No doubt the fees varied according to the merits of the school, for the schools at Athens seem to have differed greatly. Demosthenes, when boasting of his career, in his speech On the Crown, says that he went as a boy to the respectable schools;[220] the quality and quantity of the teaching must have been varied to suit the parent’s pocket. For the poor there would probably be schools where only the elements of reading and writing were taught. In the higher class of school these elements would be taught by under-masters, frequently slaves; but free citizens might also be reduced by poverty to take such a post. This may be seen from the case of the father of Aischines, the orator.[221] Impoverished and exiled like many democrats by the Thirty Tyrants, he returned with the Restoration a ruined man. To earn his living, he became an usher at the school of one Elpias, close to the Theseion, and taught letters: his son Aischines seems to have begun his life by assisting his father in this occupation. His opponent, Demosthenes, takes advantage of the contempt with which these ushers were regarded to declare that the father was a slave of Elpias,[222] “wearing big fetters and a collar,” and the son was employed in “grinding the ink and sponging the forms and sweeping out the schoolroom (παιδαγωγεῖον), the work of a servant, not of a free boy.”
No doubt letters and music were often taught at the same school, in different rooms. Such an arrangement would be natural and convenient. The vases suggest it, but their evidence is uncertain. The school buildings seem often to have been surrounded by playgrounds. A passage in Aelian[223] shows us the boys, just let out of school, playing at tug-of-war. No doubt in these places they played with their hoops and tops, and amused themselves with pick-a-back and the stone- and dice-games which corresponded to our marbles. In villages these playgrounds probably did duty as palaistrai.
The headmaster of the school sat on a chair with a high back; under-masters and boys had stools without backs, but cushions were provided. For lessons in class there were benches.[224] There was a high reading-desk for recitations. Round the walls hung writing-tablets, rulers, and baskets or cases containing manuscript rolls labelled with the author’s name, composing the school library; the rolls might also hang by themselves.[225] Masters were expected to possess at any rate a copy of Homer—Alkibiades thrashed one who did not. Sometimes they emended their edition themselves.[226] In the music-schools hung lyres and flutes and flute-cases. The (παιδαγωγειον) mentioned by Demosthenes may have been an anteroom where the paidagogoi sat, but more probably the word is only a rhetorical variant for “schoolroom.” There were often busts of the Muses round the walls,[227] which were also decorated with vases, serving for domestic purposes, and, perhaps, illustrating with their pictures the books which the boys were reading. At a later date, at any rate, a series of cartoons, illustrating scenes in the Iliad and Odyssey, were sometimes hung upon the walls: the “Tabula Iliaca,” now in the Capitoline Museum, has been recognised as a fragment of such a series.
The first stage was to learn to read and write. Instead of a slate, boys in Hellas had tablets of wax, usually made in two halves, so as to fold on a hinge in the middle, the waxen surfaces coming inwards and so being protected. Sometimes there were three pieces, forming a triptych, or even more. For pencil, they had an instrument with a sharp point at one end, suitable for making marks on the wax, and a flat surface at the other, which was used to erase what had been written, and so make the tablets ready for future use. These tablets are shown in the school-scenes on the fifth-century vases.[228] At a later period, when parchment and papyrus became more common, these materials were used in the schools. Lines could be ruled with a lump of lead, and writing done either with ink and a reed pen or with lead; for erasures a sponge was employed.
