Aristotle and Ancient Educational Ideals

CHAPTER V: EDUCATION AS INFLUENCED BY TIME, PLACE, AND CIRCUMSTANCES

The peculiar character of each form of government is what establishes it at the beginning and what usually preserves it.... Since the whole State has but one end, it is plainly necessary that there should be one education for all the citizens.—Aristotle.

Education among the Greeks, as among every other progressive people, varied with times and circumstances. The education of the Homeric Greeks was not that of the Athenians in the days of Aristotle, nor the latter the same as the education of the contemporary Spartans or Thebans. Moreover, the education actually imparted was not the same as that demanded or recommended by philosophers and writers on pedagogics. It is true that the aim was always the same; Worth, Excellence, Fair-and-Goodness (ἀρετή, καλοκἀγαθία); but this was differently conceived and differently striven after at different times and in different places.

Among the Homeric Greeks, as we have seen, education, being purely practical, aiming only at making its subject “a speaker of words and a doer of deeds,” was acquired in the actual intercourse and struggles of life. The simple conditions of their existence demanded no other education and, consequently, no special educational institutions. These conditions, as described by Homer, though by no means barbarous, are primitive. Nomadism has long been left behind and the later village-communities have been mostly merged in walled towns, generally situated at some distance from the shore, on or near a hill, whose summit forms a citadel for refuge in cases of danger. Even in the most advanced of these towns, however, the type of civilization is still largely patriarchal. The government is in the hands of chiefs or kings (βασιλῆες) claiming to be born and bred of Jove, as, indeed, in a sense, they were, since they ruled quite as much by right of personal worth, which more than anything is due to the grace of God, as by hereditary title. Worth in those days consisted in physical strength, courage, beauty, judgment, and power to address an assembly, and any king proving deficient in these qualities would soon have found his position insecure, or been compelled to fortify it by lawless tyranny. The functions devolving upon the king were mainly three, those of judge, military commander, and priest. The first required judgment and ready speech; the second, strength and intelligent courage; the third, personal beauty and dignity. Though the kings were allowed to exercise great power, this was not irresponsible or arbitrary. On the contrary, it was compatible with great public freedom in speech and action. Slavery existed only to a limited extent and in a mild form. All free heads of families, however poor, had a right to attend the popular assembly, which the king consulted on all important matters, and at which the freëst discussion was allowed. When the kings exercised judicial power, they did so in accordance with certain themistes or laws, held to have originated with Zeus, and not according to their own caprice. As there was little commerce in those days, the inhabitants of the ancient cities, when not engaged in warfare, devoted themselves chiefly to agriculture, cattle-raising, and the useful arts. In these even the kings thought it no shame to engage. We find Paris helping to build his own palace, Odysseus constructing his own bed, Lycaon cutting wood to make chariot-rails, and so on. Similarly, we find Helen and other princesses spinning and weaving, while Nausicaa, the daughter of the Phæacian king, washes the clothes of the family.

In such a primitive society, unacquainted with letters, the higher education found but few aspirants. The only persons of scientific pretensions mentioned by Homer are the physicians (who are likewise surgeons) and the soothsayers. The former are highly appreciated, and are always chiefs. The soothsayers are the exponents of divine omens to the community, and occupy a kind of official position, like the Hebrew prophets. No artists, strictly speaking, are mentioned by Homer, except the bard, and he is much honored, as historian, teacher, and inspirer. We find, indeed, that Achilles and Paris are proficients in music; but such cases seem exceptional. Of artisans, several are mentioned—the worker in wood, the worker in horn and ivory, the potter (who uses the wheel), and so on. The existence of others is implied—the weaver, the mason, the metal-worker, etc.

If there were no special schools in the heroic age, life was so lived as to be an excellent school. Then, as at all other times, it was extremely social, far more so than our modern life. This was due chiefly to three causes, (1) the smallness of the states, which made it possible for every citizen to know, and to feel his solidarity with, every other, (2) the absence of titles and formalities, which had not yet been introduced from the East, (3) the fact that the people, especially the men, spent the greater part of the day in the open air,—in the streets and agora,—and so were continually rubbing against each other. This sociality had much to do with the shaping of the Greek character, the salient elements of which are thus enumerated by Zeller, the historian of Greek philosophy: “A strong sense of freedom, combined with a rare susceptibility to proportion, form, and order, a keen relish for companionship in life and action, a social tendency which compelled the individual to combine with others, to submit to the general will, to follow the traditions of his family and his community.”

Between the simple social condition described by Homer and that for which Aristotle wrote, there intervened a period of at least six hundred years. During that time many great changes took place in the social and political life of the Greeks, demanding corresponding changes in education. These changes were due to several causes, (1) the natural human tendency toward freedom, (2) the influence of foreign nations, (3) the development of commerce, (4) the introduction of letters, (5) the rise of philosophy, (6) the Persian Wars. Though all these are closely interwoven with each other, there can be no harm in treating them separately.

(1) The tendency toward freedom, so essentially characteristic of human nature, was especially so of the nature of the Greeks. Among them it rapidly manifested itself in an ordered series of political forms, beginning with patriarchalism, and ending variously in the various states and races. There is, indeed, hardly a single form of political life that was not realized among the Greeks at some time or place. It was this that made it possible for Aristotle to write a work on Politics which, in the words of a recent political writer, “has remained for two thousand years one of the purest sources of political wisdom.”

The varied and changeful political life of the Greeks was in itself a great education. It made them aware of the principles, political and ethical, upon which society rests, and rendered necessary a faculty of clear and ready expression, which reacted most favorably upon their intellectual and æsthetic faculties. It was in the school of practical politics that the Greeks acquired their rhetoric; and Aristotle, in his treatise on Poetry, tells us that, while “the older poets made their characters talk like statesmen, the later ones made theirs talk like rhetoricians.” Not only, indeed, did political life react upon the drama, but, in developing rhetoric, it drew attention to language and led to the sciences of grammar and logic, both of which were thus called into existence by real social needs (see p. 102).

(2) Greece, lying, as it did, between three continents, and in the thoroughfare of the ancient nations, could hardly fail to be visited by many different races, or, considering its beauty and commercial advantages, to be coveted by them. From this followed two consequences, (a) that the Greeks were a very mixed race, (b) that they were, from the first and at all times, in manifold contact with foreign peoples. That they were a mixed race, is attested alike by their language, their mythology, and their legends. That they were in close and continual communication with foreign peoples, is rendered evident by their alphabet, their art, and the direct statements of their historians. Although it is true that the Greeks, especially after the Persian Wars, regarded themselves as a superior and chosen people, calling all others “barbarians,” and considering them as fit only to be slaves, it is not the less true that hardly one of all the arts and sciences which they ultimately carried to a high degree of perfection had its origin in Greece proper. All appear first in the colonies settled among “barbarians,"—in Egypt, Asia Minor, Thrace, Crete, Sicily, or Italy. Architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry—epic, lyric, dramatic—music, history, politics, philosophy, were all borrowed, transformed, and, with the exception perhaps of tragedy and painting, carried to a high degree of excellence in the colonies, before they were transplanted to the mother-country. It is beyond any doubt that even the Homeric legends are of “barbarian” origin, though from what people they were borrowed is uncertain. It was the plasticity and versatility of their character, due in part to their mixed blood, that, by enabling them to appropriate and assimilate the arts and sciences of their neighbors, raised the Greeks to a new plane of civilization and made them the initiators of a new epoch...