Part I
THE "OLD EDUCATION" (b.c. 776-480)
CHAPTER I
EDUCATION FOR WORK AND FOR LEISURE
When we consider the different arts that have been discovered, and distinguish between those which relate to the necessary conditions of life and those which contribute to the free enjoyment of it (διαγωγή), we always consider the man who is acquainted with the latter wiser than him who is acquainted with the former, for the reason that the sciences of the latter have no reference to use. Hence it was only when all the necessary conditions of life had been attained that those arts were discovered which have no reference either to pleasure or to the common needs of life; and this took place first in those countries where men enjoyed leisure.—Aristotle.
The free life of God is such as are our brief best moments.—Id.
It is not fitting that the free enjoyment of life should be permitted to boys or to young persons; for the crown of perfection belongs not to the imperfect.—Id.
Obviously, the free enjoyment of life demands not only the noble but also the pleasant; for happiness consists of these too.—Id.
Among the Homeric Greeks, whose life was almost entirely devoted to practical pursuits, education was mainly practical, aiming to produce "a speaker of words and a doer of deeds." As civilization advanced, and higher political forms were evolved, certain classesof men found themselves blessed with leisure which they were not inclined to devote to mere play. In order to make a worthy use of this leisure, they required a certain training in those arts which were regarded as befitting a free man. Education, accordingly, in some states, widened its scope, to include those accomplishments, which enable men to fill their hours of freedom with refined and gracious enjoyment—music and letters. Music, indeed, had been cultivated long before, not only by professional bards, but even by princes, like Achilles and Paris; this, however, was for the sake of amusement and recreation rather than of the free enjoyment of life. It had been regarded as a means, not as an end. We must be careful, in our study of Greek life and education, not to confound play and recreation, which are for the sake of work, with the free enjoyment of life, which is an end in itself, and to which all work is but a means. "Enjoyment is the end." We shall see, as we proceed, to what momentous results this distinction leads, how it governs not only all education but all the institutions of life, and how it finally contributes to break up the whole civilization which it determines. It may fairly be said that Greece perished because she placed the end of life in individual æsthetic enjoyment, possible only for a few and regarding only the few.
In historic Greece, music came to be an essential part of the education of every free man. Even free women learnt it. Along with music went poetry, and when this came to be written down, it was termed "letters." As every free man came to be his own minstrel and his own rhapsode, the professional minstrel and rhapsode disappeared, and the Homeric poems even, in order to be preserved from oblivion, were committed to writing by an enlightened tyrant—Pisistratus.
The first portion of the Greek people that attained a degree of civilization demanding an education for hours of leisure, was the Æolian race, and particularly the Asiatic portion of it. Accordingly we find that all the earliest musicians and poets, didactic and lyric, are Æolians—Hesiod, Terpander, Arion, Alcæus, Sappho, Pittacus, etc. Lesbos seems to have taken the lead in this "higher education." The last five names all belong to that island, which produced also the earliest Greek historian and prose-writer—Hellanicus. But the Æolians, though earliest in the field, were soon outstripped by the other two races, the Doric and the Ionic. Æolian education and culture never advanced beyond music and lyric poetry. It knew no drama, science, or philosophy.