Once more we see the total absence of “vocational studies” in this Athenian education.  The whole effort is to develop a fair, noble, free, and lofty character, not to earn a living.  To set a boy to study with an eye to learning some profitable trade is counted illiberal to the last degree.  It is for this reason that practical arithmetic is discouraged, yet a little knowledge of the art of outline drawing is allowed; for though no gentleman intends to train his son to be a great artist, the study will enable him to appreciate good sculpture and painting.  Above all the schoolmaster, who, despite his brutal austerity, ought to be a clear-sighted and inspiring teacher, must lose no opportunity to instill moral lessons, and develop the best powers of his charges.  Theoginis, the old poet of Megara, states the case well:—­

To rear a child is easy; but to teach
Morals and manners is beyond our reach. 
To make the foolish wise, the wicked good,
That science never yet understood.

56.  The Study of the Poets.—­It is for the developing of the best moral and mental qualities in the lads that they are compelled to memorize long passages of the great poets of Hellas.  Theoginis, with his pithy admonitions cast in semi-proverb form, the worldly wisdom of Hesiod, and of Phocylides are therefore duly flogged into every Attic schoolboy.[*] But the great text-book dwarfing all others, is Homer,—­“the Bible of the Greeks,” as later ages will call it.  Even in the small school we visit, several of the pupils can repeat five or six long episodes from both the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey,” and there is one older boy present (an extraordinary, but by no means an unprecedented case) who can repeat both of the long epics word for word.[+] Clearly the absence of many books has then its compensations.  The average Athenian lad has what seems to be a simply marvelous memory.

[*]Phocylides, whose gnomic poetry is now preserved to us only in scant fragments, was an Ionian, born about 560 B.C.  His verses were in great acceptance in the schools.

[+]For such an attainment see Xenophon’s “Symposium,” 3:5.

And what an admirable text-book and “second reader” the Homeric poems are!  What characters to imitate:  the high-minded, passionate, yet withal loyal and lovable Achilles who would rather fight gloriously before Troy (though death in the campaign is certain) than live a long life in ignoble ease at home at Phthia; or Oysseus, the “hero of many devices,” who endures a thousand ills and surmounts them all; who lets not even the goddess Calypso seduce him from his love to his “sage Penelope”; who is ever ready with a clever tale, a plausible lie, and, when the need comes, a mighty deed of manly valor.  The boys will all go home to-night with firm resolves to suffer all things rather than leave a comrade unavenged, as Achilles was tempted to do and nobly refused, and to fight bravely, four