the claims of Theseus and the other of Hercules, to be the chief na- tional hero and ideal of adolescence. The former, represented as in the bloom of eternal youth, and as the center of some of the most in- spiring sagas, was especially in Attica a favorite theme of school declamation. The ancient student associations, the Theseides and He- rakleidae, no doubt resembled in many respects the Nations, Corps, Landsmannschaften, orders, fraternities of the medieval universities, at least in spirit. There were even excesses, hazing, competition of so- cieties for newcomers, regulated conflicts, sometimes real terrorism, broils, tricks, pranks, and practical jokes, sometimes dangerous to life, to say nothing of stipends, pensions, rules concerning students' debts, and for the regulations of drinking, feasts, and deposition ceremonials. Whether Schwarz is right in the opinion that some student initiation rites now in use are directly from consecration forms of the ancient mysteries or not, the customs of students have changed hardly more than their nature since the fourth and fifth centuries.
In the days of the Roman Empire, youth entered upon higher courses of study at sixteen, and studied from five to eight years. In Athens, courses began in the fall and continued with brief intervals till the middle of the summer. Some teachers devoted all their ener- gies to instruction and commenting on standard writers, and others to authorship, addressing chiefly posterity. Masses of manuscript ac- cumulated, many of which were multiplied by the transcriptions of students. The methods were catechising, disputation, and colloquy, lectures in the form of both monologue and dialogue, esoteric and exoteric, but no very definite curriculum was established. The true education of mankind in both virtue and knowledge was philosophy, and although its three parts — logic, physics, ethics — were recognized, it had not been rounded into a system sufficiently complete to be the basis of a uniform course. As schools multiplied, however, and as the field of practical activities at the same time increased, philosophy slowly seemed inadequate as leading to and detaining the mind where there was everywhere only sky above and sea around and beneath, and law, medicine, and nature study slowly encroached till at last in Rome came the formal persecutions of the philosophers with the Christians.
Gymnasiarchs, sophronists, paidonomoi, and ephebiarchs were all holders of established offices in the service of adolescent youth, with very definite but now not very well known duties. The last phase of the Attic ephebiate coincided with the degeneration of gymnastics and the corresponding change in the Hellenic character, of which these were both cause and effect. The luxury that developed with the Roman baths and their association with the gymnasiums was one cause of its degeneration. Aberrant practises in the education of girls was another. " Girls who studied geometry grew ashamed to dance," and women became erudite when the subject-matter of learning had become formal and technical and had lost its soul in dilettanteism. Religious culture, at first cardinal, later decayed, and toleration taught to hold no creed. The cult of Apollo, which marked the highest point CLASSICAL IDEALS AND CUSTOMS 257 of religious consciousness among the Greeks, declined. With the acrne of Roman power man was educated not as man, but to serve the state, and slowly but surely Greece and her influence faded. More than any other nation she represents the eternally adolescent. Hardly an important motive in her history, an institution in her whole na- tional life, a monument of her literature, or an item in the list of her very errors and vices, that does not in a peculiar and incomparable sense represent more or less directly the nature, ideals, and needs of adolescence, so that to exhaust what this land and race has to teach us concerning this stage of life, her entire story must be retold. Till Greece can be reproduced, fit educational environment for youth will not be complete, and in this fact we have a new justification of the advantages of the study of classical antiquity for youth and a new unifying standpoint from which to teach it. Without some knowledge of her poets, dramatists, rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, and heroes, modern youth is robbed of some of its opportunities, and, I would add, of its rights, and will be forever less complete than it would otherwise have been. Even a little epitomized and general knowledge of the best of what is here offered, if properly impressed at the fit age, has a quickening power that is simply marvelous.
