# 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Classics

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​CLASSICS. The term “classic” is derived from the Latin epithet classicus, found in a passage of Aulus Gellius (xix. 8. 15), where a “scriptor ‘classicus’” is contrasted with a “scriptor proletarius.” The metaphor is taken from the division of the Roman people into classes by Servius Tullius, those in the first class being called classici, all the rest infra classem, and those in the last proletarii. The epithet “classic” is accordingly applied (1) generally to an author of the first rank, and (2) more particularly to a Greek or Roman author of that character. Similarly, “the classics” is a synonym for the choicest products of the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. It is to this sense of the word that the following article is devoted in two main divisions: (A) the general history of classical (i.e. Greek and Latin) scholarship, and (B) its place in higher education.
(A) General History of the Study of the Classics
We may consider this subject in four principal periods:—(i.) the Alexandrian, c. 300–1 B.C.; (ii.) the Roman, A.D. c. 1–530; (iii.) the Middle Ages, c. 530–1350; and (iv.) the Modern Age, c. 1350 to the present day.
(i.) The Alexandrian Age.—The study of the Greek classics begins with the school of Alexandria. Under the rule of Ptolemy Philadelphus (285–247 B.C.), learning found a home in the Alexandrian Museum and in the great Alexandrian Library. The first four librarians were Zenodotus, Eratosthenes, Aristophanes of Byzantium, and Aristarchus. Zenodotus produced before 274 the first scientific edition of the Iliad and Odyssey, an edition in which spurious lines were marked, at the beginning, with a short horizontal dash called an obelus (—). He also drew up select lists of epic and lyric poets. Soon afterwards a classified catalogue of dramatists, epic and lyric poets, legislators, philosophers, historians, orators and rhetoricians, and miscellaneous writers, with a brief biography of each, was produced by the scholar and poet Callimachus (fl. 260). Among the pupils of Callimachus was Eratosthenes who, in 234, succeeded Zenodotus as librarian. Apart from his special interest in the history of the Old Attic comedy, he was a man of vast and varied learning; the founder of astronomical geography and of scientific chronology; and the first to assume the name of φιλόλογος. The greatest philologist of antiquity was, however, his successor, Aristophanes of Byzantium (195), who reduced accentuation and punctuation to a definite system, and used a variety of critical symbols in his recension of the Iliad and Odyssey. He also edited Hesiod and Pindar, Euripides and Aristophanes, besides composing brief introductions to the several plays, parts of which are still extant. Lastly, he established a scientific system of lexicography and drew up lists of the “best authors.” Two critical editions of the Iliad and Odyssey were produced by his successor, Aristarchus, who was librarian until 146 B.C. and was the founder of scientific scholarship. His distinguished pupil, Dionysius Thrax (born c. 166 B.C.), drew up a Greek grammar which continued in use for more than thirteen centuries. The most industrious of the successors of Aristarchus was Didymus (c. 65 B.C.–A.D. 10), who, in his work on the Homeric poems, aimed at restoring the lost recensions of Aristarchus. He also composed commentaries on the lyric and comic poets and on Thucydides and Demosthenes; part of his commentary on this last author was first published in 1904. He was a teacher in Alexandria (and perhaps also in Rome); and his death, about A.D. 10, marks the close of the Alexandrian age. He is the industrious compiler who gathered up the remnants of the learning of his predecessors and transmitted them to posterity. The poets of that age, including Callimachus and Theocritus, were subsequently expounded by Theon, who flourished under Tiberius, and has been well described as “the Didymus of the Alexandrian poets.”
The Alexandrian canon of the Greek classics, which probably had its origin in the lists drawn up by Callimachus, Aristophanes of Byzantium and Aristarchus, included the following authors:—
Epic poets (5): Homer, Hesiod, Peisander, Panyasis, Antimachus.
Iambic poets (3): Simonides of Amorgos, Archilochus, Hipponax.
Tragic poets (5): Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Ion, Achaeus.
Comic poets, Old (7): Epicharmus, Cratinus, Eupolis, Aristophanes, Pherecrates, Crates, Plato. Middle (2): Antiphanes, Alexis. New (5): Menander, Philippides, Diphilus, Philemon, Apollodorus.
Elegiac poets (4): Callinus, Mimnermus, Philetas, Callimachus.
Lyric poets (9): Alcman, Alcaeus, Sappho, Stesichorus, Pindar, Bacchylides, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides of Ceos.
Orators (10): Demosthenes, Lysias, Hypereides, Isocrates, Aeschines, Lycurgus, Isaeus, Antiphon, Ándocides, Deinarchus.
Historians (10): Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, Philistius, Theopompus, Ephorus, Anaximenes, Callisthenes, Hellanicus, Polybius.
​The latest name in the above list is that of Polybius, who died about 123 B.C. Apollonius Rhodius, Aratus and Theocritus were subsequently added to the “epic” poets. Philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, were possibly classed in a separate “canon.”
While the scholars of Alexandria were mainly interested in the verbal criticism of the Greek poets, a wider variety of studies was the characteristic of the school of Pergamum, the literary rival of Alexandria. Pergamum was a home of learning for a large part of the 150 years of the Attalid dynasty, 283–133 B.C.
The grammar of the Stoics, gradually elaborated by Zeno, Cleanthes and Chrysippus, supplied a terminology which, in words such as “genitive,” “accusative” and “aorist,” has become a permanent part of the grammarian’s vocabulary; and the study of this grammar found its earliest home in Pergamum.
From about 168 B.C. the head of the Pergamene school was Crates of Mallus, who (like the Stoics) was an adherent of the principle of “anomaly” in grammar, and was thus opposed to Aristarchus of Alexandria, the champion of “analogy.” He also opposed Aristarchus, and supported the Stoics, by insisting on an allegorical interpretation of Homer. He is credited with having drawn up the classified lists of the best authors for the Pergamene library. His mission as an envoy to the Roman senate, “shortly after the death of Ennius” in 169 B.C., had a remarkable influence on literary studies in Rome. Meeting with an accident while he was wandering on the Palatine, and being detained in Rome, he passed part of his enforced leisure in giving lectures (possibly on Homer, his favourite author), and thus succeeded in arousing among the Romans a taste for the scholarly study of literature. The example set by Crates led to the production of a new edition of the epic poem of Naevius, and to the public recitation of the Annals of Ennius, and (two generations later) the Satires of Lucilius.
(ii.) The Roman Age.—(a) Latin Studies.—In the 1st century B.C. the foremost scholar in Rome was L. Aelius Stilo (c. 154–c. 74), who is described by Cicero as profoundly learned in Greek and Latin literature, and as an accomplished critic of Roman antiquities and of ancient authors. Of the plays then passing under the name of Plautus, he recognized twenty-five as genuine. His most famous pupil was Varro (116–27), the six surviving books of whose great work on the Latin language are mainly concerned with the great grammatical controversy on analogy and anomaly—a controversy which also engaged the attention of Cicero and Caesar, and of the elder Pliny and Quintilian. The twenty-one plays of Plautus accepted by Varro are doubtless the twenty now extant, together with the lost Vidularia. The influence of Varro’s last work on the nine disciplinae, or branches of study, long survived in the seven “liberal arts” recognized by St Augustine and Martianus Capella, and in the trivium and quadrivium of the middle ages.
Part of Varro’s treatise on Latin was dedicated to Cicero (106–43), who as an interpreter of Greek philosophy to his fellow-countrymen enlarged the vocabulary of Latin by his admirable renderings of Greek philosophical terms, and thus ultimately gave us such indispensable words as “species,” “quality” and “quantity.”
The earliest of Latin lexicons was produced about 10 B.C. by Verrius Flaccus in a work, De Verborum Significatu, which survived in the abridgment by Festus (2nd century A.D.) and in the further abridgment dedicated by Paulus Diaconus to Charles the Great.
Greek models were diligently studied by Virgil and Horace. Their own poems soon became the theme of criticism and of comment; and, by the time of Quintilian and Juvenal, they shared the fate (which Horace had feared) of becoming text-books for use in schools.
Recensions of Terence, Lucretius and Persius, as well as Horace and Virgil, were produced by Probus (d. A.D. 88), with critical symbols resembling those invented by the Alexandrian scholars. His contemporary Asconius is best known as the author of an extant historical commentary on five of the speeches of Cicero. In A.D. 88 Quintilian was placed at the head of the first state-supported school in Rome. His comprehensive work on the training of the future orator includes an outline of general education, which had an important influence on the humanistic schools of the Italian Renaissance. It also presents us with a critical survey of the Greek and Latin classics arranged under the heads of poets, historians, orators and philosophers (book x. chap. i.). The lives of Roman poets and scholars were among the many subjects that exercised the literary skill of Hadrian’s private secretary, Suetonius. One of his lost works is the principal source of the erudition of Isidore of Seville (d. A.D. 636), whose comprehensive encyclopaedia was a favourite text-book in the middle ages. About the time of the death of Suetonius (A.D. 160) a work entitled the Noctes Atticae was begun by Aulus Gellius. The author is an industrious student and a typical scholar, who frequents libraries and is interested in the MSS. of old Latin authors. Early in the 4th century the study of grammar was represented in northern Africa by the Numidian tiro, Nonius Marcellus (fl. 323), the author of an encyclopaedic work in three parts, lexicographical, grammatical and antiquarian, the main value of which lies in its quotations from early Latin literature. About the middle of the same century grammar had a far abler exponent at Rome in the person of Aelius Donatus, the preceptor of St Jerome, as well as the author of a text-book that remained in use throughout the middle ages. The general state of learning in this century is illustrated by Ausonius (c. 310–393), the grammarian and rhetorician of Bordeaux, the author of the Mosella, and the probable inspirer of the memorable decree of Gratian (376), providing for the appointment and the payment of teachers of rhetoric and of Greek and Latin literature in the principal cities of Gaul. His distinguished friend, Q. Aurelius Symmachus, the consul of A.D. 391, aroused in his own immediate circle an interest in Livy, the whole of whose history was still extant. Early in the 5th century other aristocratic Romans interested themselves in the textual criticism of Persius and Martial. Among the contemporaries of Symmachus, the devoted adherent of the old Roman religion, was St Jerome (d. 420), the most scholarly representative of Christianity in the 4th century, the student of Plautus and Terence, of Virgil and Cicero, the translator of the Chronology of Eusebius, and the author of the Latin version of the Bible now known as the Vulgate. St Augustine (d. 430) confesses to his early fondness for Virgil, and also tells us that he received his first serious impressions from the Hortensius of Cicero, an eloquent exhortation to the study of philosophy, of which only a few fragments survive. In his survey of the “liberal arts” St Augustine imitates (as we have seen) the Disciplinae of Varro, and in the greatest of his works, the De Civitate Dei (426), he has preserved large portions of the Antiquitates of Varro and the De Republica of Cicero. About the same date, and in the same province of northern Africa, Martianus Capella produced his allegorical work on the “liberal arts,” the principal, and, indeed, often the only, text-book of the medieval schools.
In the second half of the 5th century the foremost representative of Latin studies in Gaul was Apollinaris Sidonius (fl. 470), whose Letters were modelled on those of the younger Pliny, while his poems give proof of a wide though superficial acquaintance with classical literature. He laments the increasing decline in the classical purity of the Latin language.
An interest in Latin literature lived longest in Gaul, where schools of learning flourished as early as the 1st century at Autun, Lyons, Toulouse, Nîmes, Vienne, Narbonne and Marseilles; and, from the 3rd century onwards, at Trier, Poitiers, Besançon and Bordeaux.
About ten years after the death of Sidonius we find Asterius, the consul of 494, critically revising the text of Virgil in Rome. Boëthius, who early in life formed the ambitious plan of expounding and reconciling the opinions of Plato and Aristotle, continued in the year of his sole consulship (510) to instruct his fellow-countrymen in the wisdom of Greece. He is a link between the ancient world and the middle ages, having been the last of the learned Romans who understood the language and studied the ​literature of Greece, and the first to interpret to the middle ages the logical treatises of Aristotle. He thereby gave the signal for the age-long conflict between Nominalism and Realism, which exercised the keenest intellects among the Schoolmen, while the crowning work of his life, the Consolatio Philosophiae (524), was repeatedly expounded and imitated, and reproduced in renderings that were among the earliest literary products of the vernacular languages of modern Europe. His contemporary, Cassiodorus (c. 480–c. 575), after spending thirty years in the service of the Ostrogothic dynasty at Ravenna, passed the last thirty-three years of his long life on the shores of the Bay of Squillace, where he founded two monasteries and diligently trained their inmates to become careful copyists. In his latest work he made extracts for their benefit from the pages of Priscian (fl. 512), a transcript of whose great work on Latin grammar was completed at Constantinople by one of that grammarian’s pupils in 527, to be reproduced in a thousand MSS. in the middle ages. More than ten years before Cassiodorus founded his monasteries in the south of Italy, Benedict of Nursia (480–543) had rendered a more permanent service to the cause of scholarship by building, amid the ruins of the temple of Apollo on the crest of Monte Cassino, the earliest of those homes of learning that have lent an undying distinction to the Benedictine order. The learned labours of the Benedictines were no part of the original requirements of the rule of St Benedict; but before the founder’s death his favourite disciple had planted a monastery in France, and the name of that disciple is permanently associated with the learned labours of the Benedictines of the Congregation of St Maur (see Maurists).
