[95] Polemon ap. Athen. 56 a, and 138-139.
[96] Cp. the crèche temples in Plato’s Laws, 794 A.
[97] Demetrius of Scepsis (ap. Athen. 141 e).
CHAPTER II
ATHENS AND THE REST OF HELLAS:
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Laconia and Crete were mainly agricultural countries that had little concern with trade or manufactures. Their citizens comprised a landed aristocracy, supported by estates which were cultivated for them by a subject population; there was no necessity, therefore, for them to prepare their boys for any profession or trade, or even to instruct them in the principles of agriculture. The young Spartan or Cretan no more needed professional or technical instruction of any sort than the richer absentee Irish landlords of the present day. He could give the whole of his school-time, without any sacrifice of his financial prospects, to the training of his body and of his character.
But the rest of Hellas was for the most part the scene of busy manufactures and extensive trade. It would be natural to expect that great commercial peoples, like the Athenians or the Ionians of Asia Minor, would have set great store by the commercial elements of education, and to assume that business methods and utilitarian branches of study would have occupied a large place in their schools. But this was very far from being the case. To a Hellene education meant the training of character and taste, and the symmetrical development of body, mind, and imagination. He would not have included under so honourable a name either any course of instruction in which the pupils mastered their future trade or profession, or any accumulation of knowledge undertaken with the object of making money. Consequently technical training of all sorts was excluded from Hellenic schools and passed over in silence by Hellenic educationalists. Information concerning it must be pieced together from stray facts and casual allusions, and the whole idea of “utilitarian” instruction, in the modern sense of the word, must be carefully put aside during any consideration of Hellenic schools.
For the Hellenes as a nation regarded all forms of handicraft as bourgeois (βάναυσος) and contemptible. Herodotos says that they derived this view from the surrounding peoples, who all held it.[98] To do anything in order to extract money from some one else was, in their opinion, vulgar and ungentlemanly. The lyric poets and the Sophists were alike blamed for taking fees. The cheapness and abundance of serf- or slave-labour made it possible for a large proportion of the free population to live in idleness, and devote their time to the development of the body by physical exercises, of the mind by perpetual discussions, and of the imagination by art and music. Citizenship required leisure, in the days before representative government came into vogue. It was owing to this principle that the Athenian received pay for a day’s attendance in the Law Courts or the Assembly, for by this means the poorest citizen obtained an artificial leisure for the performance of his duties. Otherwise true citizenship was impossible. Plato regards a tradesman as unfit to be an acting citizen.[99] Aristotle rejects as unworthy of a free man all trades which interfere with bodily development or take time which ought to be devoted to mental improvement.[100] Xenophon explains the reason of this attitude. The discredit which attaches to the bourgeois occupations is quite natural; for they ruin the physical condition of those who practise them, compelling them to sit down and live in the shade, and in some cases to spend their day by the fire. The body thus becomes effeminate, and the character is weakened at the same time. Tradesmen, too, have less leisure for serving their friends and the State. In some communities, especially the most warlike, the citizens are not allowed to practise sedentary trades.[101] The owner of a factory or a farm worked by slave-labour was exempt from corrupting influences: it was only actual work which was degrading.
A large number, however, from among the poorer classes were compelled to work with their own hands; so these, as well as the slaves, required technical instruction. Some indications survive as to the manner in which this was imparted. Trades were mostly hereditary; “the sons of the craftsmen learn their fathers’ trade, so far as their fathers and their friends of the same trade can teach it.”[102] But others might also learn. Xenophon mentions such cases. “When you apprentice a boy to a trade,” he says, “you draw up a statement of what you mean him to be taught,”[103] and the fees were not paid unless this agreement was carried out. The Kleitophon[104] mentions as the two functions of the builder or the doctor the practising of their profession and the teaching of pupils. The Republic[105] says: “If owing to poverty a craftsman is unable to provide the books and other requisites of his calling, his work will suffer, and his sons and any others whom he may be teaching will not learn their trade so well.” The teaching of building is mentioned in the Gorgias.[106] In the Republic[107] Plato states that the παῖδες of the potters—a word which will include both sons and apprentices—act as servants and look on for a long time before they are allowed to try their hands themselves at making pots. “To learn pot-making on a wine-jar” was a proverb for beginning with the most difficult part of a subject. The pupils of a doctor named Pittalos are mentioned in the Acharnians of Aristophanes.[108] The comic poets of the early third century contain several references to cookery-schools. Sosipater makes one cook say that his pupils must learn astrology, architecture, and strategy before they come to him, just as Plato had exacted a preliminary knowledge of mathematics from his disciples. Euphron gives ten months as the minimum length of a course of cookery. Aristotle mentions a man at Syracuse who taught slaves how to wait at table, and perform their household duties: perhaps the play of Pherekrates[109] entitled The Slave-Teacher may have dealt with a similar case. From these fragments a picture can be drawn of a regular system of apprenticeship by which the knowledge of the trades was handed down. Solon, wishing to encourage Athenian manufactures, had enacted that if a father did not have his son taught some trade, he could not legally demand to be supported in his old age.[110] But the general opinion of Hellas still maintained that “technical instruction and all teaching which aimed only at money-making was vulgar and did not deserve the name of education. True education aimed solely at virtue, making the child yearn to be a good citizen, skilled to rule and to obey.”[111] For all the gold on the earth and under it, according to Plato, could not pay the price of virtue, or deserve to be given in exchange for a man’s soul. Thus the Spartans and Cretans did not stand alone, but had the support of all Hellas, in banishing from their schools any idea of technical or professional instruction.