Bodily and not mental training was the center and beginning of all. In Sparta, the care and development of the body was the chief business of life. Greece gives us a new creation of education on a physical basis. To train the intellect without training the body, not to mention its education at the expense of the body, would have seemed an abomination for health, morals, and religion. To sit much was bad, and " to have the hands and feet soft and the rump hard from use" (Seneca) was a disgrace. The great games were in honor of the gods. All who threw the spear, ran, or leaped did so for the greater glory of deity. The very nakedness of the athlete was a symbol of sacrifice, and victory was by special divine favor. Youth were more temperate and less passionate than if obliged to sit all day in closed spaces. One strong impulse to poetry and to statuary was to perpetuate athletic victories in story and form. The mind was edu- cated so that it could take care of and control the body, but body training was the best mode of mind building. The Greeks held, as the Turners claim, that man is whole and entire only when he plays. Games, of which Grasberger gives a list of scores, many of which fitted Greece as untransferably close as some games of the great English schools fit their form of grounds and buildings, were a dominant passion of the Greek mind. The Trojan heroes intermitted their war- fare to celebrate them, as did Xenophon's Ten Thousand their marches. They were played in old age, and future life for the Greeks provided for games. Play is the poetry of life, more truly humanistic than lit- erature itself. The history of motor culture shows, as we saw in Chapter III, that the neglect and decline of plays and sports and that of physical education go together. National growth and decay rest upon this basis, for nations rise and fall as the body is well devel- 258 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE oped or neglected, and the stability of culture depends upon the same condition. To try to educate the mind apart from the body is an ap- proach to the dark ages and asceticism where this basis was lost. Starting with the physical, education naturally passes from this fun- damental to the more accessory mental unfoldment. Indeed, the best test of the value of body training is its effect on the higher culture, for which it opens new possibilities. In fine, we have in Greece a new creation of education on a physical basis with all the new possi- bilities of culture, the sense of which was never so well developed as in this land of its origin, where also the higher education was born. This made its unity and harmony. The " good chest, clear complex- ion, short tongue," which was Aristophanes's characterization of the ideal ephebos, was due to an ideal blending of nature and art, im- agination and reason, passion and logic, heredity and training. The vitality of the ideal is shown by its persistence as the chivalric con- ception against the monastic down the Middle Ages. The knight's ideal was not unlike that of the young Greek, " to fight eye to eye," and we can not refuse sympathy with the hero of many a joust who lamented that all the craft and prowess of the best-trained cavalier could be overcome by so much of the newly invented black powder as could be put in a woman's thimble.
The state which claimed the Greek youth at eighteen was not so much a camp or barrack as a pedagogic province, such as is described in Wilhelm Meister. It was a kind of university, where citizen- ship was a baccalaureate degree, and its great men a faculty of sages not so remote from youth as not to be its inspirers and mentors. Till Plato's educational state and Aristotle, no one had suggested a state program. Lepelletier has urged that all should be educated by com- pulsion, but that instruction should be reserved for the fit few. In Greece nothing was obligatory. There was no danger that the bud- ding soul would be crushed by the mass of literature, science, and his- tory forced on unwilling minds by a kind of mental rape, for bookish- ness was abhorred; but nowhere was curiosity so intense, all-sided, and universal. None have so understood or so loved adolescent youth as the Greeks, so bemoaned the death of those rarely endowed, or so admired their bodies, so sympathized with their souls, so loved to teach and incite them to noble deeds. Even military duty was almost a sacrament for members of the ephebic college. All this freshness, zest, enthusiasm, and naivete of youth impelled the Greek mind to live no longer in a world of twilight knowledge, but to push on to enlighten and clear up mental vision by the greatest effort the human spirit has yet made to solve anew the problems of life and death, and which has added new dignity to human nature. All is to serve and advance the kingdom of man. The musician who did not strive pri- marily to make men better by his art, but sought merely to please the many, was condemned. Theocritus, Virgil, as well as Plato and even the popular consensus of a higher state of the human race, to which ideal our Sabbath was originally sacred, the customs of the Satur- CLASSICAL IDEALS AND CUSTOMS *59 nalia, the glimpses of Hyperboreans, Ethiopians, and all the Ar- cadias, Golden Ages, and millennia seem less dreamy and more pos- sible in their best features when we feel most deeply the vitality of the sudden push upward toward a larger estate and higher dignity of human nature nowhere so manifest as in the eternally adolescent of Greece.