(b) Greek Studies.—Meanwhile, the study of the Greek classics was ably represented at Rome in the Augustan age by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (fl. 30–8 B.C.), the intelligent critic of the ancient Attic orators, while the 1st century of our era is the probable date of the masterpiece of literary criticism known as the treatise On the Sublime by Longinus (q.v.).
The 2nd century is the age of the two great grammarians, Apollonius Dyscolus (the founder of scientific grammar and the creator of the study of Greek syntax) and his son Herodian, the larger part of whose principal work dealt with the subject of Greek accentuation. It is also the age of the lexicographers of Attic Greek, the most important of whom are Phrynichus, Pollux (fl. A.D. 180) and Harpocration.
In the 4th century Demosthenes was expounded and imitated by the widely influential teacher, Libanius of Antioch (c. 314–c. 393), the pagan preceptor of St Chrysostom. To the same century we may assign the grammarian Theodosius of Alexandria, who, instead of confining himself (like Dionysius Thrax) to the tenses of τύπτω in actual use, was the first to set forth all the imaginary aorists and futures of that verb, which have thence descended through the Byzantine age to the grammars of the Renaissance and of modern Europe.
In the 5th century we may place Hesychius of Alexandria, the compiler of the most extensive of our ancient Greek lexicons, and Proclus, the author of a chrestomathy, to the extracts from which (as preserved by Photius) we owe almost all our knowledge of the contents of the lost epics of early Greece. In the same century the study of Plato was represented by Synesius of Cyrene (c. 370–c. 413) and by the Neoplatonists of Alexandria and of Athens. The lower limit of the Roman age of classical studies may be conveniently placed in the year 529. In that year the monastery of Monte Cassino was founded in the West, while the school of Athens was closed in the East. The Roman age thus ends in the West with Boëthius, Cassiodorus and St Benedict, and in the East with Priscian and Justinian.
(iii.) The Middle Ages.—(a) In the East, commonly called the Byzantine Age, c. 530–1350. In this age, grammatical learning was represented by Choeroboscus, and lexicography by Photius (d. 891), the patriarch of Constantinople, who is also the author of a Bibliotheca reviewing and criticizing the contents of 280 MSS., and incidentally preserving important extracts from the lost Greek historians.
In the time of Photius the poets usually studied at school were Homer, Hesiod, Pindar; certain select plays of Aeschylus (Prometheus, Septem and Persae), Sophocles (Ajax, Electra and Oedipus Tyrannus), and Euripides (Hecuba, Orestes, Phoenissae, and, next to these, Alcestis, Andromache, Hippolytus, Medea, Rhesus, Troades,) also Aristophanes (beginning with the Plutus), Theocritus, Lycophron, and Dionysius Periegetes. The principal prose authors were Thucydides, parts of Plato and Demosthenes, with Aristotle, Plutarch’s Lives, and, above all, Lucian, who is often imitated in the Byzantine age.
One of the distinguished pupils of Photius, Arethas, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia (c. 907–932), devoted himself with remarkable energy to collecting and expounding the Greek classics. Among the important MSS. still extant that were copied at his expense are the Bodleian Euclid (888) and the Bodleian Plato (895). To the third quarter of the 10th century we may assign the Greek lexicon of Suïdas, a combination of a lexicon and an encyclopaedia, the best articles being those on the history of literature.
Meanwhile, during the “dark age” of secular learning at Constantinople (641–850), the light of Greek learning had spread eastwards to Syria and Arabia. At Bagdad, in the reign of Mamun (813–833), the son of Harun al-Rashid, philosophical works were translated by Syrian Christians from Greek into Syriac and from Syriac into Arabic. It was in his reign that Aristotle was first translated into Arabic, and, shortly afterwards, we have Syriac and Arabic renderings of commentators on Aristotle, and of portions of Plato, Hippocrates and Galen; while in the 10th century new translations of Aristotle and his commentators were produced by the Nestorian Christians.
The Arabic translations of Aristotle passed from the East to the West by being transmitted through the Arab dominions in northern Africa to Spain, which had been conquered by the Arabs in the 8th century. In the 12th century Toledo was the centre of the study of Aristotle in the West, and it was from Toledo that the knowledge of Aristotle spread to Paris and to other seats of learning in western Europe.
The 12th century in Constantinople is marked by the name of Tzetzes (c. 1110–c. 1180), the author of a mythological, literary and historical miscellany called the Chiliades, in the course of which he quotes more than four hundred authors. The prolegomena to his scholia on Aristophanes supply us with valuable information on the Alexandrian libraries. The most memorable name, however, among the scholars of this century is that of Eustathius, whose philological studies at Constantinople preceded his tenure of the archbishopric of Thessalonica (1175–1192). The opening pages of his commentaries on the Iliad and the Odyssey dwell with enthusiasm on the abiding influence of Homer on the literature of Greece.
While the Byzantine MSS. of the 11th century (such as the Laurentian MSS. of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and the Ravenna MS. of Aristophanes) maintain the sound traditions of the Alexandrian and Roman ages, those of the times of the Palaeologi give proof of a frequent tampering with the metres of the ancient poets in order to bring them into conformity with theories recently invented by Moschopulus and Triclinius. The scholars of these times are the natural precursors of the earliest representatives of the Revival of Learning in the West. Of these later Byzantines the first in order of date is the monk Planudes (d. 1330), who devoted his knowledge of Latin to producing excellent translations of Caesar’s Gallic War as well as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Heroides, and the classic work of Boëthius; he also compiled (in 1302) the only Greek anthology known to scholars before the recovery in 1607 of the earlier and fuller anthology of Cephalas (fl. 917).
The scholars of the Byzantine age cannot be compared with the great Alexandrians, but they served to maintain the continuity of tradition by which the Greek classics selected by the critics of Alexandria were transmitted to modern Europe.
(b) In the West (c. 530–c. 1350).—At the portal of the middle ages stands Gregory the Great (c. 540–604), who had little (if any) knowledge of Greek and had no sympathy with the secular ​side of the study of Latin. A decline in grammatical learning is exemplified in the three Latin historians of the 6th century, Jordanes, Gildas and Gregory of Tours (d. 594), who begins his history of the Franks by lamenting the decay of Latin literature in Gaul. The historian of Tours befriended the Latin poet, Venantius Fortunatus (d. c. 600), who is still remembered as the writer of the three well-known hymns beginning Salve festa dies, Vexilla regis prodeunt, and Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis. The decadence of Latin early in the 7th century is exemplified by the fantastic grammarian Virgilius Maro, who also illustrates the transition from Latin to Provençal, and from quantitive to accentual forms of verse.
While Latin was declining in Gaul, even Greek was not unknown in Ireland, and the Irish passion for travel led to the spread of Greek learning in the west of Europe. The Irish monk Columban, shortly before his death in 615, founded in the neighbourhood of Pavia the monastery of Bobbio, to be the repository of many Latin MSS. which were ultimately dispersed among the libraries of Rome, Milan and Turin. About the same date his fellow-traveller, Gallus, founded above the Lake of Constance the monastery of St Gallen, where Latin MSS. were preserved until their recovery in the age of the Renaissance. During the next twenty-five years Isidore of Seville (d. 636) produced in his Origines an encyclopaedic work which gathered up for the middle ages much of the learning of the ancient world.
In Italy a decline in the knowledge of Greek in the 5th and 6th centuries led to an estrangement between the Greek and Latin Churches. The year 690 is regarded as the date of the temporary extinction of Greek in Italy, but, in the first quarters of the 8th and the 9th centuries, the iconoclastic decrees of the Byzantine emperors drove many of the Greek monks and their lay adherents to the south of Italy, and even to Rome itself.
In Ireland we find Greek characters used in the Book of Armagh (c. 807); and, in the same century, a Greek psalter was copied by an Irish monk of Liége, named Sedulius (fl. 850), who had a wide knowledge of Latin literature. In England, some sixty years after the death of Augustine, the Greek archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus (d. 690) founded a school for the study of Greek, and with the help of an African monk named Hadrian made many of the English monasteries schools of Greek and Latin learning, so that, in the time of Bede (d. 735), some of the scholars who still survived were “as familiar with Greek and Latin as with their mother-tongue.” Among those who had learned their Greek at Canterbury was Aldhelm (d. 709), “the first Englishman who cultivated classical learning with any success.” While Aldhelm is known as “the father of Anglo-Latin verse,” Latin prose was the literary medium used by Bede in his celebrated Ecclesiastical History of England (731). Nine years after the death of Bede (735), Boniface, “the apostle of Germany,” sanctioned the founding of Fulda (744), which soon rivalled St Gallen as a school of learning. Alcuin (d. 804), who was probably born in the year of Bede’s death, tells us of the wealth of Latin literature preserved in the library at York. Through the invitation of Charles the Great, he became associated with the revival of learning which marks the reign of that monarch, by presiding over the School of the Palace (782–790), and by exercising a healthy influence as abbot of St Martin’s at Tours (796–804). Among the friends of Alcuin and the advisers of Charles was Theodulfus, bishop of Orleans and abbot of Fleury (d. 821), who is memorable as an accomplished Latin poet, and as the initiator of free education. Einhard (d. 840), in his classic life of Charles the Great, models his style on that of Suetonius, and shows his familiarity with Caesar and Livy and Cicero, while Rabanus Maurus (d. 856), who long presided over Einhard’s school of Fulda, was the first to introduce Priscian into the schools of Germany. His pupil, Walafrid Strabo, the abbot of Reichenau (d. 849), had a genuine gift for Latin poetry, a gift agreeably exemplified in his poem on the plants in the monastic garden. In the same century an eager interest in the Latin classics is displayed by Servatus Lupus, who was educated at Fulda, and was abbot of Ferrières for the last twenty years of his life (d. 862). In his literary spirit he is a precursor of the humanists of the Renaissance. Under Charles the Bald (d. 877) there was a certain revival of interest in literature, when John the Scot (Erigena) became, for some thirty years (c. 845–875), the head of the Palace School. He was familiar with the Greek Fathers, and was chosen to execute a Latin rendering of the writings of “Dionysius the Areopagite,” the patron saint of France. In the preface the translator praises the king for prompting him not to rest satisfied with the literature of the West, but to have recourse to the “most pure and copious waters of the Greeks.” In the next generation Remi of Auxerre was the first to open a school in Paris (900). Virgil is the main authority quoted in Remi’s Commentary on Donatus, which remained in use until the Renaissance. During the two centuries after John the Scot, the study of Greek declined in France. In England the 9th century closes with Alfred, who, with the aid of the Welsh monk, Asser, produced a series of free translations from Latin texts, including Boëthius and Orosius and Bede, and the Cura Pastoralis of Gregory the Great.
In the 10th century learning flourished at Aachen under Bruno, brother of Otto I. and archbishop of Cologne (953–965), who had himself learned Greek from certain Eastern monks at the imperial court, and who called an Irish bishop from Trier to teach Greek at the imperial capital. He also encouraged the transcription of Latin MSS., which became models of style to Widukind of Corvey, the imitator of Sallust and Livy. In the same century the monastery of Gandersheim, south of Hanover, was the retreat of the learned nun Hroswitha, who celebrated the exploits of Otho in leonine hexameters, and composed in prose six moral and religious plays in imitation of Terence. One of the most prominent personages of the century was Gerbert of Aurillac, who, after teaching at Tours and Fleury, became abbot of Bobbio, archbishop of Reims, and ultimately pope under the name of Silvester II. (d. 1003). He frequently quotes from the speeches of Cicero, and it has been surmised that the survival of those speeches may have been due to the influence of Gerbert. The most original hellenist of this age is Luitprand, bishop of Cremona (d. 972), who acquired some knowledge of Greek during his repeated missions to Constantinople. About the same time in England Oswald of York, who had himself been educated at Fleury, invited Abbo (d. 1004) to instruct the monks of the abbey recently founded at Ramsey, near Huntingdon. At Ramsey he wrote for his pupils a scholarly work dealing with points of prosody and pronunciation, and exhibiting an accurate knowledge of Virgil and Horace. During the same half-century, Ælfric, the abbot of Eynsham (d. c. 1030), aided Bishop Æthelwold in making Winchester famous as a place of education. It was there that he began his Latin Grammar, his Glossary (the earliest Latin-English dictionary in existence), and his Colloquium, in which Latin is taught in a conversational manner.
