Читать книгу Old Greek Education - J. P. Mahaffy - Страница 5
ОглавлениеCHAPTER II.
EARLIER CHILDHOOD.
§ 10. The external circumstances determining a Greek boy’s education were somewhat different from ours. We must remember that all old Greek life, except in rare cases, such as that of Elis, of which we know nothing, was distinctly town life; and so, naturally, Greek schooling was day schooling, from which the children returned to the care of their parents. To hand over boys, far less girls, to the charge of a boarding-school was perfectly unknown, and would, no doubt, have been gravely censured. Orphans were placed under the care of their nearest male relative, even when their education was provided (as it was in some cases) by the State. Again, as regards the age of going to school, it would naturally be early, seeing that day schools may well include infants of tender age, and that in Greek households neither father nor mother was often able or disposed to undertake the education of the children. Indeed, we find it universal that even the knowledge of the letters, and reading, were obtained from a schoolmaster. All these circumstances would point to an early beginning of Greek school life; whereas, on the other hand, the small number of subjects required in those days, the absence from the programme of various languages, of most exact sciences, and of general history and geography, made it unnecessary to begin so early, or work so hard, as our unfortunate children have to do. Above all, there were no competitive examinations, except in athletics and music. The Greeks never thought of promoting a man for “dead knowledge,” but for his living grasp of science or of life.
Owing to these causes, we find the theorists discussing, as they now do, the expediency of waiting till the age of seven before beginning serious education—some advising it, others recommending easy and half-playing lessons from an earlier period. And then, as now, we find the same curious silence on the really important fact that the exact number of years a child has lived is nothing to the point in question; and that while one child may be too young at seven to commence work, many more may be distinctly too old.
§ 11. At all events, we may assume in parents the same varieties of over-anxiety, of over-indulgence, of nervousness, and of carelessness about their children; and so it doubtless came to pass that there was in many cases a gap between infancy and school-life, which was spent in playing and doing mischief. This may be fairly inferred, not only from such anecdotes as that of Alcibiades playing with his fellows in the street,[6] evidently without the protection of any pædagogue, but also from the large nomenclature of boys’ games preserved to us in the glossaries of later grammarians.
These games are quite distinct from the regular exercises in the palæstra (of which we will speak presently, as forming a regular part of education). We have only general descriptions of them, and these either by Greek scholiasts or by modern philologists. But, in spite of the sad want of practical knowledge of games shown by both, the instincts of boyhood are so uniform that we can often frame a very distinct idea of the sort of amusement popular among Greek children. For young boys, games can hardly consist of anything else than either the practising of some bodily dexterity, such as hopping on one foot, higher or longer than is easy, or throwing farther with a stone; or else some imitation of war, such as snowballing, or pulling a rope across a line, or pursuing under fixed conditions; or, lastly, the practice of some mechanical ingenuity, such as whipping a top or shooting with marbles. So far as climate or mechanical inventions have not altered our little boys’ games, we find all these principles represented in Greek games. There was the hobby- or cock-horse (κάλαμον παραβῆναι), standing or hopping on one leg (ἀσκωλιάζειν), which, as the word ἀσκός implies, was attempted on a skin-bottle filled with liquid and greased; blindman’s-buff (χαλκῆ μυῖα), in which the boy cried, “I am hunting a bracken fly,” and the rest answered, “You will not catch it;” games of hide-and-seek, of taking and releasing prisoners, of fool in the middle, of playing at king—in fact, there is probably no simple child’s game now known which was not then in use.
A few more details may, however, be interesting. There was a game called κυνδαλισμός, in which the κύνδαλον was a peg of wood with a heavy end sharpened, which boys sought to strike into a softened place in the earth so that it stood upright, and knocked out the peg of a rival. This reminds us of the pegtop-splitting which still goes on in our streets. Another, called ὀστρακίνδα, consisted of tossing an oyster-shell in the air, of which one side was blackened or moistened, and called night, the other day, or sun and rain. The boys were divided into two sides with these names, and, according as their side of the shell turned up, they pursued and took prisoners their adversaries. On the other hand, ἐποστρακισμός was making a shell skip along the surface of water by a horizontal throw, and winning by the greatest number of skips. Εἰς ὤμιλλαν, though a general expression for any contest, was specially applied to tossing a knuckle-bone or smooth stone so as to lie in the centre of a fixed circle, and to disturb those which were already in good positions. This was also done into a small hole (τρόπα). They seem to have shot dried beans from their fingers as we do marbles (φρυγίνδα). They spun coins on their edge (χαλκισμός).
Here are two games not perhaps so universal nowadays. Πενταλιθίζειν was a technical word for tossing up five pebbles or astragali, and receiving them so as to make them lie on the back of the hand. Μηλολόνθη, or the beetle game, consisted in flying a beetle by a long thread, and guiding him like a kite. But by way of improvement they attached a waxed splinter, lighted, to his tail; and this cruelty is now practised, according to a good authority (Papasliotis), in Greece, and has even been known to cause serious fires.[7] Tops were known under various names (βέμβιξ, στρόμβος, στρόβιλος), one of them certainly a humming-top. So were hoops (τροχοί).
