Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/280

268* Respecting Babylonia and Assyria Professor Sayce, describing the social life there, says:—

"The libraries were established in the temples, and the schools in which the work of education was carried on were doubtless attached to them." "The 'house of males' into which the young men were introduced, seems to have been a sort of monastic establishment attached to the great temples of Babylonia."

Of educational arrangements in Egypt the like is said by various authorities Brugsch, Erman, and Duncker.

"Schools were established in the principal towns of the country; and human and divine wisdom was taught in the assemblages of the holy servants of the gods."

"The high priest of Amon, Bekenkhonsu, tells us, that from his fifth to his seventeenth year he was 'chief of the royal stable of instruction,' and thence entered the temple of Amon as an under-priest."

"The colleges at these temples [Thebes, Memphis, and Heliopolis] were the most important centers of priestly life and doctrine."

That absence of a priestly hierarchy in Greece which, as before pointed out, interfered with the normal developments of other professions, interfered also with the normal development of the tutorial profession. The temples and their surroundings were indeed places for special culture of one or other kind, mostly having some relation to religious observances. But this form of priestly teaching did not grow into any general system taking in the lay members of the community. Referring, by contrast, to education in the gymnasia, Mahaffy writes:—

"The older fashion had been to bring up boys very much as we bring up girls, keeping them constantly under the eye of a special attendant or teacher. . . teaching them the received religion and a little of the standard literature, inculcating obedience to the gods and to parents."

As happened in Persia during its phase of militant activity, physical culture and culture of the mental powers useful in war took precedence of other culture.

"The old system of advanced education, which ordained that from the age of eighteen to twenty Athenian youths. . . should remain under State supervision, and do the duty of patrols round the outlying parts and frontier forts of Attica, receiving at the same time drill in military exercises, as well as some gymnastic and literary training," became in time modified to one in which "most of the gymnastics and military training was left out."

But intellectual culture as it increased fell into the hands not of the priests but of secular teachers. "Those philosophers who did not, like the Stoics, despise teaching youths. . . . set up their schools close beside these gymnasia."

Still more in Rome, where the course of evolution was so much modified by the intrusion of foreign elements and influences, was the normal genesis of the teacher interfered with. Always when militancy is extremely predominant, mental acquisition, regarded