and Empedocles and the early Pythagoreans. Suppose we had Antisthenes and the first Cynics, the barefooted denouncers of sin and rejectors of civilization. Suppose we had that great monument of bitter eloquence and scorn of human greatness applied to history, the Philippica of Theopompus. Suppose we had the great democracy of the fifth century represented, not by its opponents, but by the philosophers who believed in it-by Protagoras, say, and Thrasymachus. Suppose that we had more of the women writers, Sappho above all and Corinna and Nossis and Leontion. Suppose we even had more literature like that startling realistic lyric, Grenfell's Alexandrian Erotic fragment, in which the tragedy is, that between a man and a woman Cypris has taken the place of philia: 'It has been free choice in both. Friendship came before passion. Anguish seizes me when I remember.' (It is explained by Wilamowitz in the Goettinger Nachrichten for 1896.)

Had the conditions of the paradosis been different, all that might easily have happened. And how different then would have been our conception of the supposed limitations of Greek literature. Let us remember the facts. Let us be sceptical a priori towards most statements of limitation and negation-all generalizations which state that 'The Greeks had no conception of this, no understanding of our elevated sentiments with regard to that.' As a rule the only truth in such statements is that those Greeks who had, were not canonical in Byzantine schools. And, what is of more practical significance to ourselves, let us remember that the literature which we do possess has been filtered through the same limiting and cramping medium which rejected the rest, and that the traditional interpretation of our texts, especially the poetical texts, has been mainly the work of those generations whose activity I have been describing, and suffers still from the need of a freer air and a wider imagination.

XIV

THE CLASSICS IN EUROPEAN EDUCATION 1

BY EDWARD KENNARD RAND

The ancient classics, the literature of Greece and Rome, were regarded as a vital constituent of education from the moment when they were produced. Studied with devotion as the immortal memorials of a great past, they have led, when rightly followed, to new and high achievement in the present. With this consideration as a clue, let us travel on as briskly as the moments at our disposal require down the centuries of European history.

I know not what Homer studied when he went to school-for may we not, encouraged by recent discussions, not only think of Homer in personal terms, but even boldly picture him as a schoolboy once upon a time?—I know not what Homer studied; but everybody knows that Homer was part and parcel of the education of a great age that came after him, the age of Periclean Greece. In that age, moreover, we see that twofold impulse of the human spirit which the study of classical literature normally inspires-reverence for the past, and the passionate desire to act worthily in the present. Aeschylus, who described his dramas as mere slices from the Homeric feast, prepared for his own times, as Herder remarked, another kind of banquet. The Alexandrian age, which created canonical lists of the best authors, among whom Aeschylus now took his place, was also an age of startling innovations in philosophy and politics; in literature, much pondering of Homer led, not to remote and archaistic fancies, but to the translation of heroic types into

[1 Dr. Edward Kennard Rand, Professor of Latin in Harvard University, produced this article as a contribution to the volume entitled Latin and Greek in American Education, with Symposia on the Value of Humanistic Studies, edited by Francis W. Kelsey. New York, 1911. The article is now reprinted with the consent of its author and Professor Kelsey. It is the first of three articles in Symposium VI, The New Education (pp. 260 ff.), the other two being The Classics and the Elective System, by R. M. Wenley, and The Case for the Classics, a notable study, with a wealth of references in the footnotes, by Paul Shorey.-EDITOR.]

contemporary terms. Then came the Romans, not an alien race with a hybrid culture, save in the sense that all culture is hybrid, but creators of another great period in the development of antiquity, a period less novel in the invention of literary forms, but fertile and to the highest degree original in the adaptation of the old. Rome's innovations in human history are conspicuous enough; they followed naturally from a loyal consecration to the past. Beginning with a devotion to their own heroic past, they connected this past deliberately with the glories of Greek literature and history, when once that potent influence had made its presence felt. Think for a moment of these typical Romans, and the double outlook on the past and on the present, conspicuous in their lives and works: Ennius, who refashioned Latin verse in the new Grecian measure, that in this verse he might immortalize the history of his country; Cicero, reverent student of the ancient poetry of Ennius, and leader of his times in the year 63; Horace, who bids the learner

Thumb Greek classics night and day,

and, thanks to such a training, arraigns the age in a splendid series of Alcaean odes. Poets who know their own day only are the 'singers of Euphorion,' in Cicero's contemptuous phrase. Young Virgil, perhaps included in that phrase, has so little fame from his early poems, which bear the mark of Euphorion, that until recently nobody believed he could have written them. Virgil's great message to his generation, and to ours, came in a poem which reveals an intense study of his country's past and an intense study of Homer and Greek tragedy.