In France, the most notable teacher in the first quarter of the 11th century was Fulbert, bishop of Chartres (d. 1029). In and after the middle of that century the Norman monastery of Bec flourished under the rule of Lanfranc and Anselm, both of whom had begun their career in northern Italy, and closed it at Canterbury. Meanwhile, in Germany, the styles of Sallust and Livy were being happily imitated in the Annals of Lambert of Hersfeld (d. 1077). In Italy, where the study of Latin literature seems never to have entirely died out, young nobles and students preparing for the priesthood were not infrequently learning Latin together, in private grammar schools under liberal clerics, such as Anselm of Bisate (fl. 1050), who describes himself as divided in his allegiance between the saints and the muses. Learning flourished at Monte Cassino under the rule of the Abbot Desiderius (afterwards Pope Victor III.). In this century that famous monastery had its classical chronicler in Leo Marsicanus, and its Latin poet in Alfanus, the future archbishop of Salerno.
The Schoolmen devoted most of their attention to Aristotle, and we may here briefly note the successive stages in their gradually increasing knowledge of his works. Until 1128 only the first two of the five parts of the Organon were known, and those solely in Latin translations from the original. After that date two more became known; the whole was familiar to John ​of Salisbury in 1159; while the Physics and Metaphysics came into notice about 1200. Plato was mainly represented by the Latin translation of the Timaeus. Abelard (d. 1142) was acquainted with no Greek works except in Latin translations, but he has left his mark on the history of European education. The wide popularity of his brilliant lectures in the “schools” of Paris made this city the resort of the many students who were ultimately organized as a “university” (c. 1170). John of Salisbury attended Abelard’s lectures in 1136, and, after spending two years in the study of logic in Paris, passed three more in the scholarly study of Latin literature at Chartres, where a sound and healthy tradition, originally due to Bernard of Chartres (fl. 1120), was still perpetuated by his pupils. In that school the study of “figures of speech” was treated as merely introductory to that of the classical texts. Stress was laid on the sense as well as the style of the author studied. Discussions on set subjects were held, select passages from the classics learned by heart, while written exercises in prose and verse were founded on the best ancient models. In the general scheme of education the authority followed was Quintilian. John of Salisbury (d. 1180), the ripest product of this school, is the most learned man of his time. His favourite author is Cicero, and in all the Latin literature accessible to him he is the best-read scholar of his age. Among Latin scholars of the next generation we have Giraldus Cambrensis (d. c. 1222), the author of topographical and historical writings on Ireland and Wales, and of other works teeming with quotations from the Latin classics. During the middle ages Latin prose never dies out. It is the normal language of literature. In England it is used by many chroniclers and historians, the best known of whom are William of Malmesbury (d. 1142) and Matthew Paris (d. 1259). In Italy Latin verse had been felicitously applied to historic themes by William of Apulia (fl. 1100) and other Latin poets (1088–1247). In the 12th century England claims at least seven Latin poets, one of these being her only Latin epic poet, Joseph of Exeter (d. 1210), whose poem on the Trojan war is still extant. The Latin versifier, John of Garlandia, an Englishman who lived mainly in France (fl. 1204–1252), produced several Latin vocabularies which were still in use in the boyhood of Erasmus. The Latin poets of French birth include Gautier and Alain de Lille (d. c. 1203), the former being the author of the Alexandreis, and the latter that of the Anti-Claudianus, a poem familiar to Chaucer.
During the hundred and thirty years that elapsed between the early translations of Aristotle executed at Toledo about 1150 and the death in 1281 of William of Moerbeke, the translator of the Rhetoric and the Politics, the knowledge of Aristotle had been greatly extended in Europe by means of translations, first from the Arabic, and, next, from the original Greek. Aristotle had been studied in England by Grosseteste (d. 1253), and expounded abroad by the great Dominican, Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), and his famous pupil, Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). Among the keenest critics of the Schoolmen and of the recent translations of Aristotle was Roger Bacon (d. 1294), whose Opus majus has been recognized as the Encyclopédie and the Organon of the 13th century. His knowledge of Greek, as shown in his Greek Grammar (first published in 1902), was clearly derived from the Greeks of his own day. The medieval dependence on the authority of Aristotle gradually diminished. This was partly due to the recovery of some of the lost works of ancient literature, and the transition from the middle ages to the revival of learning was attended by a general widening of the range of classical studies and by a renewed interest in Plato.
The classical learning of the middle ages was largely second-hand. It was often derived from glossaries, from books of elegant extracts, or from comprehensive encyclopaedias. Among the compilers of these last were Isidore and Hrabanus, William of Conches and Honorius of Autun, Bartholomaeus Anglicus (fl. 1250), Vincent of Beauvais (d. 1264), and, lastly, Brunetto Latini (d. 1290), the earlier contemporary of Dante. For Aristotle, as interpreted by Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, Dante has the highest regard. To the Latin translations of Aristotle and to his interpreters he refers in more than three hundred passages, while the number of his references to the Latin translation of the Timaeus of Plato is less than ten. His five great pagan poets are Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan; Statius he regards as a “Christian” converted by Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. His standard authors in Latin prose are Cicero, Livy, Pliny, Frontinus and Orosius. His knowledge of Greek was practically nil. Latin was the language of his political treatise, De Monarchia, and even that of his defence of the vulgar tongue, De Vulgari Eloquio. He is, in a limited sense, a precursor of the Renaissance, but he is far more truly to be regarded as the crowning representative of the spirit of the middle ages.
(iv.) The Modern Age.—(a) Our fourth period is ushered in by the age of the Revival of Learning in Italy (c. 1350–1527). Petrarch (1304–1374) has been well described as “the first of modern men.” In contrast with the Schoolmen of the middle ages, he has no partiality for Aristotle. Italy. He was interested in Greek, and, a full century before the fall of Constantinople, he was in possession of MSS. of Homer and Plato, though his knowledge of the language was limited to the barest rudiments. For that knowledge, scanty as it was, he was indebted to Leontius Pilatus, with whose aid Boccaccio (1313–1375) became “the first of modern men” to study Greek to some purpose during the three years that Leontius spent as his guest in Florence (1360–1363). It was also at Florence that Greek was taught in the next generation by Chrysoloras (in 1396–1400). Another generation passed, and the scholars of the East and West met at the council of Florence (1439). One of the envoys of the Greeks, Gemistus Pletho, then inspired Cosimo dei Medici with the thought of founding an academy for the study of Plato. The academy was founded, and, in the age of Lorenzo, Plato and Plotinus were translated into Latin by Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499). The Apology and Crito, the Phaedo, Phaedrus and Gorgias of Plato, as well as speeches of Demosthenes and Aeschines, with the Oeconomics, Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, had already been translated by Leonardo Bruni (d. 1444); the Rhetoric by Filelfo (1430), and Plato’s Republic by Decembrio (1439). A comprehensive scheme for translating the principal Greek prose authors into Latin was carried out at Rome by the founder of the manuscript collections of the Vatican, Nicholas V. (1447–1455), who had belonged to the literary circle of Cosimo at Florence. The translation of Aristotle was entrusted to three of the learned Greeks who had already arrived in Italy, Trapezuntius, Gaza and Bessarion, while other authors were undertaken by Italian scholars such as Guarino, Valla, Decembrio and Perotti. Among the scholars of Italian birth, probably the only one in this age who rivalled the Greeks as a public expositor of their own literature was Politian (1454–1494), who lectured on Homer and Aristotle in Florence, translated Herodian, and was specially interested in the Latin authors of the Silver Age and in the text of the Pandects of Justinian. It will be observed that the study of Greek had been resumed in Florence half a century before the fall of Constantinople, and that the principal writers of Greek prose had been translated into Latin before that event.
Meanwhile, the quest of MSS. of the Latin classics had been actively pursued. Petrarch had discovered Cicero’s Speech pro Archia at Liége (1333) and the Letters to Atticus and Quintus at Verona (1345). Boccaccio had discovered Martial and Ausonius, and had been the first of the humanists to be familiar with Varro and Tacitus, while Salutati had recovered Cicero’s letters Ad Familiares (1389). During the council of Constance, Poggio, the papal secretary, spent in the quest of MSS. the interval between May 1415 and November 1417, during which he was left at leisure by the vacancy in the apostolic see.
Thirteen of Cicero’s speeches were found by him at Cluny and Langres, and elsewhere in France or Germany; the commentary of Asconius, a complete Quintilian, and a large part of Valerius Flaccus were discovered at St Gallen. A second expedition to that monastery and to others in the neighbourhood led to the recovery of Lucretius, Manilius, Silius Italicus and Ammianus ​Marcellinus, while the Silvae of Statius were recovered shortly afterwards. A complete MS. of Cicero, De Oratore, Brutus and Orator, was found by Bishop Landriani at Lodi (1421). Cornelius Nepos was discovered by Traversari in Padua (1434). The Agricola, Germania and Dialogue of Tacitus reached Italy from Germany in 1455, and the early books of the Annals in 1508. Pliny’s Panegyric was discovered by Aurispa at Mainz (1433), and his correspondence with Trajan by Fra Giocondo in Paris about 1500.
Greek MSS. were brought from the East by Aurispa, who in 1423 returned with no less than two hundred and thirty-eight, including the celebrated Laurentian MS. of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Apollonius Rhodius. A smaller number was brought from Constantinople by Filelfo (1427), while Quintus Smyrnaeus was discovered in south Italy by Bessarion, who presented his own collection of MSS. to the republic of Venice and thus led to the foundation of the library of St Mark’s (1468). As the emissary of Lorenzo, Janus Lascaris paid two visits to the East, returning from his second visit in 1492 with two hundred MSS. from Mount Athos.
The Renaissance theory of a humanistic education is illustrated by several treatises still extant. In 1392 Vergerio addressed to a prince of Padua the first treatise which methodically maintains the claims of Latin as an essential part of a liberal education. Eight years later, he was learning Greek from Chrysoloras. Among the most distinguished pupils of the latter was Leonardo Bruni, who, about 1405, wrote “the earliest humanistic tract on education expressly addressed to a lady.” He here urges that the foundation of all true learning is a “sound and thorough knowledge of Latin,” and draws up a course of reading, in which history is represented by Livy, Sallust, Curtius, and Caesar; oratory by Cicero; and poetry by Virgil. The same year saw the birth of Maffeo Vegio, whose early reverence for the muse of Virgil and whose later devotion to the memory of Monica have left their mark on the educational treatise which he wrote a few years before his death in 1458. The authors he recommends include “Aesop” and Sallust, the tragedies of Seneca and the epic poets, especially Virgil, whom he interprets in an allegorical sense. He is in favour of an early simultaneous study of a wide variety of subjects, to be followed later by the special study of one or two. Eight years before the death of Vegio, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (Pius II.) had composed a brief treatise on education in the form of a letter to Ladislaus, the young king of Bohemia and Hungary. The Latin poets to be studied include Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and (with certain limitations) Horace, Juvenal and Persius, as well as Plautus, Terence and the tragedies of Seneca; the prose authors recommended are Cicero, Livy and Sallust. The first great school of the Renaissance was that established by Vittorino da Feltre at Mantua, where he resided for the last twenty-two years of his life (1424–1446). Among the Latin authors studied were Virgil and Lucan, with selections from Horace, Ovid and Juvenal, besides Cicero and Quintilian, Sallust and Curtius, Caesar and Livy. The Greek authors were Homer, Hesiod, Pindar and the dramatists, with Herodotus, Xenophon and Plato, Isocrates and Demosthenes, Plutarch and Arrian.
Meanwhile, Guarino had been devoting five years to the training of the eldest son of the marquis of Ferrara. At Ferrara he spent the last thirty years of his long life (1370–1460), producing text-books of Greek and Latin grammar, and translations from Strabo and Plutarch. His method may be gathered from his son’s treatise, De Ordine Docendi et Studendi. In that treatise the essential marks of an educated person are, not only ability to write Latin verse, but also, a point of “at least equal importance,” “familiarity with the language and literature of Greece.” “Without a knowledge of Greek, Latin scholarship itself is, in any real sense, impossible” (1459).
