a sharp divergence between Spartan and Athenian practice. At Sparta boys and girls alike, over the age of seven years, were taken in hand by the state, and given the most thorough of physical trainings. The girls were allowed their meals at home, but otherwise were subjected to the same discipline as the boys. They had to harden their bodies, so that they might bear strong children, and among their sports were wrestling, running, and swimming. They learned to throw the diskos and the javelin; and wearing only the short Doric chiton engaged in contests of speed with youths. The result we may see in the statue of the girl runner, a copy of a fifth-century original, which is now in the Vatican at Rome, and in the description of the Spartan woman envoy in Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, who looked ‘as though she could throttle a bull.’ The boys, for their part, were organized in the strictest fashion into ‘packs’ of sixty-four and into divisions. Each pack fed together, slept together on bundles of reeds for bedding, and played together. They had to go barefoot always, wore only a single garment summer and winter, and provided for their own wants.

One boy in the pack was appointed as ‘Bouagor,’ or ‘Herd-leader,’ and could give orders and inflict punishment. Over him was a young man, above twenty years of age, of tried character and courage, the ‘Eiren’ who was in charge of the pack’s organization and lived always with the boys. In control of the whole system was the ‘Paidonomos,’ the minister of education, an elderly citizen of rank and repute who had the ultimate powers of discipline over boys and eirens alike. In the three ranks we see something resembling the prefects, assistant masters, and Heads of our schools: in manner of life there was a close approximation to the boy-scout movement.

This Spartan type of education in some respects was not unlike the English public school system, as we owe it to Dr. Arnold, before it was affected by the spread of competitive examinations and the demand for utilitarian knowledge. The qualities that the Spartans wished to cultivate were not intellectual acuteness or literary taste, but the moral virtues of obedience, discipline, and endurance. To obtain these the lads were kept under constant supervision by grown men, and the weakness of the system was that individual initiative was not sufficiently encouraged, and that the claims of the mind were too persistently disregarded. Of book study there was practically none. Hunting, scouting, and foraging for food took up most of the boys’ time. Fighting, both in play and in earnest, was encouraged, together with gymnastics of an unspecialized sort, especially the musical drill which the Spartans called gymnopædia. Competitions between individuals and divisions were very frequent, and in many of them girls met boys on equal terms. Above all things, the idea of military efficiency was kept before the children’s eyes, and a strict military discipline was enforced. In fact, the Spartan system had all the strength and weakness of an exclusively military regime. The young Spartans were brave, healthy, modest, hardy and obedient: on the other hand, they were stupid, quarrelsome, brutal, lacking in self-restraint, and inclined to a gross immorality when once they were free from the close restraint of Spartan law. As long as a Spartan lived in his own country he behaved well, but the vices that the system produced showed themselves unpleasantly in any dealings with others. To the rest of Greece the vices seemed more than to counterbalance the virtues, and the Athenian ideal of education became the model for most of the other Greek States.

At Athens, everything was left to the individual parent and to the private schoolmaster. The State recognized its responsibility for the maintenance of children, and if a man died in battle his orphans were reared at the public expense; but it did not recognize its responsibility for their education. Some ancient laws, attributed to Solon, did indeed enact that all free-born children should be sent to school and there taught ‘letters and how to swim.’ Other regulations fixed the school hours, and in the interests of morality forbade boys to come home from school in the dark. But as regards the methods and the subjects of education given to boys, the Athenian Government was indifferent. The keeping of a school was a private speculation, and the State required no evidence of moral or intellectual qualifications from the schoolmaster. Accordingly, schools and the fees charged varied very greatly. Poor folk sent their children to establishments where only the elements of reading and writing were taught χαχὰ χαχῶς as the sausage-seller in Aristophanes says. Richer parents not only gave their children a better training in the early stages, but kept them at school for a longer period.

The schoolmaster himself was regarded with extreme contempt. The father of Æschines belonged to the despised class, and Demosthenes draws a scornful picture of his youthful rival helping to mix the ink, scrub the forms, and sweep the schoolroom. The fees were due on the last day of the month; but they were grudgingly paid and mean parents would keep their children away from school in those months of the year when the State festivals gave the schoolmaster an opportunity of granting his pupils a holiday. Of long intervals from work, such as our summer and winter vacations, we have no trace in Athens, and the precept of the Roman poet ‘æstate pueri si valent satis discunt’ apparently went unregarded.

