§ 69. There is yet another scheme of education left us by the classical age of Greece, Xenophon’s “Education of Cyrus,” which, in the form of a very tedious novel on the life of the Persian king, gives a theory of the education of a prince and his surroundings which may deserve a very few words in concluding this chapter.[60] He shares with Plato and Aristotle the belief that private education, with mere prohibitive laws to guide the citizen, is quite insufficient. All the theorists were agreed that there must be one public education, and they imagined that crime would be to a great extent precluded by such effective training.
Xenophon, dividing his period of education into boyhood up to sixteen, and youth (ἐφηβεία) up to twenty-six, provides a regular public-school education for the boys, keeping them all together in a sort of polity of their own, where their teaching is performed by special State masters, and their quarrels and delinquencies settled by tribunals of their own. To the elder youth is assigned all the police and patrol duty, as well as the accompanying of the king in hunting, especially of beasts of prey. This sort of exercise Xenophon had learned to know in the East, and he recognized its superiority over ordinary gymnastics. But the musical education, on which Plato and Aristotle lay such stress, he omits altogether, without giving his reasons. Perhaps he found from experience that the great Aryan nobles were men of refinement, and understood the harmony of life no less than the more theoretical Greeks. He also differs from them in alone recognizing the importance of a system which will control not one limited city, but an empire of various peoples and languages. Yet his education is, in consequence, only the expensive and exclusive training of a dominant aristocracy, and is not supposed to be compulsory for the ordinary citizen. In his State all higher official position is only to be attained by this training.
There are no other ideas in the scheme which make it worthy of any special consideration. The Spartan system blinded the vision of all these speculators, and kept them from understanding the true character of a free and various development of individual genius.
FOOTNOTES
[53] Few people have ever heard of the attempt to found a Platonopolis in Italy in the Renaissance times.
[54] Of course, he saw and admitted these defects; but it is obvious that he thought them only defects of detail, which could be remedied by better arrangement; whereas the Athenian democracy appeared to him radically unsound. And yet could Sparta ever have produced such a splendid passage of history as the conduct of the Athenian army at Samos when the news came (411 B.C.) that the constitution of their city had been overthrown and an oligarchy established? Let the reader consult Grote’s chapter on this.
[55] Plato even insists upon a fixed number, 11,080 men and the same number of women, all excess being guarded against either by exposing of infants or transporting adults into colonies.
[56] The critics have shown that Plato gradually softened his recommendations on this point. In the “Timæus” he speaks as if he had never recommended exposal, but only a relegation of the children of unhealthy parents into his third grade of society. In the “Laws” (if it be, indeed, his work) he lets the whole matter drop, though it was to be expected that he should discuss it. Whether this arose from a gradual advance of humanity in Plato himself, or from the adverse criticism of the day, we cannot tell. The German critics (Zeller, Susemihl, etc.) hold the former; I am disposed to the latter, even though his successor, Aristotle, as they remark, is even more inhuman.
[57] This is in the “Laws,” of which the genuineness is not without doubt.
[58] vii. 2.