strength and endurance training, various foot races (includ-
ing races while wearing armor), and the acquisition of mili-
tary skills such as boxing, wrestling, archery, swordplay, and
the use of the spear and javelin.
Before the widespread adoption of the Greek alphabet,
“literary” and cultural education would have come through
public rituals. Th e shared theology and mythology, a cultural
heritage that more than any thing else united the independent
and scattered communities of Greek speakers, passed from
generation to generation through sacrifi ces and festivals, each
associated with a myth or in celebration of the origin of some
cultural institution. Th us, Athenian children would learn of
the history of their legendary king Th eseus at the festival of
the Deipnophoria and of the political unifi cation of Athens
at the festival of the Synoikia. Many festivals featured the
performance of Homeric poetry, and all young Greeks would
thereby have come to know of the legends about the Trojan
War and the heroes who fought in it.
At some time, and over a period of time, before the fi ft h
century b.c.e., the Greeks adopted a new alphabet, modifi ed
from the Phoenician alphabet, which allowed a true culture
of literacy to arise and which spurred the invention of for-
mal programs and institutions of learning. An anecdote from
the fi ft h century b.c.e. historian Herodotus illustrates this
change.
In Book 6 of his history, Herodotus describes an incident
that occurred around 496 b.c.e. on the island of Chios, where
a roof collapsed on a group of 120 boys as they were being
taught their letters; only one boy survived. Herodotus calls
this an omen, anticipating the overall political disaster that
was about to befall the community of Chios, specifi cally an
invasion by a Persian army. Herodotus mentions another di-
saster that happened at the same time: A chorus of 100 young
men from Chios, offi cially sent to Delphi for a performance at
a festival there, fell victim to a plague that killed 98 of them.
Only two of the boys returned alive to Chios. Th is double
tragedy serves, for us, to illustrate two parallel institutions
of learning: one private and literate—an indoor school where
boys quietly studied written texts—and one public and prelit-
erate—a chorus trained to sing poetry.
In Athens during the fi ft h century b.c.e., we have evi-
dence for a fully developed system of education for boys,
while the education of girls seems to have continued to be a
private, ad hoc aff air managed, if at all, by mothers inside the
home. For all Athenian boys, there was a compulsory pro-
gram of public education during the years of adolescence, the
ephebeia, designed to train young citizens of the democracy.
Th is program included military training but also training in
civic responsibility. Apart from these years, however, school-
ing was optional and required payment to private teachers.
Young Athenian boys learned under three kinds of
teachers. A boy might begin the day with the paidotribēs,
the gymnastics teacher, working on physical fi tness and the
vigorous games that formed the basis of public competition
and prepared young men for war. Aft erward he might go to
the kitharistēs to study music—singing and playing the lyre,
a stringed instrument like a harp. Music was considered im-
portant for teaching balance and moderation, for developing
aesthetic sensibilities, and for providing a certain amount
of mathematical study. And later still he might go to the
grammatistēs to learn letters, read Homeric poetry, and study
arithmetic and geometry. Apart from any examinations these
teachers might give to their students, study was motivated by
the prospect of festivals, at which boys would be expected to
compete in games, to recite the poetry they had learned, or to
dance as members of a chorus.The dry sands of Egypt have preserved tens of thou-
sands of documents that were part of the day-to-day
lives of people. Because the ruling classes of Egypt
after the fourth century B.C.E. were Greek, we have
a vast number of receipts and recipes, personal let-
ters, and business contracts written in Greek by ordi-
nary people. Among these are school exercises from
students as they learned to read and write the Greek
language, the universal language of business, politics,
science, and art from the fourth century B.C.E. until
well into the period of the Roman Empire.
Some of these surviving exercises are extremely
basic. A fragment from the fourth century B.C.E. shows
a series of letters written well and clearly, followed by
the same letters written in a very clumsy hand; clearly
the teacher did the fi rst row, and a beginning student
tried to copy them, working on the shapes and at-
tempting (unsuccessfully) to write between the lines
scratched on the fragment.
A scrap of papyrus from the second century B.C.E.
has the student’s name at the top—Apollonius—and
a list of the Athenian names for the months, followed
by a list of the Macedonian names of the months.
The writing is unsteady, and there are a number of
misspellings. Other fragments show students copy-
ing the names of Greek gods and goddesses, or the
names of the heroes in Homeric poetry.
After learning their letters, students went on to
learn grammar. One student was set to writing the
phrases “the good father,” “the appropriate warn-
ing,” and “the philanthropic attitude” in each of the
grammatical cases of the Greek language—the teacher
was clearly trying to add some moral instruction to
the lesson in grammar and syntax. These fragments
are a wealth of evidence for teachers and learners in
the ancient Greek world, though the stories behind
them—the students’ successes and failures—are now
lost.HOMEWORK IN ANCIENT GREECE
education: Greece 383