I have tarried a moment with the ancients, instead of beginning much later in the history of Europe, expressly to suggest that the best things in ancient literature were not written solely from the artistic but often from the social motive as well. Letters, and, originally, men of letters, were not sundered from public life, but actively contributed to it. If the classics have moulded later history, it is not merely because of their great qualities as literature, but because they are involved in the history of their own times, and because they enshrine the ideals of a liberal and four-square education, such as their authors possessed. This is a matter that will become obvious, in a moment, when we consider the educational program of Italian humanism.

But first we must quickly traverse the intervening ages-Middle Ages, but not wholly dark-which a new system of education controlled. It is a mistake to suppose that the Christian Church was

hostile to pagan culture; on the contrary, after a brief season of combat and readjustment, the old learning was appropriated for a new purpose. But the purpose was new. Whereas to Cicero and Quintilian the goal of education was eloquentia, the art of expression and its application to the business of state, the Christian monastery removed from the world and prescribed hours of silence. Ill would the sophist Polemo have fared there, who was buried before the breath left his body, that he might not be seen above ground with mouth shut. The Christian Church maintained both systems of education for some time, but monasticism gained the day, and was the main strength of education till later, in the Middle Ages, when the university came. Now the classics did not perish under the new régime; in fact, we can thank the monastery for preserving them for us. They constituted the first step in education, the 'Human Readings,' as Cassiodorus called them, to be succeeded by 'Divine Readings' later. More than that, in the revival of learning under Charlemagne, and later at the school of Chartres, the ancient idea came again to the front. John of Salisbury in the twelfth century had a great deal to say about eloquentia, while Hildebert of Tours wrote epigrams delightfully antique, which could deceive the very elect; for they are included in certain modern editions of the Anthologia Latina. Church, State, and learning were more intimately associated than before. The university, too, though its tendencies were philosophical rather than humanistic, created a new interest in Greek by finding the real Aristotle again, and thus led the way for the humanists' quest of all Greek literature. Men of the Middle Ages did not differ radically from those of succeeding centuries in their attitude toward the classics. Humanism and philosophy had their battles in that period as in every period, but the importance of classical culture for education was in general unquestioned. The great and striking difference lay in the amount of classical culture available. The division of the empire into an East and a West effected curious results in civilization. Byzantium, after dark ages of its own, settled down to an eminently respectable scholarship which created little in literature or thought. It treasured the Greek authors, but forgot the Roman. When the monk Maximus Planudes at the end of the thirteenth century translated various Latin authors into Greek, he selected those most in vogue in the West at that time, such as Ovid, Boethius, Augustine, Donatus, Dionysius Cato; there was evidently no separate tradition of Latin literature at Byzantium. In the West, similarly, the stream of Greek was trickling feebly; the knowledge

of the language had not completely disappeared, and technical writers like Aristotle and the author of the Celestial Hierarchy were directly introduced, but the writers typical to us of the Hellenic genius were none of them known. Now a world without Homer, the Attic drama, Thucydides, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Theocritus, a world without the real Plato, is bound to be a very different world from our own. Not that this loss which befell the Occident was ultimately a calamity. The very isolation of the Roman spirit permitted its most triumphant expression in Dante, for whose poetry we should willingly forego whatever a combined East and West might have achieved.

To see how the mediaeval imagination was still fixed faithfully upon antiquity, though less able than before to understand its meaning, we turn to Dante, who mirrors truly the vital sentiments of his times. Many a reader has felt the beauty of that scene in the Purgatorio, where Dante and Beatrice come upon a troop who sing:

Benedictus qui venis,

E for gittando di sopra e dintorno,
Manibus o date lilia plenis.

Christian liturgy and pagan poetry, which to some could sound only a discord, blend harmoniously here. But for a more striking instance still I turn to Dante's seventh letter, addressed to Henry VII of Germany in 1311. In this letter Dante speaks of 'the new hope of a better age' which 'flashed upon Latium' when that monarch came down into Italy. "Then many a one, anticipating in his joy the wishes of his heart, sang with Maro of the kingdom of Saturn and of the returning Virgin.' But since this sun of their hopes seems to tarry, as though bidden to stand by a second Joshua, Italy is tempted to cry: 'Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another?' Dante himself has firm faith in the 'minister of God' and 'the promoter of Roman glory,' but wonders still why he can delay, apparently believing that the boundaries of Rome end at Liguria. But the real Rome 'scarce deigneth to be bounded by the barren wave of ocean; for it is written for us:

Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Caesar

Imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris.'

Had not the edict 'that all the world should be taxed' issued from the 'council chamber of the most righteous princedom,' the Son of God would not have 'chosen that time to be born of a Virgin.' So