Читать книгу Old Greek Education онлайн

5 страница из 35

§ 5. If we could command our material, we might seek elsewhere for analogies to the education of our nobility and higher gentry. We know through Greek and Roman sources, as well as through the heroic poetry of the “Shahnameh,” that the Aryan nobles who became, under Cyrus, the rulers of Western Asia, were in character, as they were in blood, allied to the Germanic chiefs and Norse Vikings, with their love of daring adventure, their chivalry, and their intense loyalty to their appointed sovereign. In these qualities they were strangely opposed to the democratic Greeks, on whom they looked with contempt, while they were appreciated in return only by a few such men as Herodotus and Xenophon. Indeed, such devotion to their sovereign as made them leap overboard to lighten his ship in a storm was confounded by the Greeks with slavish submission, Oriental prostrations, and other signs of humiliation. Nevertheless, the men whom the Greeks long dared not look in the face—the conquerors of half the known world, the successful rivals of the Romans for the dominion of the East—faced death under Xerxes and the last Darius with other feelings than those of slavish submission. Herodotus, in his interesting and sympathetic account of them, says their children’s education consisted of three things—to ride, to shoot, and to tell the truth. If he had added a chivalrous loyalty to their kings like that of the French nobles in the last century, he would have completed the picture, and sketched a training which many an English gentleman considers little short of perfection.