attending private schools at the age of 6 and continued at least until the age of
- The government did not require attendance, but education was highly val-
ued among all classes, and it seems that even poor parents somehow found the
means to provide tuition.
Young students were taught by agrammatistes,who provided instruction in
the alphabet(grammata),reading, writing, and grammar. Agrammatistesalso
gave instruction in other subjects, such as music and mathematics. When stu-
dents were proficient readers and writers, they were deemedgrammatikos,or
literate. At this point, they began studying literature in earnest. Plato wrote in
Protagorasthat “when the boy has learned his letters and is beginning to under-
stand what is written, as before he understood only what was spoken, they [the
teachers] put into his hands the works of the great poets, which he reads sitting
on a bench at school” (ll. 325–326).
The study of Homer was a central part of elementary education in Greece be-
cause his poems contain moral messages that were deemed vital for children. In
addition, the poems represented the ideal form of language that students were
expected to mimic so as to preserve the “purity” of Homeric Greek. Thus,
Greek education developed a prescriptive stance with respect to language and
grammar, defining notions of “correct” and “incorrect” language use in terms
of adherence to literary norms that characterized Greek hundreds of years in the
past.^1 To better understand the educational difficulties associated with this ap-
proach, we might consider what our language arts classes would be like today if
we used the language of Shakespeare as a model for correct English.
Greeks of 6thcentury Athens obviously knew that their language was differ-
ent from what Homer used. The language had changed, as all living languages
do. This troubled the Greeks greatly, because they viewed the Homeric period
as a golden age. Change necessarily meant decline. And although it may seem
ironic to us because we honor the great contributions to civilization that Greece
made from about 600 to 300 BC, the Greeks of the period often saw themselves
as living in the dark ages after a fall from the golden age of their legendary
heroes. They appear to have responded, in part, by initiating the study of lan-
guage in an effort to understand its structure and stem the tide of change.
The 6thcentury also marked the beginning of what might be called an “intel-
lectual explosion,” typified by the emergence over the next 350 years of hereto-
fore unparalleled art, drama, mathematical discoveries, political theory, and
philosophy. As intellectuals began pondering the nature of the world around
A SHORT HISTORY OF GRAMMAR 3
(^1) Glenn (1995) and Kolln (1996) argued a different view. Glenn, for example, proposed that the an-
cient Greeks viewed grammar as being related to style rather than correctness. This view, however, does
not seem entirely congruent with the realities of Greek education; grammar was taught to children as part
of their elementary education and style was taught to older students as part of rhetoric.