At school, Socrates had three teachers: a grammatistēs, or reading instructor; a gymnastēs, or physical education instructor; and a kitharistēs, or music instructor.[7] He sat on the ground or on a plain wooden bench and listened as his instructors taught. He would first learn the letters of the alphabet: alpha, beta, gamma, delta … He would draw the letters with a stick in the sand, and then with a stylus on a tablet consisting of two pieces of wood hinged together like a modern book, each side covered with beeswax. In the soft wax his teacher would draw lines to guide his writing, and then print letters to copy. Hour after hour, Socrates copied letters of the alphabet to show to the reading teacher. With the blunt top of the stylus Socrates could erase the letters, then draw them again with the sharp end. Over and over he would practice: A, B, Γ, Δ …
Writing was still a new invention, having entered Greece less than three centuries earlier. There was still magic in the art of letters, grammatikē, the magic of being able to take a small set of marks and with them to construct any word, any sentence, any composition, any thought. It seemed miraculous, as Democritus said, that you could take the same letters and compose either a comedy or a tragedy.[8] The alphabet was, in fact, the first great achievement of Greek culture. As in many other cases, the Greeks borrowed a practice from their neighbors, and then transformed it into something amazingly better than they had received. The Greek alphabet came from the Phoenicians, who, like speakers of other Semitic languages, had letters only for consonants, since words were built on consonant stems and vowels could be filled in from morphological patterns.[9] Each letter was the name of some familiar object, as is detectable in the mnemonic letter-names of the related Hebrew alphabet: aleph, ox; beit, house; gimmel, camel; daleth, door. The Greeks took these over as meaningless sounds: alpha, beta, gamma, delta. But they were stuck with letters for guttural sounds they did not recognize, and so they assigned them to vowels: alpha, A, and so on. Suddenly, and probably quite by accident, the Greeks produced the first true alphabet that could represent all the sounds they used to speak, not just the consonants.[10 The new alphabet was so simple it no longer required the many years of specialized training only a scribe could devote, as did the learning of hieroglyphics in Egypt and cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia. Even a child could learn this. Soon there were schools for young boys, built around the grammatikē technē, the art of letters, literacy.[11]
Teaching was strict, class was mostly memorization and recital, and progress was slow. First the letters were learned, then combinations of letters in syllables, then words. The letters Socrates learned did not distinguish between the short E and the long E, which the Ionian Greeks rendered by epsilon, E, and eta, H, respectively; or between short O and long O, which the Ionians represented by omicron, O, and omega, Ω.[12] The Ionic alphabet that eventually became standard in Greece down to the present day would be adopted by Athens only in the archonship of Euclides (403-2) when Socrates was in his 60s. The alphabet he learned had no lower case letters, and words were transcribed into strings of letters having no punctuation and no word breaks.
READINGWASALOTHARDERFORSOCRATESGENERATIONTHANFORUSBE CAUSEHEHADTOSOUNDOUTEVERYLETTERTOMAKESENSEOFTHETEXT
Papyrus was dear and had to be imported from Egypt, so wooden tablets, potsherds, and sand served for practice. Only when one was ready to write something important would ink and papyrus be furnished. At that point the boy was grammatikos, lettered or literate.
But erudition was never an end in itself for the Greeks. As Protagoras explains in a Platonic dialogue, a child’s parents direct his teacher “to put much more emphasis on the behavior of the child than on reading and music lessons. And the teachers do emphasize this; for instance, when the children have got their letters down and are at the point of understanding the written as well as the spoken word, they set them on their seats to read poems of great poets and compel them to memorize those works which contain many admonitions, many tales, tributes, and encomiums of the great men of yore, that the child might eagerly imitate their examples and long to acquire their virtues.”[13] The ultimate aim of primary education was moral edification, and the means was memorization of uplifting passages from poetry. These lessons, it seems, made a deep impression on Socrates.
School was the beginning of social and political connections. At school Socrates would meet other boys his own age, with whom he would form life-long friendships. Later, as an adult, he would meet them in the streets for conversations and at political occasions as colleagues. Athens was a large city for the time, but still a small world with a limited number of citizens, many of whom knew each other well, and most of whom knew each other at least superficially.