Ball-playing was ancient and diffused, even among the Homeric heroes. But as it was found very fashionable and carefully practised by both Mexicans and Peruvians at the time of the conquest, it is probably common to all civilized races. We have no details left us of complicated games with balls; and the mere throwing them up and catching them one from the other, with some rhythmic motion, is hardly worth all the poetic fervor shown about this game by the Greeks. But possibly the musical and dancing accompaniments were very important, in the case of grown people, and in historical times. Pollux, however—our main authority for most of these games—in one place[8] distinctly describes both football and handball. “The names,” he says, “of games with balls are—ἐπίσκυρος, φαινίνδα, ἀπόῤῥαξις, οὐρανία. The first is played by two even sides, who draw a line in the centre, which they called σκῦρος, on which they place the ball. They draw two other lines behind each side, and those who first reach the ball throw it (ῥίπτουσιν) over the opponents, whose duty it is to catch it and return it, until one side drives the other back over their goal line.” Though Pollux makes no mention of kicking, this game is evidently our football in substance. He proceeds: “φαινίνδα was called either from Phænindes, the first discoverer, or from deceiving (φενακίζειν),” etc.—we need not follow his etymologies—“and ἀπόῤῥαξις consists of making a ball bound off the ground, and sending it against a wall, counting the number of the hops according as it was returned.” And as if to make the anticipations of our games more curiously complete, there is cited from the history of Manuel, by the Byzantine Cinnamus (A.D. 1200), a clear description of the Canadian lacrosse, a sort of hockey played with rackets: “Certain youths, divided equally, leave in a level place, which they have before prepared and measured, a ball made of leather, about the size of an apple, and rush at it, as if it were a prize lying in the middle, from their fixed starting-point (a goal). Each of them has in his right hand a racket (ῥάβδον) of suitable length ending in a sort of flat bend, the middle of which is occupied by gut strings dried by seasoning, and plaited together in net fashion. Each side strives to be the first to bring it to the opposite end of the ground from that allotted to them. Whenever the ball is driven by the ῥάβδοι (rackets) to the end of the ground, it counts as a victory.”[9]
Two games, which were not confined to children, and which are not widely diffused, though they exist, among us, are the use of astragali, or knuckle-bones of animals, so cut nearly square as to serve for dice; and with these children threw for luck, the highest throw (sixes) being accounted the best. In later Greek art representations of Eros and other youthful figures engaged with astragali are frequent. It is to be feared that this game was an introduction to dice-playing, which was so common, and so often abused, that among the few specimens of ancient dice remaining there are some false, and which were evidently loaded. The other game to which I allude is the Italian morra, the guessing instantaneously how many fingers are thrown up by the player and his adversary. It is surprising how fond Southern men and boys still are of this simple game, chiefly, however, for gambling purposes.
There was tossing in a blanket, walking on stilts, swinging, leap-frog, and many other similar plays, which are ill-understood, and worse explained, by the learned, and of no importance to us, save as proving the general similarity of the life of little boys then as now.
We know nothing about the condition of little girls of the same age, except that they specially indulged in ball-playing. Like our own children, the girls probably joined, to a lesser degree, in the boys’ games, and only so far as they could be carried on within-doors, in the court of the house. There are graceful representations of their swinging and practising our seesaw. Dolls they had in plenty, and doll-making (of clay) was quite a special trade at Athens. In more than one instance we have found in children’s graves their favorite dolls, which sorrowing parents laid with them as a sort of keepsake in the tomb.
§ 12. Most unfortunately, there is hardly a word left of the nursery rhymes and of the folk-lore, which are very much more interesting than the physical amusements of children. Yet we know that such popular songs existed in plenty; we know, too, from the early fame of Æsop’s fables, from the myths so readily invented and exquisitely told by Plato, that here we have lost a real fund of beautiful and stimulating children’s stories.[10] And of course here, too, the general character of such stories throughout the human race was preserved.
Footnote
[6] Plut. “Alkib.,” c. 2.
[7] This seems to be the interpretation of “Achar.” 920 sq., according to Grasberger.
[8] ix. 103.
[9] I do not know whether so late an authority is valid proof for the early Greek origin of a game. Most certainly the polo played at Constantinople at the same time came from an equestrian people, and not from the Greeks.
[10] There is a possibility of recovering some of them by a careful collection of the ναναρίσματα of the modern Greeks, which in many cases doubtless correspond to their forerunners the βαυκαλήματα of the old Greeks. Stories of Mormo and Gorgo and the Empousa are still current to frighten children, as are also (about Arachova) songs about Charos (the old Charon), the ruthless genius of death. The belief in Lamia is still so common that ἔπνιξεν ἡ Λάμια—Lamia choked it—is a common expression when a child dies suddenly. Cf. Βενίζελος, “On the Private Life of the Old Greeks,” Athens, 1873.
