J. P. Mahaffy

“ The games and sports of children, all over the world, are as uniform as the weapons and designs of savages. The delights and disappointments of education have also remained the same, at least in many respects. The conflict of theoretical and practical educators, and the failure of splendid schemes for the reform of society by a systematic training of youth, mark every over-ripe civilization. Here, then, if anywhere, we may gain a distinct advantage by contemplating the problems, which we ourselves are solving, under discussion in a remote society. ”

“ Burdened as we are with these defects of national character, the products of the subtler and more genial, if less solid and truthful, Hellenic race are particularly well worth our consideration. This has been so thoroughly recognized by thoughtful men in our generation as to require no further support by argument. It only remains that each of our Hellenists should do his best, in some distinct line, to make the life of the Greeks known to us with fairness and accuracy. ”

“ He is just as careful as Plato in recommending care of unborn children by attention to their mothers’ air and exercise. He is still more ruthless in advocating the destruction, either before or after birth, of illegitimate offspring. Neither can he, any more than Plato, imagine an ideal state capable of such expansion as to contain a great people, nor can he dispense with disabilities for most of its members, such as slaves and operatives. ”

“ If we ask where in Greece the home enjoyed the greatest honor and sanctity, where the house-mother stood highest in reverence and social importance, and where violations of fidelity were rarest, no one would hesitate to answer, At Sparta. Yet at Sparta all the sentiment, all the delicacy, of the marriage-tie was sacrificed to the duty of producing healthy children for the State. Plutarch tells us of a state of things which modern people would think wholly subversive of all purity—of old men ceding their rights of temporary unions and exchanges for the sake of desirable offspring. ”

“ Hence, when it occurs to a modern reader that the main superiority of our education over the Greek is the early training in the Scriptures—a training, alas! decaying in earnestness every day—an old Athenian or Milesian or Cean would deny the fact, and say that they, too, had an inspired volume, written for their learning, in which all the moral virtues and all the necessaries of faith were contained. ”

“ But we may at least conceive the position of Isocrates’ pupils if we compare it with that of the popular preachers, so powerful a generation ago, and even now playing no unimportant part in society. I have known more than one of these eminent men who educated themselves with great care generally, and in all directions, for the purpose of supplying themselves with matter for their discourses. And this is very well-meant, legitimate, and honest education, though perverted in order, and, like that of Isocrates, not likely to lead to really deep and thorough knowledge. ”

“ And it is the peculiar province of music to awaken emotions too subtle and various for the coarser utterance of words, and therefore to fill the mind with feelings delightful, indeed, and deep, but from their very nature unutterable in words and inexplicable except by sympathy. You cannot convey to an unmusical man what is called the expression of an air—that is to say, the emotion it has caused within you. ”

“ Plato, in a celebrated passage, even inveighs bitterly against the gross immorality and luxuriousness of all mere instrumental music, which allowed of so much ornament, so much exaggeration of expression, so much complexity of emotion, as to be wholly unsuited to his ideal state. It is, indeed, perfectly true that the intellectual effort in understanding instrumental music, at least some instrumental music, is far greater than is required for appreciating, or imagining one appreciates, a simple song. ”

“ But it is more than probable that, as in our own universities, so at Athens, the best and most earnest of the teachers set themselves so exclusively to their task that they left nothing behind them except in the note-books of their classes. This sort of university teacher never earns any wider popularity than that of his college; and yet there, and among those who have known his diligence, his patience, and his power, he will always rank far higher than those who rush before the public from ambition, often with badly digested ideas. ”

“ Thus the school of Isocrates stood side by side, and in rivalry, with the schools of Plato and Aristotle, as one in which elegance of form, and a superficial but graceful culture, was given to the higher youth, instead of the exact science and metaphysic which unfitted men for public life. ”

“ This state of things, which reminds us so strongly of the mediæval universities, and is inestimably honorable to a growing age of culture when the masses want leavening, may be driven to a dangerous excess when the educated classes become too numerous; for it dissuades every ambitious young man from agriculture and the commercial pursuits so necessary to a nation’s welfare. And as this is the case in Greece now, so it was doubtless the case when, in the days of Hellenism, Athens offered philosophy at so cheap a rate to all the Greek-speaking world. ”

“ Hence Plato and Socrates found it easy to pick holes in their programmes, and to accuse them of getting money under false pretences. These philosophers went further, and reviled them for taking money at all, bartering their wisdom for gold, and imparting virtue for a fee. All this was mere jealous polemic, and based on an unfair estimate of the attempt made by practical men to supply a public want. ”

“ This now unique provision brings to Athens an influx of young Greeks from all the Levant, from Turkish countries, from Egypt—nay, even from Italy. They support themselves as best they can, often by menial employments, provided they can keep their lecture hours free. Lodging together in the humblest apartments, they club their scanty earnings for the purchase of a light and a text-book, which they use in common, the one sleeping till his fellow has done his work, and wakes him to hand him the fresh-trimmed lamp and well-worn manual. ”

