Old Greek Education

by J. P. Mahaffy

§ 63. And yet there were some points on which these thinkers, especially Plato, were far more thoroughgoing than we are, chiefly from a total absence of that sentiment or sentimentality which infects modern life. For Plato, both in the “Republic” and the “Laws,” insists that education will be of little avail if children are brought into the world deformed in body and warped in mind by the bad physical and mental condition of their parents. On some of these cases Greek society was agreed with him. In most states a deformed child was exposed either to die or to be picked up by some one who might run the risk of bringing it up to make a household slave.[56] For in most states, and certainly at Sparta, it would have been held a crime to propagate hereditary disease; and men were spared the disgusting spectacle of the scrofulous or deaf-and-dumb heir to a great name being courted in matrimony to perpetuate the miseries or the vices of his progenitors.

But Plato went further, and held that the production of the most important animal, man, should be regulated with even more care than that of the lower animals, in which such striking results have been obtained by artificial selection. He therefore recommended, in his ideal State, not community of wives—Heaven forbid that we should follow Aristotle in repeating this gross libel!—but a careful State selection of suitable pairs, and their solemn union, under the guise of a direction from Providence by an appeal to the lot. These marriages were to take place at a fixed season, and all the children born of them within the year to be regarded the common children of all: here the word community may fairly apply. He has nowhere told us whether in successive years the same parents were to remain united, and hence we do not know whether his marriages were meant to be temporary or not. I fancy the point was of little importance to him. If the offspring turned out well, there would be no change; if badly, of course the guardians of the State would not sanction the continuance of an unwholesome union. Thus, though Plato was willing to allow sentiment its sentimental place, and to bring forward the decision of the rulers of the State as the will of Providence, marriages professedly arranged in heaven were to be permitted only with a strict view to the improvement of the race.

The objection that such an arrangement would destroy the sanctity and the influence of the family, and thus abolish our most powerful engine of early education, was no objection to Plato. He wished to abolish separate families, and rescue children from the tyranny, the indulgence, and incompetence of individual parents, so as to put them under state discipline. And the State was absolutely nothing but one huge family, as far as the higher classes were concerned. To us who live in large kingdoms, who know that the family gives the law for individuals in ordinary life, and that schemes of public education cannot replace it, all systems which abolish the sanctity of the home are inadmissible.

§ 64. No point in Plato’s scheme excites more sympathy nowadays with advanced thinkers than that of equalizing the sexes in education, and subjecting women to the same training and duties as men. For he held that, though nature had not made women as strong as men, and that their important functions in the production of the race put them under some inconveniences and disabilities, there was, nevertheless, no reason to assume any permanent difference in kind. If such a theory is thought revolutionary by most people in modern society, what must it have been in the days and among the people of Plato’s age! Here, again, what guided him was an exaggerated estimate of the liberty and importance of Spartan women, who, when young, were encouraged to exercise in public; and who, when married, maintained over their husbands an influence far exceeding that of women in other Greek households. But then we must not forget the small culture of the men, their devotion to military training, and the consequent necessity for women to use their own judgment in the management of their homes.

§ 65. On the other hand, if we may digress for a moment on account of the interest and importance of the subject, there is no valid reason why the physical production of the race should not receive infinitely more attention than it does within the bounds of our present social arrangements. In the first place, though the sentimental reasons for marrying are still put in the foreground, and though at wedding speeches and in amatory correspondences some divine predestination, or the sentimental compulsion called falling in love, is assumed the only efficient cause of marriages, we know that many reasonable considerations intervene and are the real motives of action. These motives—the acquisition of wealth or position or connection, the desire of home comforts and of a life independent of external amusements, a calm mutual respect—are commonly enough confessed even by the very people who parade sentimental reasons; and whenever a marriage appears suitable from rational considerations, no trouble is spared by match-makers to induce young people to imagine themselves drawn together by some subtle and sentimental affinity—like Plato’s guardians, who were to pretend the providential lot as their guide.