By the fall of Constantinople in 1453, “Italy (in the eloquent phrase of Carducci) became sole heir and guardian of the ancient civilization,” but its fall was in no way necessary for the revival of learning, which had begun a century before. Bessarion, Theodorus Gaza, Georgius Trepezuntius, Argyropulus, Chalcondyles, all had reached Italy before 1453. A few more Greeks fled to Italy after that date, and among these were Janus Lascaris, Musurus and Callierges. All three were of signal service in devoting their knowledge of Greek to perpetuating and popularizing the Greek classics with the aid of the newly-invented art of printing. That art had been introduced into Italy by the German printers, Sweynheym and Pannartz, who had worked under Fust at Mainz. At Subiaco and at Rome they had produced in 1465–1471 the earliest editions of Cicero, De Oratore and the Letters, and eight other Latin authors.
The printing of Greek began at Milan with the Greek grammar of Constantine Lascaris (1476). At Florence the earliest editions of Homer (1488) and Isocrates (1493) had been produced by Demetrius Chalcondyles, while Janus Lascaris was the first to edit the Greek anthology, Apollonius Rhodius, and parts of Euripides, Callimachus and Lucian (1494–1496). In 1494–1515 Aldus Manutius published at Venice no less than twenty-seven editiones principes of Greek authors and of Greek works of reference, the authors including Aristotle, Theophrastus, Theocritus, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Sophocles, Herodotus, Euripides, Demosthenes (and the minor Attic orators), Pindar, Plato and Athenaeus. In producing Plato, Athenaeus and Aristophanes, the scholar-printer was largely aided by Musurus, who also edited the Aldine Pausanias (1516) and the Etymologicum printed in Venice by another Greek immigrant, Callierges (1499).
The Revival of Learning in Italy ends with the sack of Rome (1527). Before 1525 the study of Greek had begun to decline in Italy, but meanwhile an interest in that language had been transmitted to the lands beyond the Alps.
In the study of Latin the principal aim of the Italian humanists was the imitation of the style of their classical models. In the case of poetry, this imitative spirit is apparent in Petrarch’s Africa, and in the Latin poems of Politian, Pontano, Sannazaro, Vida and many others. Petrarch was not only the imitator of Virgil, who had been the leading name in Latin letters throughout the middle ages; it was the influence of Petrarch that gave a new prominence to Cicero. The imitation of Cicero was carried on with varying degrees of success by humanists such as Gasparino da Barzizza (d. 1431), who introduced a new style of epistolary Latin; by Paolo Cortesi, who discovered the importance of a rhythmical structure in the composition of Ciceronian prose (1490); and by the accomplished secretaries of Leo X., Bembo and Sadoleto. Both of these papal secretaries were mentioned in complimentary terms by Erasmus in his celebrated dialogue, the Ciceronianus (1528), in which no less than one hundred and six Ciceronian scholars of all nations are briefly and brilliantly reviewed, the slavish imitation of Cicero denounced, and the law laid down that “to speak with propriety we must adapt ourselves to the age in which we live—an age that differs entirely from that of Cicero.” One of the younger Ciceronians criticized by Erasmus was Longolius, who had died at Padua in 1522. The cause of the Ciceronians was defended by the elder Scaliger in 1531 and 1536, and by Étienne Dolet in 1535, and the controversy was continued by other scholars down to the year 1610. Meanwhile, in Italy, a strict type of Ciceronianism was represented by Paulus Manutius (d. 1574), and a freer and more original form of Latinity by Muretus (d. 1585).
Before touching on the salient points in the subsequent centuries, in connexion with the leading nations of Europe, we may briefly note the cosmopolitan position of Erasmus (1466–1536), who, although he was a native of the Netherlands, was far more closely connected with France, England, Italy, Germany and Switzerland, than with the land of his birth. He was still a school-boy at Deventer when his high promise was recognized by Rudolf Agricola, “the first (says Erasmus) who brought from Italy some breath of a better culture.” Late in 1499 Erasmus spent some two months at Oxford, where he met Colet; it was in London that he met More and Linacre and Grocyn, who had already ceased to lecture at Oxford. At Paris, in 1500, he was fully conscious that “without Greek the amplest ​knowledge of Latin was imperfect”; and, during his three years in Italy (1506–1509), he worked quietly at Greek in Bologna and attended the lectures of Musurus in Padua. In October 1511 he was teaching Greek to a little band of students in Cambridge; at Basel in 1516 he produced his edition of the Greek Testament, the first that was actually published; and during the next few years he was helping to organize the college lately founded at Louvain for the study of Greek and Hebrew, as well as Latin. Seven years at Basel were followed by five at Freiburg, and by two more at Basel, where he died. The names of all these places are suggestive of the wide range of his influence. By his published works, his Colloquies, his Adages and his Apophthegms, he was the educator of the nations of Europe. An educational aim is also apparent in his editions of Terence and of Seneca, while his Latin translations made his contemporaries more familiar with Greek poetry and prose, and his Paraphrase promoted a better understanding of the Greek Testament. He was not so much a scientific scholar as a keen and brilliant man of letters and a widely influential apostle of humanism.
In France the most effective of the early teachers of Greek was Janus Lascaris (1495–1503). Among his occasional pupils was Budaeus (d. 1540), who prompted Francis I. to found in 1530 the corporation of the Royal Readers in Greek, as well as Latin and Hebrew, afterwards famous France. Germany. under the name of the Collège de France. In the study of Greek one of the earliest links between Italy and Germany was Rudolf Agricola, who had learned Greek under Gaza at Ferrara. It was in Paris that his younger contemporary Reuchlin acquired part of that proficiency in Greek which attracted the notice of Argyropulus, whose admiration of Reuchlin is twice recorded by Melanchthon, who soon afterwards was pre-eminent as the “praeceptor” of Germany.
In the age of the revival the first Englishman who studied Greek was a Benedictine monk, William of Selling (d. 1494), who paid two visits to Italy. At Canterbury he inspired with his own love of learning his nephew, Linacre, who joined him on one of those visits, studied Greek England. at Florence under Politian and Chalcondyles, and apparently stayed in Italy from 1485 to 1499. His translation of a treatise of Galen was printed at Cambridge in 1521 by Siberch, who, in the same year and place, was the first to use Greek type in England. Greek had been first taught to some purpose at Oxford by Grocyn on his return from Italy in 1491. One of the younger scholars of the day was William Lilye, who picked up his Greek at Rhodes on his way to Palestine and became the first high-master of the school founded by Colet at St Paul’s (1510).
(b) That part of the Modern Period of classical studies which succeeds the age of the Revival in Italy may be subdivided into three periods distinguished by the names of the nations most prominent in each.
1. The first may be designated the French period. It begins with the foundation of the Royal Readers by Francis I. in 1530, and it may perhaps be regarded as extending to 1700. This period is marked by a many-sided erudition rather than by any special cult of the form of the The French period. classical languages. It is the period of the great polyhistors of France. It includes Budaeus and the elder Scaliger (who settled in France in 1529), with Turnebus and Lambinus, and the learned printers Robertus and Henricus Stephanus, while among its foremost names are those of the younger (and greater) Scaliger, Casaubon and Salmasius. Of these, Casaubon ended his days in England (1614); Scaliger, by leaving France for the Netherlands in 1593, for a time at least transferred the supremacy in scholarship from the land of his birth to that of his adoption. The last sixteen years of his life (1593–1609) were spent at Leiden, which was also for more than twenty years (1631–1653) the home of Salmasius, and for thirteen (1579–1592) that of Lipsius (d. 1606). In the 17th century the erudition of France is best represented by “Henricus Valesius,” Du Cange and Mabillon. In the same period Italy was represented by Muretus, who had left France in 1563, and by her own sons, Nizolius, Victorius, Robortelli and Sigonius, followed in the 17th century by R. Fabretti. The Netherlands, in the 16th, claim W. Canter as well as Lipsius, and, in the 17th, G. J. Vossius, Johannes Meursius, the elder and younger Heinsius, Hugo Grotius, J. F. Gronovius, J. G. Graevius and J. Perizonius. Scotland, in the 16th, is represented by George Buchanan; England by Sir John Cheke, Roger Ascham, and Sir Henry Savile, and, in the 17th, by Thomas Gataker, Thomas Stanley, Henry Dodwell, and Joshua Barnes; Germany by Janus Gruter, Ezechiel Spanheim and Chr. Cellarius, the first two of whom were also connected with other countries.
We have already seen that a strict imitation of Cicero was one of the characteristics of the Italian humanists. In and after the middle of the 16th century a correct and pure Latinity was promoted by the educational system of the Jesuits; but with the growth of the Literary Latin. vernacular literatures Latin became more and more exclusively the language of the learned. Among the most conspicuous Latin writers of the 17th century are G. J. Vossius and the Heinsii, with Salmasius and his great adversary, Milton. Latin was also used in works on science and philosophy, such as Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia (1687), and many of the works of Leibnitz (1646–1705). In botany the custom followed by John Ray (1627–1705) in his Historia Plantarum and in other works was continued in 1760 by Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae. The last important work in English theology written in Latin was George Bull’s Defensio Fidei Nicenae (1685). The use of Latin in diplomacy died out towards the end of the 17th century; but, long after that date negotiations with the German empire were conducted in Latin, and Latin was the language of the debates in the Hungarian diet down to 1825.
2. During the 18th century the classical scholarship of the Netherlands was under the healthy and stimulating influence of Bentley (1662–1742), who marks the beginning of the English and Dutch period, mainly represented in Holland by Bentley’s younger contemporary and The English and Dutch period. correspondent, Tiberius Hemsterhuys (1685–1766), and the latter scholar’s great pupil David Ruhnken (1723–1798). It is the age of historical and literary, as well as verbal, criticism. Both of these were ably represented in the first half of the century by Bentley himself, while, in the twenty years between 1782 and 1803, the verbal criticism of the tragic poets of Athens was the peculiar province of Richard Porson (1759–1808), who was born in the same year as F. A. Wolf. Among other representatives of England were Jeremiah Markland and Jonathan Toup, Thomas Tyrwhitt and Thomas Twining, Samuel Parr and Sir William Jones; and of the Netherlands, the two Burmanns and L. Küster, Arnold Drakenborch and Wesseling, Lodewyk Valckenaer and Daniel Wyttenbach (1746–1829). Germany is represented by Fabricius and J. M. Gesner, J. A. Ernesti and J. J. Reiske, J. J. Winckelmann and Chr. G. Heyne; France by B. de Montfaucon and J. B. G. D. Villoison; Alsace by French subjects of German origin, R. F. P. Brunck and J. Schweighäuser; and Italy by E. Forcellini and Ed. Corsini.
3. The German period begins with F. A. Wolf (1759–1824), whose Prolegomena to Homer appeared in 1795. He is the founder of the systematic and encyclopaedic type of scholarship embodied in the comprehensive term Altertumswissenschaft, or “a scientific knowledge The German period. of the old classical world.” The tradition of Wolf was ably continued by August Böckh (d. 1867), one of the leaders of the historical and antiquarian school, brilliantly represented in the previous generation by B. G. Niebuhr (d. 1831).
In contrast with this school we have the critical and grammatical school of Gottfried Hermann (d. 1848). During this period, while Germany remains the most productive of the nations, scholarship has been more and more international and cosmopolitan in its character.
