" When about fifteen or sixteen years of age Kosa boys are cir- cumcised. The rite is purely civil; by it a youth is enabled to emerge from the society of women and boys, and is admitted to the privi- leges of manhood. Its performance is attended with many ceremonies, some of a harmless, others, to European ideas, of a criminal nature. At a certain period in every year, unless it is a time of calamity or the chief has a son not yet ready, all the youths of a village who are old enough are circumcised. Thereafter for a couple of months or longer they live by themselves, and are distinguished by wearing a peculiar head-dress and a girdle of long grass about the loins, besides having their bodies covered with white clay. During this period they have license to steal freely from their relatives, provided they can do so without being caught in {he act. After returning to their homes they are brought before the old men of the tribe, who lecture them upon the duties and responsibilities which they have taken upon them- selves. Presents of cattle and weapons are afterward made by their friends to give them a start in life. A free rein is then given to all kinds of immorality, without let or hindrance from their elders." 2 " Females," says Theal, " who arrive at the age of puberty are in- troduced into the state of womanhood by peculiar ceremonies, which extinguish all virtuous feelings within them. Originally, however, the very worst of the observances on these occasions was a test of self- discipline. The object of the education which a people like the Kosas go through is to make a man entirely master of himself. He must be able to control himself so that no trace of his emotions shall appear on his countenance; he must not wince when undergoing the most se- vere punishment. In olden times a further test was applied, which has degenerated into the most abominable licentiousness. It will be sufficient to say that the young women who attend the revels on these occasions are allowed to select temporary companions of the other sex, and if they decline to do so the chief distributes them at his pleas- ure. As these pages are being prepared, a Kosa chief, who is consid- ered one of the most advanced of his tribe in civilization, has come into legal collision with the colonial authorities for distributing, in a dis- trict annexed to the colony, a large number of girls in this manner."
(d) Circumcision. — There is some evidence that circumcision was common in the age of neolithic man, and it now seems exceedingly improbable that it originated with the Hebrews. It was practised by the priests of ancient Egypt, from whom Pythagoras obtained the rite, 1 J. G. Wood: Natural History of Man, vol. i, p. 324 et seq. a History of South Africa, by George McCall Theal, London, 1888, vol. ii, p.
248 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE and by the Persians and Phenicians. It is common among the Turks and most Moslem races, although not commanded by the Koran, and was adopted by Mohammed for himself probably from a prevailing custom of ancient Arabia. It is practised by many of the aborigines of Australia, the Malay tribes, and a number of the native African races. The best authorities now think it prevailed among the ancient Aztecs and perhaps the Peruvians, and among certain native stocks of central North America. While Andree is wrong in calling it " a cus- tom which extends over the whole world," it is one of the most widely diffused and persistent of all ancient rites. The medical and an- thropological literature upon the subject is now extensive, and shows great diversity concerning both the nature and the manner of the operation itself, the various instruments in this oldest of surgical proc- esses, the preparation, curative treatment, and the attendant rituals and ceremonials sometimes elaborated and exactly prescribed. Its symbolic significance is subject to manifold interpretations, and its hygienic and moral bearing was never so actively discussed as at present.
Circumcision is performed at almost every stage of life; by the Hebrews at the age of eight days, by the Turks between the ages of six and thirteen years, by the African tribes south of the Zambesi from ten to fifteen, by most of the Malay and native American races at the same age or a little later, by other tribes just before or after marriage, or when a certain number of children are born, or on be- coming a soldier, priest, ascetic, convert, or at senescence. Dr. Re- mondino,1 from inquiry among physicians, thinks it is extending in most civilized communities independently of race or creed. That it is generally and essentially connected with puberty, and that its habitual occurrence at earlier or later stages can be or should be accounted for, and indicates a secondary or derived origin, I think any careful and fair-minded reader of the literature will grant. My reasons for this view are briefly as follows: where it occurs at the dawn of adolescence, the ceremonial, the germs of which are often as old as the custom it attends, is fuller, more prolonged, and more significant; and even where it occurs in infancy, the symbolism of the attending liturgy or ritual refers chiefly to sexual maturity and function. Its transposition to infancy also seems readily accounted for by reasons of prac- tical convenience.
It thus marks the advent of youth to the rites of manhood, and is sometimes essentially civic, political, or social. It may signalize in- itiation into the secret societies or religious mysteries of the tribe. In some cases the ceremonies are mainly hygienic or psycho-physiologi- cal. Occasionally it is associated with gross sensual orgies, but more often, with higher races, the ritual suggests the higher rather than the lower life, both of which now become possible. A Madagascar tribe regards circumcision as making boys into men. Without it, they 1 History of Circumcision, by P. E. Remondino. Philadelphia, 1891, p. 346.
