8 14 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



round about him. The schools, except in occasional cases, do not 

 seem to have been crowded. No furniture, as desks or tables, were 

 used, such things being unknown in the country. The universal 

 Eastern custom prevailed, while reading or writing, the book or roll 

 of parchment was held on the knee. Water was kept for the thirsty 

 boys. There seems to have been but one master — seldom any assist- 

 ant — who, like the old pedant in The Deserted Village, was supposed 

 to know everything. 



In the lower schools, the " spare the rod, spoil the child " doctrine 

 was a Median article of faith. Flogging seems to have been popular, 

 or at least in great demand, in both Greek and Roman schools ; even 

 the learned Horace, in his epistles, says, " Well do I remember what 

 Orbilius, good at flogging, told me when I was a little boy." In 

 many late writers the severities of the schoolmasters are noted. 

 In one of the Pompeian pictures is represented a schoolmaster 

 flogging a boy held upon the shoulders of a second boy, while a 

 third holds the victim by the heels. Though the ferule seems to 

 have been the favorite instrument of castigation in the Roman 

 school, Lucian and Plutarch have noted the use of the sandal in 

 both domestic and scholastic corporeal correction. The sounds of 

 woe prevalent in satirical pieces prove that Stoicism did not pre- 

 vail among the whining schoolboys, though there is no reason to 

 suppose that the penalties were any more severe than ours of two 

 decades ago. 



To the common-school education in the most brilliant age of 

 Athenian glory — the time of Pericles — there were but three depart- 

 ments; no language course, as all barbarians were supposed to learn 

 Greek, and no true Grecian would degrade himself by studying 

 a foreign tongue. The so-called exact sciences had not yet ob- 

 tained recognition. The three R's were letters, including reading, 

 writing, counting, and learning of the poets; music, including 

 singing and playing on the lyre; and gymnastics, which included 

 dancing. 



Probably at home or before the child knew its letters it was 

 taught to repeat verses from the poets. The analytical mode of 

 teaching the alphabet, by which a word is made to represent an object 

 and then is resolved into its component letters, was not used. The 

 individual letters were learned, and then put together to form sylla- 

 bles and words, called " syllableizing." To add interest, Callias 

 wrote his so-called " grammatical tragedy " or poetical ABC book. 

 Each one of the letters spoke in the prologue, while the chorus com- 

 bined vowels and consonants into words. With a touch of humor, it 

 seems to me, this old versifier has made the consonants, without 

 sound, represent the male characters; but the vowels, which furnish 



