Old Greek Education

by J. P. Mahaffy

§ 54. These men really shaped out the first form which university education took in Europe, meaning by university education that higher general training which, coming after school discipline, trains men for the duties of social and political as well as scientific and literary life.

In the city life of the Greeks, when residence in any foreign place entailed great inconvenience, it was evident that this university teaching could not occupy a fixed place. It was not till the amalgamation of the Greek nation under Roman sway that Athens became (like Alexandria) strictly a university town. So, as the students could not gather round the early sophist, he was obliged to go to them, wandering through Greece, and staying for a considerable time in each great centre, where the native youth could profit by him. But even in early days there were some enthusiastic pupils, who abandoned home and country, and wandered about as aliens in the wake of these brilliant teachers. The latter generally made high display of their acquirements, and gave exhibitions of eloquence and of argument to show the value of their wares. They lived an ostentatious life, like the professional artists of the present day, and though they made large profits, saved but little money. Their first object was to make ready and practical citizens, men able to collect and express their thoughts and give sound advice on public matters. For this purpose they not only taught the art of rhetoric and that of disputation, but they were obliged to enter upon some of the great theories which form the basis of all practical life—the problems of philosophy, of ethics, and of religion. As we might expect, they took in all these a utilitarian view, such as a practical crammer would take. Some of them, such as Gorgias and Protagoras, studied philosophy deeply, but only to show that a devotion to metaphysic or to abstract science was idle, all knowledge being subjective, and varying with the age. Man was the measure of things; abstract nature was mere nothing. On the more pressing question of morals, though practically sound enough, and though some of them, such as Prodicus, were celebrated as moral preachers, they denied all immutable morality, and were content with obeying the existing laws of society, without admitting any permanent scientific basis for them. It was Socrates who first applied his great mind to solve this question, and his classes of young men—he was in this a regular sophist or university teacher, and was commonly so called—were specially exercised in seeking for the permanent and immutable ideas implied in our moral terms which characterize our moral actions. As regards religion, seeing that the Greek faith had grown up in myths and poetry, and was imbedded in an elaborate polytheistic mythology full of immoralities and absurdities, the Sophists were, as we might expect, sceptical, and so far opposed to the conservative public. One of them, Protagoras, actually professed his unbelief in the national faith, and was persecuted accordingly; others, though more cautious, and regarding any formal denial of transcendental truths as hardly practical, were justly suspected of agnosticism, as their moral essays kept suspiciously clear of theology. They were regarded as unsound in faith, and hence alleged to be unsound in morals by the orthodox, whose faith the Sophists charged fairly enough with the same objection.

§ 55. So the education of the Sophists came to be regarded by the soberest part of the public, the steady-going old people, as subversive of ancient and venerable traditions. In religion it was supposed to suggest, if not to teach, infidelity; in politics and society, radicalism. This is exactly the sort of charge we hear made by the old-fashioned public against the universities—still more in Germany, where the gulf between the average and the learned part of society is far wider than it is here. When we university teachers make young men think, even though carefully avoiding (as we are in honor bound) anything which may shock the traditions in which they have been brought up, the mental agitation produced must, nevertheless, lead them to reject at least some superstitions which they have accepted on weak evidence. If our education does not produce this result, it is not worthy the name. But this partial and cautious scepticism is of course identified by the older generation, who are less spiritually developed, with the rejection of vital truths. And there are many cases where the young sceptic really oversteps his just bounds, and becomes as rash in negation as his fathers were uncritical in affirmation. Let us add that the orthodox party are not very particular about evidence, and will start a calumnious charge against a teacher whom they suspect and fear, with very little care about really proving their case. This party are, moreover, always supplied with powerful allies by the jealousies and differences among the teachers themselves, the elder and less able of whom often try to sustain their waning influence by an alliance with orthodoxy, and make up by theological popularity what they have been unable to attain for want of intellectual force and sympathy.

All these things, which now happen constantly in our universities, are the exact counterparts of what happened in Greece in the days of the Sophists. They taught clever young men such surface-knowledge of science as disgusted the deeper experts, and, what was more, they taught them that the experts were pursuing a vain shadow, and attempting insoluble problems. They taught them to avoid becoming specialists, and to apply themselves to public life. Just as the English universities can boast of many great politicians and literary men, rather than of specialists in the sciences, and as they might hold that to produce a Gladstone or a Cornewall Lewis is better than to produce a Faraday, so the Sophists made general culture their professed object, and so far quarrelled with deeper philosophy.

