*

yet music was regarded as an indispensable element in the education of every citizen. Even reading as it was taught in the schools was a musical exercise, since music was required to distinguish the long and short syllables, and to regulate the rise and fall of the voice and the emissions of breath, by certain rules which had their origin in the musical feeling of the Greeks. The opinion of the Greeks respecting the moral influence of music is seen in the strictness of the laws, in which their early legislators prohibited or allowed the use of certain instruments, and in the vigilance with which they guarded against innovations in a science of so much importance. The enervating melodies of Asiatic Ionia, however, at length made their way across the gean and mingled with the simple harmony of Greece. But although these innovations, after having been at first hissed from the stage even at Athens, succeeded at last in establishing themselves there, they met with no quarter at Lacedæmon. "Strike from your lyre four of its eleven strings," was the decree of the kings and ephori against Timotheus the Ionian," and corrupt not the youth of Sparta with your soft, effeminate airs." Yet the same warlike people knew how to employ softer measures when such were the most useful. Laying aside the rougher instruments, they commanded their troops to march against the enemy to the sound of flutes, because the fiery courage of the Spartan youth, always urging them beyond the bounds of prudence, needed not the spirit-stirring stimulus of the trumpet and the horn. "The hymns of the first poets," says the Abbe Barthelemi, "inspired piety, their poems the thirst of glory, their elegies patience and firmness under misfortune. Examples as well as precepts were easily imprinted on the memory by simple airs of a noble and expressive character; and the youth, early accustomed to repeat them, imbibed with pleasure the love of every duty, and the true idea of real excellence."t

We turn to another characteristic of the Grecian education

* Der Glaube an die Allgewalt der Musik war in Athen eben so gross, wie in Sparta, und daher wurde auch hier Musikalisc le Bildung als nothwendig von jedem Freien gefordert. --Cramers Geschichte Erziehung, I: 275.

† Anacharsis, II: 127.

―its aim at the union of the beautiful and good. If there is any one feature of the Grecian character which is more strongly marked than all the others, it is the love of the beautiful. The idea of beauty pervaded the national mind, and spread itself through every portion of society. It guided every thought and motion, and gave form and color to every production. The Graces reigned in Greece with undisputed sway, and Jupiter himself inspired his worshippers, not so much with fear by the thunder which he bore, as with love and admiration by the mingled beauty and grandeur of his form, and the serene and awful majesty that sat upon his brow. This characteristic of the Greeks developed itself in a thousand ways, but in none more strikingly than in their conceptions of the gods. In the ideas of their divinities, which were embodied and expressed by painting and sculpture, is grouped together a collection of beauties, physical, intellectual, and moral, which the modern world has labored in vain to equal. In the mythology of the Greeks, in the fables which obtained currency in the heroic age, and even in their early history, we see the most conclusive proofs that the love of beauty was a national characteristic. That a beautiful body is the external form in which a beautiful and noble spirit dwells, was the common belief of the Greeks. On the other hand, between deformity and vice there is, it seemed to them, a natural connection. The bad qualities of Thersites, Homer clothes with a misshapen and ugly body. The fascinations of beauty originated the Trojan war; the goddesses strove for the prize of beauty; if the gods descended from heaven to visit men, it was beauty that brought them down; and when mortals were seized and carried to Olympus, beauty was the quality which secured them this preeminence. If Jupiter in the counsels of the gods, was proud, haughty, and inexorable, the charms of beauty had power to soften his severity, and render him placable and mild. It was not the virtuous only, but the beautiful that were admitted to the favor of the gods. If heaven was in commotion and Olympus was shaken to its centre, it was some beauty either present or absent that produced the tumult.

The Orientals desired children, the Greeks wished not for children simply, but for beautiful children. The barbarous custom of exposing infants was intimately connected with this love of beauty. When the child at five days old was

SECOND SERIES, VOL. IX. NO. III.

3

presented to his father, so completely did the love of beauty triumph over natural affection, that a personal deformity subjected the little unfortunate to a cruel death. The ancient philosophers taught, that goodness and beauty, if not absolutely identical, are in their nature inseparable."