19th Century.—We must here be content with simply recording the names of a few of the more prominent representatives of ​the 19th century in some of the most obvious departments of classical learning. Among natives of Germany the leading scholars have been, in Greek, C. F. W. Jacobs, C. A. Germany. Lobeck, L. Dissen, I. Bekker, A. Meineke, C. Lehrs, W. Dindorf, T. Bergk, F. W. Schneidewin, H. Köchly, A. Nauck, H. Usener, G. Kaibel, F. Blass and W. Christ; in Latin, C. Lachmann, F. Ritschl, M. Haupt, C. Halm, M. Hertz, A. Fleckeisen, E. Bährens, L. Müller and O. Ribbeck. Grammar and kindred subjects have been represented by P. Buttmann, A. Matthiae, F. W. Thiersch, C. G. Zumpt, G. Bernhardy, C. W. Krüger, R. Kühner and H. L. Ahrens; and lexicography by F. Passow and C. E. Georges. Among editors of Thucydides we have had E. F. Poppo and J. Classen; among editors of Demosthenes or other orators, G. H. Schäfer, J. T. Vömel, G. E. Benseler, A. Westermann, G. F. Schömann, H. Sauppe, and C. Rehdantz (besides Blass, already mentioned). The Platonists include F. Schleiermacher, G. A. F. Ast, G. Stallbaum and the many-sided C. F. Hermann; the Aristotelians, C. A. Brandis, A. Trendelenburg, L. Spengel, H. Bonitz, C. Prantl, J. Bernays and F. Susemihl. The history of Greek philosophy was written by F. Ueberweg, and, more fully, by E. Zeller. Greek history was the domain of G. Droysen, Max Duncker, Ernst Curtius, Arnold Schäfer and Adolf Holm; Greek antiquities that of M. H. Meier and G. F. Schömann and of G. Gilbert; Greek epigraphy that of J. Franz, A. Kirchhoff, W. von Hartel, U. Köhler, G. Hirschfeld and W. Dittenberger; Roman history and constitutional antiquities that of Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), who was associated in Latin epigraphy with E. Hübner and W. Henzen. Classical art and archaeology were represented by F. G. Welcker, E. Gerhard, C. O. Müller, F. Wieseler, O. Jahn, C. L. Urlichs, H. Brunn, C. B. Stark, J. Overbeck, W. Helbig, O. Benndorf and A. Furtwängler; mythology (with cognate subjects) by G. F. Creuzer, P. W. Forchhammer, L. Preller, A. Kuhn, J. W. Mannhardt and E. Rohde; and comparative philology by F. Bopp, A. F. Pott, T. Benfey, W. Corssen, Georg Curtius, A. Schleicher and H. Steinthal. The history of classical philology in Germany was written by Conrad Bursian (1830–1883).
In France we have J. F. Boissonade, J. A. Letronne, L. M. Quicherat, M. P. Littré, B. Saint-Hilaire, J. V. Duruy, B. E. Miller, É. Egger, C. V. Daremberg, C. Thurot, L. E. Benoist, O. Riemann and C. Graux; (in archaeology) A. C. Quatremère de Quincy, P. le Bas, C. F. M. Texier, the duc France. Belgium, Holland. England. de Luynes, the Lenormants (C. and F.), W. H. Waddington and O. Rayet; and (in comparative philology) Victor Henry. Greece was ably represented in France by A. Koraes. In Belgium we have P. Willems and the Baron De Witte (long resident in France); in Holland, C. G. Cobet; in Denmark, J. N. Madvig. Among the scholars of Great Britain and Ireland may be mentioned: P. Elmsley, S. Butler, T. Gaisford, P. P. Dobree, J. H. Monk, C. J. Blomfield, W. Veitch, T. H. Key, B. H. Kennedy, W. Ramsay, T. W. Peile, R. Shilleto, W. H. Thompson, J. W. Donaldson, Robert Scott, H. G. Liddell, C. Badham, G. Rawlinson, F. A. Paley, B. Jowett, T. S. Evans, E. M. Cope, H. A. J. Munro, W. G. Clark, Churchill Babington, H. A. Holden, J. Riddell, J. Conington, W. Y. Sellar, A. Grant, W. D. Geddes, D. B. Monro, H. Nettleship, A. Palmer, R. C. Jebb, A. S. Wilkins, W. G. Rutherford and James Adam; among historians and archaeologists, W. M. Leake, H. Fynes-Clinton, G. Grote and C. Thirlwall, T. Arnold, G. Long and Charles Merivale, Sir Henry Maine, Sir Charles Newton and A. S. Murray, Robert Burn and H. F. Pelham. Among comparative philologists Max Müller belonged to Germany by birth and to England by adoption, while, in the United States, his ablest counterpart was W. D. Whitney. B. L. Gildersleeve, W. W. Goodwin, Henry Drisler, J. B. Greenough and G. M. Lane were prominent American classical scholars.
The 19th century in Germany was marked by the organization of the great series of Greek and Latin inscriptions, and by the foundation of the Archaeological Institute in Rome (1829), which was at first international in its character. The Athenian Institute was founded in 1874. Schools at Athens and Rome were founded by France in 1846 and 1873, by the United States of America in 1882 and 1895, and by England in 1883 and 1901; Schools of Rome and Athens. and periodicals are published by the schools of all these four nations. An interest in Greek studies (and especially in art and archaeology) has been maintained in England by the Hellenic Society, founded in 1879, with its organ the Journal of Hellenic Studies. A further interest in Greek archaeology has been awakened in all civilized lands by the excavations of Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, Epidaurus, Sparta, Olympia, Dodona, Delphi, Delos and of important sites in Crete. The extensive discoveries of papyri in Egypt have greatly extended our knowledge of the administration of that country in the times of the Ptolemies, and have materially added to the existing remains of Greek literature. Scholars have been enabled to realize in their own experience some of the enthusiasm that attended the recovery of lost classics during the Revival of Learning. They have found themselves living in a new age of editiones principes, and have eagerly welcomed the first publication of Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens (1891), Herondas (1891) and Bacchylides (1897), as well as the Persae of Timotheus of Miletus (1903), with some of the Paeans of Pindar (1907) and large portions of the plays of Menander (1898–1899 and 1907). The first four of these were first edited by F. G. Kenyon, Timotheus by von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, Menander partly by J. Nicole and G. Lefebre and partly by B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt, who have also produced fragments of the Paeans of Pindar and many other classic texts (including a Greek continuation of Thucydides and a Latin epitome of part of Livy) in the successive volumes of the Oxyrhynchus papyri and other kindred publications.
Authorities.—For a full bibliography of the history of classical philology, see E. Hübner, Grundriss zu Vorlesungen über die Geschichte und Encyklopädie der klassischen Philologie (2nd ed., 1889); and for a brief outline, C. L. Urlichs in Iwan von Müller’s Handbuch, vol. i. (2nd ed., 1891). 33-145; S. Reinach, Manuel de philologie classique (2nd ed., 1883–1884; nouveau tirage 1907), 1-22; and A. Gudemann, Grundris (Leipzig, 1907), pp. 224 seq. For the Alexandrian period, F. Susemihl, Gesch. der griechischen Litteratur in der Alexandrinerzeit (2 vols., 1891–1892); cf. F. A. Eckstein, Nomenclator Philologorum (1871), and W. Pökel, Philologisches Schriftsteller-Lexikon (1882). For the period ending A.D. 400, see A. Gräfenhan, Gesch. der klass. Philologie (4 vols., 1843–1850); for the Byzantine period, C. Krumbacher in Iwan von Müller, vol. ix. (1) (2nd ed., 1897); for the Renaissance, G. Voigt, Die Wiederbelebung des class. Altertums (3rd ed., 1894, with bibliography); L. Geiger, Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland (1882, with bibliography); J. A. Symonds, Revival of Learning (1877, &c.); R. C. Jebb, in Cambridge Modern History, i. (1902), 532-584; and J. E. Sandys, Harvard Lectures on the Revival of Learning (1905); also P. de Nolhac, Pétrarque et l’humanisme (2nd ed., 1907). On the history of Greek scholarship in France, É. Egger, L’Histoire d’hellénisme en France (1869); Mark Pattison, Essays, i., and Life of Casaubon; in Germany, C. Bursian, Gesch. der class. Philologie in Deutschland (1883); in Holland, L. Müller, Gesch. der class. Philologie in den Niederlanden (1869); in Belgium, L. C. Roersch in E. P. van Bemmel’s Patria Belgica, vol. iii. (1875), 407-432; and in England, R. C. Jebb, “Erasmus” (1890) and “Bentley” (1882), and “Porson” (in Dict. Nat. Biog.). On the subject as a whole see J. E. Sandys, History of Classical Scholarship (with chronological tables, portraits and facsimiles), vol. i.; From the Sixth Century B.C. to the end of the Middle Ages (1903, 2nd ed., 1906); vols. ii. and iii., From the Revival of Learning to the Present Day (1908), including the history of scholarship in all the countries of Europe and in the United States of America. See also the separate biographical articles in this Encyclopaedia.
(B) The Study of the Classics in Secondary Education
After the Revival of Learning the study of the classics owed much to the influence and example of Vittorino da Feltre, Budacus, Erasmus and Melanchthon, who were among the leading representatives of that revival in Italy, France, England and Germany.
1. In England, the two great schools of Winchester (1382) and Eton (1440) had been founded during the life of Vittorino, but before the revival had reached Britain. The first school which came into being under the immediate influence of humanism was that founded at St Paul’s England.by Dean ​Colet (1510), the friend of Erasmus, whose treatise De pueris instituendis (1529) has its English counterpart in the Governor of Sir Thomas Elyot (1531). The highmaster of St Paul’s was to be “learned in good and clean Latin, and also in Greek, if such may be gotten.” The master and the second master of Shrewsbury (founded 1551) were to be “well able to make a Latin verse, and learned in the Greek tongue.” The influence of the revival extended to many other schools, such as Christ’s Hospital (1552), Westminster (1560), and Merchant Taylors’ (1561); Repton (1557), Rugby (1567) and Harrow (1571).
At the grammar school of Stratford-on-Avon, about 1571–1577, Shakespeare presumably studied Terence, Horace, Ovid and the Bucolics of Baptista Mantuanus (1502). In the early plays he quotes Ovid and Seneca. Similarly, in Titus Andronicus (iv. 2) he says, of Integer vitae: Shakespeare and the grammar-school. “ ’Tis a verse in Horace; I know it well: I read it in the grammar long ago.” In Henry VI. part ii. sc. 7, when Jack Cade charges Lord Say with having “most traitorously corrupted the youth of the realm in erecting a grammar-school,” Lord Say replies that “ignorance is the curse of God, knowledge the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.” In the Taming of the Shrew (I. i. 157) a line is quoted as from Terence (Andria, 74): “redime te captum quam queas minimo.” This is taken verbatim from Lilye’s contribution to the Brevis Institutio, originally composed by Colet, Erasmus and Lilye for Early text-books. St Paul’s School (1527), and ultimately adopted as the Eton Latin Grammar. The Westminster Greek Grammar of Grant (1575) was succeeded by that of Camden (1595), founded mainly on a Paduan text-book, and apparently adopted in 1596 by Sir Henry Savile at Eton, where it long remained in use as the Eton Greek Grammar, while at Westminster itself it was superseded by that of Busby (1663). The text-books to be used at Harrow in 1590 included Hesiod and some of the Greek orators and historians.
In one of the Paston Letters (i. 301), an Eton boy of 1468 quotes two Latin verses of his own composition. Nearly a century later, on New Year’s Day, 1560, forty-four boys of the school presented Latin verses to Queen Elizabeth. The queen’s former tutor, Roger Ascham, in his Scholemaster (1570), agrees Ascham. with his Strassburg friend, J. Sturm, in making the imitation of the Latin classics the main aim of instruction. He is more original when he insists on the value of translation and retranslation for acquiring a mastery over Latin prose composition, and when he protests against compelling boys to converse in Latin too soon. Ascham’s influence is apparent in the Positions of Mulcaster, who in 1581 insists on instruction in English before admission to a grammar-school, while he is distinctly in advance of his age in urging the foundation of a special college for the training of teachers.
Cleland’s Institution of a Young Nobleman (1607) owes much to the Italian humanists. The author follows Ascham in protesting against compulsory Latin conversation, and only slightly modifies his predecessor’s method of teaching Latin prose. When Latin grammar has been mastered, he Cleland. bids the teacher lead his pupil “into the sweet fountain and spring of all Arts and Science,” that is, Greek learning which is “as profitable for the understanding as the Latin tongue for speaking.” In the study of ancient history, “deeds and not words” are the prime interest. “In Plutarch pleasure is so mixed and confounded with profit; that I esteem the reading of him as a paradise for a curious spirit to walk in at all time.” Bacon in his Advancement of Learning (1605) notes it as “the first distemper of learning when men study words and not matter” (I. iv. 3); he also observes that the Jesuits “have much Bacon, Milton, Petty. quickened and strengthened the state of learning” (I. vi. 15). He is on the side of reform in education; he waves the humanist aside with the words: vetustas cessit, ratio vicit. Milton, in his Tractate on Education (1644), advances further on Bacon’s lines, protesting against the length of time spent on instruction in language, denouncing merely verbal knowledge, and recommending the study of a large number of classical authors for the sake of their subject-matter, and with a view to their bearing on practical life. His ideal place of education is an institution combining a school and a university. Sir William Petty, the economist (1623–1687), urged the establishment of ergastula literaria for instruction of a purely practical kind. Locke, who had been educated Locke. at Winchester and had lectured on Greek at Oxford (1660), nevertheless almost completely eliminated Greek from the scheme which he unfolded in his Thoughts on Education (1693). With Locke, the moral and practical qualities of virtue and prudence are of the first consideration. Instruction, he declares, is but the least part of education; his aim is to train, not men of letters or men of science, but practical men armed for the battle of life. Latin was, above all, to be learned through use, with as little grammar as possible, but with the reading of easy Latin texts, and with no repetition, no composition. Greek he absolutely proscribes, reserving a knowledge of that language to the learned and the lettered, and to professional scholars.
