The Maternal Slipper
48. Playing in the Streets.—Narrow, dirty, and dusty as the streets seem, children, even of good families, are allowed to play in them. After a rain one can see boys floating toy boats of leather in every mud puddle, or industriously making mud pies. In warm weather the favorite if cruel sport is to catch a beetle, tie a string to its legs, let it fly off, then twitch it back again. Leapfrog, hide-and-seek, etc., are in violent progress down every alley. The streets are not all ideal playgrounds. Despite genteel ideas of dignity and moderation, there is a great deal of foul talk and brawling among the passers, and Athenian children have receptive eyes and ears. Yet on the other hand, there is a notable regard and reverence for childhood. With all its frequent callousness and inhumanity, Greek sentiment abhors any brutality to young children. Herodotus the historian tells of the falling of a roof, whereby one hundred and twenty school children perished, as being a frightful calamity,[*] although recounting cold-blooded massacres of thousands of adults with never a qualm; and Herodotus is a very good spokesman for average Greek opinion.
[*] Herodotus, VI. 27.
49. The First Stories and Lessons.—Athens has no kindergartens. The first teaching which children will receive is in the form of fables and goblin tales from their mothers and nurses,—usually with the object of frightening them into “being good,”—tales of the spectral Lamiæ, or of the horrid witch Mormo who will catch nasty children; or of Empusa, a similar creature, who lurks in shadows and dark rooms; or of the Kabaloi, wild spirits in the woods. Then come the immortal fables of Æsop with their obvious application towards right conduct. Athenian mothers and teachers have no two theories as to the wisdom of corporeal punishment. The rod is never spared to the spoiling of the child, although during the first years the slipper is sufficient. Greek children soon have a healthy fear of their nurses; but they often learn to love them, and funeral monuments will survive to perpetuate their grateful memory.
50. The Training of Athenian Girls.—Until about seven years old brothers and sisters grow up in the Gynæconitis together. Then the boys are sent to school. The girls will continue about the house until the time of their marriage. It is only in the rarest of cases that the parents feel it needful to hire any kind of tutor for them. What the average girl knows is simply what her mother can teach her. Perhaps a certain number of Athenian women (of good family, too) are downright illiterate; but this is not very often the case. A normal girl will learn to read and write, with her mother for school mistress.[*] Very probably she will be taught to dance, and sometimes to play on some instrument, although this last is not quite a proper accomplishment for young women of good family. Hardly any one dreams of giving a woman any systematic intellectual training.[+] Much more important it is that she should know how to weave, spin, embroider, dominate the cook, and superintend the details of a dinner party. She will have hardly time to learn these matters thoroughly before she is “given a husband,” and her childhood days are forever over (see § 27).
[*] There has come down to us a charming Greek terra-cotta (it is true, not from Athens) showing a girl seated on her mother’s knee, and learning from a roll which she holds.
[+] Plato suggested in his Republic (V. 451 f.) that women should receive the same educational opportunities as the men. This was a proposition for Utopia and never struck any answering chord.
Meantime her brother has been started upon a course of education which, both in what it contains and in what it omits, is one of the most interesting and significant features of Athenian life.
Chapter IX.
The Schoolboys of Athens.
51. Athenians Generally Literate.—Education is not compulsory by law in Athens, but the father who fails to give his son at least a modicum of education falls under a public contempt, which involves no slight penalty. Practically all Athenians are at least literate. In Aristophanes’s famous comedy, The Knights, a boorish “sausage-seller” is introduced, who, for the purposes of the play, must be one of the very scum of society, and he is made to cry, “Only consider now my education! I can but barely read, just in a kind of way.”[*] Evidently if illiterates are not very rare in Athens, the fellow should have been made out utterly ignorant. “He can neither swim[+] nor say his letters,” is a common phrase for describing an absolute idiot. When a boy has reached the age of seven, the time for feminine rule is over; henceforth his floggings, and they will be many, are to come from firm male hands.