CHAPTER V.
THE MUSICAL SIDE—SCHOOLS AND THEIR APPOINTMENTS.
§ 30. The school was generally distinguished by the term διδασκαλεῖον[24] from the palæstra. We know that every Greek town possessed one or more, and in early times Herodotus[25] mentions one existing at Chios as early as 500 B.C., of which the roof fell in and killed one hundred and nineteen out of one hundred and twenty children at work within it at the time. Pausanias tells of another at Astypalæa, into which a madman rushed and pulled down the supporting pillar, so that sixty boys were buried under the ruins. The sad affair of Mycalessus is told by Thucydides, and extorts from him a most ungrammatical grimace of pity, when Thracian mercenaries murdered all the children assembled in school. These cases show how it was evidently regarded as an essential in every town. So the Trœzenians, when they received the fugitive Athenians during the invasion of Xerxes, took care, even in that great and sudden crisis, to provide for the teaching of the Attic children.[26] Of course, in early days and in poor towns, the place of teaching was not well appointed; nay, even in many places teaching in the open air prevailed. The oldest legends speak of Cheiron teaching in his grotto on Pelion; in the latest Greek χαμαιδιδάσκαλος (teacher on the ground) is a word for a low class of teacher. This was, again, like the old hedge schools of Ireland, and, no doubt, of Scotland too. They also took advantage, especially in hot weather, of colonnades, or shady corners among public buildings; as at Winchester the summer term was called cloister-time, from a similar practice, even in that wealthy foundation, of instructing in the cloisters.
On the other hand, properly appointed schools in respectable towns were furnished with some taste, and according to traditional notions. As in gymnasia and palæstras, there was a shrine of the Muses or of Hermes, and the head of the institution was regarded as the priest of this shrine, at which offerings were made, so in the schools also there were statues of tutelary gods set up, and busts of heroes and other eminent men, by way of ornament as well as reminder to the boys.
We hear that the master sat on a high seat, from which he taught; the scholars often sat on the ground, as they still do in many countries, or else they stood or occupied benches round him. The pictures and descriptions extant do not point to the schools being so crowded, as appears from the accidents above cited; but this is probably a mere chance, or an omission for the artist’s convenience. For though the laws quoted in Æschines’ speech forbid any one save the master and boys to be present, we know that in later days this was not strictly observed, and in Theophrastus’s “Characters,” the Chatterbox, among other mistakes in tact, is represented going into the schools and interrupting lessons with his idle talk. We may be sure that there were no tables or desks, such furniture being unusual in Greek houses; it was the universal custom, while reading or writing, to hold the book or roll on the knee—to us an inconvenient thing to do, but still common in the East.
There are some interesting sentences, given for exercise in Greek and Latin, in the little-known “Interpretamenta” of Dositheus, now edited and explained by German scholars. The entry of the boy is thus described, in parallel Greek and Latin: “First I salute the master, who returns my salute: good-morning, master; good-morning, school-fellows. Give me my place, my seat, my stool. Sit closer. Move up that way. This is my place, I took it first.” This mixture of politeness and wrangling is amusing, and, no doubt, to be found in all ages. It seems that the seats were movable. A scholium on Æschines tells us that there was a supply of water close at hand, lest the boys might suffer from thirst.
The extant pictures show that along the walls were hung up various vessels of which the use is not always plain to us. But we can clearly distinguish the necessary implements for the teaching of reading and writing, boxes for book-rolls, writing-boards, reckoning-boards with parallel grooves, and pebbles fixed in them, geometrical figures, flute-cases, and lyres. There is also late authority to show that there were notice-boards on which regulations were posted. We hear from Lucian of a notice over a sophist’s door, “No philosophy to-day.” The notice-board was called “the white board,” being covered with chalk. We are not told how this was written on; but if the ground was black, then mere writing with the finger across the chalked surface would produce distinct characters.
§ 31. What is far more interesting is the remnant now discovered of the pictorial teaching of children, by hanging up in the schoolroom illustrations of the Trojan and other legends. By the researches of Böttiger and O. Jahn,[27] it appears that we still have the fragments of such a table in the tabula Iliaca of Theodorus, preserved at the Capitoline Museum in Rome. These were large pictures, in a series, with names or words of explanation attached to them. Thus we have one picture (from “Iliad” Α) of Chryses praying Agamemnon to restore his daughter, beside him a wagon loaded with ransom, and under each figure, and under the wagon respectively, Agamemnon, Chryses, the ransom. Other extant pictures illustrate the third and twenty-fourth books of the “Iliad.” The “Odyssey” was similarly treated, so that there seems to have been a traditional and widely circulated pictorial compendium of the Homeric poems used, at all events, in later Greek and in Roman schools. There are also chronological and historical fragments of the same kind still extant, so that it is more than probable that even in classical days Greek boys were not without the benefit of illustrated school-books, or at least school-sheets, as the elegiac distich on the back of one of them suggests.[28] The use of these pictures on the walls explains the constant appearance of a long wand in the master’s hand, which is more characteristic of him than the rod of punishment, though this, too, was not missing.