The military character of ephebic education in ancient Greece and Rome has no analogue in modern times. Fighting involved the use of arms of various sorts, and strength and skill in close personal en- counter, which decided battles, was the dominant idea in the palestra. The ephebic regimen was a political novitiate and also a school of tactics, fortifications, camp life, and of parades and festivals. It was boy-breaking to civic life. Youth were watchmen and did police duty, were guardians of the sacred mountains, household gods, na- tional treasures and palladia, and had patrol duties, often changed, so that in their wanderings much geography was learned, and there was much night duty and in the dark, for even city streets had no lights. In extreme mHitary need boys of sixteen could be called to actual war, and in general the duties of Greek were not very differ- ent from those of Persian youth as described by Xenophon, although the latter held hunting, with great system and detail, to be the best preparation for war. Most smaller Greek states had athletic excur- sions and traveling marches, and sometimes even mimic warfare, to season the body and soul of youth, and an outdoor life of action was almost universal. Fighting in full and heavy armor, hoplomachy, which Plato praised as a noble art, came somewhat later. Only while the Greek national character was developing was the institution of the ephebiate seen at its best, and with the beginning of the decline it at once began to show signs of decay. Special military exercises are described, as stabbing a post, shooting with the bow, hurling spears of various sizes and forms, slinging, fort-fighting, and several styles of wrestling, leaping, and running. These and other exercises had often as their goal and motive future participation in the pentathlon, which was variously composed at different periods of Greek history. There was also special training in swimming and nautics, as rowing and sailing, and riding and driving, preparatory to chariot-racing in the circus and mimic battles.
Music, the orchestral culture of adolescence in Greece which sup- plemented the athletic training, making a harmony of body and mind, began in ancient times with the culture of the sages and the lyre and pipe. Music was not yet independent of words, but, together with gesture, dance, and processionals, reenforced and " sweetened " speech.
Among the Romans, the end of the period of education at about seventeen was marked by a change of costume. Free-born boys and girls wore the toga pratexta, of Etruscan origin, with a broad pur- ple stripe, with the bulla aurea, a spherical ornament made of two concave gold plates and containing an amulet. Later the children of the rich, or bullati, also wore it. It was suspended by a band around 260 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE the neck, and was a symbol of honor and fidelity. About the end of the sixteenth year the b-ulla was laid aside and the all-white toga of manhood, toga pura, toga virilis, z'estis pura, was assumed in its place. Just when the change should be made was determined chiefly by the father. Caligula assumed it in his nineteenth year, Nero, Commodus, and Caracalla in the fourteenth, etc. The age of eighteen was plena pubertate. Only in the days of the empire did the Roman jurists fix the lower limit of puberty at the end of the fourteenth year for boys and of the twelfth for girls. The ceremonial was usually at the fes-. tival of Liber alia, March 1701. In his new toga lib era, the juventus laid off before the Lares of his house the insignia pueritia, especially the bulla, which was hung up over the hearth as a gift to the house- hold gods. Next morning the youth, now called vesticeps or invest is, accompanied by relatives and friends, went to the Forum. This was a symbol of his first public act, and was called tirocinium fori. The procession went to the capitol, sacrificed to Jupiter and Liber, and the name of the tiro wras inscribed in the tribal list of citizens by an aedile acting for a tribune. After an offering the day was closed by a repast, often elaborate, more or less public, and with some of the features of a wedding feast. Rich people gave gifts and entertainments to the people. With this ceremony all instruction provided by the parents ended, and further education was left entirely to the youth himself. The father was no longer responsible for his acts, but with complete freedom came now also full legal responsibility. Adults no longer talked with the former prescribed reserve in his presence; he could frequent all public places, and participate in games before forbidden. The chief choice was now between a military or a legal or forensic career. In the first case the military service by elite youth was not that of common soldiers but of companion or contubernalis in a gen- eral's cohort, although even here rhetoric and declamation had some place. For the other career private apprenticeship and instruction with some jurist or statesman for at least a year was customary. A blunt-pointed spear was given as a symbol of the right of might and of property, and was carried especially on parades and in triumphs. As in the Middle Ages, the bestowal of a horse was a token of eleva- tion to knighthood, and deprivation of it a sign of expulsion; so with the spear among Roman youth. The sacrament was the regular oath for entrance to the army, and the jusjurandum was a camp oath made on special military occasions. The strictness of military discipline for these Roman youth was great, and they must faithfully serve the emperor as if he were a god. To be a Roman soldier was a high honor. The members of the old legions were full Roman citizens, and fidelity to the standard here cultivated later shaped the idea of a soldier of Christ in the Church militant.
