The universities of ancient Greece

Preface

The germ of this book was first presented in the form of public lectures delivered at Harvard University in the spring of 1904. To the material then presented much other material, which it was found impossible to put in the lectures, has been added, and the whole has been thoroughly revised.

It is the feeling of the author that the Greek education of the imperial times has not received the consideration that is due to its importance. This neglect has perhaps been partly owing to the difficulty and uncertainty that have until recently attended the reading of many of the authors of this period. We now have, for Libanius's speeches — though not yet for his letters — the excellent text edition of Richard Forster, but of some other authors important for this subject there is still lacking an authoritative text.

In some measure also the neglect in question is probably to be accounted for by the general shadow under which every period of Greek antiquity not strictly to be called 'classical* has to some extent rested. Happily this shadow, which is due to the very brilliancy of the so-called 'classical* period, has been in recent years somewhat dissipated. The attitude of mind that would see in the institutions and productions of the later age only deteriorated forms of the perfect types of the

vii viii PREFACE

earlier age, and things therefore to be disregarded, is less common now than it was formerly. It will not do to dismiss the Greek education of imperial times with the words 'barren* and 'superficial. ' To those who shared in it, it was a very living thing, and it was bound up with the past life and the religion of Greece in a way which we do not find it easy fully to appreciate. To those living in the eastern part of the Empire the belief in the past of the Greek race — that brilliant past that antedated the conquests of Alexander — was what the belief in the permanency of Rome was to those living in the western part of the Empire. It was an integral and vital part of their being. The education that rested on such a basis could not be wholly barren and superficial, and any system of education that survived and performed its part in the world for eight hundred years certainly merits our closest scrutiny.

Notwithstanding the insufficiency, as measured by modern standards, of the ancient sophistical education, it is well for us in this extremely 'practical* age to hold in mind the ideal which that education proposed for itself. This ideal will be found stated on page 351. It "received its embodiment in the man who had been trained, morally, intellectually, and aesthetically, to use his powers in the interest of the state. Such a man was the orator. The orator . . . was the man of broad learning and general culture, trained to see the distinctions of right and wrong, and to act with reference to them in the service of his 7ro\t?, or native city." A life of service in the interest of the state was here proposed — a life, however, based, not on technical knowledge or

PREFACE

IX scientific attainments, but on a literary and humanistic training. Though undue stress was laid in this education on the aesthetic training, and though the intellectual training was, as judged by modern standards, defective, these facts should not be allowed to obscure the outlines of the ideal.

This book is a contribution to the study of the Greek education of imperial times. Greek education, however, was a connected whole. It is impossible fully to understand its later forms without having some understanding of those which preceded them. For this reason, a short account has been given, in the earlier chapters, of the Athenian education in pre-Alexandrian times, and of the conditions which prevailed in Grecian lands in the last three centuries B. C.

Exception may be taken to the use of the term University as applied to the congregations of professors and students described in these chapters, on the ground that no distinct charters of incorporation were granted them. At Alexandria, however, the Museum was a royal foundation and, if it did not actually receive a charter from the king of Egypt, it resembled in many other respects the modern university. The Capitolium at Constantinople, put on a new basis by Theodosius II in the fifth century, had a rigid organization and was under the immediate direction of the emperor. At other places, as at Athens and Antioch, where the educational organization was less rigid than at Constantinople, the teachers and the students formed a recognized body in the community, and the teachers were from the time of the Antonines, or even earlier, granted x PREFACE

privileges and held subject to governmental control. But, apart from this more formal aspect of the question, the essential elements of the university, the teachers and students, the spirit of learning, the enthusiasm for intellectual ideals, were present in all these centres. There seems, therefore, to be ample justification for the use of the word University in connection with them.

The lectures which formed the nucleus of this book were designed, not only for professed students of education and of classical philology, but also for those whose interests were more general. It is hoped that the book will appeal to these three classes of readers, and that, while other investigators in this field may be assisted by the references in the notes, those whose interests are less specific may, by neglecting the notes and reading the pages of the text consecutively, gain a connected and comprehensive idea of the story of Greek education.

I desire to express my sincere thanks to Professor Herbert Weir Smyth of Harvard University for his kindness in reading a part of the proof and suggesting to me a number of improvements in the text. To my wife I am indebted for the encouragement she gave me while I was writing the lectures and for helpful suggestions.

Cambridge, September 20, 1909.