There is one report that Socrates was poorly educated. His first biographer, Aristoxenus (a student of Aristotle), called him “uneducated and ignorant.”[14] While Aristoxenus has been accused of slander in his biographies, he seems rather to have been a competent researcher who aimed at correcting adulatory pictures of Socrates.[15] A late source that seems to go back to Aristoxenus says of Socrates, “While he was not without natural gifts, he was completely uneducated in everything, and indeed, he barely knew his letters, but was ridiculous whenever he had to read or write, stammering like a child.[16] Socrates no doubt did lack the polish that his more well-to-do peers enjoyed by reason of their acculturation in polite society. But it seems unlikely, in light of his later attainments, that he was only semi-literate. Xenophon portrays Socrates as an avid reader who explored literature with his friends.[17] Plato portrays him as eager to read philosophical works[18] and competent in literature.[19] Perhaps most significantly, in the Crito, one of the most biographical of his dialogues, Plato has the personified Laws of Athens remind Socrates several times that under their auspices he received an education (paideia), including training in musikē and gymnastikē.[20] Plato’s implication was that the institutions of the city, including the elementary schools, provided Socrates with the education he needed to function as a productive citizen. Socrates appears to have had a basic education and to have filled any gaps in his cultural preparation by his own initiative so as to become unusually well-informed in intellectual matters. It seems his biographer Aristoxenus, in his efforts to provide a balanced portrayal, was too eager to listen to the philosopher’s detractors.
The skills that Socrates was learning were the lifeblood of the young democracy. Once anyone was allowed to learn to read (though, to be sure, not everyone had the means or the time to do so), written information became more accessible to the public.[21] Once literacy became widespread lawmakers inscribed laws in public places, as Solon did in Athens more than a century before Socrates’ birth.[22] Now, no magistrate or party or clique could hide the laws from the people or claim they alone knew the laws. The laws were disclosed for all to see, and if all could not read, there were enough readers to interpret the markings and speak the laws to the ears of all citizens.
Indeed, the practice of ostracism required that citizens write on a potsherd the name of the person they wished to exile from the city. Some of course needed help to do so. In a famous story, an illiterate citizen asked a stranger to write the name of Aristides on his potsherd. “What wrong has he done you?” the stranger asked. “I’m tired of hearing him called ‘Aristides the just’ everywhere.” The stranger duly wrote the name — his own, for he was Aristides.[23] And so, in a way, literacy was the first great art of democracy, a guarantee of rule by law and of equality under law, the protection against tyranny. It increasingly became the duty of every citizen to learn his letters.
Along with the laborious task of learning letters, the boys were subjected to a vigorous physical education: exercise, calisthenics, athletic competitions. Physical health was not just an ideal for the Greeks, it was an obsession. Three great gymnasia were built outside the city walls within walking distance of the city: the Academy to the northwest, the Lyceum to the east, and the Cynosarges to the south. They were filled with youths and men exercising and competing. Within the cities the palaestra provided a more private space for boys to exercise. The palaestra was an enclosed space officially for wrestling, including dressing rooms and baths. Boys spent much of their school time working out in the several palaestras of the city. Parents sent their sons to the trainers so that the boys might “keep their bodies in shape in the service of a sound mind, that they may not be constrained by bodily weakness to cower either in war or in any other enterprise.”[24] The ultimate aim was not just physical fitness and courage, however, but grace and beauty, another obsession.
Beauty to the Greeks meant male beauty every bit as much as female beauty. And since females were largely segregated from males and expected to stay indoors, it was only male beauty that could be celebrated publicly. Boys were admired for their beauty and followed around by men. In this department Socrates could have few admirers. He was stocky of build and bow-legged rather than tall and stately, the ideal. He was pop-eyed and snub-nosed instead of having balanced eyes and aquiline features. Indeed, he was almost the antithesis of the ideal — ugly like a mythical satyr. As a boy he must have been a laughingstock.
