Schools of Hellas / An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 B. C.

by Kenneth J. Freeman

Otherwise, they sought this end whole-heartedly. The games, physical exercises, and hardships of a boy’s life were meant to develop his pluck, fortitude, and endurance. For, according to the Hellenic view, now too much neglected in many quarters, the condition and treatment of the body had a very important effect both upon mental activities and upon character. It was for this reason that physical training formed at least half of every system of education practised in Hellenic states or recommended by Hellenic philosophers. A National School which trained the minds only, and neglected the bodies of the pupils, would have been inconceivable to a Hellene. It was not merely that physical infirmities interrupted the free exercise of thought, or led to peevishness and lack of decision. Man was a whole to the Hellenes, and one part of him could not be sound if the other parts were not. So strongly did they hold this opinion, that they more than half believed that physical beauty was a sign of moral beauty; it was this latent idea which added an additional significance to the exercises of the palaistra with their symmetrical development of the body, and to the competitions for manly beauty which were prevalent throughout the country; it lent, moreover, a nobler aspect to that passion for the outward loveliness of youth which the vases, sculpture, and literature of ancient Hellas reveal so surprisingly. But, besides this vaguer and more doubtful connection with character, bodily exercise and development were supposed to have a special and indubitable effect in strengthening the resolution and will-power. The object of physical training was only in a minor degree to keep the body in good condition; its main aim was to develop strength of character, determination, fortitude, endurance, pluck, and energy. But, in accordance with that Hellenic canon of “moderation in all things,” which was worked out so thoroughly by Aristotle, there might be too much, as well as too little, of all these ethical qualities. Consequently physical exercise must be taken only in due moderation, and carefully balanced by artistic and musical training, which militated in an opposite direction, leading, if pursued in excess, to weakness of character, indecision, effeminacy, cowardice, and sloth. A scientifically arranged symmetry between the two would produce the perfect character.

In the literary and æsthetic schools there were two elements of the subjects taught, both with an ethical effect, matter and form. The literature studied in the schools was expected to be full of improving suggestions and life-histories of heroes worthy of imitation, couched in the form most attractive to young minds, in order that they might appreciate and love its teaching and examples. The music which the boys played or heard, the songs which they sang, the dances which they performed or watched, the art which they copied or observed, must be such as would influence their characters for good—mould them, that is, in accordance with the national ideal. For Hellenic morality was æsthetic; they followed the course which appealed to their imagination and sense of beauty. It was therefore the object of education to make the children see and feel beauty in virtue, and good art in good ethics, in order that they might find satisfaction for their æsthetic cravings—the dominant instinct of a Hellene—in living good and upright lives.

For the unanimous feeling of Hellas based ethics not upon duty, but upon happiness—upon the satisfaction, that is, of the instincts. But this eudæmonistic attitude was qualified by an important consideration which is often forgotten. Owing to the solidarity of Hellenic life, the happiness which was sought was primarily not that of the individual but that of the community. The readiness of the average Hellene, during the best period of the country, to sacrifice everything on behalf of his city is very remarkable. The real, if unformulated, basis of his ethics came thus to be not personal pleasure, but duty to the State. When the individualism of the Socratic age overthrew this basis, the Hellenes fell back from the happiness of the State to the happiness of the self, and both patriotism and personal morality suffered from the change.

It was the sense of duty to the State, the resolution to promote the happiness of the whole citizen-body, which made parents willing to undergo any sacrifice in order to have their sons educated in the way which would best minister to this ideal. The bills of the masters of letters and music and of the paidotribai, and the lengthy loss of the son’s services in the shop or on the farm in Attica, the break-up of family life at Sparta, must have been a sore trial to the parents and have involved many sacrifices. Yet there is no trace of grumbling. The Hellene felt that it was quite as much his duty to the State to educate her future citizens properly as it was to be ready to die in her cause, and he did both ungrudgingly. If the laws which made the teaching of letters compulsory at Athens fell into desuetude, it was only because the citizens needed no compulsion to make them do their duty. Nor had the State to pay the school bills; for every citizen, however poor, was ready to make the necessary sacrifices of personal luxuries and amusements in order to do his duty to the community by having his children properly taught. The State only interfered to make schooling as cheap and as easy to obtain as possible.

