Page:Tragedies of Sophocles (Plumptre 1878).djvu/33

Rh fifteen are, as all acknowledge, among the most important of any man's life for the growth of intellect and the formation of character. In most cases, indeed, the total or all but total absence of any records of the boyhood of a great man, would make it impossible to reconstruct in any way the history of his education. The present instance, however, is an exceptional one. There was a marked difference in the character of Athenian education in the periods that preceded and followed the Persian war, and we have the most vivid pictures both of the earlier and the later systems. The latter, under the influence of sophists and rhetoricians, was open to the charge of cultivating sharpness of intellect at the expense of manliness, and strength, and purity. It proposed political success as the one object in life, and that was only to be obtained by the skill of speech, which involved long practice and attendance in the assemblies, deliberative and judicial, of the people. So trained, the youths of Athens became pale and narrow-chested, glib of speech, chattering in the Agora, boasting that they were better than their fathers, calling good evil and evil good, sinking into all forms of effeminacy. But the same hand that has drawn us this picture has left us also another. The education, which was old-fashioned and obsolete at the beginning of the Peloponnesian