But if we can judge from Socrates’ adult demeanor, we may assume his lack of beauty did not bother him. He was affable, gregarious, and completely unflappable. He must have enjoyed his education, especially the intellectual side of it, as long as it was not too tedious and plodding for his active mind. As for physical education, he seems to have been unusually vigorous and hardy. He never fell victim to the devastating plagues that befell Athens. As an adult he usually went barefoot and wore the same simple clothing in summer and in winter, taking no notice of summer heat or winter cold. He behaved, indeed, like the most austere of Spartan boys, who were brought up to endure hardships and bear suffering without flinching. While admiring self-control, the Athenians did not worship it as did the Spartans, nor did they expect their children should be ascetics. They expected them to endure a certain amount of hardship, but not to a heroic degree. For them the point was to learn to bear both hardship and prosperity nobly, and the Athenians expected that people would always choose pleasure over pain, so long as the pleasure was an honorable one.[25]
In music the boys learned to sing, to dance, and to play the lyre. They were required to memorize uplifting songs and perform them tolerably well to please their parents. Choruses were an important part of public performances, and boys were expected to take part, singing and dancing to entertain their elders. Music was an integral part of culture, from choruses at public festivals to lyrical songs at drinking parties. Any well-bred youth should know his music, but not so as to become professional, for of course professional actors and singers were not respectable people. The task of the music teacher was to “cultivate moderation and to see that the young boys do no wrong. In addition, when the boys learn to play the lyre, the music teacher introduces the works of other good lyric poets, setting the words to music and making the rhythms and harmonies conform to the souls of the children, to make them calmer, so that, becoming more rhythmic and harmonious, they may speak and act properly.”[26]
Aristophanes paints a picture of music education in the good old days of the early fifth century. “The first rule was that not a sound, not even a peep, should be heard from a boy. Furthermore, the boys of each neighborhood had to walk through the streets to the music masters all together and in good order, without coats even if the snow were coming down like chaff. Then he would teach them to memorize a song . . . ‘Pallas, Dire City-Sacker,’ or ‘A Cry Resounds from Afar,’ and to tune their voices to the mode their fathers handed down. And if any of them clowned around or jazzed up the song with the sort of riff today’s singers put in . . . he’d get a whipping, with plenty of lashes for effacing the Muses.”[27]
[7].Plato Crito 50d-e.
[8].DK 67A9.
[9].Jeffery 1990:1-42.
[10]. The Greeks in fact had a form of writing in the bronze age known to archaeologists as Linear B, but it was a difficult syllabic form of writing probably known only to a guild of scribes, and the script perished with its scribes in the social-political-cultural collapse we now call the Dark Ages of Greece.
[11].The term grammatikē often gets translated ‘grammar,’ but the term never means that in the classical period, but always the art of letters (grammata), or literacy. See Graham and Barney 2014; Sandys [1920]1958:6, 88-90.
[12].Jeffery 1990:66-78.
[13].Plato Protagoras 325e-326a.
[14].Plutarch On the Malice of Herodotus 9 = Moralia 856c-d, Aristoxenus fr. 55 Wehrli. See Schorn 2012:213.
[15].See Schorn 2012; Huffman 2012 a, and in general Huffman 2012.
[16].Theodoret The Cure for Greek Diseases 1.29, quoting from Porphyry, following Aristoxenus. (Porphyry probably did not have access to Aristoxenus’ complete work: Schorn 2012:202-203.)
[17].Xenophon Memorabilia 1.6.14. This is perhaps in part a reply to the criticism of Polycrates the Sophist that Socrates studied literature in order to find passages undermining conventional morality, Memorabilia 1.2.56. Significantly, a near-contemporary critic of Socrates does not accuse him of illiteracy but a misuse of his literary skills. See also Xenophon Symposium 4.27, which depicts Socrates at a reading lesson; but the context is confusing, for he is with the younger Critobulus; yet nothing is made of the disparity of ages.
[18].Plato Phaedo 97b-c, 98b; cf. Apology 26d-e. I do not think Plato’s account in the Phaedo is genuinely biographical, but it is based on an understanding of Socrates’ capabilities.
[19].Plato Protagoras 339a-347a, where Socrates holds his own in a discussion of a poem of Simonides; see below, ch. 7*.
[20].Plato Crito 50d-e, 51c.
[21].On the extent of literacy, see Harris 1989.
[22].Aristotle Constitution of Athens 7.1.
[23].Plutarch Aristides 7.5-6.
[24].Plato Protagoras 326b-c.
[25].Thucydides 2.39.1, 4.
[26]. Plato Protagoras 326a-b.
[27].Aristophanes Clouds 963-72, tr. Henderson.