The early stages of learning to write are described in the Protagoras of Plato.[229] “When a boy is not yet clever at writing, the masters first draw lines, and then give him the tablet and make him write as the lines direct.” The passage has been variously interpreted. Some regard the master as merely writing a series of letters which the boy is to copy underneath. The word used in Greek for the master’s writing is ὑπογράψαντες, and it is significant that the word for a “copy” in this sense is a derivative of this word, ὑπογραμμός. Such a copy, corresponding to the phrases like “England exports engines” or “Germany grows grapes,” which are employed in English schools for this purpose, is extant.[230] It is a nonsense sentence designed to contain all the letters of the alphabet μάρπτε σφὶγξ κλὼψ ζβυχθηδόν. If this rendering is correct, the master wrote a sentence of this sort on the tablets, and the boy copied it underneath. Others interpret the lines which the master draws on the tablet as parallel straight lines, within which the boy had to write. Just such a device is often employed in English copy-books. The word used for “lines,” γραμμαί, usually means “straight lines,” which supports this interpretation. But ὑπογραφή, on the other hand, a derivative of ὑπογράφειν, is used for irregular traces, e.g. a footstep,[231] and ὑπογράφειν itself is a technical term in Hellenic art for “sketching in” what is afterwards to be finished in detail. Consequently a third rendering of the passage makes the master draw a faint, rough outline of the various letters, and the boy has to go over them with his pen, marking the grooves in the wax deeper and filling in the details. For example, in England, the master might draw |·| and the boy go over the two vertical lines and draw in the other two, M. Thus all three interpretations are sensible and rest on good authority. But surely the master may be regarded as adopting all three processes, according to the intelligence of the pupils. For the beginner he would outline the whole letter, and leave him only the task of going over it again. Then he would gradually give less and less help, till the boy was capable of writing the letters with the assistance of the parallel lines alone. Finally these would be withdrawn, and the boy would be left to write his imitation of the copy without assistance. The phrase in Plato is purposely vague, and will include the whole of this process.
The letters were written in lines horizontal and vertical, so that they fell beneath one another. No stops or accents were inserted, and no spaces were left between words. The writing-master probably ruled both the horizontal and the vertical lines on the tablet for his pupil. On the Vase of Douris,[232] an under-master is represented as writing with his pen on a wax tablet, while a boy stands in front of him. He is probably meant either to be writing a copy or else correcting his pupil’s exercise. Over his head hangs a ruler, for marking out the guiding lines on the tablet. Behind the boy sits a bearded man with a staff, who is probably the paidagogos. The boys in the class are clearly coming up one by one to receive their copies or have their exercises corrected, while the rest are doing their writing. It will be noticed that there is no desk or table: the Hellenes wrote with their tablets on their knees.
As soon as the boy had acquired a certain facility in writing, he entered the dictation class. The master read out something, and the boys wrote it down.[233] At first, of course, very simple words would be dictated, and there would not be much to write. But, later on, the boys would write at his dictation passages of the poets and other authors. For this purpose, ink and parchment may sometimes have been employed: Aischines seems to have “ground ink”[234] for a writing-school. Various “elaborations in the way of speed and beauty” of writing seem to have been customary in the case of more advanced pupils.[235] Possibly they learnt to make flourishes and ornamental letters. Speed would naturally be taught, for it was usual to take notes at the lectures of Sophists and Philosophers, and speed is required for this purpose. This must have involved the use of the cursive letters, which otherwise were not needed, for the Hellene had not very much writing to do, unless he became a clerk to a public body.
Learning to read must have been a difficult business in Hellas, for books were written in capitals at this time. There were no spaces between the words, and no stops were inserted. Thus, the reader had to exercise much ingenuity before he could arrive at the meaning of a sentence. Still more difficult for the boys to grasp was the Attic accent, upon which the masters set a great importance. So difficult was it, that few foreigners ever acquired it, and a born Athenian, if he went abroad for a few years, often lost the power of speaking with the Attic intonation. The first step in learning to read is to acquire the alphabet. The Hellenes, wishing, as usual, to make learning as easy as possible, seem to have put the alphabet into verse. A metrical alphabet, ascribed to Kallias, a contemporary of Perikles, is still extant, but in a mutilated form, which has been restored in several not very convincing ways. Probably it has been adapted to suit different alphabets, for there were several current in different parts of Hellas. The following is a conjectural restoration:—
ἔστ’ ἄλφα, βῆτα, γάμμα, δέλτα τ’, εἶ τε, καί
ζῆτ’, ἦτα, θῆτ’, ἴωτα, κάππα, λάβδα, μῦ,