III. Of the practices of MEDIEVAL KNIGHTHOOD we know little, but it is plain that they were quite as much classic as CLASSICAL IDEALS AND CUSTOMS Christian in spirit. From the eleventh century through the feudal period, lords opened schools in their castles for the sons of their vassale. From the age of about seven to fourteen they attended ladies, and were taught obedience and courtesy as well as games, music, and religion. The young boy often chose a lady for his particular attention, so that his first thoughts were those of love, honor, bravery, and gallantry. The page was made a squire at the age of fourteen, and then had to attend his lord in battle or tourney, and keep near him to help or protect. After seven years of this work, at the age of twenty-one, he was knighted with solemn and imposing ceremonies. A day and night were spent in fasting, prayer, confession, and watch- ing, and in the morning, after a bath, the candidate was dressed in new white robes — a satin vest, embroidered in gold, and a leather collar, over his coat of mail. The Holy Sacra- ment was given, and then he was taken to the church and ex- amined by the priest. If found worthy, he took " vows to be a brave, loyal, generous, just, and gentle knight, a champion of the Church, a redressor of the wrongs of widows and or- phans, and a protector of ladies "; then the priest, after blessing his sword, hung it about the new-made knight's neck. The ceremony was completed by handing him his spear, helmet, shield, and spurs. Then the prince or king who gave the honor of knighthood to the youth struck him on the neck with the flat of his sword, saying, " In the name of God, St. Michael, and St. George, I make thee a knight; be valiant, courteous, and loyal."
The youth's mind was saturated with tales of knight- errantry, of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and the Quest of the Holy Grail, and taught the old Teutonic love of women, arms, and the gods. This system constituted perhaps the brightest spot in the dark ages, produced charac- ters like Bayard and Sidney, and the ideal of a gentleman, until the invention of gunpowder and the appearance of Don Quixote gave it its death-blow.
IV. The JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS have always recognized the critical nature of this epoch and its peculiar temp- tations and invoked the aid of transcendental motives before in- telligence and self-control are able to cope with the strong new 262 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE instincts that now spring into life. Hence a religious majority is celebrated in the early teens, when the young become members of the religious community as well as of the home, and parents seek divine and ecclesiastical cooperation in the further nurture of their offspring. The ideas and rites that follow, which I have described sympathetically, have not only a profound re- ligious but also an anthropological, psychological, and peda- gogic interest.
(A) The Old Testament tells us little concerning the special train- ing of adolescents. When the open vision had been sealed up because of the wickedness of Israel, the office of prophet was first established in the youth Samuel, who was thrice called in the night, who fore- told the swift destruction of Eli and his house, and became the pio- neer and in a sense the founder of the school of the prophets in which the ancient Hebrew spirit reached its highest expression. The picture of Jesus in adolescent years discussing the highest themes with the doctors in the temple suggests at once the care of Jewish training and the characteristic gravitation of the soul at this age to fundamental religious and philosophical questions and insights.
