§ 211. The stringed instrument, the cithern, was preferred by the Greeks to all wind instruments because it was not exciting, and allowed the accompaniment of recitation or song, i.e. the contemporaneous activity of the spirit in poetry. Flute-playing was first brought from Asia Minor after the victorious progress of the Persian war, and was especially cultivated in Thebes. They sought in vain afterwards to oppose the wild excitement raised by its influence.
§ 212. Grammar comprehended Letters (γράμματα), i.e. the elements of literary culture, reading and writing. Much attention was given to correct expression. The Fables of Æsop, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, and later the tragic poets, were read, and partly learned by heart. The orators borrowed from them often the ornament of their commonplace remarks.
§ 213. (3) The internal growth of what was peculiar to the Grecian State came to an end with the war for the Hegemony. Its dissolution began, and the philosophical period followed the political. The beautiful ethical life was resolved into thoughts of the True, Good, and Beautiful. Individuality turned more towards the internal, and undertook to subject freedom, the existing regulations, laws and customs, to the criticism of reason as to whether these were in and for themselves universal and necessary. The Sophists, as teachers of Grammar, Rhetoric, and Philosophy, undertook to extend the cultivation of Reflection; and this introduced instability in the place of the immediate fixed state of moral customs. Among the women, the Hetæræ undertook the same revolution; in the place of the πότνια μήτηρ appeared the beauty, who isolated herself in the consciousness of her charms and in the perfection of her varied culture, and exhibited herself to the public admiration. The tendency to idiosyncrasy often approached wilfulness, caprice and whimsicality, and opposition to the national moral sense. A Diogenes in a tub became possible; the soulless but graceful frivolity of an Alcibiades charmed, even though it was externally condemned; a Socrates - completed the break in consciousness, and urged upon the system of the old morality the pregnant question, whether Virtue could be taught? Socrates worked as a philosopher who was to educate. Pythagoras had imposed upon his pupils the abstraction of a common, exactly-defined manner of living. Socrates, on the contrary, freed his disciples—in general, those who had intercourse with him—leading them to the consciousness of their own individuality. He revolutionized the youth in that he taught them, instead of a thoughtless obedience to moral customs, to seek to comprehend their purpose in the world, and to rule their actions according to it. Outwardly he conformed in politics, and in war as at Marathon; but in the direction of his teaching he was subjective and modern.
§ 214. This idea, that Virtue could be taught, was realized especially by Plato and Aristotle; the former inclining to Dorianism, the latter holding to the principle of individuality in nearly the modern sense. As regards the pedagogical means—Gymnastics, Music, and Grammar—both philosophers entirely agreed. But, in the seizing of the pedagogical development in general, Plato asserted that the education of the individual belonged to the state alone, because the individual was to act wholly in the state. On the other hand, Aristotle also holds that the state should conduct the education of its citizens, and that the individual should be trained for the interest of the state; but he recognizes also the family, and the peculiarity of the individual, as positive powers, to which the state must accord relative freedom. Plato sacrificed the family to the state, and must therefore have sacred marriages, nurseries, and common and public educational institutions. Each one shall do only that which he is fitted to do, and shall work at this only for the sake of perfecting it: to what he shall direct his energies, and in what he shall be instructed, shall be determined by the government, and the individuality consequently is not left free. Aristotle also will have for all the citizens the same education, which shall be common and public; but he allows, at the same time, an independence to the family and self-determination to the individual, so that a sphere of private life presents itself within the state: a difference by means of which a much broader sway of individuality is possible.
—These two philosophers have come to represent two very different directions in Pedagogics, which at intervals, in certain stages of culture, reappear—the tyrannical guardianship of the state which assumes the work of education, tyrannical to the individual, and the free development of the liberal state-education, in opposition to idiosyncrasy and fate.—
§ 215. The principle of æsthetic individuality reaches its highest manifestation when the individual, in the decay of public life, in the disappearance of all beautiful morality, isolates himself, and seeks to gain in his isolation such strength that he can bear the changes of external history around him with composure—"ataraxy." The Stoics sought to attain this end by turning their attention inward into pure internality, and thus, by preserving the self-determination of abstract thinking and willing, maintaining an identity with themselves: the Epicureans endeavored to do the same, with this difference however, that they strove after a positive satisfaction of the senses by filling them with concrete pleasurable sensations. As a consequence of this, the Stoics isolated themselves in order to maintain themselves in the exclusiveness of their internal unconditioned relation to themselves, while the Epicureans lived in companies, because they achieved the reality of their pleasure-seeking principle through harmony of feeling and through the sweetness of friendship. In so far the Epicureans were Greeks and the Stoics Romans. With both, however, the beauty of manifestation was secondary to the immobility of the inner feeling. The plastic attainment of the Good and the Beautiful was cancelled in the abstraction of thinking and feeling. This was the advent of the Roman principle among the Greeks.
§ 216. The pedagogical significance of Stoicism and Epicureanism consists in this, that, after the moral life in public and in private were sundered from each other, the individual began to educate himself, through philosophical culture, into stability of character, for which reason the Roman emperors particularly disliked the Stoics. At many times, a resignation to the Stoic philosophy was sufficient to make one suspected. But, at last, the noble emperor, in order to win himself a hold in the chaos of things, was forced himself to become a Stoic and to flee to the inaccessible stillness of the self-thinking activity and the self-moving will. Stoics and Epicureans had both what we call an ideal. The Stoics used the expression "kingdom"; as Horace says, sarcastically, "Sapiens rex est nisi—pituita molesta est."
§ 217. The truth of the solution of the beautiful individuality is the promise of the activity conformable to its purpose [i.e. teleological activity], which on the one hand considers carefully end and means, and on the other hand seeks to realize the end through the corresponding means, and in this deed subjects mere beauty of form. The practical individuality is therefore externally conditioned, since it is not its own end like the Beautiful, whether Stoical or Epicurean, but has an end, and finds its satisfaction not so much in this after it is attained as in the striving for its attainment.
§ 218. The education of this system begins with very great simplicity. But after it has attained its object, it abandons itself to using the results of æsthetic culture as a recreation without any specific object. What was to the Greeks a real delight in the Beautiful became therefore with the Romans simply an æsthetic amusement, and as such must finally be wearisome. The earnestness of individuality made itself in mysticism into a new aim, which was distinguished from the original one in that it concealed in itself a mystery and exacted a theoretically æsthetic practice.