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

Bibliography: Selected Titles . . . xiii

. I. Introductory 1

Chapter I

The period treated in these chapters on The Universities of Ancient Greece is the first five centuries of the Christian era, and the part of the world the eastern half of the Roman Empire — that half of it that was dominated by the Greek language and Greek civilization. Ancient Greece, as the term is commonly understood, included that small district in Europe which lay south of the Cambunian Mountains and formed the southern extremity of the Balkan Peninsula; it corresponded roughly to the modern political division of that name. More properly, however, the term is applied to all those lands in which the Greek type of civilization and Greek ideals prevailed, and in this sense it included in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. the islands of the ^Egean Sea, much of the neighboring coast-land of Europe and Asia, and many outlying districts in various directions, such as parts of Sicily and southern Italy in the west, Cyrene in the south, and numerous colonies on the shore of the Black Sea. With the advent of Macedonia into the field of Grecian politics, Greek civilization was

l spread still further abroad and the bounds of Greece were again widened. They now included, besides the Balkan Peninsula and the islands of the iEgean and eastern Mediterranean, Egypt and the adjacent parts of Libya, the whole of Asia Minor, with Syria, Palestine, and Arabia Petrsea, Thrace, and Macedonia. It is in this broadest sense of the term that the word Greece is used in the title of the present work.

The period is one of great interest. It was the time when, throughout the Empire, the old order of things was breaking up or dissolving and the new was taking its place. In the West, Roman civilization was uniting with German arms to form the new Roman-German Empire; while, in the East, that which we call Hellenism

— the later Greek civilization and culture, permeated by the ancient Greek spirit — was slowly but surely giving way before the new forces of Christianity and Byzantinism. Strictly, this is true of only the last part

— approximately the last half — of the period in question; for the spirit of Byzantinism can hardly be said to have made its appearance much before the time of Diocletian, and the Christian religion was itself on the defensive as late as that emperor's reign, while the menace of the German arms was not serious in the early years of the Empire. But the seed had already been sown for the overthrow of the Hellenistic civilization before the first convert to Christianity had been made in the East, and the downfall of the Empire was foreshadowed in the corruption, profligacy, and extravagance of the Roman Court in the first century A. D. In the meantime, before the new capital had been built near the mouth of the Black Sea, and the Christian religion established as the Court religion by Constantine, and before the more serious inroads of the barbarians began along the northern border of the Empire, Greece and Rome respectively enjoyed large measures of peace and prosperity. Indeed, in the first centuries of the period before us, there was something like a genuine revival both in Roman and in Greek letters, and even in the later years the course of affairs was not always, on its face, one of steady and uninterrupted decline. Attached to both events — the breaking up of the civilization of the West and the decline and extinction of Hellenism in the East — there is a tragic interest, and it is only when we recall that on the ruins of the Roman state there was to be raised by other hands a new civilization, embodying much of the old, and that the seed of Hellenism was to be preserved through the centuries and to fructify in modern soil, that we view the events in a different light.

We have to do in these chapters, not with the wars and bloodshed, but with the educational and social life, of the times. It is, indeed, not a little singular that Greece, just at the moment when she lost her political independence, should have established another sort of rule more solid and more enduring than the other. The contrast that is here presented is striking. In the field of government Greece had never been able to establish and to maintain successfully for any length of time a federation of states. The centrifugal force among the different units of which such a federation should have been composed was too great. The Greek language and education, on the other hand, formed, in the later centuries of Hellenism, the strongest bond of union between diverse races. This it was that distinguished these races from all barbarians, and even gave them a certain superiority over their Latin-educated countrymen in the western half of the Empire. More than any other thing, it appealed to a national sentiment. 1

In this study of ancient university life, the inquiry has been limited to those countries in which the prevailing language was Greek. Roman education in imperial times was, it is true, in the main modelled on that of the Greeks, and there were teachers of Greek learning in Gaul, as there were teachers of Latin learning at Constantinople. On the whole, however, it seems desirable to keep the two fields apart, and there is enough distinction between the two on the basis of language alone to warrant this separation.

1 Lib., i. 458, 22: "EM^y tis et Kal Kpareis ''EW-^vcaw oUtu yap tf8t6v fwi KoKeiv rb rots fiapfidpois dpTiiraXov, Kal otide'v p.oi /x4p.\f/€Tai rb yivos Alvetov ib., i. 333, 8: el drj rots A6yois /xaXKov 1) rb ye'vei rbv YiWyva. KXrjre'ov. See Rohde, Gr. Rom., p. 319, and Schmid, Gr. Renais., pp. 4, 31. Greek sophistry was a protest against barbarism, and it tended to preserve the level of culture in the ancient world. Cf. H. C. Lodge, Scribner's Magazine, June, 1907, p. 658: "... I have often wondered how many people have stopped to consider that our language is one of the greatest bonds which hold the Union together, perhaps the strongest, as it is the most impalpable of all. ... In the language, too, lies the best hope of assimilating and Americanizing the vast masses of immigrants who every year pour out upon our shores, for when these new-comers learn the language, they inevitably absorb, in greater or less degree, the traditions and beliefs, the aspirations and the modes of thought, the ideals and the attitude toward life, which that language alone enshrines." See p. 346.