SAVAGE PUBIC INITIATIONS 249 can never become soldiers or govern. The ceremony includes meas- urement, sprinkling with water, and a formula, " He is not a child, but a man, breasting a stream; his money fills a large vault, his house is crowded with slaves, etc." Bechuana and Kaffir tribes circumcise boys in the early teens, and set them apart for life as followers of one of the sons of the chief. They are taken off alone to recover in huts built for the purpose. Meanwhile old men teach them to dance and interpret the wisdom of African church and state, while each youth composes a homily praising himself, is beaten, and later points with pride to the scars thus left as signs of the thoroughness of his education. A Peruvian tribe wrap their youths in skins after the operation, give them presents, and send them to hide in the forest, there to feast and fatten till they grow weary of idleness. In Aus- tralia circumcision is a very sacred ceremony, admitting to the rights and duties of manhood, marriage among the rest.1 Besides the physiological aspect presented in Chapter VI, this topic has or should be given a higher one. The latest treatise on the sub- ject that I have read urges that the very first requirement of a cir- cumciser should be " satisfactory guarantees of a moral life and con- stant maintenance of an honorable character." Although the writer's purpose is chiefly medical, this ethical requirement is placed first, sug- gesting that the symbolic character of the rite predominates over the physical in the Jewish mind, hardly less than is the case among Chris- tians with baptism or communion. From the time of Abraham to the present it has been a sacred blood covenant with Jehovah. On their part the Jews were to obey his commands and keep his law, and their promised reward for so doing was that they should be blessed in their seed, which should be as the stars for multitude. This is still the blessing possible to those who normalize this part of their nature. When the latter awakens, the need of control is most imperative till maturity is complete, and here this rite originally belonged, enforcing inhibition by the strongest physical and psychic motives. Well admin- istered, it combines the best yet attainable results aimed at by scores of savage methods of enforcing chastity for a season by physiologi- cal and even mechanical restraints, with a Platonic, or, better, an essentially Christian mode of spiritualizing and long-circuiting what might be the love of sense into a sacrament. It is almost as if Jeho- vah's chief interest in man and that of man in him centered about this biological function and was cemented just at the time of life when the chief sin against self and the Lord becomes possible.
II. CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY. — No pedagogic contrast can be greater than that between barbaric rites like the preceding and 1 Circumcision, by A. B. Arnold. New York Med. Jour., February 13, 1886. See also laffe", Bergson, Terquem, Bernheim, Arnholdt, Clapare~de, Chabas, and Nogues.
55 250 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE the mode of inducting youth to manhood which was developed in classical antiquity. The latter stands in hardly less sharp contrast to modern methods, and every informed and candid student of youthful nature and needs must ponder whether we of to-day have really gained more than wre have lost. The best Attic methods especially stand out in the golden light that in- vests this land with a perennial and ideal charm. The glory of Greece is that it best represented and understood youth as no other age or race has done. It seems a bitter irony of fate that just the pedagogics that advocate and teach classical culture are not only dead to this spirit but have lapsed farthest from it to mere verbalism, as we shall see later.
Few subjects are more difficult or have given rise to more diversity of conclusion among classical scholars than the de- tails of the education of pubescent and adolescent boys in ancient Greece and Rome. Authorities are fragmentary and contradictory; customs differed in different provinces and pe- riods; the historical value of Plato and the poets, distinction between what was exceptional or habitual or merely theoreti- cal, and differences of rank and wealth are involved. A Dumont 1 for Attica, and L. Grasberger 2 for all Greece and Rome, are our best authorities. Chaotic as is the arrangement and slovenly as is the style of the latter, his work is a monu- ment of erudition, and seeks to exhaust all the original sources, although the author is needlessly wary of general conclusions, and the incessant comparisons between Greece and Rome are 1 Essai sur l'£phebie attique. Paris, 1879.