The solidarity of Hellenic life, which converted eudæmonism into patriotism, was carefully encouraged by the educational system. Sparta, with this object, invented the boarding-school, where boys learnt from early years to sink their individualities in a community of character and interests. The Athenians and most of the other Hellenes, on the other hand, had day-schools. This fact might seem to militate against the principle which I have stated. But Hellenic custom qualified the system of day-schools in a particular way. There were no home-influences in Hellas. The men-folk lived out of doors. The young Athenian or Ephesian from his sixth year onwards spent his whole day away from home (excepting possibly for an interval for the mid-day meal), in the company of his contemporaries, at school or palaistra or in the streets. When he came home, there was no home-life. His father was hardly ever in the house. His mother was a nonentity, living in the women’s apartments; he probably saw little of her. His real home was the palaistra, his chief companions his contemporaries and his paidagogos. He learned to dissociate himself from his family and associate himself with his fellow-citizens. No doubt he lost much by this system, but the solidarity of the State gained.

The duties of citizenship were also impressed upon the boys in other and more direct ways, especially its supreme duty, at any rate in those days, of military service. The schools of Sparta and Crete were one long training for war. The other States set apart two years of the boy’s life, those from eighteen to twenty, as a period of conscription, during which he was at the service of his city and under the orders of the military authorities, learning tactics and the use of arms, and being practised in the life of camps and forts. The young recruit took a solemn oath of allegiance to his country and its constitution: the sacredness of his civic duties was impressed upon him from the first. The first function of his new officers was to take him on a personally conducted tour, so to speak, of the national temples, that he might realise something of the religious life and history of his country. His weapons were solemnly presented to him in the theatre of Dionusos, before the assembled people; they were sacred, and to lose them in battle or disgrace them by cowardice was not only dishonourable, it was impious. Nor were the boys allowed to grow up in ignorance of the constitution of their city: the ephebos of eighteen had to be acquainted with the laws, some of which he had probably learnt in the music-school, set to a tune. Every means was taken of making the boys realise that they were members of a community, to whose prosperity and happiness their own advantage or pleasure must be subordinated. In this way grew up the strong Hellenic sense of an obligation of utter self-sacrifice on behalf of the State.

But education had also to consult the happiness of the children as well as the happiness of the community, although in a lesser degree. This may seem a startling statement to make with regard to Spartan education. Nevertheless, I believe it to be strictly true. It must be remembered that all our accounts of the rigours and horrors of Spartan methods come from Athenian writers who in all probability had never been to Lakedaimon. Xenophon, who had his sons educated there, gives a much milder, and wholly eulogistic, account. The somewhat hedonistic Attic visitor must have watched Spartan games and exercises with much the feelings of a French visitor at an English public school; he found it difficult to realise that the boys underwent such hardships of their own free will. Then we must remember what the Spartan boys were. They were a picked breed of peculiar toughness, strength, and health; for centuries every invalid had been exposed at birth or rejected as incapable of the school-system. Generation after generation had been trained to be thick-skinned and stout-hearted; pluck and endurance were hereditary, and asceticism was a national characteristic. The whole system, with its perpetual fighting, its rough games, its hardships, its fagging and “roughing-it” in the woods, is just what boys of this sort might be expected to evolve for themselves because they liked it. I have already pointed out, in my account of the Spartan schools, how very similar are many of the customs which grew up at the older English public schools, mainly on the boys’ own initiative. If English boys, brought up on the whole much less roughly, evolved such customs of their own free will, the young Spartans may reasonably be supposed to have accepted them gladly. One significant token of this survives. The violent and sometimes fatal floggings of the epheboi at the altar of Artemis Orthia were entirely voluntary on the part of the victims; yet there was no lack of candidates even in Plutarch’s days. The Spartan school-system was, in fact, an exact expression of the national characteristics, and accordingly was entirely acceptable to the Spartan boys.

