Another joining them across their middles.
The third is like a curl of hair. The fourth,
One upright line and three crosswise infixed.
The fifth is hard to tell: from several points
Two lines run down to form one pedestal.
The last is with the third identical.
In the same spirit, Sophocles, in his satyric drama Amphiaraos, introduced an actor who represented the shapes of the letters by his dancing.[240] Periclean Athens seems to have taken a very keen interest in matters of spelling: the audience must all have known their letters, or such devices could never have become so popular.
Kallias’ play is the ancestor of such books as Reading without Tears. His dramatic presentation of the process of spelling must have caught the imagination and impressed the memory of many Athenian boys. It may even be suspected that his method was adopted in enterprising schools, and spelling lessons were conducted to a tune, perhaps even accompanied by dancing.[241] The tunes of Kallias were highly praised, and were, no doubt, very different from the monotonous drone which announces to the outside world the presence of a Board School.
To return to more prosaic methods. Plato gives an interesting sketch[242] of a reading class. “When boys have just learnt their letters, they recognise any of them readily enough in the shortest and easiest syllables, and are able to give a correct answer about them. But in the longer and more difficult syllables they are not certain, but form a wrong opinion and answer wrongly. Then the best way is to take them back to the syllables in which they recognise the same letters and then compare them with those in which they made mistakes, and, putting them side by side, show that in both combinations the same letters have the same meaning.”
Take an English example. The master writes SCRAPE on the blackboard and asks the boys to tell him what letters it contains. The class fail to recognise the letters: the word is too long and difficult. The master then writes beside it consecutively APE, RAPE, CAPE, in all of which the boys recognise the letters correctly. Then CRAPE and SCRAP. From these he passes on to SCRAPE, which they now recognise by analogy from the words which they know already. “Finally, they learn always to give the same name to the same letter whenever it comes.”[243]