§ 205. Here the individual is of value only in so far as he is beautiful. At first beauty is apprehended as natural, but then it is carried over into the realm of spirit, and the Good is posited as identical with the Beautiful. The ideal of æsthetic education remains always that there shall be also an external unity of the Good with the Beautiful, of Spirit with Nature.
—We cannot here give in detail the history of Greek Education. It is the best known among us, and the literature in which it is worked out is very widely spread. Among the common abridged accounts we mention here only the works of Jacobs, of Cramer & Bekker's "Charinomos." We must content ourselves with mentioning the turning-points which follow from the nature of the principle.—
§ 206. Culture was in Greece thoroughly national. Education gave to the individual the consciousness that he was a Greek and no barbarian, a free man and so subject only to the laws of the state, and not to the caprice of any one person. Thus the nationality was freed at once from the abstract unity of the family and from the abstract distinction of caste, while it appeared with the manifold talents of individuals of different races. Thus the Dorian race held as essential, gymnastics; the Æolians, music; the Ionics, poetry. The Æolian individuality was subsumed in the history of the two others, so that these had to proceed in their development with an internal antagonism. The education of the Dorian race was national education in the fullest sense of the word; in it the education of all was the same, and was open to all, even including the young women; among the Ionic race it was also in its content truly national, but in its form it was varied and unlike, and, for those belonging to various great families, private. The former, reproducing the Oriental phase of abstract unity, educated all in one mould; the latter was the nursery of particular individualities.
§ 207. (1) Education in the heroic age, without any systematic arrangement on the subject, left each one perfectly free. The people related the histories of the adventures of others, and through their own gave material to others again to relate stories of them.
—The Greeks began where the last stage of the active system of education ended—with piracy and the seizure of women. Swimming was a universal practice among the sea-dwelling Greeks, just as in England—the mistress of the ocean—rowing is the most prominent exercise among the young men, and public regattas are held.—
§ 208. (2) In the period of state-culture proper, education developed itself systematically; and gymnastics, music, and grammatics, or literary culture, constituted the general pedagogical elements.
§ 209. Gymnastics aimed not alone to render the body strong and agile, but, far more, to produce in it a noble carriage, a dignified and graceful manner of appearance. Each one fashioned his body into a living, divine statue, and in the public games the nation crowned the victor.
—Their love of beautiful boys is explicable not merely by their interest in beautiful forms, but especially by their interest in individuality. The low condition of the women could not lie at the foundation of it, for among the Spartans they were educated as nearly as possible like the men, and yet among them and the Cretans the love of boys was recognized in their legislation. To be without a beloved (ἀïιτης), or a lover (εἴσπνηλας), was among them considered as disgraceful as the degradation of the love by unchastity was contemptible. What charm was there, then, in love? Manifestly only beauty and culture. But that a person should be attracted by one and not by another can be accounted for only by the peculiar character, and in so far the boy-love and the man-friendship which sprang from it, among the Greeks, are very characteristic and noteworthy phenomena.—
§ 210. It was the task of Music, by its rhythm and measure, to fill the soul with well-proportioned harmony. So highly did the Greeks prize music, and so variously did they practise it, that to be a musical man meant the same with them as to be a cultivated man with us. Education in this respect was very painstaking, inasmuch as music exercises a very powerful influence in developing discreet behavior and self-possession into a graceful naturalness.
—Among the Greeks we find an unrestricted delight in nature—a listening to her manifestations, the tone of which betrays the subjectivity of things as subjectivity. In comparison - with this tender sympathy with nature of the Greeks—who heard in the murmur of the fountains, in the dashing of the waves, in the rustling of the trees, and in the cry of animals, the voice of divine personality—the sight and hearing of the Eastern nations for nature is dull.—