II. EDUCATION

Athens provides public gymnasiums and palaestras, and exercises some loose supervision over teachers; but the city has no public schools or state universities, and education remains in private hands. Plato advocates state schools,¹⁰ but Athens seems to believe that even in education competition will produce the best results. Professional schoolmasters set up their own schools, to which freeborn boys are sent at the age of six. The name paidagogos is given not to the teacher but to the slave who conducts the boy daily to and from school; we hear of no boarding schools. Attendance at school continues till fourteen or sixteen, or till a later age among the well to do.¹¹ The schools have no desks but only benches; the pupil holds on his knee the roll from which he reads or the material upon which he writes. Some schools, anticipating much later fashions, are adorned with statues of Greek heroes and gods; a few are elegantly furnished. The teacher teaches all subjects, and attends to character as well as intellect, using a sandal.*¹²

The curriculum has three divisions—writing, music, and gymnastics; eager modernists will add, in Aristotle’s day, drawing and painting.¹⁴ Writing includes reading and arithmetic, which uses letters for numbers. Everyone learns to play the lyre, and much of the material of instruction is put into poetical and musical form.¹⁵ No time is spent in acquiring any foreign language, much less a dead one, but great care is taken in learning the correct usage of the mother tongue. Gymnastics are taught chiefly in the gymnasium and the palaestra, and no one is considered educated who has not learned to wrestle, swim, and use the bow and the sling.

The education of girls is carried on at home, and is largely confined to “domestic science.” Outside of Sparta girls take no part in public gymnastics. They are taught by their mothers or nurses to read and write and reckon, to spin and weave and embroider, to dance and sing and play some instrument. A few Greek women are well educated, but these are mostly hetairai; for respectable ladies there is no secondary education, until Aspasia lures a few of them into rhetoric and philosophy. Higher education for men is provided by professional rhetors and sophists, who offer instruction in oratory, science, philosophy, and history. These independent teachers engage lecture halls near the gymnasium or palaestra, and constitute together a scattered university for pre-Platonic Athens. Only the prosperous can study under them, for they charge high fees; but ambitious youths work by night in mill or field in order to be able to attend by day the classes of these nomadic professors.

When boys reach the age of sixteen they are expected to pay special attention to physical exercises, as fitting them in some measure for the tasks of war. Even their sports give them indirectly a military preparation: they run, leap, wrestle, hunt, drive chariots, and hurl the javelin. At eighteen they enter upon the second of the four stages of Athenian life (pais, ephebos, aner, geron—child, youth, man, elder), and are enrolled into the ranks of Athens’ soldier youth, the epheboi.† Under moderators chosen by the leaders of their tribes they are trained for two years in the duties of citizenship and war. They live and eat together, wear an impressive uniform, and submit to moral supervision night and day. They organize themselves democratically on the model of the city, meet in assembly, pass resolutions, and erect laws for their own governance; they have archons, strategoi, and judges.¹⁶ For the first year they are schooled with strenuous drill, and hear lectures on literature, music, geometry, and rhetoric.¹⁷ At nineteen they are assigned to garrison the frontier, and are entrusted for two years with the protection of the city against attack from without and disorder within. Solemnly, in the presence of the Council of Five Hundred, with hands stretched over the altar in the temple of Agraulos, they take the oath of the young men of Athens:

I will not disgrace the sacred arms, nor will I abandon the man next to me, whoever he may be. I will bring aid to the ritual of the state, and to the holy duties, both alone and in company with many. I will transmit my native commonwealth not lessened, but larger and better than I have received it. I will obey those who from time to time are judges; I will obey the established statutes, and whatever other regulations the people shall enact. If anyone shall attempt to destroy the statutes I will not permit it, but will repel him both alone and with all. I will honor the ancestral faith.¹⁸

The epheboi are assigned a special place at the theater, and play a prominent role in the religious processions of the city; perhaps it is such young men that we see riding so handsomely on the Parthenon frieze. Periodically they exhibit their accomplishments in public contests, above all in the relay torch race from the Piraeus to Athens. All the city comes out for this picturesque event, and lines the four-and-a-half-mile road; the race is run at night, and the way is not illuminated; all that can be seen of the runners is the leaping light of the torches that they carry forward and pass on. When, at the age of twenty-one, the training of the epheboi is completed, they are freed from parental authority, and formally admitted into the full citizenship of the city.

Such is the education—eked out by lessons learned in the home and in the street—that produces the Athenian citizen. It is an excellent combination of physical and mental, moral and esthetic, training, of supervision in youth with freedom in maturity; and in its heyday it turns out young men as fine as any in history. After Pericles theory grows and beclouds practice; philosophers debate the goals and methods of education—whether the teacher should aim chiefly at intellectual development or at moral character, chiefly at practical ability or the promotion of abstract science. But all agree in attaching the highest importance to education. When Aristippus is asked in what way the educated are superior to the untutored he answers, “as broken horses are to the unbroken”; and Aristotle to the same question replies, “as the living are to the dead.” At least, adds Aristippus, “If the pupil derives no other good, he will not, when he attends the theater, be one stone upon another.”¹⁹