Whatever may have been the origin of this love of beauty in the Greek, their system of education was fitted to foster it, and so far as the education was extended, to make it universal. Homer was the text-book in all the schools, and the absence of the Iliad was considered as so unpardonable, that Alcibiades once gave a school-master who had no Homer, a box on the ear. Other poets also were studied, but Homer moulded the mind of the nation. At Athens the body of the people from their infancy were familiar with his poems, and many in old age could repeat the whole Iliad. If we consider what Homer in the Iliad is; if we call to mind the dignity of his subject, the harmony of his numbers, the nobleness of his sentiments, the beauty of his descriptions, and the inexpressible fire of genius that pervades the whole and enables him to clothe the immortal gods with human forms and make them mingle in all the affairs of men; we shall see how admirably fitted as an instrument of education was the study of his works to produce in the minds of the susceptible and imaginative Greeks a love of the beautiful. Various other modes were adopted in their education to cultivate the feeling for the beautiful. Pericles proclaimed, that while Athens opened an asylum to the unfortunate of all nations, his countrymen should love the beautiful and true. Had the Greeks possessed a means of forming moral character as efficient as the instrumentalities which concurred in cherishing the feeling for the beautiful, the result would have no doubt approached more really to the realization of that charming theory which is indicated by the term xaλixayabía. Their system aimed at the beautiful and good, but unhappily produced only the beautiful without the good.

*The relation to each other of the ideas of beauty and goodness has been developed with much originality of thought and felicity of expression, in two lectures on " The Connexion between Taste and Morals," by President Hopkins of Williams College

While this was the theory of the Greek education, its highest practical object was the production of a perfect orator, and a perfect master of "divine philosophy."*" Eloquence, according to Aristotle and Cicero, is the daughter of freedom and of peace. Under a despotism she pines away for want of exercise, and amid the tumult of war her voice is drowned by the clash of arms. Eloquence exists, however, in the rudest periods of society, and is called into action in the stormiest times. Ulysses spoke with skill, and the words of Nestor were sweeter than honey. But it was another age that produced Demosthenes. Cherished by education, and strengthened by the arts of peace, oratory in its noblest form appeared in Greece at a later period. It was intimately connected with politics. The orator was the leader of the people, and therefore every statesman must be an orator. The sciences of Rhetoric and government were regarded as inseparable, and in the brightest days of Greece, success in them was considered as the highest summit of human excellence. But when the sun of Grecian glory was descending towards the west, another science rose into consequence and contended with Rhetoric for the place of honor. Philosophy came to be considered as a necessary means of education, and to be universally cultivated by those who wished to elevate themselves above the common mass. The four most distinguished philosophical schools, the Academic, the Peripatetic, the Stoic, and the Epicurean, each maintained a Professor's chair at Athens, and under the Roman Emperors these schools became state institutions, whose teachers received their salaries from the government.† While rhetoric was taught with distinguished success at Rhodes, the subtile and metaphysical genius of the Greeks found, at

*The arts and sciences belong to musical education, and this ends with the love of the beautiful and good. Philosophy, therefore, which is the love of science and wisdom, which relates to divine things, which elevates man to true freedom, and imparts dignity even to common affairs-is the most perfect music and the highest of all cultures.

The annual stipend of a Professor of philosophy is stated at ten thousand, and of a Professor of politics at six thousand drachmæ. Cramer's Geschichte der Erziehung I: 35.

*

Athens, in the speculations of philosophy its native element. The age at which the youth sought the philosophical schools is not well defined, but the years devoted to this onestudy were equal to those of our college course. In general the youth heard lectures in philosophy from the sixteenth to the twentieth year, but the study was often begun as in the case of Epicurus in boyhood. The remark of Cramer, that the extensive study of philosophy among any people is a sign, if not of decrepitude and decay, at least of a ripe national character, is illustrated by the history of Greece. This study did not decline with the corruption of morals and the overthrow of freedom, but maintained itself in vigor for centuriesat the seat of science. The Athenians re-built the gardens of the philosophers as often as the barbarians destroyed them.

In concluding what we have to say of the Grecian education, it is proper to refer to the unfavorable change in the mode of training youth at Athens about the time of Socrates. The influence of the state in education was far more decided and strong in the earlier than in the later periods of the history of Athens. By degrees education broke away from the restraints imposed by the state, and became to a great extent a private matter. This change seems to have been brought about chiefly by the increase of wealth and luxury, and to have originated in a desire, on the part of the rich, to give their children a different education from that which the middle and poorer classes could obtain. Its influence on the public morals was disastrous. Combined with other enervating causes it relaxed the springs of virtue, introduced general licentiousness of manners, and paved the way for the final ruin of the nation. It is not to be supposed, that this corruption was completed without remonstrance or without a struggle on the part of the friends of morality and order. The contest between the rigid severity of the old system of education, and the lax liberality of the new is ingeniously

* Geschichte der Erziehung I: 471. "Nur das Eine werde bemerkt, dass, je älter ein valk wird, es sich desto mehr zu Philosophie hinneigt und dass, diese selbst gewöhnlich das Zeichen eines gereiften Volksleben ist, welches die Sonnenseite seines Daseins überschritten hat, wenn sie nicht wohl gar den Grabstein desselben bildet."