2 Grasberger, L.: Erziehung und Unterricht im klassischen Alterthum; Wttrz- burg, Bd. Ill; Die Epheben Bildung, 1881. See also Girard, Paul: L'Education Athe'nienne au Ve et au IVe siecle avant J.-C.; Paris, 1889. Hermann: Lehr- buch des Griechen Privat Alterthums; 2d ed., pp. 71, 269. Dittenberger: De ephebis atticis; Gottingen, 1863. Marquardt: Das Privatleben der Romern, 1886. Becker, W. A.: Gallus. See also his Charicles. Krause: Gymnastik und Agonistik bei den Hellenen. Schmidt, K.: Geschichte der Padagogik. Krause, C. J. H.: Geschichte der Erziehung bei den Griechen, Etruskern, und Romern; Halle, 1851* Capes, W. W.: University Life in Ancient Athens; New York, 1877. Jaeger, O. H.: Die Gymnastik der Hellenen; Stuttgart, 1881. Cramer, F.: Geschichte der Erziehung und Unterrichts im Alterthum, 2 vols.; Elberfeld, 1832. Helfericht: Erziehung und Unterricht bei den Romern. Weete: Erziehung und Unterricht bei den Romern, 1854. Ussing, J. L.: Erziehung und Unterrichtswesen bei den Griechen und den Romern; Altona, 1870.
CLASSICAL IDEALS AND CUSTOMS 251 confusing. The large features, however, stand out with some distinctness.
Higher education in Greece or the training of epheboi lasted some five years, or from the end of a period of more private education to the beginning of the public life of citizenship with more or less for- mal induction to which the years of specific apprenticeship to teach- ers ended. Politics were regarded as the highest vocation of man, whom Aristotle defined as a political animal, and thus the maxim, non scholce sed vita: discimus, was valid in both Greece and Rome in a very different sense than it is in a commercial and industrial age like our own. Much earlier than now boys of antiquity were brought into close contact with not only governmental matters, but were trained to become watchmen of the state and zealous custodians of the commonweal. The beardless ageneioi from sixteen to eighteen or more often to twenty were a third-class intermediate between boys and men in the Greek scheme of Agonistik. In Rome the term puer, boy, was best applied to the first fifteen years of life; and adulescens to subsequent years, sometimes to the age of thirty, but was often not distinguishable from juvenis. In Athens formal induction to the ephebic status came two years after puberty, and at eighteen, majority was attained with the civic oath to bear arms for the fatherland. The ephebic period comprised the age from eighteen to twenty, and else- where from sixteen to eighteen, and rarely the years of puberty, hebe, from fourteen to sixteen. In Athens youths were formally accepted as epheboi at eighteen, and then were for two years watchmen in the suburbs or at the frontiers as a sort of compulsory military service; they then took the civic oath in the grove of Agraulos, were inscribed on the list of burghers, each in his phratry or deme, and enjoyed more freedom and certain dispensations. The oath was as follows: " I will never bring disgrace to these arms, nor desert the man next me in the ranks, but will fight for the sanctities and for the common good, both alone and with others. I will not leave the fatherland di- minished, but greater and better (by sea and land) than I received it. I will listen to those always who have the power of decision, and obey existing laws and all others which the people shall agree in ordaining; and if any one would nullify or refuse to obey them, I will not permit it, but will defend them, whether alone or with others. I will honor the religion of my native land, witness the gods, Agrau- los, Enyalius, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, and Hegemone." Of this oath there were many variants, detailed comments, and explanations, and the gods invoked were agrarian and military and not distinctly ephebic. It was administered with solemn ceremonial. In Attica the hair was festively cut, and in Sparta the hair and the beard were now left to grow. So in many rites of confirmation in the early Christian Church, as is common in pubescent initiations among savages, the hair is symbolically cut or dressed. So, too, the ancient Persian investiture 252 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE with the girdle at fifteen is symbolic of becoming a warrior for Or- muzd, while in India a similar girdle ceremony signifies being twice born or else entering into a higher caste. In Attica the hair was of- fered to a mystic river god or some higher deity, to whom perhaps it had been vowed beforehand. As festive hair-cutting is often a token of sadness or an offering to the dead, some have fancied here a symbol of the death of the old self as the higher life of the race is begun.
The chlamys was the distinctive garment of the ephebos. It was a short war-mantle of Thessalian or Macedonian origin. Its color was always black in the older, reflecting the serious character of nearly all earlier festivities, but white in the Roman period. Who- ever died at this age was buried in the chlamys. Hardly less charac- teristic was the broad-brimmed traveling hat, and the shield and spear were the ephebic arms. Ancient art often represents a band around the forehead and the right hand wrapped in the mantle. After this oath and equipment, the youth were introduced to the people by the herald, usually at the festival of Dionysus, just before the tragedy, after which they were conducted to the first place in the theater es- pecially reserved for them, where they were chaperoned by the soph- ronists. Thus the youth became at once a citizen, a soldier of the army, a member and voter in the popular assemblies, save in Sparta, where complete citizenship was reserved till the age of thirty. The] were now ceremonially enrolled as either politai or zenoi. In Sparta the epheboi were officially inspected every ten days, and ranks wen ordered according to drill and conduct. In Crete chief stress w; laid on military and practical training and a little on literature am music, as in Athens. Everywhere, however, the institution of th< ephebiate was intended to lay the foundation for a just and virtuous life. Grasberger (iii, 65) finds it in nearly every part and even province of Greece.
