Page:Symonds - A Problem in Greek Ethics.djvu/46

The fourth point which I have noted above requires more illustration, since its bearing on the general condition of Athenian society is important. Owing to the prevalence of paiderastia, a boy was exposed in Athens to dangers which are comparatively unknown in our great cities, and which rendered special supervision necessary. It was the custom for fathers, when they did not themselves accompany their sons, ^[1] to commit them to the care of slaves chosen usually among the oldest and most trustworthy. The duty of the attendant guardian was not to instruct the boy, but to preserve him from the addresses of importunate lovers or from such assaults as Peisthetærus in the Birds of Aristophanes describes. ^[2] He followed his charge to the school and the gymnasium, and was responsible for bringing him home at the right hour. Thus at the end of the Lysis we read: ^[3]—

"Suddenly we were interrupted by the tutors of Lysis and Menexenus; who came upon us like an evil apparition with their brothers, and bade them go home, as it was getting late. At first, we and the bystanders drove them off; but afterwards, as they would not mind, and only went on shouting in their barbarous dialect, and got angry, and kept calling the boys—they appeared to us to have been drinking rather too much at the Hermæa, which made them difficult to manage—we fairly gave way and broke up the company."

In this way the daily conduct of Athenian boys of birth and good condition was subjected to observation; and it is not improbable that the charm which invested such lads as Plato portrayed in his Charmides and Lysis was partly due to the self-respect and self-restraint generated by the peculiar conditions under which they passed their life.

Of the way in which a Greek boy spent his day, we gain some notion from two passages in Aristophanes and Lucian. The Dikaios Logos ^[4] tells that—

"in his days, when justice flourished and self-control was held in honour, a boy's voice was never heard. He walked in order with his comrades of the same quarter, lightly clad even in winter, down to the school of the harp-player. There he learned old-fashioned hymns to the gods, and patriotic songs. While he sat, he took care to cover his person decently; and when he rose, he never forgot to rub out the marks which he might have left upon the dust lest any man should view them after he was gone.

1. As Lycon chaperoned Autolycus at the feast of Callias.—Xen. Symp. Boys incurred immediate suspicion if they went out alone to parties. See a fragment from the Sappho of Ephippus in Athen., xiii. p. 572 C.
2. Line 137. The joke here is that the father in Utopia suggests, of his own accord, what in Athens he carefully guarded against.
3. Page 222, Jowett's trans.
4. Clouds, 948 and on. I have abridged the original, doing violence to one of the most beautiful pieces of Greek poetry.