The side of education that was most prominent in the centuries we are to study, and the side, therefore, that will specially engage our attention, is that known as the sophistic. The words sophistry and sophistic are familiar to us in English, but we must not be misled by the associations of the English words. Sophistry was, no doubt, even among the Greeks, responsible for much that was pernicious in style and in form of thought, but it was far from being the wholly bad thing that it is, probably, with us.

The phenomenon of the rise and spread of Greek sophistry had a basis of fact deep in the character of the Greek people, and its influence on the course of Greek letters we should find it hard to overestimate. The Greeks were by nature a people of speakers, and from early times the art of oratory was highly prized among them. Hardly a form — we may say, no form — of literature arose in Greece that did not owe much of its distinctive character to considerations of the spoken word. The Greeks were also, however, a people in whom the sense of fitness and proportion was highly developed. In the old days — the days to which the most perfect of the works of art and literature belong — the poet or the philosopher, the historian or the public speaker, if he had a message to convey, not only chose the appropriate form in which to convey it, but also, in making use of that form, attended to the careful adjustment of words and thought; neither of these two parts of the discourse was allowed to be out of proportion to the other; and in this careful adjustment of words and thought lay the literary perfection for which the Greeks strove. But, as time went on, men came to see more and more of the possibilities that lay in this that was called language, and to observe and wonder at the many curious things that could be done with it; * then they began to cultivate literary style as a thing that was to be desired for itself. Symmetry and proportion were lost sight of. Perfection was no longer sought in the careful adjustment of words and thought, but in the polish and elegance of words alone. Now it was just this cult of style for style's sake that formed the essence of sophistry. Artistic excellence, we see, was still the ideal of the Greek, but his mental vision had become perverted.

But though this was the case, the influence of sophistry on the course of Greek letters was far-reaching and important. Sophistry served, by bringing back into favor Attic words, expressions, and peculiarities of language which had fallen, or were tending to fall, into disuse, to establish, on a basis of Attic purity, the form which the Greek literary language was to retain through several centuries. The old so-called

1 The first intimation of these possibilities was given to the Athenians by Gorgias, the famous orator and rhetorician, who came to Athens on an embassy from Leontini in Sicily in 427 B.C. "Being brought before the people," says Diodorus (xiu 53), "he spoke to the Athenians about the alliance, and the Athenians, who were naturally clever and fond of speech-making, were astounded at the strange character of his language. For he was the first to make use of exaggerated and elaborate figures, antitheses, equally balanced clauses, rhymes, and other such devices — things which nowadays [the second half of the first century B. C] are held to smack of over-niceness and strike one as ridiculous when used to excess, but were then, owing to the novelty of the style, deemed worthy of respect."

1 classic ' authors, as Plato, Demosthenes, Isocrates, etc., were carefully read and studied in the schools, and collections of unfamiliar words and phrases, sometimes accompanied by explanations, were made from them. Some of these collections were designed to serve as a basis for further study, while others were meant for the use of those who wished to write in a pure Attic style. Sometimes juristic, antiquarian, or other lore was incorporated in these works, which then took on the character of encyclopaedias. It is to this kind of activity that we owe such works as the Lexicon of Harpocration, the Onomasticon of Julius Pollux, and the i k.TTLKL<TTal i or Guides to Correct Attic, of Phrynichus and Mceris, as well as lexica like those of M\ius Dionysius and Pausanias, which are no longer preserved, but were used by the later, Byzantine, lexicographers. Other kinds of collections were also made under the influence of the sophistic schools, such as collections of proverbs, myths, etc., and certain grammatical works stood in near relation to the study of sophistry. Compilations of the class represented by the Deipnosophistce of Athenseus and the Varia Historia of iElian were fostered in the same atmosphere. Certain forms of literature were of distinctly sophistic origin or development: the imaginary epistle, cultivated noticeably by Alciphron and Aristaenetus ; the ' description ' so-called, employed by the two Philostrati in their descriptions of pictures, and by Callistratus in his descriptions of statues; and, perhaps most important of all, the novel, known to us especially through the works of Heliodorus, Longus, and Achilles Tatius. Probably no form of literature, however, was not in some measure influenced by the sophistic movement, and, indeed, the case could not well be otherwise, when nearly everybody that wrote received his training in a school of sophistry. Even the discourses of the philosophers, though more or less technical in character, tended to clothe themselves in a language of sophistical coloring and form, and some authors who were comparatively free from the mannerisms of the sophists themselves acknowledged the sophistical sway by recurring to the Attic style, which the sophists had established as a standard. The great Christian orators and writers of the fourth century, men like Gregory Nazianzehe, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, John Chrysostom, were educated in the schools of sophistry, and so the sophistic standard of taste in style was carried over into the Christian literature also.