Antique song, such an integral part of the education of Greek youth, was chiefly recitative and declamatory, but was not, at the same time, without features of elaborate ballet and pantomime. Words, and not music, led, and melody and rhythm were strictly sub- ordinate to the text. In melic poetry music in this sense was an in- separable commentary, and the creative element was entirely in th< song of the performer. Instrumental music was a still later offsh( of song. The dance, too, was in a similar sense auxiliary and an art of expressing the verbal or dramatic content of a given theme. The choral rhythm was primarily orchestral and only secondarily musical; the gymnastic element was harmoniously welded to the dance as poetry to music, and the " figures " were expressions of the games of the pentathlon. " The musical man is a man of culture," and only grim Mars and Death were quite unmusical. Many plays and games were with beats and in rhythm. Ball-games, e. g., were the root of both agonistic and also of orchestral form. Even in battle warriors were controlled by tone and tact. Religious dances celebrating gods and heroes were no less common than profane. In Sparta the motto CLASSICAL IDEALS AND CUSTOMS 253 of the playgrounds was " Strip and join the play, or go." The standpoint and spirit of the profane orchestras was that of the best and most vigorous folk-festivals of Europe, and that of the religious orchestras was cognate with the mysteries of ancient and medieval times. Harvest and other agrarian celebrations (as described in Fra- ser's Golden Bough, Mannhardt's Feldculte und Baumkultus) were favorite nuclei for both, but the profane was derived from the re- ligious, and not vice versa. Poetry, music, and dance were never be- fore nor since welded into such educative power over the human heart. The true singer must be a godlike man, whose song must be, like prayer, a mode of worshiping the gods, or a teacher who forms by his art the souls of youth. Plato would have songs for each age, and virtue was taught by the dance. With all these elements the com- pelling power of music over souls is illustrated by a wealth of legend; the martial Phrygian and the massive Doric music were thought to implant courage and temperance, while the Lydian, Ionian, and orgias- tic services of the Muses were subversions of virtue. In the early days dancers sang, sharpened their minds, strengthened their bodies, and ravished beholders till even Solon would learn a new dance and then die. Later not only instrumentation but song was delegated to others, and dancing became more intricate. Love, anger, mourning, and mad- ness could be represented with such intensity that the postures and gestures were athletic culture; there were few acts, types of character, or states of mind that could not be expressed by pantomime, and all of these gave the best basis for philosophical education and for eloquence. So lucid was his hand alone, the use of which was at first very secondary to speech and sense, that Lesbonax was surnamed chei- risophon, or " wise in gesture," and it was said he could make any- thing plain to barbarians who spoke an unknown tongue. Nothing of all that is lost in antiquity, said Buchholtz, would be more desirable to restore than the choral dance in the age of its glory in Greece. The prominent dances of the Spartan gymnopsedia were religious and national, and perhaps began with festive paeans to Apollo; but most of these were changed by the ephors after the defeat of Leuctra, and ephebic dances became largely military and with pyrrhic maneuvers, in which some think strophe and antistrophe were first introduced. The cults of Apollo and Dionysus were chiefly groups of these acted, marched, and sung dances. Thus literature was taught,' and arithme- tic and physics were parts of music. There were also song contests and prizes.