That the Athenian system was designed to suit the wishes of the Athenian children is less difficult to establish. It is only necessary to think what the primary schools were like. When once the letters and rudiments of reading and writing had been mastered, the process perhaps being aided by metrical alphabets and dramatised spelling, the boys began to read, learn by heart, and write down the fascinating stories of adventure and the romantic tales of Homer. There was no grammar to be studied; that, when invented, came at a later age as a voluntary subject. There were no years wasted over “Primary Readers” consisting of dull and second-rate stories. The boys began at once upon the best and most attractive literature in their language, and it remained their study for many years, and was still remembered and loved in after life. Nor can it be doubted that the music- and art-schools were attractive to Athenian boys, sons of a people who filled their whole city with art, and made their year a round of musical festivals. A large part, too, of Athenian schooling was what now would be called play; for the Hellene recognised the importance of physical exercise in the upbringing of the young, and included it in his conception of education.

The effect upon Hellenic culture of thus making education attractive was far-reaching. Instead of regarding with aversion or a bored indifference the subjects which they had studied at school, the Hellenes had an affection for them and continued to practise and improve themselves in them. Throughout their lives they were eager to hear recitations of Homer. At banquets they sang the songs and played the music on the lyre which they had learnt at school. Elderly men would return to a music-master, to improve their style, or rush off to hear a Sophist lecture on geography or astronomy. The exercises of the palaistra were pursued till old age made them impossible. Grown citizens retained throughout an affection for education, and went on educating themselves all their lives. Thus an Hellenic city formed a centre of widely diffused culture, a home where literature and art and music and research could flourish surrounded by appreciation and capable criticism. Children, too, seeing how much their elders were preoccupied with education, found it even more attractive than its designers had made it, since they were not constrained by nursery-logic to see in it one of the plagues of youth from which “grown-ups” were set free. No doubt the Hellenic schoolmaster was much assisted in his endeavour to make education attractive by the intellectual curiosity which was a feature of all those States where the intellect was systematically trained. The young Athenian or young Chian was exceedingly eager to learn. In fact, his eagerness was excessive; he was too much in a hurry; he desired to have his information given to him ready-made, not having the patience to think or to undertake researches on his own account. Hence the phenomenal success and educational unsoundness of those prototypes of the modern “crammer,” the Sophists, who supplied their pupils with a superficial knowledge of many subjects ready-made, and already dressed in striking phraseology. This intellectual appetite for the accumulation of facts made secondary education at Athens attractive without much effort on the part of the teachers, but it was not allowed to influence the primary schools; a sound and symmetrical development of mind and body, artistic taste and moral character, had to precede the accumulation of facts. This latter stage too was universally treated as optional. In unintellectual districts it found no place, and even in Athens it was only for those who felt a desire for it; it was not forced upon the unwilling and incapable. For education was regarded as the development of the latent powers of the individual personality, it was no vain attempt to excite or implant non-existent faculties. Every one had a body, which he must make as efficient as possible, for the service of the State; every one, in an æsthetic people, had a taste which could be developed; every one had enough intellect to learn his letters; and every one, above all, had a character to be formed. But not every one could be an international athlete or a first-class artist or musician, and not every one had sufficient mental gifts to combine the accumulation of facts with profit or enjoyment.

In fact, Hellenic sentiment was distinctly adverse to great development in any one direction: the Hellenes had a reasonable horror of undue specialisation at school. The object of education was to make symmetrical, all-round men, sound alike in body, mind, character, and taste, not professional athletes who were mentally vacuous and without any appreciation of art, nor great thinkers of stunted physique, nor celebrated musicians who lacked brains. Opponents of the Spartan system tried to condemn it on this ground, as a specialisation intended only to produce good soldiers; but the pro-Spartans seemed to have claimed in return that it developed both character and good taste in judging art and music, even if it produced small capacity for painting or playing, while Laconian terseness involved a greater depth of mental exercise than Athenian verbosity.