by the well-to-do. So the Academy became a fashionable lounge, and here developed the walking and talking clubs, which became the Platonic or Academic Schools. Logic and ethics, built on a foundation of geometry and mathematics, seem to have been the staple subjects. An inner circle met, and dined together in Plato's private house and garden, close to the Academy. Plato devised the house and garden to his successor Speusippus, who passed them on to Xenocrates. They thus became the first endowment of the first endowed college, which grew very rich and lasted till the disestablishment and disendowment of the old learning by Justinian in A.D. 529. Aristotle, a pupil of Plato for twenty years, set up a school of his own in the Lyceum, another public gymnasium, where he lectured twice a day, in the morning esoterically to the inner circle of regular attendants, in the afternoon to the public. From these two institutions three nations of Europe have derived three different terms for a school, the Germans their gymnasium, the French their lycée, and the Scotch their academy. Yet neither of the originals was a school in any real sense of the word. In the days of their founders they were like discussion forums; at the most, courses of lectures. In later years, the gilded youth who flocked to Athens from the whole Greco-Roman world were enrolled among the ephebi, and the so-called “university of Athens” was evolved (Dumont, L’Ephébie attique).
Meanwhile the intellectual hegemony of Greece had for a time passed with the political hegemony from Athens to Alexandria. It is to the Alexandrines, either to Antiodorus or to Eratosthenes, c. 250 (J. E. Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship, 7), that grammar, as a term and a science, which included literary criticism and scholarship, and the grammar school are due. The earliest extant treatise on grammar is by Dionysius of Thrace (born c. 146), a pupil of the Homeric critic, Aristarchus. It defines grammar as “the practical knowledge of the usage of writers of poetry and prose” and includes exegesis or explanation of the author in the widest sense as well as mere verbal or syntactical grammar. It was from the term thus understood that the grammar school (scola grammaticalis), the term which described the typical secondary school from that day to 1869, derived its denotation and its connotation. For a true conception of the history of secondary schools it cannot be repeated too often and too emphatically that to this day the true title of the greatest English “public schools” is grammar school. Winchester and Eton are the grammar schools of the colleges of the Blessed Mary of Winchester and of Eton respectively, and Westminster is the grammar school of the collegiate church of St Peter, Westminster. Throughout the thirteen centuries which intervened between Dionysius Thrax and Dr Kennedy, Dionysius’s grammar was the standard work and the foundation, directly or indirectly, of all other grammars, while the grammar school has always meant, and, in the hands of the better class of teachers, has always been, not a gerund-grinding machine, but a place for the training and exercise of the mind by the study of literature. The word “school,” as well as the word “grammar,” seems to be due to Alexandria. Plato in the Laws had spoken of a learned discussion or teaching, the product of leisure, as a scholé. But it does not appear that the word was transferred to the place where such discussion took place before the Alexandrian epoch. The first known use of it in that sense seems to be in Dionysius Halicarnassus' Letter to Ammaeus, c. 30 B.C. But as Plautus (c. 210) uses the corresponding Latin term, ludus literarius, some two centuries earlier, we may safely infer that he used it, not on the principle of ludus a non ludendo, but as a translation of grammar school.
