against forty, as Odysseus and his comrades did, when at the call of duty and honor they cleared the house of the dastard suitors.  True, philosophers like Plato complain:  “Homer gives to lads very undignified and unworthy ideas of the gods”; and men of a later age will assert:  “Homer has altogether too little to say about the cardinal virtues of truthfulness and honesty."[*] But making all allowances the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” are still the two grandest secular text-books the world will ever know.  The lads are definitely the better for them.

[*]The virtue of unflinching honesty was undoubtedly the thing least cultivated by the Greek education.  Successful prevarication, e.g. in the case of Odysseus, was put at altogether too high a premium.  It is to be feared that the average Athenian schoolboy was only partially truthful.  The tale of “George Washington and the cherry tree” would never have found favor in Athens.  The great Virginian would have been blamed for failing to concoct a clever lie.

Three years, according to Plato, are needed to learn the rudiments of reading and writing before the boys are fairly launched upon this study of the poets.  For several years more they will spend most of their mornings standing respectfully before their master, while he from his chair reads to them from the roll of one author or another,—­the pupils repeating the lines, time and again, until they have learned them, while the master interrupts to explain every nice point in mythology, in real or alleged history, or a moot question in ethics.

57.  The Greeks do not study Foreign Languages.—­As the boys grow older the scope of their study naturally increases; but in one particular their curriculum will seem strangely limited.  The study of foreign languages has no place in A Greek course of study.  That any gentleman should learn say Persian, or Egyptian (unless he intended to devote himself to distant travel), seems far more unprofitable than, in a later age, the study of say Patagonian or Papuan will appear.[*] Down at the Peireus there are a few shipmasters, perhaps, who can talk Egyptian, Phoenecian, or Babylonish.  They need the knowledge for their trade, but even they will disclaim any cultural value for their accomplishment.  The euphonious, expressive, marvelously delicate tongue of Hellas sums up for the Athenian almost all that is valuable in the world’s intellectual and literary life.  What has the outer, the “Barbarian,” world to give him?—­Nothing, many will say, but some gold darics which will corrupt his statesmen, and some spices, carpets, and similar luxuries which good Hellenes can well do without.  The Athenian lad will never need to crucify the flesh upon Latin, French, and German, or an equivalent for his own Greek.  Therein perhaps he may be heavily the loser, save that his own mother tongue is so intricate and full of subtle possibilities that to learn to make the full use thereof is truly a matter for lifelong education.