It is very curious for us moderns to read the details of these things in the old rhetoricians. There is not an apparent touch of nature—a word emphatically repeated, a sudden break off, an angry burst, even a don’t you see? or a by Jove! or a dear me!—in a Greek oration which was not noted as a figure of diction, or a figure of thought, and brought under the discipline of rules. We are even told that Demosthenes composed his prose in rhythm, and avoided the use of more than two short syllables together. Isocrates certainly made the law against hiatus—against closing a word and beginning the next with vowels—a law adopted by all the prose writers of his age. Thus the formal education in rhetoric must have been no light task for the pupils of Isocrates and the other rhetors, and writing or speaking good Greek a far stricter and more difficult thing than writing English which will pass muster with the critics.
§ 61. Still, there is room for surprise that the matter of higher education, the ideas to be acquired, should have been introduced indirectly under the guise of preparation for public speaking. No doubt, this was an artificial and unnatural order of things. To subordinate the matter of knowledge to the form is always a mistake. But we may at least conceive the position of Isocrates’ pupils if we compare it with that of the popular preachers, so powerful a generation ago, and even now playing no unimportant part in society. I have known more than one of these eminent men who educated themselves with great care generally, and in all directions, for the purpose of supplying themselves with matter for their discourses. And this is very well-meant, legitimate, and honest education, though perverted in order, and, like that of Isocrates, not likely to lead to really deep and thorough knowledge. We are told that in the present day there are people who read all kinds of books for the purpose of solving double acrostics, and I have heard men of intelligence advocate this foolish kind of riddles as promoting general education!
Thus the school of Isocrates stood side by side, and in rivalry, with the schools of Plato and Aristotle, as one in which elegance of form, and a superficial but graceful culture, was given to the higher youth, instead of the exact science and metaphysic which unfitted men for public life. It was a contrast somewhat like the Oxford and Cambridge type in England. Isocrates’ own failure as a politician, and the little influence which his open letters on politics attained, made the wiser portion of men drift away still farther from the sophistic aspect of his teaching, from the mixture of philosophy and politics with rhetoric; and so they again subdivided their training into strictly rhetorical, such as had already been begun by Lysias and was carried out by Isæus, and the philosophical, for which an increasing number of schools now offered themselves. As the political power of Greece decayed, and its literary and artistic splendor became universally recognized, Athens became an educational centre, to which youths from all parts of the civilized world flocked for their training. This later history of Greek culture will occupy us in our [last chapter]. But we must first give a brief account of the deeper theories of State education which Plato and Aristotle have left us, in contrast to the shallow popularity of Isocrates.
FOOTNOTES
[52] Περὶ ἀντιδόσεως, p. 98 sq.
CHAPTER X.
THE GREEK THEORISTS ON EDUCATION—PLATO AND ARISTOTLE.
§ 62. It is usual in books on Greek education to give a very large space to the discussion of the “Republic” and “Laws” of Plato and the “Politics” of Aristotle, because they contain elaborate and systematic recommendations as to the training of youth. But the states of both philosophers are ideal, Aristotle’s not less than Plato’s; and, though the educational portion of Aristotle’s work seems fragmentary and unfinished, we cannot hold that any further developments would have brought it within the range of practical politics. Plato’s notions were confessedly theoretical, and are discussed as such by all his commentators; but some scholars have given themselves endless trouble to find out how much of his system, especially in the tamer and less extravagant “Laws,” was borrowed from real life, and from actual states, as opposed to the creations of his own fancy. But in nearly every detail the distinction is purely conjectural. It is really for want of positive evidence that these theories have assumed such undue importance. To the philosophical theorist and the educational reformer the speculations of such splendid intellects in the early post-meridian of the glorious day of Greece must ever be most attractive and suggestive; but it is idle to transfer to a practical book, or to an historical account, what has never been realized.[53] These speculations, however, may fairly find a limited space here as showing what general effect the practical education already described had produced upon the most advanced thinkers of the day.
Unfortunately, we have here again only the aristocratic side, and that which would assert the State to be paramount and all-interfering through individual and private life. If we had the speculations of Lycophron and his school, who held, with truly democratical instinct, that laws were only useful to repress crime, and that the rest of the citizen’s life was to be left free and uncontrolled, our notions about the theories of Greek education might be considerably modified. But, on the other hand, we have preserved to us the Hellene of the Hellenes; the school of Lycophron might only have recommended to us what we know by practical experience in modern society.
From the very outset Plato and Aristotle adopt quite definite principles. They assume that the State is to interfere everywhere and control the whole life of man. Thus the splendid Athenian democracy in which Plato lived had no power to wean him from his somewhat narrow prejudices. He despised the goods he possessed, and longed for a Spartan ideal, though its defects were plain enough before his eyes.[54] Still worse, the wide vista opened by Alexander into a larger fusion of ideas, and into widely various forms of society, had no power to emancipate the intellect of Aristotle from its ingrained Hellenic narrowness. It is necessary to make this strong protest at the outset, on account of the chorus of admiration sung by the pedants and pedagogues of modern days over these thoroughly unpractical and retrograde theories. One fact will speak volumes to the modern reader. Both of them look upon a small number of citizens, and, indeed, a small limit of territory, as essential to their schemes, no accurate or perpetual supervision by State police and direction being possible either in a great city or a large territory.[55] This will in itself show how antiquated they must have seemed even in the next century, when the Greeks woke to the ambition of ruling over kingdoms in the East.