He puffs his flute, they’re puffed away.
It was usual to play on two flutes at the same time. Such a pair has been found,[308] together with a lyre, in a tomb at Athens. The flutes are somewhat over a foot in length, and have five holes on the upper and one on the lower side. Each has a separate mouthpiece. Besides this, flute-players sometimes wore a sort of leathern muzzle[309] over their mouths; but this does not appear in the schools. The pair of flutes were carried in a double case, made of some spotted skin; it had a pocket on one side, to hold the mouthpieces,[310] and a cord attached by which it could be hung up when not in use. The two flutes seem to have corresponded to treble and bass, “male” and “female” as Herodotos calls them. The treble was on the right, the bass on the left.[311] Flutes could be set to different harmonies, apparently by some rearrangement of stops. In the case of the flute, as in the case of the lyre, individual tuition was the rule. First the master played an air, and then the boy had to repeat it, while the master criticised.[312] Or the master played the air on a barbitos and sang to it, while the pupil accompanied him on the flute. This method had two advantages. The master was able to play at the same time as the boy, and give him instruction while playing, which the flute prevented him from doing. The song, too, which he was enabled to sing obviated one of the chief disadvantages of the flute: for the Hellenes objected to instrumental music as meaningless, unless it was accompanied by words.
There seem to have been music-schools scattered throughout Attica, besides those established in the capital: the description of the village boys marching off to the lyre-master’s in a snow-storm without overcoats has already been quoted. The names of a few masters are extant. Lampros taught Sophocles the poet.[313] Sokrates[314] recommends Nikias to send his son to the famous Damon, who “is not merely a first-class musician, but also just the man to be with boys like this.” But whether these musicians kept regular schools cannot be ascertained. Sokrates himself in his later years attended the music-school of Konnos, and learned among the boys. “I am disgracing Konnos the music-master,” he says, “who is still teaching me to play the lyre. The boys who are my schoolfellows laugh at me and call Konnos the ‘Greybeard teacher.’”[315] The same Konnos adopted the common but iniquitous custom of bestowing his chief attention on his more promising pupils, while neglecting the backward.[316] Aristophanes caricatures Kleon’s school-days as follows: “The boys who went to school with Kleon say he would often set his lyre to the Dorian (= Gift-ian) harmony alone. Finally, the lyre-master lost his temper and told the paidagogos to take him away, saying, “This boy can’t learn anything but the Briberian (Dorodokisti) mode.”[317]
The attitude of the philosophers towards music will be discussed elsewhere. Plato’s view may be summed up in the words which he puts in the mouth of Protagoras the Sophist.[318] “The music-master makes rhythm and harmony familiar to the souls of the boys, and they become gentler and more refined, and having more rhythm and harmony in them, they become more efficient in speech and in action. The whole life of Man stands in need of good harmony and good rhythm.” Aristotle’s attitude is briefly this. “Music is neither a necessary nor a useful accomplishment in the sense in which Letters are useful, but it provides a noble and worthy means of occupying leisure-time.”[319]
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Aristotle mentions that in his day some added drawing and painting to the three parts of the course.[320] It was not universal, like these, and it does not seem to have started till the fourth century. In the Republic and Laws Plato does not attack and criticise it among the other educational subjects; but it plays so prominent a part in the Republic that it is obvious that the philosopher regarded it as a dangerous enemy to the views which he wished to spread. It is noticeable that the discussion of Art comes in as an after-thought, in Book X. May it not be inferred that when Plato wrote the earlier books, drawing and painting were not yet in vogue in the schools, but they became popular before he had finished his great work?
In Periclean Athens the possibilities of artistic training had certainly existed. In the Protagoras,[321] as an instance in some argument, it is suggested that the lad Hippokrates might “go to this young fellow who has been in Athens of late, Zeuxippos of Heraklea. Every day that he was with him he would improve as an artist.” Earlier in the same dialogue Sokrates remarks that his friend might go to Polukleitos or Pheidias, and pay to be taught sculpture.[322] The large numbers of boys who became apprentices to the potters at Athens must have learned line-drawing and designing and painting from the earliest times. But art probably did not become a usual part of a liberal, as distinct from a technical, education till the middle of the fourth century.
This date is fixed by a passage in Pliny.[323] According to him, its introduction was due to Pamphilos the Macedonian. At his instance, first at Sikuon, where he lived, and afterwards in the rest of Hellas, free boys were taught before everything painting on boxwood, and this art was included in the first rank of the liberal arts. Now Pamphilos’ picture of the Herakleidai is mentioned in the Ploutos of Aristophanes, which appeared in 388 B.C. Apelles, his pupil, began to come into prominence about 350: Pamphilos himself seems to have lived on till the close of the century. The introduction of painting into the schools at Sikuon may therefore be dated, roughly, about 360 B.C., and from there the custom spread over Hellas. By 300 B.C. no doubt art had become a regular part of the educational curriculum; for the philosopher Teles,[324] who probably lived about that time, mentions the gymnastic trainer, the letter-master, the musician, and the painter as the four chief burdens of boys. A trace of the new art-schools, with their technical vocabulary, is found in the Laws, the work of Plato’s old age:[325] “paint in or shade off,” he says, “or whatever the artists’ boys call it.”
Of the methods used in drawing and painting in Hellas little trace is left. Polugnotos and his contemporaries had produced idealised pictures, taking points from many beautiful men and women and uniting them to make one perfect man or woman. When Idealism gave way to Realism in Hellas, the change affected painting also. The artists tried to create a real illusion in their works, taking subjects like chairs or tables and making the spectator believe them to be real. They were helped by the developments of perspective and foreshortening, which were discovered at this time. It is against this exaggerated realism and the choice of homely subjects that Plato’s attack is directed: he hates such illusions as shams.[326] In the diatribes of the Republic the possibility of idealised painting seems to be forgotten. Whether the boys in the art-schools also suffered by this change and were condemned to draw chairs and tables only cannot be decided.
The pupils, of course, did not have paper to draw and paint upon, nor was canvas employed. Ordinarily they used white wood, boxwood for preference, owing to its smoothness. Lead or charcoal would serve for drawing; for erasures, instead of india-rubber a sponge was used.[327] They may, perhaps, have practised on their wax tablets. One process was σκιαγραφία “shadow-drawing,” which produced rough sketches in light and shade: these seem to have been only intelligible when considered from a distance. Plato regarded them with distrust, as a sort of conjuring.[328]