At Athens, everything was left to the individual parent and to the private schoolmaster. The State recognized its responsibility for the maintenance of children, and if a man died in battle his orphans were reared at the public expense; but it did not recognize its responsibility for their education. Some ancient laws, attributed to Solon, did indeed enact that all free-born children should be sent to school and there taught ‘letters and how to swim.’ Other regulations fixed the school hours, and in the interests of morality forbade boys to come home from school in the dark. But as regards the methods and the subjects of education given to boys, the Athenian Government was indifferent. The keeping of a school was a private speculation, and the State required no evidence of moral or intellectual qualifications from the schoolmaster. Accordingly, schools and the fees charged varied very greatly. Poor folk sent their children to establishments where only the elements of reading and writing were taught χαχὰ χαχῶς as the sausage-seller in Aristophanes says. Richer parents not only gave their children a better training in the early stages, but kept them at school for a longer period.
The schoolmaster himself was regarded with extreme contempt. The father of Æschines belonged to the despised class, and Demosthenes draws a scornful picture of his youthful rival helping to mix the ink, scrub the forms, and sweep the schoolroom. The fees were due on the last day of the month; but they were grudgingly paid and mean parents would keep their children away from school in those months of the year when the State festivals gave the schoolmaster an opportunity of granting his pupils a holiday. Of long intervals from work, such as our summer and winter vacations, we have no trace in Athens, and the precept of the Roman poet ‘æstate pueri si valent satis discunt’ apparently went unregarded.
The school hours were arranged to suit the time of meals in the boys’ homes. After the early breakfast, taken at sunrise, the boy sets off to his teacher, with whom he remained till noon. Then came the midday meal, followed by a siesta, and then afternoon school. Discipline was lax. The schoolmaster certainly had a rod to assist him in maintaining order, but his social inferiority deprived him of any real authority. Children would bring their pet dogs to school and play with them under the master’s chair. The master usually was sitting, a position which an Athenian despised as unworthy of a free-born man, and we have the typical schoolmaster pictured for us on a vase by Euphronios. He is a small, ill-developed man, with a bald head and a prominent nose. His body twisted, he leans forward with a threatening gesture, his forefinger raised in warning. In his left hand there is a stylus, for a writing-lesson is in progress; his stick with crooked handle and formidable knobs lies convenient to his right. He is drawn by a malicious hand with something of the caricaturist’s touch, but he is thoroughly alive and evidently closely resembles a real original. We may imagine that not unlike him even in bodily form was the schoolmaster in the third mime of Herondas who beats his idle pupil with his bull’s tail strap until he is ‘black and blue like a spotted snake.’