Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/287

IX important to note this carefully. As in his doctrine of the middle class, it is not the benefit of the individual as such that is in his mind when he deals with education, but the benefit of the State, as the only means whereby the individual can reach his full mental stature. This is quite in keeping with his view of the State as a whole, and that view was founded upon the essential facts of Greek life. Preserve the State, and you will keep the conditions under which man can best develop himself; and to preserve each State, you must keep up the institutions which have grown with it and are most natural to it. Education, then, must be subordinated to the character of the State; the citizen must be brought up, not by a code abstractedly good for human nature, but by one which is based on the traditions and feeling of his forefathers. And this is how Aristotle comes to be able to claim education as one great and direct preventive of stasis. He does not look on it so much as a process which makes virtuous and sensible men, but as one which creates in the oligarch or democrat the true spirit of the best oligarchy and democracy of which his city is capable. He might have used the pregnant expression of Herodotus to which I have so often referred, and have said that while no citizen has a right to step outside his, he should have every opportunity of making the best of himself within those traditional limits. Education, in his view, should produce rhythm and order in the State, by tending to subordinate all citizens to the