CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY, MIDDLE AGES 9 



did not conflict with the ancient religious usages. The religious persecutions 

 that occasionally took place in Greece against thinkers, as, for instance, 

 against Socrates, were rather the work of the mob than of the defenders of 

 religion and were therefore of a purely incidental and transitory nature. On 

 the other hand, we find that many of Greece's oldest philosophers were 

 priests or at any rate the sons of priests. And just as religion in ancient 

 Greece was primitive, so also were the moral ideas: provided the citizen 

 obeyed the ancient laws of the State, he need not worry much about what 

 further duties were owed to his nearest and to himself. Thought was thus 

 at liberty to turn to external nature and devote itself to speculations on 

 how things arose and why the world and the living creatures in it were 

 formed just as they were. The oldest Greek thinkers were therefore natural 

 philosophers, while it was not till later that the ethical problems — which, 

 for instance, among the thinkers of the Jewish people, the prophets, had 

 from the very beginning dominated the soul — through Socrates found a 

 place in Greek thought and finally, in late classical times, entirely sup- 

 planted the interest in nature and its phenomena. 



These, mankind's earliest natural philosophers, went about their work 

 under conditions which in most respects were utterly primitive. The general 

 education amongst their neighbours was extremely limited and far from wide- 

 spread — in fact, throughout the whole of the classical period of Greek cul- 

 ture it was confined to a very few. The public instruction provided by the State 

 for the benefit of its citizens was of the simplest kind; in Athens in the time 

 of Pericles, when the greatest philosophers and poets of Greece were as- 

 sembled there, the citizens had to learn in the State schools only the simplest 

 rudiments of reading, writing, and arithmetic, besides music and gymnastics, 

 which were necessary for military service, while it is said that at the same 

 period in the more conservative country of Sparta the majority of the peo- 

 ple were illiterate. Anything that the private individual wished to study 

 beyond that, he had to find out for himself as best he could. Nor were 

 there in ancient times any private professional teachers. If a person of studi- 

 ous mind happened to belong to a family connected with the priesthood, 

 its traditional learning was naturally at his disposal as a foundation; for 

 the rest he had to rely upon whatever knowledge he could acquire in his 

 own city from foreign travellers and such of his countrymen as had travelled 

 abroad, unless he himself was rich enough to travel and visit learned men 

 in their own homes. Fortunately hospitality in Greece in ancient times knew 

 no bounds; in actual fact it took the place of learned schools and universities 

 and even of books and writings. For if the knowledge of writing was rare, 

 this was to a great extent due to the difficulty of obtaining writing-materials. 

 The Egyptians had discovered a cheap material in their papyrus, the Chaldees 

 another in their clay tablets, but the ancient Greeks had nothing but metal 



