The Hellenistic school par excellence was still the school of gymnastics, the practice of athletic sports and the nudity that they required being the most characteristic feature contrasting the Greek way of life with that of the barbarians. There were, at least in sufficiently large cities, several gymnasiums, separately for the different age classes and on occasion for the sexes. They were essentially palaestrae, or open-air, square-shaped sports grounds surrounded by colonnades in which were set up the necessary services: cloakrooms, washstands, training rooms, massage rooms, and classrooms. Outside there was a track for footraces, the stadion.
The foundation of the training always consisted of the sports properly called gymnastic and field. Horsemanship remained an aristocratic privilege. Nautical sports had a very modest role—a curious thing for a nation of sailors, but the fact is the Greeks were by origin Indo-Europeans from the interior of the Eurasian continent. The other sports—ball games and hockey—were considered merely diversions or at best preparatory exercises. As the competition of professional sports grew, however, education based on sports progressively—though no doubt very slowly—lost its preeminent position. The popularity of athletic sports as spectacle endured, but educational sports moved into the background, disappearing altogether in the Christian period (in the 4th century ce) in favour of literary studies.
There was a similar progressive decline, a similar final effacement, of artistic—particularly musical—education, the other survivor from the Archaic period. The art of music continued to flourish, but like sports it became the concern of professional practitioners and a feature of public spectacles rather than an art generally practiced in cultivated circles. The primary school
The child from 7 to 14 years of age went to the school of letters, conducted thither, as in the Classical period, by the paidagōgos, whose role was not limited to accompanying the child: he had also to educate him in good manners and morals and finally to act as a lesson coach. Literacy and numeration were taught in the private school conducted by the grammatistes. Class sizes varied considerably, from a few pupils to perhaps dozens. The teaching of reading involved an analytical method that made the process very slow. First the alphabet was taught from alpha to omega and then backward, then from both ends at once: alpha–omega, beta–psi, and so on to mu–nu. (A comparable progression in the Latin alphabet would be A–Z, B–Y, and so on to M–N.) Then were taught simple syllables—ba, be, bi, bo—followed by more complex ones and then by words, successively of one, two, and three syllables. The vocabulary list included rare words (e.g., some of medical origin) chosen for their difficulty of reading and pronunciation. It took several years for the child to be able to read connected texts, which were anthologies of famous passages. With reading was associated recitation and, of course, practice in writing, which followed the same gradual plan.
The program in mathematics was very limited; rather than computation, the subject, strictly speaking, was numeration: learning the whole numbers and fractions, their names, their written notations, their representation in finger counting (in assorted bent positions of the fingers and assorted placements of either hand relative to the body). The general use of tokens and of the abacus made the teaching of methods of computation less necessary than it became in the modern world. Secondary education
Between the primary school and the various types of higher education, the Hellenistic educational system introduced a program of intermediate, preparatory studies—a preliminary education, a kind of common trunk preparing for the different branches of higher culture, enkyklios paideia (“general, or common, education”). This general education, far from having “encyclopaedic” ambitions in the modern sense of the word, represented a reaction against the inordinate ambitions of philosophy and, more generally, of the Aristotelian ideals of culture, which had demanded the large accumulation of intellectual attainments. The program of the enkyklios paideia was limited to the common points on which, as noted earlier, the rival pedagogies of Plato and of Isocrates agreed—namely, the study of literature and mathematics. Specialized teachers taught each of these subjects. The mathematics program had not changed since the ancient Pythagoreans and comprised four disciplines—arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and harmonics (not the art of music but the theory of the numerical laws regulating intervals and rhythm). The primary function of the grammatikos, or professor of letters, was to present and explicate the great classic authors: Homer first of all, of whom every cultivated man was expected to have a deep knowledge, and Euripides and Menander—the other poets being scarcely known except through anthologies. Although poetry remained the basis of literary culture, room was made for prose—for the great historians, for the orators (Demosthenes in particular), even for the philosophers. Along with these explications of texts, the students were introduced to exercises in literary composition of a very elementary character (for example, summarizing a story in a few lines).
The program of this intermediate education did not attain its definitive formulation until the second half of the 1st century bce, after the appearance of the first manual devoted to the theoretical elements of language, a slim grammatical treatise by Dionysius Thrax. The program then consisted of the seven liberal arts: the three literary arts of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic and the four mathematical disciplines noted above. (These were, respectively, the trivium and the quadrivium of medieval education, though the latter term did not appear until the 6th century and the former not until the 9th century.) The long career of this program should not conceal the fact that, in the course of centuries, it fell into disuse and became rather largely a theory or abstraction; in reality, literary studies gradually took over at the expense of the sciences. Of the four mathematical disciplines, only one remained in favour—astronomy. And this was not merely because of its connections with astrology but primarily because of the popularity of the basic textbook used to teach it—the Phaenomena, a poem in 1,154 hexameters by Aratus of Soli—whose predominantly literary quality was suited to textual explications. Not until about the 3rd and 4th centuries ce was the need of a sound preparatory mathematical education again recognized and put into practice. Higher education
Higher education appeared in several forms, complementary or competitive. First was the ephebeia (“youth” culture), a kind of civic and military training that completed the education of the young Greek and prepared him to enter into life; it lasted two years (from 18 to 20) and corresponded quite closely to the obligatory military service of modern states. It was a survival from the regime of the old Greek city-states, but in the Hellenistic Age the absence of national independence erased all reason for this military training; between the 3rd and 2nd centuries bce the Athenian ephebeia (eventually reduced to a single year) was transformed into a leisured civilian college where a minority of rich young men came to be initiated into the refinements of the elegant life. Military training came to play only a modest role and gave way to athletic competition. To this were added lectures on scientific and literary subjects, assuring the ephebe a polish of general culture. The same evolution took place in other cities: the ephebeia became everywhere more aristocratic than civic, more sporting than military. What the Greeks, especially those who had emigrated to the barbarian lands, demanded of it was above all that it initiate their sons into Greek life and its characteristic customs, beginning with athletic sports. Especially in Egypt, it was intended to legitimize the privileged status of the Hellene relative to the “native” Egyptian. In any event, the ephebeia no longer was the setting for the highest forms of education.