EDUCATIOI^
EDUCATION
323
ing and virtue. We even read of bequests being made to provide free education to children of both sexes, but the rule was that women needed no more instruction than they were likely to receive at home. Being an afiair of the State, education was under the control of officials appointed to superintend it. Gymnastic, for the training of the body, and mxisic in the larger sense, including letters, for the training of the mind, were the sub- jects of instruction. These — athletics, literature, music — were regulated by a body of guardians of public instruction (iraiZov6iJ.oi). We hear of an Ephebarch at the head of a college of ^(p-q^oi, or youths who have entered the higher school, and of a Gymnasiarch who superintends the exercises of the va\aii7Tpa and pays the training-masters.
The stages of education Avere practically the same in all the different branches of the wide-spread Grecian people. First, there was the stage of home education, extending from birth to the end of the seventh year, when the children were under paren- tal supervision ; second, the stage of school educa- tion, beginning with the eighth year and lasting to the sixteenth or eighteenth year ; thirdly, there was the stage from the sixteenth or eighteenth to the twenty-first year, when the youths were ?^7?/3ot, and were subjected to strict discipline and training. Before a youth was enrolled among the ^^jy/Sot he had to undergo an examination (So/ct/tacrta) to make sure that he was the son of an Athenian citizen and that he had the physique for the duties now devolving upon him. This was really the univer- sity stage of his career, for he then attended the class of the rhetors and sophists who lectured in such institutions as the Lyceum and the Academy, and devoted himself to the study of rhetoric and philosophy (cf. Ac IQ'-*). On the completion of this course he was ready to enter upon the exercise of his duties towards the State.
When the boy, at the age of seven, went to school — the grammar school and the gymnastic school — he was accompanied by a servant called a TTCLi-dayoyyos who carried his books and writing materials, his lyre and other instruments, and saw him to school and back (see Schoolmaster, Tutor). The school-rooms of ancient Athens seem to have been simple enough, containing little or no furniture — they were often nothing but porches open to wind and sun, where the children sat on the ground, or on low benches, and the teacher on a high chair. At first the child would be exer- cised in 'the rudiments,' ra (TTotx^a (cf. Col 2^ and Xen. Mem. II. i. 1). Great stress was laid upon reading, recitation, and singing. In particular, the memory was exercised upon the best literature, and cultivated to an extraordinary degree of re- tentiveness. The works of yEsop and Theognis were much in use in the class-rooms. Homer was valued not merely as a poet but as an inspired moral teacher, and the Iliad and Odyssey were the Bible of the Greeks. Great pains were also taken with the art of writing. Tablets covered with wax formed the material to receive the writing, and the stylus was employed to trace the letters. By apostolic times papyrus or parchment was in use, written upon with pen (KaXa/jLos) and ink {^liXap) (2 Jni2, 3 Jni3 ; cf. 2 Co 3^ and 2 Ti 4i3). Sherds (Scrrpa/ca) were a common writing material — that used by the very poor in ancient Egypt. Exercises in writing and in grammar have been preserved to us in the soil of Egypt written on ostraca, on wooden tablets, on tablets smeared over with wax, and have now been recovered to let us see the performances of the school children of twenty centuries ago. Among them are school copies giving the letters of the alphabet, syllables, common words and proper names, conjugation of verbs, pithy or proverbial sayings as headlines.
and there are even exercises having the appearance of being school punishments (E. Ziebarth, Aus der antiken Schule, 1910, in Lietzmann's Kleine Texte).
The mention of school punishments leads to the subject of school discipline. At home, at school, and in the palaestra, the rod and the lash were freely used. It is from school life, both Jewish and Greek, that St. Paul, as noted already, derives the imagery of a well-known passage in his Epistles (Ro 2^^"2'). In the Psalms of Solomon, a Jewish book written under Greek influence, there is refer- ence both to the rod {pd^dos, vii. 8) and to the lash (AtdoTil, xviii. 8) as instruments of punishment ; and ' chastening,' 'correction ' (7rat5e/a), occurs again and again in this sense (Eph 6*, 2 Ti 3i«, He 12" ; cf. Didache, 4).
•We are given over to grammar,' says Sextus Empiricus [adv. Math. i. 41), 'from childhood, and almost from our baby-clothes.' Grammar was succeeded by rhetoric, which had accomplished its purpose when the student had acquired the power of speaking offhand on any subject under discus- sion. In addition to these subjects, philosophy was also taught, its technical terms being mastered and its various schools discriminated. Arithmetic, geometry, astronomy belonged to the programme of secondaiy education, and from Plato and Aris- totle there nave come down to us the seven liberal arts — the trivium, and the quadrivium of the Middle Ages. All the while gymnastic training went hand in hand with the training of the intellect. The gymnasion, where the youths of Greece exer- cised themselves naked, was enclosed by walls and fitted up with dressing-rooms, bath-rooms, and requisites for running, leaping, wrestling, boxing, and other athletic exercises, and there were seats round about the course for spectators, and porticoes where philosophers gathered.