It will be seen from what has been said that the sophistic movement was one of great significance in the history of Greek letters. A movement which thus affected the course of a literature for several centuries and even exerted its influence over those who tried to deny its authority is one of the important events in the intellectual life of a nation. For a proper understanding of the later ancient Greek literature — the literature of the last five centuries of Hellenism — an understanding of Greek sophistry — its meaning and its course — is essential. These considerations alone should recommend the study of this subject to our attention; but there are other aspects under which the movement of which we are speaking may be viewed.

The sophistic training appeals to our curiosity as a method of education, and the activity of the schools of sophistry presents to us a most interesting phase of ancient Greek social life. It is to these two aspects of the movement that we purpose in these pages to direct our attention. We wish, in the first place, to obtain an idea of what the Greek higher education was like in the last five centuries of Hellenism, and we wish, in the second place, to become acquainted with the teachers and students of those days, to get as vivid an impression as possible of their activity and their personality. As a setting to this picture, we need also to know something of the course which this higher education took, and of the way in which it was affected by the different streams of Roman politics, barbarian invasion, Christianity, and what has been called the spirit of Byzantinism.

Greek education, however, was continuous. It began probably far back of the time when we begin to have historical records, and it continued, with modifications but not with interruptions, at least through the time that is included in these chapters. Some consideration, therefore, of the conditions that prevailed in the centuries preceding those in which sophistry came to the fore, as well as some account of the lower grades of education, of which the highest grade was an outgrowth, is desirable. A detailed exposition of the intellectual life of the earlier period, however, we shall not be required to give.

Chapter II

EDUCATION AT ATHENS IN THE FIFTH AND FOURTH CENTURIES B. C.

Although the Greeks in many parts of the world began at an early time to take a practical interest in the education of their youth, it is with regard to the educational life of the Athenians that we have the most information up to, at least, the third century B. C. In later years, when Athens became the centre of a new, Hellenistic, world, there was, among nearly all Greeks, a tendency, which grew stronger every day, to adopt the principles and methods of the Athenian education. For these reasons we may take, as the centre of our inquiry in the pre-Alexandrian period, the educational life of Athens.

The education of the Athenians in the fifth century B. C. was, as is well known, a form of training, or education in the strict sense, rather than a system of instruction. It consisted of two parts — a training for the mind and character (called /javai/ey), and a training for the body (called yv/Mvaa-riKij). MovaLfcri, music in the broad sense (as being any art presided over by a Muse), comprised reading and writing, counting, singing, and lyre or flute playing. For a long time the lyre was the

only musical instrument used in the schools, but after the Persian Wars the flute came into favor; it did not, however, supersede the lyre, and in the fourth century, if not earlier, it fell into its former disfavor. The authors that were read in the schools were, of course, the poets — Homer and Hesiod perhaps first of all, and then the lyric poets. Toward the end of the fifth century the tragedians also probably came into use. 1 Large quantities of these authors were learned by heart, and some of the lyric poetry was sung to the accompaniment of the lyre. The chief aim of the Athenian education appears in the point of view from which the poets were studied : they were looked upon primarily, not as literary artists, but as moral preceptors, and were required, not so much to form the tastes as to develop the characters of the pupils. The teacher, the 'ypafM/jLaTiaT^ as he was called, would be sure to find, in reading with his pupils the Homeric poems, abundant opportunity to inculcate lessons of morality based on the actions and words of the gods and heroes, while much of the lyric poetry, of course, taught its own lesson and required no interpreter. Still, although the moral side of these poems was the side chiefly dwelt upon in the instruction of the period, it is certain that the Greeks, with all their natural sensitiveness to the charm of language, did not fail to recognize an educating influence in the harmony of sweet words, as well as in that of musical sounds. The training as a whole, we should say, was directed to the harmonious development of the judgment, the taste,

