Page:Symonds - A Problem in Greek Ethics.djvu/47

At meals he ate what was put before him, and refrained from idle chattering. Walking through the streets, he never tried to catch a passer's eye or to attract a lover. He avoided the shops, the baths, ^[1] the Agora, the houses of Hetairai. ^[2] He reverenced old age and formed within his soul the image of modesty. In the gymnasium he indulged in fair and noble exercise, or ran races with his comrades among the olive-trees of the Academy."

The Adikos Logos replies by pleading that this temperate sort of life is quite old-fashioned; boys had better learn to use their tongues and bully. In the last resort he uses a clinching argumentum ad juvenem. ^[3]

Were it not for the beautiful and highly-finished portraits in Plato, to which I have already alluded, the description of Aristophanes might be thought a mere ideal; and, indeed, it is probable that the actual life of the average Athenian boy lay mid-way between the courses prescribed by the Dikaios and the Adikos Logos.

Meanwhile, since Euripides, together with the whole school of studious and philosophic speculators, are aimed at in the speeches of the Adikos Logos, it will be fair to adduce a companion picture of the young Greek educated on the athletic system, as these men had learned to know him. I quote from the Autolycus, a satyric drama of Euripides:—

"There are a myriad bad things in Hellas, but nothing is worse than the athletes. To begin with, they do not know how to live like gentlemen, nor could they if they did; for how can a man, the slave of his jaws and his belly, increase the fortune left him by his father? Poverty and ill-luck find them equally incompetent. Having acquired no habits of good living, they are badly off when they come to roughing it. In youth they shine like statues stuck about the town, and take their walks abroad; but when old age draws nigh, you find them as threadbare as an old coat. Suppose a man has wrestled well, or runs fast, or has hurled a quoit, or given a black eye in fine style, has he done the State a service by the crowns he won? Do soldiers fight with quoits in hand, or without the press of shields can kicks expel the foeman from the gate? Nobody is fool enough to do these things with steel before his face. Keep, then, your laurels for the wise and good, for him who rules a city well, the just and temperate, who by his speeches wards off ill, allaying wars and civil strife. These are the things for cities, yea, and for all Greece to boast of."

Lucian represents, of course, a late period of Attic life. But his picture of the perfect boy completes, and in some points supplements, that of Aristophanes. Callicratidas, in

1. Aristophanes returns to this point below, line 1,036, where he says that youths chatter all day in the hot baths and leave the wrestling-grounds empty.
2. There was a good reason for shunning each. The Agora was the meeting-place of idle gossips, the centre of chaff and scandal. The shops were, as we shall see, the resort of bad characters and panders.
3. Line 1,071, et seq.