Throughout the 18th century and the early part of the 19th, the old routine went on in England with little variety, and with no sign of expansion. The range of studies was widened, however, at Rugby in 1828–1842 by Thomas Arnold, whose interest in ancient history and geography, as a Arnold. necessary part of classical learning, is attested by his edition of Thucydides; while his influence was still further extended when those who had been trained in his traditions became head masters of other schools.
During the rest of the century the leading landmarks are the three royal commissions known by the names of their chairmen: (1) Lord Clarendon’s on nine public schools, Eton, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, St Paul’s and Merchant Taylors’ (1861–1864), resulting in the Public Schools Act of 1868; (2) Lord Taunton’s on 782 endowed schools (1864–1867), followed by the act of 1869; and (3) Mr Bryce’s on secondary education (1894–1895).
A certain discontent with the current traditions of classical training found expression in the Essays on a Liberal Education (1867). The author of the first essay, C. S. Parker, closed his review of the reforms instituted in Germany and France by adding that in England there had Controversy on classical education. been but little change. The same volume included a critical examination of the “Theory of Classical Education” by Henry Sidgwick, and an attack on compulsory Greek and Latin verse composition by F. W. Farrar. The claims of verse composition have since been judiciously defended by the Hon. Edward Lyttelton (1897), while a temperate and effective restatement of the case for the classics may be found in Sir Richard Jebb’s Romanes Lecture on “Humanism in Education” (1899).
The question of the position of Greek in secondary education has from time to time attracted attention in connexion with the requirement of Greek in Responsions at Oxford, and in the Previous Examination at Cambridge.
In the Cambridge University Reporter for November 9, 1870, it was stated that, “in order to provide adequate encouragement for the study of Modern Languages and Natural Science,” the commissioners for endowed schools had determined on the establishment of modern schools of “Compulsory Greek.” the first grade in which Greek would be excluded. The commissioners feared that, so long as Greek was a sine qua non at the universities, these schools would be cut off from direct connexion with the universities, while the universities would in some degree lose their control over a portion of the higher culture of the nation. On the 9th of March 1871 a syndicate recommended that, in the Previous Examination, French and German (taken together) should be allowed in place of Greek; on the 27th of April this recommendation (which only affected candidates for honours or for medical degrees) was rejected by 51 votes to 48.
All the other proposals and votes relating to Greek in the Previous Examination in 1870–1873, 1878–1880, and 1891–1892 are set forth in the Cambridge University Reporter for November 11, 1904, pp. 202-205. In November 1903 a syndicate was ​appointed to consider the studies and examinations of the university, their report of November 1904 on the Previous Examination was fully discussed, and the speeches published in the Reporter for December 17, 1904. In the course of the discussion Sir Richard Jebb drew attention to the statistics collected by the master of Emmanuel, Mr W. Chawner, showing that, out of 86 head masters belonging to the Head Masters’ Conference whose replies had been published, “about 56 held the opinion that the exemption from Greek for all candidates for a degree would endanger or altogether extinguish the study of Greek in the vast majority of schools, while about 21 head masters held a different opinion.” On the 3rd of March 1905 a proposal for accepting either French or German as an alternative for either Latin or Greek in the Previous Examination was rejected by 1559 to 1052 votes, and on the 26th of May 1906 proposals distinguishing between students in letters and students in science, and (inter alia) requiring the latter to take either French or German for either Latin or Greek in the Previous Examination, were rejected by 746 to 241.
Meanwhile, at Oxford a proposal practically making Greek optional with all undergraduates was rejected, in November 1902, by 189 votes to 166; a preliminary proposal permitting students of mathematics or natural science to offer one or more modern languages in lieu of Greek was passed by 164 to 162 in February 1904, but on the 29th of November the draft of a statute to this effect was thrown out by 200 to 164. In the course of the controversy three presidents of the Royal Society, Lord Kelvin, Lord Lister and Sir W. Huggins, expressed the opinion that the proposed exemption was not beneficial to science students.
Incidentally, the question of “compulsory Greek” has stimulated a desire for greater efficiency in classical teaching. In December 1903, a year before the most important of the public discussions at Cambridge, the Classical Association was founded in London. The aim of that The Classical Association. association is “to promote the development, and maintain the well-being, of classical studies, and in particular (a) to impress upon public opinion the claim of such studies to an eminent place in the national scheme of education; (b) to improve the practice of classical teaching by free discussion of its scope and methods; (c) to encourage investigation and call attention to new discoveries; (d) to create opportunities of friendly intercourse and co-operation between all lovers of classical learning in this country.”
The question of the curriculum and the time-table in secondary education has occupied the attention of the Classical Association, the British Association and the Education Department of Scotland. The general effect of the recommendations already made would be to begin the study of The curriculum. foreign languages with French, and to postpone the study of Latin to the age of twelve and that of Greek to the age of thirteen. At the Head Masters’ Conference of December 1907 a proposal to lower the standard of Greek in the entrance scholarship examinations of public schools was lost by 10 votes to 16, and the “British Association report” was adopted with reservations in 1908. In the case of secondary schools in receipt of grants of public money (about 700 in England and 100 in Wales in 1907–1908), “the curriculum, and time-table must be approved by the Board of Education.” The Board has also a certain control over the curriculum of schools under the Endowed Schools Acts and the Charitable Trusts Acts, and also over that of schools voluntarily applying for inspection with a view to being recognized as efficient.
Further efficiency in classical education has been the aim of the movement in favour of the reform of Latin pronunciation. In 1871 this movement resulted in Munro and Palmer’s Syllabus of Latin Pronunciation. The reform was carried forward at University College, London, by Reform in Latin pronunciation. Professor Key and by Professor Robinson Ellis in 1873, and was accepted at Shrewsbury, Marlborough, Liverpool College, Christ’s Hospital, Dulwich, and the City of London school. It was taken up anew by the Cambridge Philological Society in 1886, by the Modern Languages Association in 1901, by the Classical Association in 1904–1905, and the Philological Societies of Oxford and Cambridge in 1906. The reform was accepted by the various bodies of head masters and assistant masters in December 1906–January 1907, and the proposed scheme was formally approved by the Board of Education in February 1907.
See W. H. Woodward, Studies in Education during the Age of the Renaissance (1906), chap. xiii.; Acland and Llewellin Smith, Studies in Secondary Education, with introduction by James Bryce (1892); Essays on a Liberal Education, ed. F. W. Farrar (1867); R. C. Jebb, “Humanism in Education,” Romanes Lecture of 1899, reprinted with other lectures on cognate subjects in Essays and Addresses (1907); Foster Watson, The Curriculum and Practice of the English Grammar Schools up to 1660 (1908); “Greek at Oxford,” by a Resident, in The Times (December 27, 1904); Cambridge University Reporter (November 11 and December 17, 1904); British Association Report on Curricula of Secondary Schools (with an independent paper by Professor Armstrong on “The Teaching of Classics”), (December 1907); W. H. D. Rouse in The Year’s Work in Classical Studies (1907 and 1908), chap. i.; J. P. Postgate, How to pronounce Latin (Appendix B, on “Recent Progress”), (1907). For further bibliographical details see pp. 875-890 of Dr Karl Breul’s “Grossbritannien” in Baumeister’s Handbuch, I. ii. 737-892 (Munich, 1897).
2. In France it was mainly with a view to promoting the study of Greek that the corporation of Royal Readers was founded by Francis I. in 1530 at the prompting of Budaeus. In the university of Paris, which was originally opposed to this innovation, the statutes of 1598 France. prescribed the study of Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Theocritus, Plato, Demosthenes and Isocrates (as well as the principal Latin classics), and required the production of three exercises in Greek or Latin in each week.
From the middle of the 16th century the elements of Latin were generally learned from unattractive abridgments of the grammar of the Flemish scholar, van Pauteren or Despautère (d. 1520), which, in its original folio editions of 1537–1538, was an excellent work. The Textbooks. unhappy lot of those who were compelled to learn their Latin from the current abridgments was lamented by a Port-Royalist in a striking passage describing the gloomy forest of le pays de Despautère (Guyot, quoted in Sainte-Beuve’s Port-Royal, iii. 429). The first Latin grammar written in French was that of Père de Condren of the Oratoire (c. 1642), which was followed by the Port-Royal Méthode latine of Claude Lancelot (1644), and by the grammar composed by Bossuet for the dauphin, and also used by Fénelon for the instruction of the duc de Bourgogne. In the second half of the 17th century the rules of grammar and rhetoric were simplified, and the time withdrawn from the practice of composition (especially verse composition) transferred to the explanation and the study of authors.
Richelieu, in 1640, formed a scheme for a college in which Latin was to have a subordinate place, while room was to be found for the study of history and science, Greek, and French and modern languages. Bossuet, in educating the dauphin, added to the ordinary classical routine Richelieu, Bossuet, Fénelon, Fleury. represented by the extensive series of the “Delphin Classics” the study of history and of science. A greater originality in the method of teaching the ancient languages was exemplified by Fénelon, whose views were partially reflected by the Abbé Fleury, who also desired the simplification of grammar, the diminution of composition, and even the suppression of Latin verse. Of the ordinary teaching of Greek in his day, Fleury wittily observed that most boys “learned just enough of that language to have a pretext for saying for the rest of their lives that Greek was a subject easily forgotten.”
In the 18th century Rollin, in his Traité des études (1726), agreed with the Port-Royalists in demanding that Latin grammars should be written in French, that the rules should be simplified and explained by a sufficient number of examples, and that a more important place should Rollin. be assigned to translation than to composition. The supremacy of Latin was the subject of a long series of attacks in the same century. Even at the close of the previous century the brilliant achievements of French literature had prompted La Bruyère ​to declare in Des ouvrages de l’esprit (about 1680), “We have at last thrown off the yoke of Latinism”; and, in the same year, Jacques Spon claimed in his correspondence the right to use the French language in discussing points of archaeology.
Meanwhile, in 1563, notwithstanding the opposition of the university of Paris, the Jesuits had succeeded in founding the Collegium Claromontanum. After the accession of Henry IV. they were expelled from Paris and other important towns in 1594, and not allowed to return The Jesuits. until 1609, when they found themselves confronted once more by their rival, the university of Paris. They opened the doors of their schools to the Greek and Latin classics, but they represented the ancient masterpieces dissevered from their original historic environment, as impersonal models of taste, as isolated standards of style. They did much, however, for the cultivation of original composition modelled on Cicero and Virgil. They have been charged with paying an exaggerated attention to form, and with neglecting the subject-matter of the classics. This neglect is attributed to their anxiety to avoid the “pagan” element in the ancient literature. Intensely conservative in their methods, they kept up the system of using Latin in their grammars (and in their oral instruction) long after it had been abandoned by others.
The use of French for these purposes was a characteristic of the “Little Schools” of the Jansenists of Port-Royal (1643–1660). The text-books prepared for them by Lancelot included not only the above-mentioned Latin grammar (1644) but also the Méthode grecque of 1655 and the Jardin Port-Royal. des racines grecques (1657), which remained in use for two centuries and largely superseded the grammar of Clenardus (1636) and the Tirocinium of Père Labbe (1648). Greek began to decline in the university about 1650, at the very time when the Port-Royalists were aiming at its revival. During the brief existence of their schools their most celebrated pupils were Tillemont and Racine.
The Jesuits, on the other hand, claimed Corneille and Molière, as well as Descartes and Bossuet, Fontenelle, Montesquieu and Voltaire. Of their Latin poets the best-known were Denis Petau (d. 1652), René Rapin (d. 1687) and N. E. Sanadon (d. 1733). In 1762 the Jesuits were suppressed, and more than one hundred schools were thus deprived of their teachers. The university of Paris, which had prompted their suppression, and the parliament, which had carried it into effect, made every endeavour to replace them. The university took possession of the Collegium Claromontanum, then known as the Collège Louis-le-Grand, and transformed it into an école normale. Many of the Jesuit schools were transferred to the congregations of the Oratoire and the Benedictines, and to the secular clergy. On the eve of the Revolution, out of a grand total of 562 classical schools, 384 were in the hands of the clergy and 178 in those of the congregations.
