§ 47. What a solemn procession of ephebi must have been is best shown by the equestrian and sacrificial procession on the frieze of the Parthenon. We notice some young men naked, some in the short cloak and hat, riding horses and leading victims. The riding of the horses was not so easy as with us, for, in the first place, they had no saddles and stirrups, and, in the second, it was thought necessary for a good display to have the horse continually on his hind-legs. A quiet walking horse in a procession was thought very tame by the Greeks. Hence the management of these curvetting and caracoling steeds must have necessitated careful training in their riders. Again, we find others leading bulls to the sacrifice, and the frequent mention of contests with bulls has even misled many authorities to imagine that the Attic ephebi practised bull-fighting. The fact is that an unruly victim was of evil omen, and hence the careful leading of these beasts, with skill and strength combined, so as to make a proper part of a great show, came under ephebic training. This, too, we see on the Parthenon frieze. Wherever, in fact, any public display was required, the artistic taste of the Greeks ordained that the fairest and most stalwart men should be there to adorn it; and as nothing is so beautiful as a crowd of vigorous fresh youths, in the bloom of life and the happiness of youth, we can conceive how splendid was a State procession then compared with those of our day, when the grandest show is one of old generals, effete officials, and other venerable but decrepit magnates, who must be covered with fine clothes, brilliants, and orders to prevent their real ugliness and decay from being painfully obtrusive. In Roman days we hear of these youths being employed as guards of honor when distinguished foreigners visited Athens.
§ 48. Though this ephebic training is spoken of as universal—and it seems that after his inscription into the register (ληξιαρχικὸν γραμματεῖον) of his deme, which was his patent of citizenship, every Athenian lad was bound to serve as patroller (περίπολος) and undergo his military training—there must have been many exceptions; and, indeed, this whole education is evidently that of the higher classes, and unsuitable for the poor. In Roman days, we even find strangers coming to Athens and enrolling themselves among the ephebi, as those wealthy foreigners who understand what culture means often send their sons to England to receive the unique training of the English public schools. But this points to its being a privilege, a special and much-prized education, though we do not know what restrictions there were, or how the sons of poorer men, who could not afford the time and outlay, avoided it. The number of official ephebi was never, I fancy, large, and always a class from which Phidias might well select for his models, when seeking for ideal types of youth and manliness.
It has, indeed, not been sufficiently noticed, in the various essays on this ephebic training, that the very idea of such a class never occurs in Herodotus or in Thucydides, though it does in Xenophon;[51] and if Plutarch speaks of Alcibiades influencing the ephebi in the gymnasia with his wild schemes of western conquest, we may be sure the historian transferred the titles and notions of his age to older times. In the third century B.C., there are so many inscriptions about this class extant that it must have assumed a most prominent place in Attic life. From that time onward into Roman times, we hear of it constantly, and from many sources. It is impossible that Socrates and his school should not have alluded to it, had it already formally existed. We may therefore infer that though its component parts—the formal enrolment and sacrifices at a certain age, the patrol duties, the gymnastic and musical training, the procession duty at festivals—were developed in the best period of Attic history, their official reduction to a State system of education could not have taken place till later, till the decay of practical public life had given men time to theorize about methods of restoring by education what was irreparably lost.
Apparently, the earliest formal notice is in a fragment of the orator Lycurgus, who, in his famous speech on his own management of the Athenian exchequer, alluded to the statue of a certain Epicrates, which had been set up in bronze on account of his law about the ephebi. We cannot tell whether this was a special enactment or not. But it may have been the very law which established this famous system, so praised and sought after by all the Hellenistic world in Roman days. If so, the establishment would date from the very time when it proved of little real importance to the history of Attica or of the world.
Nevertheless, the many inscriptions reveal to us certain curious and interesting features, which make us approve of the good taste of Cicero and his friends, when they sent their boys away from Rome to Athens, as we send our sons to schools in England. Thus the learned Germans who have investigated with great pains the various titles of the magistrates or dignitaries among these ephebi are often at a loss to determine whether they are masters set over them, or leaders among the ephebi themselves. Indeed, the so-called ἄρχων τῶν ἐφηβῶν (head of the ephebi) appears to have been no other than the most successful and brilliant youth, the representative and spokesman of the rest, like the senior prefect at some of our public schools. No doubt, learned men who, in future ages, investigate the ephebic training of the English will puzzle themselves over the senior prefect at Winchester, and wonder whether he was a master or a boy; and, if a boy, how he could have so much power intrusted to him. We also find that the expenditure of keeping up the solemn processions and public contests was so great that the ephebi themselves were encouraged to contribute largely; and if they were rich, they gained an importance disproportionate (we may suspect) to their age. What is even more interesting to English students is that they had independent clubs and associations, and even held solemn meetings, where they used the terms of public life, and entitled the resolutions (ψηφίσματα) enacted in their assembly (ἀγορά) laws (νόμοι). They had archons, strategi, agoranomi, and even areopagites in these associations of youths. It must have been with the approval of these formal meetings that the gymnastic side of the ephebic training became gradually discredited. Whether the dislike of great generals like Alexander and Philopœmen to athletics contributed to change public opinion, we cannot tell. But I confess to feeling a considerable sympathy with the reform which asserted the superiority of hunting and riding to the exercises of the gymnasium—a change which is regarded by some German critics as a melancholy sign of degradation.
§ 49. In these later days, when the seven subjects of knowledge, including rhetoric, philosophy, etc., were formally adopted, the ephebic training assumed the character of a university course. There were, indeed, masters appointed for fencing, the use of arms, dancing, and wrestling, as of old; but the leading philosophical schools did not then carry off the youths from the ephebic training; they rather supplied it with formal professors. In the better and strictly classical days, before we hear of the technical term ephebi, the practical training of the youths for patrols, and then as incipient citizens, rather corresponded to what we call the sixth form at a public school, and did not embrace really philosophic teaching, such as is supposed to be found at our universities. It had the same mixture of the physical and intellectual, the same attention to mere accomplishments, the same careful surveillance which we practise in schools, but which are not a complete introduction to full citizen life. This was the summit of Spartan training, where the object was not to train really political men able to discuss public affairs and assist in the government of the State, but brave soldiers, and fine men, physically able to endure hardship and submit to strict discipline. Something quite different and intellectually higher was needful for a really democratic life, for an intelligent understanding of State functions, and the proper discussion of them. It was all very well to dance complicated figures with grace, to play the lyre and sing sweetly with it, to wrestle and run with force and ease. This was the old training, which made fine soldiers, but good citizens only in the sense of stupidly ignorant, and therefore obedient, hearers of the orders of their superiors. The necessity of a change came with the rise of democracy in Greece, and the Greeks provided themselves, when the need arose, with teachers suited to their wants. These men, the Sophists, were the first who gave any education corresponding to our university courses, and to these we now turn.
FOOTNOTES
[48] Cf. the list in Grasberger, iii. 65.
[49] “N. L.,” p. 233.
[50] Cf. for the text of his oath Philol. for 1854, p. 694, or Grasberger, iii. 61.