1 Sandys, Hist. Clas. Schol, i. p. 60; Girard, L'Ed. ath'en., pp. 149, 150. According to Lucian (Anarch., 22), the laws were learned by heart in the time of Solon (c/. Plato, Protag., 326 D).

the intelligence, the moral and the physical qualities of the youth. 1

1 Cf. Quint., Inst, or., i. 8, 5. The locus classicus on the education of the Greek boy is Plato, Protag., 325 C-326 C. The following translation is by Professor Jowett : " Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood and last to the very end of life. Mother and nurse and father and tutor are quarrelling about the improvement of the child as soon as ever he is able to understand them: he cannot say or do anything without their setting forth to him that this is just and that is unjust; this is honourable, that is dishonourable; this is holy, that is unholy; do this and abstain from that. And if he obeys, well and good; if not, he is straightened by threats and blows, like a piece of warped wood. At a later stage they send him to teachers, and enjoin them to see to his manners even more than to his reading and music; and the "teachers do as they are desired. And when the boy has learned his letters and is beginning to understand what is written, as before he understood only what was spoken, they put into his hands the works of great poets, which he reads at school; in these are contained many admonitions, and many tales, and praises, and encomia of ancient famous men, which he is required to learn by heart, in order that he may imitate or emulate them and desire to become like them. Then, again, the teachers of the lyre take similar care that their young disciple is temperate and gets into no mischief; and when they have taught him the use of the lyre, they introduce him to the poems of other excellent poets, who are the lyric poets; and these they set to music, and make their harmonies and rhythms quite familiar to the children's souls, in order that they may learn to be more gentle, and harmonious, and rhythmical, and so more fitted for speech and action; for the life of man in every part has need of harmony and rhythm. Then they send them to the master of gymnastic, in order that their bodies may better minister to the virtuous mind, and that they may not be compelled through bodily weakness to play the coward in war or on any other occasion." Cf. Luc, Anarch., 20 ff. See also Monroe, Hist, of Educ, p. 91: "However long it might take the boy to acquire the ability to play the lyre, mere technical skill was never the end. The task of the boy was similar to that of the work of the old bard. . . . The playing of the lyre, in the school sense, continued to be this improvising an accompaniment in harmony with the thought expressed in the passage repeated. Here was demanded both an insight and understanding in the interpreta-

Such was the type of the education of the Athenian youth through most of the fifth century B. C. In matters of detail, the education of one boy doubtless often differed from that of another. The sons of the rich, we are told, 1 went to school earlier, and left school later, than the sons of the poor, and this fact of itself implies, or suggests, in these cases a difference of attainment. Again, all teachers, we may be sure, did not teach by the same stereotyped method, and some, no doubt, were able to carry their pupils farther than others or even to give them more or less rudimentary instruction in branches not here indicated. Such teachers were Damon, Pythocleides, Agathocles, and so on — men of larger intelligence and fuller equipment than their neighbors, and so better able to carry their pupils along the lines of a more advanced instruction.

One important aspect, however, of the educational life of this period we have as yet not touched upon — that represented by the so-called sophists. As far back as the time of Thales, or even earlier, men had begun to speculate in a rational way on the phenomena of nature and to study the facts of science, and from then onward all the great speculative writers of Greece were really so many public teachers. Also, the poets and others, in so

tion of the poem and skill and creative ability in the construction and performance of its accompaniment. In both respects, there was a demand for individual ability and initiative, and hence there resulted a development of personality quite foreign to any preceding type of education. Indeed, it is to be doubted whether education as a process of developing creative power — power of expression, of initiative, and of appreciation — has ever been given a more fruitful form."

1 Plato, Protag., 326 C.

far as they showed a tendency to speculate and reason, may be regarded in the same light. Some of these men are even said to have given personal instruction, as Xenophanes to Parmenides, 1 Parmenides to Leucippus,* Anaxagoras to Euripides." How true it is that in those days great thinkers were looked upon as teachers is shown by the fact that we so often in the history of Greek thought meet the statement that this or that distinguished man was the pupil of this or that other distinguished man. In many instances, perhaps, the former was influenced solely by the writings of the latter, and this may have been the case with at least one of the pairs just mentioned — Parmenides and Leucippus, namely. However this may be, we see that at no period of her history, at least subsequently to the time of Thales, was Greece without some measure of what is commonly called "higher learning." It was probably such learning as this that formed the staple of the instruction of the more advanced of the musical teachers of the day, such men as Damon and the others just mentioned.