If, then, such be the case; if even now there are civilized countries and classes of people who openly profess prudential reasons as the best for marrying, it will only require a better education of public opinion to enable men to advance to the position that the physical and mental vigor of the resulting children is a motive to be consciously considered in the selection. We may first reach the stage of avoiding an hereditary taint as people now fly an infectious disease. Such avoidance would ultimately stamp out or reduce to a minimum this evil, and the race would escape a great part of the direst and most hopeless of its physical miseries. Then the systematic and deliberate desire that there should be healthy children will discover many conditions now unknown, when so many of our unions are the result of chance or avarice, or, still worse, of passion. Men of science will begin to make observations on the difference of physical antecedents which cause such curious differences in children of the same house. And the day will come when, from a body of such observations, valuable practical rules may be deduced. We may thus improve our race as the Spartans did in old Greece; and they, we know, were perfectly successful in obtaining what they sought—a high average of physical strength and beauty.

All this, we may hope, will only be the introduction to a far more important, but far more difficult, problem—the determining of the conditions which produce genius. There is no reason to doubt that these conditions are mainly transient, for genius is no fixed heritage, the most splendid instances coming from obscure and ordinary parents. Nor does the mere combination of the suitable parents work its effect uniformly without other more limited conditions. For we find the great leaders of the world sometimes the only child, sometimes eldest, sometimes youngest, or in the middle of a family of brothers and sisters as obscure as their parents. The careful observation, then, not only of the parents, but of the particular passage in their life which produced an intellectually splendid offspring, is one upon which we cannot expect light for a long time, and until people have become accustomed to regard the general improvement of the race of far greater importance than they now do. If such results could be obtained even approximately—if, even in one case out of ten, intellectual excellence could be produced as we reproduce physical perfections—then, indeed, the perfectibility of mankind would no longer be a vague dream, but would show some signs of a partial fulfilment.

Are we to hope that such an advance in ideas will take place in our own day? We have perhaps advanced beyond the stage when men regard genius as distinctly heaven-born, and the direct gift of the gods, apart from any natural conditions. If it is indeed heaven-born, it is now conceded to be such through the combination of natural causes. But, on the other hand, our best and most refined people will recoil with deep aversion from making a scientific analysis of such conditions; they will exclaim that the possible advantages are as nothing compared with the desecration of that mystery which has been hallowed by the sacraments of the Church, and protected from profane inquiry by a cloud of delicate sentiment. To reduce the holy estate of marriage to the deliberate and scientific production of conditioned offspring will destroy, say they, all the sanctity of the relation, and with it the purity and dignity of our homes.

These weighty and respectable objections are to be met by observing that it would be idle and wrong to attempt any reform in opposition to the unanimous sentiment of the very people who alone could carry it out—our most sober and refined classes. Until this sentiment can be gradually changed by argument, and come to be looked on as a venerable and amiable superstition, nothing will be accomplished. But it is a matter of history that the most respectable and hallowed sentiments, if irrational, can be gradually removed by a progress in what Mr. Lecky calls rationalism, or intellectual enlightenment. We can even now point to the important fact, that in those countries and those ages where marriages had been confessedly arranged from prudential reasons, they have not been less sacred, nor has home life been less pure, than where vague and irrational sentiments have been brought into the foreground. The lower-class Irish are as faithful and happy in their homes, and the marriage-tie is a sacred and honored as it is anywhere in the world; and yet among them a love-match is rare. It is a matter of cows and of pigs, of the succession to a farm—nay, often of arrangement by the landlord for reasons of his own; and yet these marriages are as happy and as pure as if they had been the outcome of a great mutual passion. The same thing may be said of married life in the country parts of France, where a thrifty and provident race accommodate their unions to their circumstances, and leave the extravagances of great passion to poets and Parisians.

The history of Greece offers a more notable instance. If we ask where in Greece the home enjoyed the greatest honor and sanctity, where the house-mother stood highest in reverence and social importance, and where violations of fidelity were rarest, no one would hesitate to answer, At Sparta. Yet at Sparta all the sentiment, all the delicacy, of the marriage-tie was sacrificed to the duty of producing healthy children for the State. Plutarch tells us of a state of things which modern people would think wholly subversive of all purity—of old men ceding their rights of temporary unions and exchanges for the sake of desirable offspring. The Spartan men and women were not wanting in sentiment about marriage, in advocating the honor and sanctity of the marriage-tie; but their sentiment led them to regard a fine offspring as the noblest outcome of marriage, and one to which all other considerations were secondary. Hence it was in accordance with their sentiment that they adopted the same kind of precautions as regards physical perfection which a later and wiser age may adopt as regards intellectual and moral perfection.