The school hours were arranged to suit the time of meals in the boys’ homes. After the early breakfast, taken at sunrise, the boy sets off to his teacher, with whom he remained till noon. Then came the midday meal, followed by a siesta, and then afternoon school. Discipline was lax. The schoolmaster certainly had a rod to assist him in maintaining order, but his social inferiority deprived him of any real authority. Children would bring their pet dogs to school and play with them under the master’s chair. The master usually was sitting, a position which an Athenian despised as unworthy of a free-born man, and we have the typical schoolmaster pictured for us on a vase by Euphronios. He is a small, ill-developed man, with a bald head and a prominent nose. His body twisted, he leans forward with a threatening gesture, his forefinger raised in warning. In his left hand there is a stylus, for a writing-lesson is in progress; his stick with crooked handle and formidable knobs lies convenient to his right. He is drawn by a malicious hand with something of the caricaturist’s touch, but he is thoroughly alive and evidently closely resembles a real original. We may imagine that not unlike him even in bodily form was the schoolmaster in the third mime of Herondas who beats his idle pupil with his bull’s tail strap until he is ‘black and blue like a spotted snake.’

The ordinary system of elementary education at Athens, as followed by boys from seven to fourteen, consisted of three parts: letters, music and gymnastics, presided over by the grammatiste, kithariste, and pædotribe respectively. The grammatiste taught reading, writing and simple arithmetic, and his methods, on the evidence of the papyri and ostraka which have recently been discovered in Egypt, were not very much unlike those of a modern school. We have long lists of alphabets, and of simple and difficult combinations of letters; passages for dictation and recitation, the conjugation of verbs, and elementary grammatical rules. The kithariste taught ‘music’; i.e. the words of the lyric poets and the simple lyre accompaniment which went with the words. In general estimation he ranked a little higher than the grammatiste, but they both taught under the same conditions, and usually in the same building. The pædotribe was a much more important person than the other two, and his teaching, which directed the boy’s physical development upon scientific lines, lasted usually till manhood. He taught the rules of health, ‘dancing’ in the Greek sense of the word, and especially the five exercises of the pentathlon, which aimed at producing a perfect, all-round athlete. The palæstra was his school-room, and he was always sure of eager pupils and interested spectators.

But upon the smaller boys no very arduous tasks were imposed. Deportment, how to sit, stand, and walk gracefully, the correct manner of salutation, a decorous and becoming carriage of the body; these with some easy gymnastic exercises, together with a multitude of games and an occasional cockfight, occupied most of a boy’s day. He spent much more time at the palæstra than he did anywhere else, but the border-line there between instruction and amusement was not very rigidly drawn. This was the sort of education that seemed to Aristophanes ideal, and nowhere is a better picture given of it than in the Clouds:

‘To hear then prepare of the Discipline rare which flourished in Athens of yore,
When Honour and Truth were in fashion with youth and Sobriety bloomed on our shore;
First of all, the old rule was preserved in our school that “boys should be seen and not heard”:
And then to the home of the harpist would come, decorous in action and word,
All the lads of one town, though the snow peppered down, in spite of all wind and all weather;
And they sung an old song as they paced it along, not shambling with thighs glued together ...
But now must the lad from his boyhood be clad in a man’s all enveloping cloke;
So that, oft as the Panathenæa returns, I feel myself ready to choke,
When the dancers go by with their shields to their thigh, not caring for Pallas a jot.
You therefore, young man, choose me while you can; cast in with my method your lot;
And then you shall learn the forum to spurn and from dissolute baths to abstain,
And fashions impure and shameful abjure, and scorners repel with disdain,
And rise from your chair if an elder be there, and respectfully give him your place.
And with love and with fear your parents revere, and shrink from the brand of disgrace ...
Not learning to prate, as your idlers debate, with marvellous prickly dispute,
Nor dragged into court day by day to make sport in some small disagreeable suit:
But you will below to the Academe go, and under the olives contend
With your chaplet of reed, in a contest of speed, with some excellent rival and friend;
All fragrant with woodbine and peaceful content and the leaf which the lime blossoms fling,
When the plane whispers love to the elm in the grove in the beautiful season of spring.’
(Clouds, 961-1008, Rogers’ translation.)