ht be
thought, was submitted, to his surprise, to a sort of literary
canonization, and was invested with the office of forming the young mind
of Greece to noble thoughts and bold deeds. To be read in Homer soon
became the education of a gentleman; and a rule, recognized in her free
age, remained as a tradition even in the times of her degradation.
Xenophon introduces to us a youth who knew both Iliad and Odyssey by
heart; Dio witnesses that they were some of the first books put into the
hands of boys; and Horace decided that they taught the science of life
better than Stoic or Academic. Alexander the Great nourished his
imagination by the scenes of the Iliad. As time went on, other poets were
associated with Homer in the work of education, such as Hesiod and the
Tragedians. The majestic lessons concerning duty and religion, justice and
providence, which occur in AEschylus and Sophocles, belong to a higher
school than that of Homer; and the verses of Euripides, even in his
lifetime, were so familiar to Athenian lips and so dear to foreign ears,
that, as is reported, the captives of Syracuse gained their freedom at the
price of reciting them to their conquerors.

Such poetry may be considered oratory also, since it has so great a power
of persuasion; and the alliance between these two gifts had existed from
the time that the verses of Orpheus had, according to the fable, made
woods and streams and wild animals to follow him about. Soon, however,
Oratory became the subject of a separate art, which was called Rhetoric,
and of which the Sophists were the chief masters. Moreover, as Rhetoric
was especially political in its nature, it presupposed or introduced the
cultivation of History; and thus the pages of Thucydides became one of the
special studies by which Demosthenes rose to be the first orator of
Greece.

But it is needless to trace out further the formation of the course of
liberal education; it is sufficient to have given some specimens in
illustration of it. The studies, which it was found to involve, were four
principal ones, Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, and Mathematics; and the science
of Mathematics, again, was divided into four, Geometry, Arithmetic,
Astronomy, and Music; making in all seven, which are known by the name of
the Seven Liberal Arts. And thus a definite school of intellect was
formed, founded on ideas and methods of a distinctive character, and (as
we may say) of the highest and truest character, as f