How far individual schoolmasters, as distinct from the State, gave prizes to their pupils, is little known; an epigram in the Anthology supplies the only evidence, by narrating that “Konnaros received eighty knucklebones because he wrote beautifully, better than the other boys.”[171] But probably as a general rule the task of rewarding merit was left to the public contests.
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Thus the State did much to encourage, if it did little to assist or enforce, education. With such splendid rewards before them, boys were probably quite eager to attend school, or at any rate the palaistra. As soon as they were old enough to go to school,[172] they were entrusted to an elderly slave,[173] who had to follow his master’s boys about wherever they went and never let them go out of his sight.[174] This was the paidagogos—a mixture of nurse, footman, chaperon, and tutor—who is so prominent a figure on the vases and in the literature of classical Hellas. There was only one for the family, so that all the boys had to go about together and to attend the same schools and the same palaistrai at the same time.[175] He waited on them in the house, carried their books or lyres to school, sat and watched them in the schoolroom, and kept a strict eye upon their manners and morality in the streets and the gymnasia. Thus, for instance, in Plato, Lusis and Menexenos have their paidagogoi in attendance at the palaistra, who come and force them away from the absorbing conversation of Sokrates, when it is time for them to go home.[176] On a vase these attendants may be seen sitting on stools behind their charges, in the schools of letters and music, with long and suggestive canes in their hands.[177] A careful parent would, of course, see that a slave who was to occupy so responsible a position was worthy of it: but great carelessness seems often to have been shown in this matter. The paidagogoi of Lusis and Menexenos, boys of rank and position, had a bad accent, and on a festival day, it is true, were slightly intoxicated.[178] Plutarch notices that in his time parents often selected for this office slaves who were of no use for any other purpose.[179] Xenophon, feeling the demerits of the Athenian custom, commends the Spartans, who entrust the boys not to slaves, but to public officials of the highest rank.[180] But in well-regulated households the paidagogos was often a most worthy and valuable servant. Sikinnos, who attended the children of Themistokles in this capacity, was entrusted by his master with the famous message to Xerxes, which brought on the battle of Salamis; he was afterwards rewarded with his freedom, the citizenship of Thespiai, and a substantial sum of money.[181] The custom of employing these male-nurses dated back to early times at Athens: for Solon made regulations about them.[182]
Boys were entrusted to paidagogoi as soon as they went to school at six. This tutelage might last till the boy was eighteen[183] and came of age; but more frequently it stopped earlier. Xenophon,[184] in his wish to disparage everything not Spartan, declares that in all other States the boys were set free from paidagogoi and schoolmasters as soon as they became μειράκια, i.e. at about fourteen or fifteen. The conjunction of schoolmasters suggests the explanation of the variations in age. When an elder brother ceased to attend school, and his younger brothers were still pursuing their studies, there being only one paidagogos, he had to be left unattended. But in cases where there was only one son, or where the eldest of several stayed on at school until he came of age, he would have the paidagogos to attend him until he was his own master.
The life of such an attendant must have been an anxious one in many cases. Plato compares his relations towards his charges with the relations of an invalid towards his health: “He has to follow the disease wherever it leads, being unable to cure it, and he spends his life in perpetual anxiety with no time for anything else.”[185] With unruly boys of different ages, and consequently of different tastes and desires, the slave must have been often in a difficult position. He had, however, the right of inflicting corporal punishment.
The chief object of the paidagogos was to safeguard the morals of his charges. Boys were expected to be as modest and quiet in their whole behaviour, and as carefully chaperoned, as young girls. Parents told the schoolmasters to bestow much more attention upon the boy’s behaviour than upon his letters and music.[186] This attitude was characteristic of Athens from the first. The school laws of Solon, as quoted by Aischines, deal wholly with morality. He gives the following account of them[187]:—
“The old lawgivers stated expressly what sort of life the free boy ought to lead and how he ought to be brought up; they also dealt with the manners of lads and men of other ages.” “In the case of the schoolmasters, to whom we are compelled to entrust our children, although their livelihood depends upon their good character, and bad behaviour is ruinous to them, yet the lawgiver obviously distrusts them. For he expressly states, first, the hour at which the free boy ought to go to school; secondly, how many other boys are to be present in the school; and then at what hour he is to leave. He forbids the schoolmasters to open their schools and the paidotribai their palaistrai before sunrise, and orders them to close before sunset, being very suspicious of the empty streets and of the darkness. Then he dealt with the boys who attended schools, as to who they should be and of what ages; and with the official who is to oversee these matters. He dealt too with the regulation of the paidagogoi, and with the festival of the Muses in the schools and of Hermes in the palaistrai. Finally, he laid down regulations about the joint attendance of the boys and the round of dithyrambic dances; for he directed that the Choregos should be over forty.”
“No one over the age of boyhood might enter while the boys were in school, except the son, brother, or son-in-law of the master: the penalty of infringing this regulation was death. At the festival of Hermes the person in charge of the gymnasium[188] was not to allow any one over age to accompany the boys in any way: unless he excluded such persons from the gymnasium, he was to come under the law of corrupting free boys.”
It will be noticed that these regulations are entirely concerned with morality: they safeguard an existing system. They prescribe neither the methods nor the subjects of education; for with such matters the Athenian government did not interfere. But over the question of morals it becomes unexpectedly tyrannous, and makes the most minute regulations worthy of the strictest bureaucracy. It interfered on this point in other ways also. The solemn council on the Areiopagos had a special supervision over the young, from Solon’s time onward; this was partially taken away from it by Ephialtes and Perikles, but the Axiochos shows that, though in abeyance, it continued to exist; in the middle of the fourth century, however, Isokrates laments that it had fallen into disuse.
The Axiochos also states that the ten Sophronistai, elected to guard the morals of the epheboi, exercised control over lads also. These officials probably took their rise in the days of Solon: the regulation that they must be over forty harmonises with the other enactments of those days; and, although they died out at the end of the fourth century, they were revived under the Roman Empire. Now it is most unlikely that the archaistic legislators of imperial times would have revived an office which had only existed during the closing decades of the fourth century. Solon is known to have appointed a magistracy specially to deal with the children;[189] and, if these magistrates were not the Sophronistai, all trace of his creation has been lost, which is most unlikely to have happened. So the Sophronistai probably date from early times. Their duty was a general supervision of the morals of the young; their chief function would be to prosecute, on behalf of the State, parents and schoolmasters who infringed Solon’s moral regulations. But such prosecutions would usually be undertaken by private individuals concerned in the case, and so this magistracy tended to become a sinecure. It may even have ceased to exist after the fall of the Areiopagos. But it seems to have revived under the restored democracy