YOUNG GREEK BOYS AND OLD GREEK SCHOOLS. 821 



bis minority. Liician, in his satires, describes kings as beggars or 

 primary schoolmasters in the lower world. A comic writer is quoted 

 as saying, " The man is either dead or teaching the alphabet." Orators 

 and noted men accuse each other of having followed this profession. 

 Horace's master Orbilius wi'ote an autobiography under the title of 

 " The Man acquainted with Grief." The great university teachers, 

 however, were held in high regard, and their pay was oftentimes 

 enormous. Though Plato, the rich savant, worked for love, and 

 gave his services to his pupils, the professor's chair in late Athenian 

 glory often paid a twenty-thousand-dollar salary. Gorgias, the great 

 rhetorician, is said to have received one hundred thousand dollars a 

 year for his lectures. The philosophers did not believe in bartering 

 their bread and salt for empty praise. 



When Pericles, in his famous funeral oration, reminded his 

 Athenian hearers that their city was a school of Greece, and that the 

 indestructible monuments of their greatness, all over the world, 

 would make their people the admiration not only of their generation 

 but of all posterity, he unconsciously uttered words richer in proph- 

 ecy than the oracle itself; for not only did Athens become the leader 

 of Greece, first in literature, art, invention, and social progress, but 

 for centuries she has led the nations of the world in all that civiliza- 

 tion and cultivation deem greatest and best. The physical, intel- 

 lectual, and moral superiority which the old Greek school could justly 

 claim as its own, though but a few pages from the history of the 

 nation's service to mankind, formed the basis of that university system 

 which was not only the first in the world, but was gifted with philos- 

 ophers of such power and artists of such renown that every branch of 

 science and aesthetics, which we deem so much our own, is eagerly 

 seeking for the mystic wand which will bring to view those arts, long 

 lost, but not yet despaired of. The chemist searching and seeking 

 with tireless experiment for the art of tempering copper; the econo- 

 mist spending time and intellect on the various monetary questions; 

 the advocate of equal rights for equal sexes; the statesman studying 

 trade policies and race problems; and the sculptor striving by his 

 colored statues to get nearer Nature's self, are but working out again 

 the problems whose solution constitutes the treasures of little Athens, 

 queen of reason, arts, and letters, and whose influence on the civiliza- 

 tion of the future is as yet unsearchable. The ivory palaces, bright 

 with gold, have indeed fallen to decay, but frankincense and myrrh 

 still exhale their everlasting perfume amid the beauteous ruins. 



