But what the ancients called music in the wider sense must be held to include a knowledge and recitation of good poetry, as well as proper training in that figured dancing which was the most usual service of the gods. Indeed, a good musical education in Greece, much in contrast to ours, included every graceful æsthetical and intellectual accomplishment. This wide use of the term, however, though co-ordinate with the ordinary sense of playing instruments and singing, causes little confusion. A distinction between “music and singing,” such as we often see it (not satirically) set forth in the advertisements of our professional teachers, was not admitted.
§ 26. I think we may be justified in asserting that the study of the epic poets, especially of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” was the earliest intellectual exercise of schoolboys, and, in the case of fairly educated parents, even anticipated the learning of letters. For the latter is never spoken of as part of a mother’s or of home education. Reading was not so universal or so necessary as it now is; and as it was in earlier days an accomplishment only gradually becoming an essential, its acquisition seems always to have been intrusted to a professional master, the γραμματιστής, or grammarian in the earlier use of the word. Of course, careful parents, of the model above set forth by Protagoras, must have inculcated early lessons from poetry before that age. We may assume that books of Homer were read or recited to growing boys, and that they were encouraged or required to learn them off by heart.
This is quite certain to all who estimate justly the enormous influence ascribed to Homer, and the principles assumed by the Greeks to have underlain his work. He was universally considered to be a moral teacher, whose characters were drawn with a moral intent, and for the purpose of example or avoidance. In Plato’s “Ion” we distinctly find something supernatural, some distinct inspiration by the muse, asserted of Homer; and this inspiration was even passed on, like some magnetic force, from bard to bard. These ancient poets were even supposed to have uttered words deeper and holier than they themselves knew, being driven by some divine œstrus to compose what they could not have said in their natural state. Accordingly, the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” were supposed to contain all that was useful, not only for godliness, but for life. All the arts and sciences were to be derived (by interpretation) from these sacred texts.
Hence, when it occurs to a modern reader that the main superiority of our education over the Greek is the early training in the Scriptures—a training, alas! decaying in earnestness every day—an old Athenian or Milesian or Cean would deny the fact, and say that they, too, had an inspired volume, written for their learning, in which all the moral virtues and all the necessaries of faith were contained. The charge of objectionable passages in the old epic would doubtless be retorted by a similar charge against the old Semitic books.
§ 27. It is well-nigh impossible that in the higher families throughout Greece this moral training should not have begun at home; and there must have been many Greek mothers able and anxious to help, though history is silent about them, and does not even single out individual cases, like the Roman Cornelia, where mothers influenced the moral and intellectual training of their children.[20] Certain it is that here and there we find evidences of a strong feeling of respect to the house-mother which contrast curiously with the usual silence about women. In the “Clouds,” the acme of villany in the young scapegrace who has turned sophist under Socrates’ hands is to threaten violence to his mother.[21] Here it is that Strepsiades exclaims in real horror at the result of such teaching. We also find both Plato and (perhaps in imitation of him) Cicero laying stress upon the purity of speech preserved in the conversation of cultivated women, whose conservative life and tastes rejected slang and novelty, and thus preserved the language pure and undefiled. The very opposite complaint is made concerning the pædagogues, whose often barbarous origin and rude manners were of damage to the youth.
§ 28. On the question of punishments, both at home and at school, we do not find the Greeks very different from ourselves. There are not in Greek literature any such eloquent protests against corporal punishment as we find in Seneca and Quintilian. They all acknowledge the use and justice of it, and only caution against applying servile punishments to free boys. Indeed, in many later writers, such as Lucian, the severities of schoolmasters are noted; and we have among the Pompeian pictures a scene of a master flogging a boy, who is hoisted on the shoulders of another, with a third holding him up by the heels. These evidences, together with those of the later Romans, on the sounds of woe common in schools, must not be overestimated. They are probably exceptional cases made prominent for satirical purposes, and not implying any peculiar savagery in Greek above modern masters.
Most certainly the Greek schoolmaster was not harsher than the lower-class masters in many primary schools, as, for example, the Irish hedge schoolmasters described in Carleton’s “Tales of the Irish Peasantry.”
Unfortunately, the Greek schoolmaster, at least of elementary schools, was not generally in high repute, was evidently not highly paid, and his calling was not such as to give him either dignity or self-respect. He was accused of pedantry if he was really learned, and of bad temper if he was zealous and impatient at idleness.[22]
Lucian, in a jocose description of the nether world, describes kings and satraps as beggars or “primary” schoolmasters, and was only carrying out into fiction the proverbial downfall of the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse, who spent his old-age teaching children at Corinth. An unknown comic writer is quoted as saying, “The man is either dead or teaching the alphabet.” We hear of philosophers accusing each other—very absurdly—of having once followed this profession; and every scholar will remember the famous passage in Demosthenes’ “De Corona:” “But you, worthy man, who despise others compared with yourself, now compare with mine your own lot, which consigned you to grow up from boyhood in the greatest need, when you helped your father to attend in the school, preparing the ink, cleaning the benches, sweeping out the schoolroom, and so taking the rank of a slave, and not of a free boy.” We even hear of Horace’s master, Orbilius, writing a lamentable autobiography on account of his miseries, under the title of the man acquainted with grief (περιαλγής).
§ 29. The general question of the payment of teachers will be better discussed when we come to the Sophists’ training of riper youth. Indeed, on the whole value of the various attacks on the teaching order in Greece, Grasberger concludes his elaborate summary of the above and many other facts with the sensible remark:[23] “As regards the unpleasant and objectionable features, which men seem to record with special preference, the true state of the case may be the same as with the many scandals which are reported from the life of the mediæval universities in Europe. Evil did not predominate; but the chronicler, instead of putting forward the modest virtues of diligence and of scientific earnestness, preferred to note both the faults of the teachers and the gross excesses of the students.”