“ Nowhere does the agony of the mother’s heart reach us through their literature, save in one illustration used by the Platonic Socrates, where he compares the anger of his pupils, when first confuted out of their prejudices, to the fury of a young mother deprived of her first infant. There is something horrible in the very allusion, as if in after-life Attic mothers became hardened to this treatment. We must suppose the exposing of female infants to have been not uncommon until the just retribution of barrenness fell upon the nation, and the population dwindled away by a strange atrophy. ”

“ This feature, which excites the admiration of the modern Germans, and has given rise to an immense literature, is doubtless all the more essential now that the mental training of our boys has become so much more trying; and we can quite feel, when we look at the physical development of ordinary foreigners, how keenly they must envy the freedom of limb and ease of motion, not only as we see it suggested by Greek statues, but as we have it before us in the ordinary sporting Englishman. ”

“ This is perfectly true, and no game is worthy the name in which spirit and intelligence cannot defeat brute strength. But there is little trace, save at Sparta, of any free constitution in boys’ education, in which they manage their own affairs, fight out their own quarrels, and praise or censure according to a public opinion of their own. No Greek educator seems to have had an inkling of this, and the foreign theorists who have discussed educational reforms on the Greek models seem equally unaware of its importance. ”

“ Yachting, though there were regattas, was not in fashion in ancient Greece. Rowing, which they could have practised to their heart’s content, and which was of the last importance in their naval warfare, was never thought gentlemanly, and always consigned to slaves or hirelings. There are, indeed, as above quoted from Pollux, descriptions of something like football and lacrosse, but the obscurity and rarity of any allusions to them show that they are in no sense national games. Running races round a short course was one of their chief exercises, but this is no proper out-of-door game. ”

“ Some of them, such as Gorgias and Protagoras, studied philosophy deeply, but only to show that a devotion to metaphysic or to abstract science was idle, all knowledge being subjective, and varying with the age. Man was the measure of things; abstract nature was mere nothing. On the more pressing question of morals, though practically sound enough, and though some of them, such as Prodicus, were celebrated as moral preachers, they denied all immutable morality, and were content with obeying the existing laws of society, without admitting any permanent scientific basis for them. ”

“ So the rise of democratic institutions, and the spread of international debates, made the fifth century B.C. in Greece one that required suddenly a set of practical teachers for men who practised at the bar or debated in the public assembly. We are too much in the habit of thinking that such men required training merely in rhetoric—in the way of disputing and of plausibly stating their views. ”

“ There is no reason to think that the average Greek attained anything like the fluency in writing which we now consider necessary. Plato [36] says it is only necessary so far as to be able to write or read; to write fast or elegantly must not be attempted within the range of ordinary education, except in rare cases and with peculiar natural gifts. Indeed, as slaves did all the copying work, and as published books were always in their handwriting, there may have been the same sort of prejudice against a very good, clear hand which many people now feel against an office hand. ”

“ But in the particular department before us, that of education, we have already seen that this period after the Peloponnesian war is exactly the period when the sophistic higher education began to be discarded as superficial and even morally questionable, and the task of training the keener and more ambitious youth passed into the hands of greater specialists—either philosophers like Plato and his followers, or rhetoricians like Isocrates and Antiphon. Socrates forms the connecting link between the Sophists and the philosophic schools. ”

“ Nowhere do we find anything approaching to a State endowment or regulation of university education. In fact, the want of such higher education was only felt when the Greek mind began to turn inwards upon itself after its extraordinary expansion in the Persian wars. And then the first want was supplied by voluntary efforts—by the Sophists who wandered from town to town, citizens of no fixed State, teachers in complete independence of all State direction. Indeed, their avoidance of political duties and responsibilities often brought them into suspicion, oftener into contempt. ”

“ Although, therefore, we cannot deny that past history contains many fruitful lessons for the bettering of our own time, it is not unlikely that the tendency of the present widely informed but hasty age is to exaggerate the likenesses of various epochs, and to overrate the force of analogy in social and political reasoning. Historical parallels are generally striking only up to a certain point; a deeper knowledge discloses elements of contrast, wide differences of motive, great variations in human feeling. ”

“ For young boys, games can hardly consist of anything else than either the practising of some bodily dexterity, such as hopping on one foot, higher or longer than is easy, or throwing farther with a stone; or else some imitation of war, such as snowballing, or pulling a rope across a line, or pursuing under fixed conditions; or, lastly, the practice of some mechanical ingenuity, such as whipping a top or shooting with marbles. So far as climate or mechanical inventions have not altered our little boys’ games, we find all these principles represented in Greek games. ”