Roman Schools.—At Rome schools began with intercourse with Greeks. According to Suetonius, the emperor Hadrian’s secretary, who wrote The School Masters (De grammaticis) about A.D. 140, literary teaching and the science of grammar began with Livius Andronicus, a Greek from Magna Graecia in the south of Italy, who, being brought to Rome as a slave in 272 B.C., became a freed man, translated the Odyssey into Latin, and taught both Greek and Latin. Ennius, the first Latin poet, was also half-Greek, and came to Rome in 209 B.C., where he also taught both languages. According to Plutarch (Quaest. Rom. 59) the first grammar school (grammatodidaskaleion) was opened by Spurius Carvilius, a freedman of Carvilius, who was the first Roman to divorce his wife. Like master, like man. These two innovations in morals and manners took place about 230 B.C. According to Suetonius, Crates of Mallus in Cilicia, who about 169 B.C. came to Rome as ambassador from Attalus, kin of Pergamum, a great centre of learning, and was kept there by a broken leg, occupied himself in giving lectures. His example was soon followed by Romans. Schools of grammar, in which, even as late as Cicero’s time, the Laws of the Twelve Tables were the chief text-book and were learnt by heart, were kept by Greeks or freedmen. These seem to have been of the nature of elementary schools. But at Rome, as at Athens, the working classes were for the most part slaves; and elementary schools were like English preparatory schools rather than public elementary schools. The teachers were called litteratores, a translation of the Greek γραμματισταί. Schools of rhetoric, which were more like secondary schools, were also opened after the model of that of Isocrates at Athens. Their teachers were called litterati, corresponding to the Greek γραμματικοί. Suetonius says that “the early litteratores also taught rhetoric, and we have many of their treatises which include both sciences.” In 92 B.C. schools of Latin rhetoric were put down as an innovation. Yet among the treatises written by Cato, the praiser of the past at the expense of the present, was one on public speaking, the chief rule in which was “take care of the sense, and the sounds will take care of themselves.” Cicero learned to declaim both in Greek and Latin, and the Gracchi had studied rhetoric under Greek teachers. Neither the gymnasium or palaestra, nor the music school, flourished at Rome. As at Athens, so at Rome the boys were sent to school in charge of a slave, a pedagogus, comes or custos. But it would seem that at Rome the pedagogus, generally a Greek slave, often himself gave elementary instruction. In Varro’s much-debated phrase, “Educat nutrix, instituit pedagogus, docet magister,” “the nurse brings up, the pedagogue instils the elements, the master teaches.” Magister, which in English became “maister” and then “master,” remained the term for the teacher of the public school from that day to this, though attempts were made at the time of the Reformation to introduce the Greek word didascalus in its place.
The Roman school was very much like the modern school. All the methods of torture which have made the service of the Muses for most boys a veritable slavery were in full vogue. Instruction was now in a foreign language, and grammar became prominent. Early rising, loud speaking and hard flogging were in the ascendant. Martial curses the master of a neighbouring school whose shouts and blows woke him up at cock crow. Horace assures us that he admires the old Latin poets in spite of their having been flogged into him by the pedagogus, Orbilius, whose name has become proverbial. The staple of instruction in the Roman schools was the works of the poets, Greek and Latin, Homer and Virgil, Hesiod and Aesop, Menander and Terence. Horace says (Ep. i. 19. 40) “that he was not thought Worthy of going the round of the schoolmasters desks”; but it was a fate not long delayed, and the writings of the poets of the silver age, Lucan and Statius, became school-books in their own lifetimes.
Our knowledge of the Roman curricula is mainly due to Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, c. A.D. 91. Fabius Quintilianus, born on the banks of the Ebro, was not only the son of a man who kept a rhetoric school, but himself kept one, and is said by St Jerome to have been the first who kept a public school, in the sense that he was the first who received a stipend from the emperor. In endeavouring to create the perfect orator, Quintilian discusses the whole of education from the cradle upwards. It is clear from him that the grammar school had trenched on the rhetoric school. The latter was then restricted to actual oratory, the rules and practice of public speaking, while the grammar school gave much the same teaching as English grammar schools did until 1850.
The first definitely endowed school we hear of is one founded by Pliny the younger, a pupil of Quintilian, at his native place Como. In a letter to the historian Tacitus (iv. 12) he informs him that he found a Como boy was at school at Milan, because there were no teachers at Como, whereupon he lectured the parents on the “small additional expense” a day-school at Como would be, compared to the cost of boarding boys at Milan. He therefore offered to find
a third of the cost, and would have found the whole did he not “fear that such an endowment might be corrupted . . . to private