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juniors. At Syracuse in the early fifth century the choragos taught letters as well as music, and the verb choragein stood for 'school' teaching generally.115 |
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At Athens choruses were formed anew for each event, and if the composition to be performed was an original one, as was often the case, the composer normally took over the training of the singers. The chorus, therefore, did not make a suitably stable institution for a programme of education. For this, boys were sent to a 'lyre-man' (kitharistes) and a physical trainer (paidotribes). The lyre-man taught them to sing and play songs from the established repertory. He sometimes taught reading and writing too.116 But before long we find the teacher of letters (grammatistes) established as a separate figure beside the music teacher. He made the boys read and learn passages from Homer and other improving poets, while the music teacher drilled them in the works of the lyricists.117 |
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Vase-paintings give us some vivid glimpses into the Athenian school of the early Classical age. The finest and best-known is a cup by Duris dating from the 480s. It shows lessons in music and letters taking place in the same house (Pl. 11). On one side of the cup a teacher and pupil sit facing one another on stools, each fingering a lyre. Another teacher (or rather the same one in a different lesson) is shown seated on a chair holding a papyrus roll, on which an epic verse can be read, and the pupil stands before him to recite. The slave who has brought the boy to school sits at the back and watches. On the other side we see a younger, perhaps subordinate teacher, and again two distinct lessons. In one the teacher plays the pipes while the pupil, standing, prepares to sing. In the other the teacher is writing or correcting something in an exercise book made of waxed wooden tablets strung together, and the boy is again standing in front of him with the slave in attendance. In another scene, on a water-jar of the second quarter of the fifth century attributed to the Agrigento |
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115 Alcm PMG 1. 43-101, cf. 10b; Sappho fr. 150, SLG 261A, Anth. Pal 9. 189, Philostr. VA 1. 30, Imag. 2. 1, Suda iv. 323. 8; Epicharmus frs. 13, 104, Sophron fr. 155. |
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116 Ar. Eq. 986ff., Nub. 963ff., Eup. fr. 17. Plato, Cri. 50d, speaks as if it were a legal requirement to have one's son educated in music and gymnastics, but perhaps the passage should not be taken literally. |
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117 Pl. Prt. 325d-326c, cf. 312b, Clitophon 407bc, Alc. I 106e, Leg. 812b, Xen. Lac. Pol. 2. 1. According to Aristotle (Pol. 1339b2) there was no similar formal teaching of music at Sparta. But Chamaeleon (fr. 5 Giordano) claims that everyone there learned the pipes, as also at Thebes and in his own town of Heraclea on the Black Sea. |
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