The expulsion of the Jesuits gave a new impulse to the attacks directed against all schemes of education in which Latin held a prominent position. At the moment when the university of Paris was, by the absence of its rivals, placed in complete control of the education of France, Classical education attacked. she found herself driven to defend the principles of classical education against a crowd of assailants. All kinds of devices were suggested for expediting the acquisition of Latin; grammar was to be set aside; Latin was to be learned as a “living language”; much attention was to be devoted to acquiring an extensive vocabulary; and, “to save time,” composition was to be abolished. To facilitate the reading of Latin texts, the favourite method was the use of interlinear translations, originally proposed by Locke, first popularized in France by Dumarsais (1722), and in constant vogue down to the time of the Revolution.
Early in the 18th century Rollin pleaded for the “utility of Greek,” while he described that language as the heritage of the university of Paris. In 1753 Berthier feared that in thirty years no one would be able to read Greek. In 1768 Rolland declared that the university, which held Greek in high honour, nevertheless had reason to lament that her students learnt little of the language, and he traced this decline to the fact that attendance at lectures had ceased to be compulsory. Greek, however, was still recognized as part of the examination held for the appointment of schoolmasters.
During the 18th century, in Greek as well as in Latin, the general aim was to reach the goal as rapidly as possible, even at the risk of missing it altogether. On the eve of the Revolution, France was enjoying the study of the institutions of Greece in the attractive pages of the Eve of the Revolution. Voyage du jeune Anacharsis (1789), but the study of Greek was menaced even more than that of Latin. For fifty years before the Revolution there was a distinct dissatisfaction with the routine of the schools. To meet that dissatisfaction, the teachers had accepted new subjects of study, had improved their methods, and had simplified the learning of the dead languages. But even this was not enough. In the study of the classics, as in other spheres, it was revolution rather than evolution that was loudly demanded.
The Revolution was soon followed by the long-continued battle of the “Programmes.” Under the First Republic the schemes of Condorcet (April 1792) and J. Lakanal (February 1795) were superseded by that of P. C. F. Daunou (October 1795), which divided the pupils of First Republic. the “central schools” into three groups, according to age, with corresponding subjects of study: (1) twelve to fourteen,—drawing, natural history, Greek and Latin, and a choice of modern languages; (2) fourteen to sixteen,—mathematics, physics, chemistry; (3) over sixteen,—general grammar, literature, history and constitutional law..
In July 1801, under the consulate, there were two courses, (1) nine to twelve,—elementary knowledge, including elements of Latin; (2) above twelve,—a higher course, with two alternatives, “humanistic” studies for the “civil,” and purely practical studies for the “military” section. The law Consulate. of the 1st of May 1802 brought the lycées into existence, the subjects being, in Napoleon’s own phrase, “mainly Latin and mathematics.”
At the Restoration (1814) the military discipline of the lycées was replaced by the ecclesiastical discipline of the “Royal Colleges.” The reaction of 1815–1821 in favour of classics was followed by the more liberal programme of Vatimesnil (1829), including, for those who had no Restoration. taste for a classical education, certain “special courses” (1830), which were the germ of the enseignement spécial and the enseignement moderne.
Under Louis Philippe (1830–1848), amid all varieties of administration there was a consistent desire to hold the balance fairly between all the conflicting subjects of study. After the revolution of 1848 the difficulties raised by the excessive number of subjects were solved by H. N. H. Fortoul’s expedient of “bifurcation,” the alternatives being letters and science. In 1863, under Napoleon III., Victor Duruy encouraged the study of history, and also did much for classical learning by founding the École des Hautes Études. In 1872, under the Third Republic, Jules Simon found time for hygiene, geography and modern Third Republic. languages by abolishing Latin verse composition and reducing the number of exercises in Latin prose, while he insisted on the importance of studying the inner meaning of the ancient classics. The same principles were carried out by Jules Ferry (1880) and Paul Bert (1881–1882). In the scheme of 1890 the Latin course of six years began with ten hours a week and ended with four; Greek was begun a year later with two hours, increasing to six and ending with four.
The commission of 1899, under the able chairmanship of M. Alexandre Ribot, published an important report, which was followed in 1902 by the scheme of M. Georges Leygues. The preamble includes a striking tribute to the advantages that France had derived from the study of the classics:—
“L’étude de l’antiquité grecque et latine a donné au génie français une mesure, une clarté et une élégance incomparables. C’est par elle que notre philosophie, nos lettres et nos arts ont brillé d’un si ​vif éclat; c’est par elle que notre influence morale s’est exercée en souveraine dans le monde. Les humanités doivent être protégées contre toute atteinte et fortifiées. Elles font partie du patrimoine national.
“L’esprit classique n’est pas . . . incompatible avec l’esprit moderne. Il est de tous les temps, parce qu’il est le culte de la raison claire et libre, la recherche de la beauté harmonieuse et simple dans toutes les manifestations de la pensée.”
By the scheme introduced in these memorable terms the course of seven years is divided into two cycles, the first cycle (of four years) having two parallel courses: (1) without Greek or Latin, and (2) with Latin, and with optional Greek at the beginning of the third year. In the second cycle (of three years) those who have been learning both Greek and Latin, and those who have been learning neither, continue on the same lines as before; while those who have been learning Latin only may either (1) discontinue it in favour of modern languages and science, or (2) continue it with either. As an alternative to the second cycle, which normally ends in the examination for the baccalauréat, there is a shorter course, mainly founded on modern languages or applied science and ending in a public examination without the baccalauréat. The baccalauréat, however, has been condemned by the next minister, M. Briand, who prefers to crown the course with the award of a school diploma (1907).
See H. Lantoine, Histoire de l’enseignement secondaire en France au XVII $^e$ siècle (1874); A. Sicard, Les Études classiques avant la Révolution (1887); Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, vols. i.-v. (1840–1859), especially iii. 383-588; O. Gréard, Education et instruction, 4 vols., especially “Enseignement secondaire,” vol. ii. pp. 1-90, with conspectus of programmes in the appendix (1889); A. Ribot, La Réforme de l’enseignement secondaire (1900); G. Leygues, Plan d’études, &c. (1902); H. H. Johnson, “Present State of Classical Studies in France,” in Classical Review (December 1907). See also the English Education Department’s Special Reports on Education in France (1899). The earlier literature is best represented in England by Matthew Arnold’s Schools and Universities in France (1868; new edition, 1892) and A French Eton (1864).
3. The history of education in Germany since 1500 falls into three periods: (a) the age of the Revival of Learning and the Reformation (1500–1650), (b) the age of French influence (1650–1800), and (c) the 19th Germany.century.
(a) During the first twenty years of the 16th century the reform of Latin instruction was carried out by setting aside the old medieval grammars, by introducing new manuals of classical literature, and by prescribing the study of classical authors and the imitation of classical models. In all these points the lead was first taken by south Germany, and by the towns along the Rhine down to the Netherlands. The old schools and universities were being quietly interpenetrated by the new spirit of humanism, when the sky was suddenly darkened by the clouds of religious conflict. In 1525–1535 there was a marked depression in the classical studies of Germany. Erasmus, writing to W. Pirckheimer in 1528, exclaims: “Wherever the spirit of Luther prevails, learning goes to the ground.” Such a fate was, however, averted by the intervention of Melanchthon (d. 1560), the Melanchthon. praeceptor Germaniae, who was the embodiment of the spirit of the new Protestant type of education, with its union of evangelical doctrine and humanistic culture. Under his influence, new schools rapidly rose into being at Magdeburg, Eisleben and Nuremberg (1521–1526). During more than forty years of academic activity he not only provided manuals of Latin and Greek grammar and many other text-books that long remained in use, but he also formed for Germany a well-trained class of learned teachers, who extended his influence throughout the land. His principal ally as an educator and as a writer of text-books was Camerarius (d. 1574). Precepts of style, and models taken from the best Latin authors, were the means whereby a remarkable skill in the imitation of Cicero was attained at Strassburg during the forty-four years of the headmastership of Johannes von Sturm (d. 1589), who had himself been influenced by the De disciplinis of J. L. Vivès (1531), and in all his teaching aimed at the formation of a sapiens atque eloquens pietas. Latin continued to be the living language of learning and of literature, and a correct and elegant Latin style was regarded as the mark of an educated person. Greek was taught in all the great schools, but became more and more confined to the study of the Greek Testament. In 1550 it was proposed in Brunswick to The Greek Testament. banish all “profane” authors from the schools, and in 1589 a competent scholar was instructed to write a sacred epic on the kings of Israel as a substitute for the works of the “pagan” poets. In 1637, when the doubts of Scaliger and Heinsius as to the purity of the Greek of the New Testament prompted the rector of Hamburg to introduce the study of classical authors, any reflection on the style of the Greek Testament was bitterly resented.
The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540, and by 1600 most of the teachers in the Catholic schools and universities of Germany were Jesuits. The society was “dissolved” in 1773, but survived its dissolution. In accordance with the Ratio Studiorum of Aquaviva (1599), which The Jesuits. long remained unaltered and was only partially revised by J. Roothaan (1832), the main subjects of instruction were the litterae humaniores diversarum linguarum. The chief place among these was naturally assigned to Latin, the language of the society and of the Roman Church. The Latin grammar in use was that of the Jesuit rector of the school at Lisbon, Alvarez (1572). As in the Protestant schools, the principal aim was the attainment of eloquentia. A comparatively subordinate place was assigned to Greek, especially as the importance attributed to the Vulgate weakened the motive for studying the original text. It was recognized, however, that Latin itself (as Vivès had said) was “in no small need of Greek,” and that, “unless Greek was learnt in boyhood, it would hardly ever be learnt at all.” The text-book used was the Institutiones linguae Graecae of the German Jesuit, Jacob Gretser, of Ingolstadt (c. 1590), and the reading in the highest class included portions of Demosthenes, Isocrates, Plato, Thucydides, Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil and Chrysostom. The Catholic and Protestant schools of the 16th century succeeded, as a rule, in giving a command over a correct Latin style and a taste for literary form and for culture. Latin was still the language of the law-courts and of a large part of general literature. Between Luther and Lessing there was no great writer of German prose.
(b) In the early part of the period 1650–1800, while Latin continued to hold the foremost place, it was ceasing to be Latin of the strictly classical type. Greek fell still further into the background; and Homer and Demosthenes gradually gave way to the Greek Testament. Between The age of French influence. 1600 and 1775 there was a great gap in the production of new editions of the principal Greek classics. The spell was only partially broken by J. A. Ernesti’s Homer (1759 f.) and Chr. G. Heyne’s Pindar (1773 f.).
The peace of Westphalia (1648) marks a distinct epoch in the history of education in Germany. Thenceforth, education became more modern and more secular. The long wars of religion in Germany, as in France and England, were followed by a certain indifference as to disputed Modern and secular education. points of theology. But the modern and secular type of education that now supervened was opposed by the pietism of the second half of the 17th century, represented at the newly-founded university of Halle (1694) by A. H. Francke, the professor of Greek (d. 1727), whose influence was far greater than that of Chr. Cellarius (d. 1707), the founder of the first philological Seminar (1697). Francke’s contemporary, Chr. Thomasius (d. 1728), was never weary of attacking scholarship of the old humanistic type and everything that savoured of antiquarian pedantry, and it was mainly his influence that made German the language of university lectures and of scientific and learned literature. A modern education is also the aim of the general introduction to the nova methodus of Leibnitz, where the study of Greek is recommended solely for the sake of the Greek Testament (1666). Meanwhile, Ratichius (d. 1635) had in vain pretended to teach Hebrew, Greek and Latin in the space of six months (1612), but he had the merit of maintaining that the study of a language should begin with the study of an author. Comenius (d. 1671) had proposed to teach Latin by drilling his ​pupils in a thousand graduated phrases distributed over a hundred instructive chapters, while the Latin authors were banished because of their difficulty and their “paganism” (1631). One of the catchwords of the day was to insist on a knowledge of things instead of a knowledge of words, on “realism” instead of “verbalism.”
Under the influence of France the perfect courtier became the ideal in the German education of the upper classes of the 17th and 18th centuries. A large number of aristocratic schools (Ritter-Akademien) were founded, beginning with the Collegium Illustre of Tübingen Ritter-akademien. (1589) and ending with the Hohe Karlschule of Stuttgart (1775). In these schools the subjects of study included mathematics and natural sciences, geography and history, and modern languages (especially French), with riding, fencing and dancing; Latin assumed a subordinate place, and classical composition in prose or verse was not considered a sufficiently courtly accomplishment. The youthful aristocracy were thus withdrawn from the old Latin schools of Germany, but the aristocratic schools vanished with the dawn of the 19th century, and the ordinary public schools were once more frequented by the young nobility.