§ 56. The same sort of proceeding in morals brought them into contact with Socrates, whose daily teaching may be regarded as the best university teaching of the day. Socrates was in all external respects a sophist, and commonly regarded as such. He did not, indeed, travel about, being luckily a citizen of the largest and most enlightened city in Greece. He despised, too, wealth and ostentation of the ordinary kind, though he made himself no less remarkable by his voluntary poverty. But in more important respects, in despising abstract science and speculative philosophy, and sifting traditional theories of morals and society, in radically shaking up and often upsetting all preconceived notions, Socrates was a sophist, and one of the most dangerous of them. He sought, indeed, to do what they had not done—to find some better and surer positive basis for morals, but the negative part of his work was far the most successful and striking. Hence the conservative public at Athens not only suspected and disliked him, but at the prosecution of their mouthpiece, Anytus, a most respectable and earnest man, condemned him to death, when he showed clearly that no verdict of theirs would restrain him from pursuing his occupation. This sentence on Socrates, which the orthodox party at Athens never regretted, and even justified, should indeed be a warning to those who calumniate their fellows in the interests of orthodoxy. But with this we are not now concerned.

The higher teaching of the Sophists and of Socrates, which was at best desultory, passed into the hands of successors like Plato and Isocrates, who established regular schools, and subjected their pupils to a regular course of training. This was all the more necessary, as the training given by Socrates had no definite limits, and his tendency was to keep young men talking and discussing ethical problems when they ought to have turned to practical life. Leisure was, indeed, in such high repute among the old Greeks that idleness was not reprehended as it should have been. The orthodox party made this objection with much force to the school or following of Socrates. In the case of Plato there was a regular course of higher philosophy, and his principal pupils became, in their turn, philosophic teachers. But the school of Plato was even more than that of Socrates a university training, for which there may even have been a matriculation examination, if we adopt literally the statement that no one was allowed to enter without knowing elementary geometry. The great fault of Plato, as of Socrates, was that he did not introduce men to public or practical life, but made them philosophers or idlers. In science, indeed, this special training was of great service, and the history of geometry would have been very different without these speculators. But the Platonic pupil when completely trained was professedly, according to the master himself, disinclined to join in politics, and only to be persuaded by his sense of duty and the willing obedience of the public.

It is on account of the same sort of exclusiveness, even monastic in its strictness, that the famous brotherhood of Pythagoras deserves but a small place in any general history of Greek education. Admission to this brotherhood was only obtained through a strict novitiate, and the object of it was to combine peculiar religious asceticism with an aristocratic policy, and a sort of club life antagonistic to ordinary society. We have, unfortunately, only few authentic details concerning this sect, and know it best from the few echoes of it in early, and the many in later, Platonism. But it, too, may be regarded as a higher intellectual or university training, combined with collegiate life and its restraints, thus anticipating in spirit that feature which makes the English universities so peculiar among the modern seats of learning in Europe.

I will return to Plato and his followers when we come to consider the theories of education which the philosophers based on the phenomena of Greek history. And before we pass from the Sophists to the Rhetors, and show a further specializing of higher education in that direction, we may say a word in conclusion on the external history of these once celebrated, and since much-maligned, educators. We hardly know them at all, save through their enemies, the specialist philosophers and specialist rhetoricians; and what we hear of them must be distrusted and sifted accordingly. Nevertheless, even from their enemies, we learn that the three greatest of them—Protagoras, Gorgias, and Prodicus—were eminently respectable and respected men. So was the fourth in importance, Hippias, though the encyclopædic pretensions he put forth to practise all trades and manual dexterities, as well as philosophy, history, and rhetoric, have left an unpleasant impression against him. Nevertheless, he was honored at Elis, his native place, as their leading citizen, and compiled for them the annals of their famous past in such a way as to gain universal acceptance.

As regards the other three, though they all professed to impart general education, and to give their pupils that negative training in philosophy which would arm them against false theories, yet they were each remarkable for some special line. Protagoras, apart from his famous philosophical position of the relativity of knowledge to him who knows, openly professed to teach political wisdom, and despised all other kinds of knowledge in comparison with it. Gorgias, on the other hand, though he wrote a famous treatise with the very Hegelian title “concerning nature or the non-existent,” devoted his main attention to rhetoric, and was truly the father of technical Greek oratory. For though we hear of Corax and Tisias in Sicily, and of Empedocles, as having cultivated the art, the first recognized theorist and practical speaker was Gorgias. He not only delivered set speeches, but so trained himself as to deliver elegant discourses on any proposed subject, apparently without preparation, but of course with the help of a clever system of well-arranged commonplaces, which he applied with quickness and variety. The philosophy of Prodicus was chiefly ethical, and his apologues were very popular and quoted in after-days. But more important were his grammatical studies, whereby he fixed the parts of speech, and laid the groundwork of the grammar of the modern languages of Europe. Indeed, the strict attention to form shown by all the Sophists led them to study language with peculiar care, and they were the forefathers of modern philologists in this as in some other respects.

A great many more Sophists are known by name, some of them depicted or maligned in Plato’s dialogues, such as Thrasymachus, Polus, Euenus; but they do not present to us any special features. All are said to have insisted on the dictates of society as superior to any supposed law of nature, and this Hobbism has brought upon them the anathemas of moralists. Within the century 470–370 B.C. their part was played out; and even Plato, in his later works, no longer thinks them worthy of refutation.