GREEK SCHOOLS First Phase.—The term and the institution date, not from the great or what may be called the Hellenic age of Greece, but from the later Macedonian or Hellenistic period. The account given by K. I. Freeman in his Schools of Hellas (1907) may be summed up in the statement, "There were no schools in Hellas." That is, there were no schools in the modern sense, where, during boyhood and youth, boys spent their whole time in a continuous course of instruction. There were professional teachers of three kinds: (1 ) the grammatistes, who taught reading, with writing and per haps arithmetic, in the grammateion; (2) the citharistes, who taught music, i.e., playing and singing to the cithara; (3) the paedotribes, who taught gymnastic, wrestling, boxing, running, jumping, throwing the javelin, etc., in the palaistra. To these teachers the boys were taken by slaves, called boy-leaders (ratbasywyol., whence our pedagogues), as single pupils, and were not taught in classes.
Roughly, the age for the grammar-school and song-school was 7 to 14, for the gymnastic school 12 to 18. A certain amount of literature was imparted, and especially in the song-school, Homer and other early poets, the very Bibles of Hellas, were learnt by heart. In later days, under the Sophists, and Socrates, "the great est of the Sophists," 450-400 B.c., something approaching sec ondary education was developed. But it was wholly unorganized. The itinerant orators or rhetoricians taught oratory, and the learning that was considered necessary to the political orator, a smattering of Greek history, constitutional law and elementary logic. The philosophers, such as Protagoras, discoursed vaguely on natural science, "things in the heavens above and the earth beneath," and divinity, "whether there are gods or not," mathe matics and ethics, or any subject which attracted them, while the lawyers, in the same unsystematic way, taught what law was necessary in a State where the Constitution was at the mercy of chance majorities in a sovereign assembly of 30,00o people, and trials at law were settled by 600 jurymen-judges.
Second Phase.—In the next generation, the orators and the philosophers, by settling down in fixed places, began to establish something more like schools. Plato, though like his master Socrates he taught without asking fees, was the first to give a regular educational course extending over three or four years, and in a fixed place, the Academy. The gymnasium was originally a parade or practice ground for the militia or conscript army of the State, which derived its name from the exercises being in that climate performed naked ('yv,uv6s). At the age of 15 or 16 the boys left the palaestra, or private gymnasium, for this public training school, maintained at the public expense, preparatory to their admission as youths (gOn(3ot), to take the oath of citi zenship and undergo two years' compulsory training in regiments on the frontier. After those two years were over, they still re quired continuous exercise to keep themselves in training; conse quently men of all ages, from 16 to 6o, were to be found in the gymnasium. Though the gymnasium was free, the teachers and trainers in gymnastics were paid, and as the poorer citizens had to earn their own living, the Athenian gymnasium, like the modern university, was for educational purposes chiefly frequented by the well-to-do. So the Academy became a fashionable lounge, and
here developed the walking and talking clubs, which became the Platonic or Academic Schools. Logic and ethics, built on a founda tion of geometry and mathematics, seem to have been the staple subjects. An inner circle met, and dined together in Plato's private house and garden, close to the Academy. Plato devised the house and garden to his successor Speusippus, who passed them on to Xenocrates. They thus became the first endowment of the first endowed college, which grew very rich and lasted till the disestablishment and disendowment of the old learning by Justin ian in A.D. 529. Aristotle, a pupil of Plato for 20 years, set up a school of his own in the Lyceum, another public gymnasium, where he lectured twice a day, in the morning esoterically to the inner circle of regular attendants, in the afternoon to the public. From these two institutions three nations of Europe have derived three different terms for a school, the Germans their gymnasium, the French their lycee, and the Scotch their academy. Yet none of the originals was a school in any real sense of the word. In the days of their founders they were like discussion forums ; at the most, courses of lectures. In later years, the gilded youth who flocked to Athens from the whole Graeco-Roman world were en rolled among the ephebi, and the so-called "university of Athens" was evolved.