Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/838

814 round about him. The schools, except in occasional cases, do not seem to have been crowded. No furniture, as desks or tables, were used, such things being unknown in the country. The universal Eastern custom prevailed, while reading or writing, the book or roll of parchment was held on the knee. Water was kept for the thirsty boys. There seems to have been but one master—seldom any assistant—who, like the old pedant in The Deserted Village, was supposed to know everything.

In the lower schools, the "spare the rod, spoil the child" doctrine was a Median article of faith. Flogging seems to have been popular, or at least in great demand, in both Greek and Roman schools; even the learned Horace, in his epistles, says, "Well do I remember what Orbilius, good at flogging, told me when I was a little boy." In many late writers the severities of the schoolmasters are noted. In one of the Pompeian pictures is represented a schoolmaster flogging a boy held upon the shoulders of a second boy, while a third holds the victim by the heels. Though the ferule seems to have been the favorite instrument of castigation in the Roman school, Lucian and Plutarch have noted the use of the sandal in both domestic and scholastic corporeal correction. The sounds of woe prevalent in satirical pieces prove that Stoicism did not prevail among the whining schoolboys, though there is no reason to suppose that the penalties were any more severe than ours of two decades ago.

To the common-school education in the most brilliant age of Athenian glory—the time of Pericles—there were but three departments; no language course, as all barbarians were supposed to learn Greek, and no true Grecian would degrade himself by studying a foreign tongue. The so-called exact sciences had not yet obtained recognition. The three R's were letters, including reading, writing, counting, and learning of the poets; music, including singing and playing on the lyre; and gymnastics, which included dancing.

Probably at home or before the child knew its letters it was taught to repeat verses from the poets. The analytical mode of teaching the alphabet, by which a word is made to represent an object and then is resolved into its component letters, was not used. The individual letters were learned, and then put together to form syllables and words, called "syllableizing." To add interest, Callias wrote his so-called "grammatical tragedy" or poetical ABC book. Each one of the letters spoke in the prologue, while the chorus combined vowels and consonants into words. With a touch of humor, it seems to me, this old versifier has made the consonants, without sound, represent the male characters; but the vowels, which furnish