The substance of the literary education of Greek and Roman adolescents was the reading and explanation of the poets. Here even history, astronomy, and geography were largely learned. Fortunate was the poet who was recognized in the curriculum during his life, and the mind was cast into hexameter and pentameter forms. Till Solon there was no prose, and it was long in becoming interesting and dignified with good rhythm and periods. School and poesy were most intimately unified, and prose was admitted late and with diffi- 254 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE culty. Not only prose, but foreign languages and translations and even grammar came in after the sophists, and especially in Rome, realism and such natural science as then existed followed after the Peloponnesian war for the more mature youth. The sophists con- tributed greatly to increase the subject-matter, the time and the ex- pense of adolescent education, and in Greece higher instruction began with them. They made thinking, speaking, and criticism vocations, and held that everything could be imparted by teaching, and every- thing could be proven and also disproven. A doctrinaire ethics took the place of the dying religious faith, cleverness superseded convic- tion, learning supplanted creative genius, and, as in all such de- cadences of culture, adolescents suffered first and most. Eloquence, which can only flourish in a free state, for the existence of which in turn it is itself necessary, and which is perhaps in the largest, highest sense the most worthy and effective way of obtaining and using per- sonal influence, once so central in the education of youth in the best period of Greece and Rome, slowly lapsed to rhetoric, and even to eristics, dialectic and debate, and from this logic was evolved as a set of rules of the game. Historical narration was often the first step and improvisation the last in the education of the orator. Imaginary objects and situations were eulogized or blamed, and accusation, de- fense, monologues, suasion and declamation, hortatory, imprecatory, laudatory, casuistic, controversial, epideictic, descriptive, mnemotech- nic arts, rules for the arrangement of matter, the classification and use of tropes, and a copious technical nomenclature, were developed. The so-called myths of Plato are an unique educational device pe- culiarly fitting to the adolescent mind as a mode of formulating or rather frescoing the unknown frontiers of human knowledge. Great principles that meet deep needs of the soul must be clad in fact, and can not be otherwise presented. The cave and the conversion of its dwellers from the sight of shadows to the sun; Er, whose soul visited the place and scenes of judgment, where also unborn souls choose their course of life; the two steeds, the one carnal, the other spirit- ual; Diatima, Aristophanes's tale of the origin of the sex; the development of the cosmos in the Timaeus; the crises of reversion of all cos- mic processes in the Statesman; the culture history in the Protagoras; the story of the priest of Sais and the lost Atlantis; the other world in the Gorgias and Phsedo, all show consummate pedagogic art in the scientific uses of the imagination which Deuschle, Westcott, and Vol- quarsden have helped us to rightly evaluate. We can hardly call them taken together a systematic whole, or claim that each expresses a definite and unique human instinct, as enthusiasts have urged; but they involve a clear sense on Plato's part at once of the limitations of reason and of the urgent needs of faith. Plato's myths, it has well been said, are related to his speculation somewhat as legend is related to history, and are " individual expressions of universal instincts." Although the facts recorded never happened, they might have hap- pened many times and at many places. They are not prophecies, nor CLASSICAL IDEALS AND CUSTOMS 255 are they " a Greek apocalypse." They are not allegories, myths in the common sense of that term, nor pious frauds. The folk-lore features of some of them are unified and overlaid with speculative meanings. They constitute a kind of Platonian theology, quite distinct from his philosophy, with wondrous power to allay doubt. Had there been a Greek revelation we might almost expect it to take some such shape. So artistic a soul as Plato's must fill even the gaps of his scheme of things, where philosophy failed, with poetry. With his doctrine of reminiscences, these additions were not unlike restorations of, e. g., the Acropolis, or broken statues in a. continuity as true as the human mind can yet devise. They are what we wish to believe, and are therefore a broader and deeper expression of humanity and our com- mon nature and mind than science or history has yet attained, and their moving and edifying power is so broadening to the feelings and instincts that they may claim to be part of the true Bible of the heart, with power to make it more effective for good.
The action of the best of these myths has a sweep that parables and allegories lack, a^nd they strike deeper into the subsoil of the soul than the Platonic doctrine of ideas. Nothing is better calculated to half reveal and half conceal the great ulterior truths of life and mind that beckon us on, yet baffle at every point. They are utterly differ- ent from the finished answers we give to the great nascent interests of adolescence, for they do not cause a sense of finality, but encourage the mind to press on. The best things are just beyond the solid limit of facts, were overpunctilious agnosticism stops, and further growth in mental power and knowledge may advance us within sight of still further glimpses and make the future seem vaster and richer than the past has been. This very attitude constitutes the true adolescence of the mind. From this standpoint and with this conception of myth, very different we grant from that generally held, the resolution of all Christology into myth would be a gain and mark a growth in the Christian consciousness, would be not merely its revival but its re- juvenation, and the tedious and paralyzing problem of historical valid- ity would be transcended by a satisfying conviction of eternal and profound psychological truthfulness.
Philosophy was the culmination of ephebic education after Soc- rates. After the Persian war the entire nation turned to the devel- opment of independent thought. This was the apex of education to which it had added a newer story, and was the best propaedeutic for statesmanship. The method of lecture and conversation was well adapted to secure participation, and both the personal pomp of some of the sophists and the great simplicity and directness of Socrates were extremes, both of which were pedagogically very effective. Or- ganized higher instruction was established first with the founding of the Academy, and still farther advanced by the Lyceum and the Stoa, each with a scholiarch at its head and each representing a large vol- ume of both tradition and knowledge. There were student fraternities and table companions, journeys together, rival parties urging, one 256 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE