Thus Hellenic education was not intended to produce professional knowledge of a single subject; such technical instruction was deemed unworthy of the name of education, and was excluded from the schools. The subjects studied were for the most part a means, not an end. Just as a walk is sometimes taken not for the sake of reaching any particular place, but in order to keep the muscles of the body in good condition, so education in Hellas was meant to develop and exercise the muscles of mind, imagination, and character, not to inculcate so-called “useful” information. The literature read at school was imaginative poetry, like that of Homer or Simonides, not the practical prose treatises upon Agriculture and Economics which utilitarian motives would have demanded. For the poetry was both attractive to the boys and improving for their characters, while the handbooks, however excellent, only enhanced their financial prospects. The immediate future of the individual boy may, it is true, depend somewhat largely upon the utilitarian knowledge which he has learnt at school, although a sound education in the Hellenic sense of the word will prove more advantageous to him in the long run; but the future of a State depends upon the character of its citizens. Thus a truly national education like that of Sparta or of Athens seeks to train the characters of the future citizens; having formed their characters, it leaves them with well-justified confidence to gain what technical instruction they need for themselves. At a national crisis it was not skill in trade or profession, not good cobbling, nor good weaving, that Athens required of her citizens; but pluck, energy, self-sacrifice, obedience, and loyalty. Money was, it is true, required for building the triremes and for fortifying the city: it was therefore well that Athenian trade and manufactures should prosper. But Athens recognised, and rightly, that her financial resources would be better served if she trained her boys to be industrious and thrifty and ascetic, if she made it repugnant to their taste to fling their money away upon luxury and self-indulgence, than if she founded the finest system of technical instruction possible.

But whether Sparta and Athens could have ignored technical and utilitarian subjects so wholly in their schools, if they had been educating the whole population of the State, is another question. It must be remembered that the Spartan and Athenian citizens who attended the schools were only a fraction of the inhabitants of Laconia and Attica. They corresponded pretty closely to the upper classes, the aristocracy and gentlemen, of a modern State. The bulk of the middle and lower classes in a Hellenic State were either foreign immigrants, who possessed no civic rights and did not usually attend the schools, or serfs and slaves. Athens, like mediæval Florence, was only a democracy in the very limited sense that her full citizens—a governing class, that is, and a mere fraction of the population—had equality of civic rights among themselves: the rest had no rights at all. Sparta was a “mixed constitution”; but that did not mean that the middle and lower classes, the Perioikoi and Helots, had any share in it whatever.

Consequently education in Hellas is the education of a small upper class, not of the whole population of the State. The schools of Hellas were not necessarily for the wealthiest inhabitants of the country, for there were plenty of rich Metoikoi and poor citizens at Athens; not necessarily for the boys who had most leisure, for the sausage-seller goes to school as well as a Nikias or Alkibiades; but for a hereditary aristocracy of birth, for that is what Hellenic “citizenship” means. The boys who attended the lessons of Dionusios or Elpias were the sons and grandsons of a cultured class, no matter how humble their circumstances might be; their families had lived in Attica, they believed, from time immemorial, and were probably descended from the local deities. They had the views of an hereditary caste, including a certain preoccupation with physical and military activities, and a contempt for trade.

For the duties of such an aristocracy did not consist in heaping up riches; their position was comparatively independent of their financial successes. Their work was, in brief, to govern and to fight. They composed the electorate of the State, which chose the magistrates; they alone were members of the public Assembly; they alone were eligible for office. They sat as dikastai—jurymen and justices in one—in the law-courts; they made the laws and they administered them. The national honour and morality lay in their hands, for they controlled alike the foreign and the home policy of the State. They formed, too, the cultured circle which governed natural taste; it was their criticism which shaped the art of the vase-painters, the architects, the sculptors, the bronze-makers, and the countless other artistic tradesmen, the style of the orators, the literature of dramatists and dithyrambists, the music of the choric composers. When governors and administrators were needed for the outlying districts of the Athenian or Spartan Empires, or if officers were required to lead local levies to battle, any citizen, rich or poor, might be sent. The citizens, too, formed the core of the fleets and armies in the best days of Hellas. The object of Hellenic education was to produce this type of citizen—a man capable of governing, of fighting, and of setting the taste and standards of his country.

Thus the schools of Hellas correspond in England not to the national schools, but to the “public schools.” I do not mean to assert that the English public-school boy stands, in after life, in the position of the Hellenic citizen to the bulk of the population. English democracy rests on a wider basis than Athenian or Florentine, and, in theory at any rate, the exclusive power of the “upper classes” is at an end. None the less it is true that from among the boys educated at the public schools comes a very considerable part of the generals and military officers, of the clergy, of the squires, of the Justices of the Peace and other administrators of the law, of the governors and officials required by the Indian Empire and the various dependencies and Crown Colonies, of the members of Parliament and statesmen at home. If the influence of the public schools of England upon the governing and fighting of the nation is less than that which the schools of Hellas were able to exercise, their influence upon national taste and standards in art and culture and literature is probably in no way inferior. It is therefore their duty to train their pupils’ characters, that they may be fit and able administrators, governors, and justices; and their tastes, that their criticism and demands may rightly direct the culture of the nation. In striving after these ends, the public schools of England may, I think, take not a few hints from the like-motived schools of Hellas.


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