While the Jews have always attached the greatest importance to the early training of youth in their sacred writings,1 the oldest form of confirmation, the Bar Mitzvah or son of the commandment, did not become current before the fourteenth century, but is still observed by the majority of Jews the world over.2 Up to the age of thirteen the father is responsible for his son's acts, but now by this ceremony he attains his religious majority. In a special form of benediction the father renounces or transfers responsibility from himself to the child. The ceremony is simple. The Sabbath after his thirteenth birthday the youth appears at the reader's desk, wrapped in his talith, and pro- nounces the ritual benediction of the prayer-book. If he is a student of the torah or law, and is advanced enough, he reads a few chapters in Hebrew and the prophetic portion of the day, and if a student of the Talmud, he discourses on some knotty point of his own selection, either at the close of the service in the synagogue or at home after- ward in the presence of the rabbi. In any case he then becomes a member of the congregation, wears his own phylacteries at morning 1 See titles on the History of Education among the Ancient Hebrews in my Bibliography of Education, pp. 6-7.
2 1 am chiefly indebted for this account to Rabbi I. M. Wise, Rabbin G. Gott- heil, of Temple Emanuel, New York; and also to Rabbin D. Philipson, of Cin- cinnati, I. S. Moses, and J. Stolz, of Chicago, C. Fleischer, of Boston, and others; also to a somewhat copious literature of articles, most of which they have named, and to many manuals in current use.
CHURCH CONFIRMATION 263 service, and may be called to the desk to read the law or say the bene- diction. Girls attain their legal majority a year earlier, but although they are carefully trained the event is marked by no ritual. The age and the rites are based on Oriental ideas and conditions.
This, however, all the reformed and many conservative Jews now regard as a soulless, worn-out tradition of rabbinism; they hold that the age should not be fixed, but that it depends on the capacity of the child, and should be generally later, setting thirteen as a suitable min- imum age. The new forms of confirmation were first practised at Cassel, in 1810, and have since spread for several decades, not with- out much opposition, as a servile imitation of Christianity and for- eign to the spirit of Judaism. At first the new ceremonial was per- formed not in the synagogue, but in the schoolhouse, not by the rabbi, but by the teacher, and on boys only; it was first performed in America by Dr. Max Lilienthal in New York in I846.1 It is now not a ceremony but a kind of official conclusion of the training of the Sabbath-school, the first public religious act of the child, inducting him to full and complete membership of the synagogue and to a re- ligion that is not mere legalism, a ceremony of acts, but " a religion of the spirit whose mission is to realize the prophetic ideals of one God and one mankind." It is thus an impressive ceremonial, whereby the confirmants make a self-actuated profession of belief and declare their purpose to uphold the principles of Judaism.
The earlier stages of preparation for confirmation are represented by graded classes, held on Sabbath mornings and sometimes during week-days, generally limited to children of members of the congrega- tion, who enter at from eight to ten years of age. Each of the four or five grades in the best Jewish schools has its own room, the chil- dren are marked and promoted from one section to another, pass oral and sometimes written examinations, and in all other respects the methods and principles are those of the public schools. Part of this time is devoted to the Hebrew language, as a bond uniting a dispersed people with each other and with their antiquities. The rabbi him- self commonly devotes much attention to the school. Sometimes sub- stantial prizes are offered to stimulate competition. The first year's work in the best schools is largely the biographies of the heroes of the Old Testament, the history of which is followed. The last week or two is devoted to post-Biblical history, mainly of the Jews, but includ- ing Christianity and Mohammedanism, and incidentally considerable general European history through the Christian centuries, with some attention to secular Jewish literature. The Old Testament is taught intensively and well, but mainly as literature, and the chief services of the Church are also taught in the Hebrew language. The relative absence of dogma is a chief feature of the work. The chief doctrines taught are: God, his unity, wisdom, goodness, justice, and fatherhood;