UNIVERSITY LIFE IN ANCIENT ATHENS.

INTRODUCTION.

WHEN Pericles reminded his Athenian hearers, in his Thuc. ii. 41. famous funeral speech, that their fatherland was a sort of school of Greece, he was using words unconsciously that were weighty with prophetic meaning. He was thinking of the monumental glories of the city, which strangers flocked from every land to visit; of the impulse given to art-studies by the genius of Phidias, and of his band of fellow-labourers on the Acropolis; of the outburst of literary talent stirred by the strong sense of national freedom; of the charms of poetry and music enlisted in the service of the stately ceremonials of religion. But the professional teachers of his day were aliens for the most part; Sophists, cosmopolitan in feeling, who settled in the Imperial city because they found there a ready mart for all their foreign wares, where practised skill in fence of words was needed most

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for the free play of national life. In the orator's own days, however, the movement was beginning which was to render Athens before long the home of intellectual training. Socrates was dropping into the minds of his young friends those fruitful seeds which, modified by the various soils on which they fell, were to grow in course of time into the four great schools of thought, which between them occupied well-nigh all earnest seekers after truth. They quartered themselves in Athens as their home, assuming each an organised shape, and gathering admirers from all lands.

Around them was grouped a multitude of other teachers, lecturers in rhetoric and grammar, who dressed up in popular and showy forms their theories of literary art. And so men came to think of her as the University of higher culture, in which were represented all the studies of the age.

The Ethical systems took to some extent, as Bacon says, the place which Theology has filled elsewhere, while the ancient Metaphysic dealt more expressly with many of her problems. Physical enquiry of a kind was encouraged in the Lyceum, as a part of the encyclopædia of Aristotle. Logical method was pursued, though on different principles, by all; and the Rhetoricians, too, were busy supplying something like courses of philology, or the Literæ

Humaniores' of our later times. Private benefactors before long came forward with endowments to provide a quiet shelter for the chief professors of each school, the local permanence of which was thus secured. Soon, indeed, Athens had to stoop from her former rank among the nations; but she stepped almost at once into another, and became the school not of Greece only, but the world.

After a while again she suffered from the rivalry of other intellectual centres, as also from the marked decline of original research. But the endowments of the Antonines gave her a new lease of life, and in the third and fourth centuries she was, beyond compare, the foremost of the Universities then known.

She lingered on a century longer, though in spectral form and with decaying strength, till the edict of Justinian closed her schools; and her pro- A.D. 529. fessors moodily withdrew to far-off Persia, to seek,

though vainly, for the enlightened favour which was denied them in the Roman Empire.

CHAPTER I.

THE COLLEGE SYSTEM.

Our infor- SOME scholars may be inclined to call in question

mation

comes from the term which has been chosen for the heading of the inscrip

tions of the this chapter; may doubt if there was anything at Ephebi, Athens which could answer to the College Life of modern times. Indeed it must be owned that formal history is nearly silent on the subject, that ancient writers take little notice of it, and such evidences as we have are drawn almost entirely from a series of inscriptions on the marble tablets, which were covered with the ruins and the dust of ages, till one after another came to light in recent days, to add fresh pages to the story of the past.

which extend for centuries.

Happily they are both numerous and lengthy, and may be already pieced together in an order which extends for centuries. They are known to Epigraphic students as the records which deal with the so-called Ephebi; with the youths, that is, just passing into manhood, for whom a special discipline was provided by the State, to fit them for the re