(c) The Modern Period.—In the last third of the 18th century two important movements came into play, the “naturalism” of Rousseau and the “new humanism.” While Rousseau sought his ideal in a form of education and of culture that was in close accord with nature, the The “new humanism.” German apostles of the new humanism were convinced that they had found that ideal completely realized in the old Greek world. Hence the aim of education was to make young people thoroughly “Greek,” to fill them with the “Greek” spirit, with courage and keenness in the quest of truth, and with a devotion to all that was beautiful. The link between the naturalism of Rousseau and the new humanism is to be found in J. G. Herder, whose passion for all that Herder. is Greek inspires him with almost a hatred of Latin. The new humanism was a kind of revival of the Renaissance, which had been retarded by the Reformation in Germany and by the Counter-Reformation in Italy, or had at least been degraded to the dull classicism of the schools. The new humanism agreed with the Renaissance in its unreserved recognition of the old classical world as a perfect pattern of culture. But, while the Renaissance aimed at reproducing the Augustan age of Rome, the new humanism found its golden age in Athens. The Latin Renaissance in Italy aimed at recovering and verbally imitating the ancient literature; the Greek Renaissance in Germany sought inspiration from the creative originality of Greek literature with a view to producing an original literature in the German language. The movement had its effect on the schools by discouraging the old classical routine of verbal imitation, and giving a new prominence to Greek and to German. The new humanism found a home in Göttingen (1783) in the days of J. M. Gesner and C. G. Heyne. It was represented at Leipzig by Gesner’s successor, Ernesti (d. 1781); and at Halle by F. A. Wolf, who in 1783 was appointed professor of education by Zedlitz, the minister of Frederick the Great. In literature, its leading names were Winckelmann, Lessing and Voss, and Herder, Goethe and Schiller. The tide of the new movement had reached its height about 1800. Goethe and Schiller were convinced that the old Greek world was the highest revelation of humanity; and the universities and schools of Germany were reorganized in this spirit by F. A. Wolf and his illustrious pupil, Wilhelm von Humboldt. In 1809–1810 Humboldt was at the School reorganization. head of the educational section of the Prussian Home Office, and, in the brief interval of a year and a half, gave to the general system of education the direction which it followed (with slight exceptions) throughout the whole century. In 1810 the examen pro facultate docendi first made the profession of a schoolmaster independent of that of a minister of religion. The new scheme drawn up by J. W. Süvern recognized four principal co-ordinated branches of learning: Latin, Greek, German, mathematics. All four were studied throughout the school, Greek being begun in the fourth of the nine classes, that corresponding to the English “third form.” The old Latin school had only one main subject, the study of Latin style (combined with a modicum of Greek). The new gymnasium aimed at a wider education, in which literature was represented by Latin, Greek and German, by the side of mathematics and natural science, history and religion. The uniform employment of the term Gymnasium for the highest type of a Prussian school dates from 1812. The leaving examination (Abgangsprüfung), instituted in that year, required Greek translation at sight, with Greek prose composition, and ability to speak and to write Latin. In 1818–1840 the leading spirit on the board of education was Johannes Schulze, and a complete and comprehensive system of education continued to be the ideal kept in view. Such an education, however, was found in practice to involve a prolongation of the years spent at school and a correspondingly later start in life. It was also attacked on the ground that it led to “overwork.” This attack was partially met by the scheme of 1837. Schulze’s period of prominence in Berlin closely corresponded to that of Herbart at Königsberg (1809–1833) and Göttingen (1833–1841), who insisted that for boys of eight to twelve there was no better text-book than the Greek Odyssey, and this principle was brought into practice at Hanover by his distinguished pupil, Ahrens.
The Prussian policy of the next period, beginning with the accession of Friedrich Wilhelm IV. in 1840, was to lay a new stress on religious teaching, and to obviate the risk of overwork resulting from the simultaneous study of all subjects by the encouragement of specialization in a few. Ludwig Wiese’s scheme of 1856 insisted on the retention of Latin verse as well as Latin prose, and showed less favour to natural science, but it awakened little enthusiasm, while the attempt to revive the old humanistic Gymnasium led to a demand for schools of a more modern type, which issued in the recognition of the Realgymnasium (1859).
In the age of Bismarck, school policy in Prussia had for its aim an increasing recognition of modern requirements. In 1875 Wiese was succeeded by Bonitz, the eminent Aristotelian scholar, who in 1849 had introduced mathematics and natural science into the schools of Austria, and had substituted the wide reading of classical authors for the prevalent practice of speaking and writing Latin. By his scheme of 1882 natural science recovered its former position in Prussia, and the hours assigned in each week to Latin were diminished from 86 to 77. But neither of the two great parties in the educational world was satisfied; and great expectations were aroused when the question of reform was taken up by the German emperor, William II., in 1890. The result of the conference of December 1890 was a compromise between the conservatism of a majority of its members and the forward policy of the emperor. The scheme of 1892 reduced the number of hours assigned to Latin from 77 to 62, and laid special stress on the German essay; but the modern training given by the Realgymnasium was still unrecognized as an avenue to a university education. A conference held in June 1900, in which the speakers included Mommsen and von Wilamowitz, Harnack and Diels, was followed by the “Kiel Decree” of the 26th of November. In that decree the emperor urged the equal recognition of the classical and the modern Gymnasium, and emphasized the importance of giving more time to Latin and to English in both. In the teaching of Greek, “useless details” were to be set aside, and special care devoted to the connexion between ancient and modern culture, while, in all subjects, attention was to be paid to the classic precept: multum, non multa.
By the scheme of 1901 the pupils of the Realgymnasium, the Oberrealschule and the Gymnasium were admitted to the university on equal terms in virtue of their leaving-certificates, but Greek and Latin were still required for students of classics or divinity.
For the Gymnasium the aim of the new scheme is, in Latin, “to supply boys with a sound basis of grammatical training, with a view to their understanding the more important classical ​writers of Rome, and being thus introduced to the intellectual life and culture of the ancient world”; and, in Greek, “to give them a sufficient knowledge of the language with a view to their obtaining an acquaintance with some of the Greek classical works which are distinguished both in matter and in style, and thus gaining an insight into the intellectual life and culture of Ancient Greece.” In consequence of these changes Greek is now studied by a smaller number of boys, but with better results, and a new lease of life has been won for the classical Gymnasium.
Lastly, by the side of the classical Gymnasium, we now have the “German Reform Schools” of two different types, that of Altona (dating from 1878) and that of Frankfort-on-the-Main (1892). The leading principle in both is the postponement of the time for learning Latin. Schools of the Frankfort type take French as their only foreign language in the first three years of the course, and aim at achieving in six years as much as has been achieved by the Gymnasia in nine; and it is maintained that, in six years, they succeed in mastering a larger amount of Latin literature than was attempted a generation ago, even in the best Gymnasia of the old style. It may be added that in all the German Gymnasia, whether reformed or not, more time is given to classics than in the corresponding schools in England.
See F. Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts vom Ausgang des Mittelalters bis auf die Gegenwart mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den klassischen Unterricht (2 vols., 2nd ed., 1896); Das Realgymnasium und die humanistische Bildung (1889); Die höheren Schulen und das Universitätsstudium im 20. Jahrhundert (1901); “Das moderne Bildungswesen” in Die Kulture der Gegenwart, vol. i. (1904); Das deutsche Bildungswesen in seiner geschichtlichen Entwickelung (1906) (with the literature there quoted, pp. 190-192), translated by Dr T. Lorenz, German Education, Past and Present (1908); T. Ziegler, Notwendigkeit ... des Realgymnasiums (Stuttgart, 1894); F. A. Eckstein, Lateinischer und griechischer Unterricht (1887); O. Kohl, “Griechischer Unterricht” (Langensalza, 1896) in W. Rein’s Handbuch; A. Baumeister’s Handbuch (1895), especially vol. i. 1 (History) and i. 2 (Educational Systems); P. Stötzner, Das öffentliche Unterrichtswesen Deutschlands in der Gegenwart (1901); F. Seiler, Geschichte des deutschen Unterrichtswesens (2 vols., 1906); Verhandlungen of June 1900 (2nd ed., 1902); Lehrpläne, &c. (1901); Die Reform des höheren Schulwesens, ed. W. Lexis (1902); A. Harnack’s Vortrag and W. Parow’s Erwiderung (1905); H. Müller, Das höhere Schulwesen Deutschlands am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1904); O. Steinbart, Durchführung des preussischen Schulreform in ganz Deutschland (Duisburg, 1904); J. Schipper, Alte Bildung und moderne Cultur (Vienna, 1901); Papers by M. E. Sadler: (1) “Problems in Prussian Secondary Education” (Special Reports of Education Dept., 1899); (2) “The Unrest in Secondary Education in Germany and Elsewhere” (Special Reports of Board of Education, vol. 9, 1902); J. L. Paton, The Teaching of Classics in Prussian Secondary Schools (on “German Reform Schools”) (1907, Wyman, London); J. E. Russell, German Higher Schools (New York, 1899); and (among earlier English publications) Matthew Arnold’s Higher Schools and Universities in Germany (1874, reprinted from Schools and Universities on the Continent, 1865).
(4) In the United States of America the highest degree of educational development has been subsequent to the Civil War. The study of Latin begins in the “high schools,” the average age of admission being fifteen and the normal course extending over four years. Among classical teachers an increasing number would prefer a United States.longer course extending over six years for Latin, and at least three for Greek, and some of these would assign to the elementary school the first two of the proposed six years of Latin study. Others are content with the late learning of Latin and prefer that it should be preceded by a thorough study of modern languages (see Prof. B. I. Wheeler, in Baumeister’s Handbuch, 1897, ii. 2, pp. 584-586).
It was mainly owing to a pamphlet issued in 1871 by Prof. G. M. Lane, of Harvard, that a reformed pronunciation of Latin was adopted in all the colleges and schools of the United States. Some misgivings on this reform found expression in a work on the Teaching of Latin, published by Prof. C. E. Bennett of Latin pronunciation.Cornell in 1901, a year in which it was estimated that this pronunciation was in use by more than 96% of the Latin pupils in the secondary schools.
Some important statistics as to the number studying Latin and Greek in the secondary schools were collected in 1900 by a committee of twelve educational experts representing all parts of the Union, with a view to a uniform course of instruction being pursued in all classical schools. They had the advantage of the co-operation of Dr W. T. Harris, the U.S. commissioner of education, and they were able to report that, in all the five groups into which they had divided the states, the number of pupils pursuing the study of Latin and Greek showed a remarkable advance, especially in the most progressive states of the middle west. The number learning Latin had increased from 100,144 in 1890 to 314,856 in 1899–1900, and those learning Greek from 12,869 to 24,869. Thus the number learning Latin at the later date was three times, and the number learning Greek twice, as many as those learning Latin or Greek ten years previously. But the total number in 1000 was 630,048; so that, notwithstanding this proof of progress, the number learning Greek in 1900 was only about one twenty-fifth of the total number, while the number learning Latin was as high as half.
The position of Greek as an “elective” or “optional” subject (notably at Harvard), an arrangement regarded with approval by some eminent educational authorities and with regret by others, probably has some effect on the high schools in the small number of those who learn Greek, and in their lower rate of increase, as compared with those who learn Latin. Some evidence as to the quality of the study of those languages in the schools is supplied by English commissioners in the Reports of the Mosely Commission. Thus Mr Papillon considered that, while the teaching of English literature was admirable, the average standard of Latin and Greek teaching and attainment in the upper classes was “below that of an English public school”; he felt, however, that the secondary schools of the United States had a “greater variety of the curriculum to suit the practical needs of life,” and that they existed, not “for the select few,” but “for the whole people” (pp. 250 f.).
For full information see the “Two volumes of Monographs prepared for the United States Educational Exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900,” edited by Dr N. Murray Butler; the Annual Reports of the U.S. commissioner of education (Washington); and the Reports of the Mosely Commission to the United States of America (London, 1904). Cf. statistics quoted in G. G. Ramsay’s “Address on Efficiency in Education” (Glasgow, 1902, 17-20), from the Transactions of the Amer. Philol. Association, xxx. (1899), pp. lxxvii-cxxii; also Bennett and Bristol, The Teaching of Latin and Greek in the Secondary School (New York, 1901).  (J. E. S.*)
* ↑ The above derivation is in accordance with English usage. In the New English Dictionary the earliest example of the word “classical” is the phrase “classical and canonical,” found in the Europae Speculum of Sir Edwin Sandys (1599), and, as applied to a writer, it is explained as meaning “of the first rank or authority.” This exactly corresponds with the meaning of classicus in the above passage of Gellius. On the other hand, the French word classique (in Littré’s view) primarily means “used in class.”
* ↑ See also the article Schools.