Read Ebook: Schools of Hellas An Essay on the Practice and Theory of Ancient Greek Education from 600 to 300 B. C. by Freeman Kenneth J Kenneth John Verrall A W Arthur Woollgar Author Of Introduction Etc Rendall M J Montague John Editor

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BIBLIOGRAPHY xvii INTRODUCTION 1

PART I THE PRACTICE OF EDUCATION

PART II THE THEORY OF EDUCATION

GENERAL ESSAY ON THE WHOLE SUBJECT 275

INDEX 293

AFTER PAGE

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

DITTENBERGER, W. De Ephebis Atticis Dissertatio. Dieterich, G?ttingen, 1863.

DUMONT, A. Essai sur l'?ph?bie Attique. 2 vols. Didot, Paris, 1875-76.

GIRARD, P. L'?ducation Ath?nienne au v? et au iv? si?cle avant J.-C. Hachette, Paris, 1889.

GRASBERGER, L. Erziehung und Unterricht im klassischen Alterthum. 3 vols. W?rzburg, 1864-81.

LAURIE, S. S. Historical Survey of Pre-Christian Education. 2nd Edition. Longmans, London, 1900.

MAHAFFY, J. P. Old Greek Education. Kegan Paul, 1883.

M?LLER, K. O. Dorians. Edition 1824. English translation; Oxford, 1830.

USSING, J. L. German translation. Erziehung bei den Griechen . Altona, 1870.

WILKINS, A. S. National Education in Greece . Isbister, London, 1873.

INTRODUCTION

The meeting-place of two streams has always a curious fascination for the traveller. There is a strange charm in watching the two currents blend and lose their individuality in a new whole. The discoloured, foam-flecked torrent, swirling on remorselessly its pebbles and minuter particles of granite from the mountains, and the calm, translucent stream, bearing in invisible solution the clays and sands of the plains through which its slow coils have wound, melt into a single river, mightier than either, which has received and will carry onward the burdens of both and lay them side by side in some far-off delta, where they will form "the dust of continents to be."

To the student of history or of psychology the meeting-place of two civilisations has a similar charm. To watch the immemorial culture of the East, slow-moving with the weight of years, dreamy with centuries of deep meditation, accept and assimilate, as in a moment of time, the science, the machinery, the restless energy and practical activity of the West is a fascinating employment; for the process is big with hope of some glorious product from this union of the two. Those who live while such a union is in progress cannot estimate its value or its probable result; they are but conscious of the discomforts and confusion arising from the ending of the old order that passes away, and can hardly presage the glories of the new, to which it is yielding place. It is in past history, not in the contemporary world, that such combinations must be studied.

The chief historical instance of two distinct civilisations blending into one is the Renaissance, that mighty union of the spirit of ancient Hellas and her pupil Rome with the spirit of medieval Europe, which has hardly been perfected even now. But it is often forgotten that there were at least two dress-rehearsals for the great drama of the Renaissance, in the course of which Hellenism learnt its own charm and adapted itself to the task of educating the world. Alexander carried the arts, the literature, and the spirit of Hellas far into the heart of Asia; and, though his great experiment of blending West with East was interrupted by his early death and the consequent disruption of his world-empire, yet, even so, something of his object was effected in the Hellenistic culture of Alexandria, Syria, and Asia Minor. Within a century of his death began the second dress-rehearsal, this time in the West. Conquered Hellas led her fierce conqueror captive, and the strength of Rome bowed before the intellect and imagination of the Hellene. Once more the great man who designed to unite the two currents into one stream without loss to either was cut off before his plans could be carried out, and the murder of Julius Caesar caused incalculable damage to this earlier Renaissance, for the education of Rome, the second scholar of Hellas, was not too wisely conducted. Yet the schooling produced Virgil and Horace and that Greco-Roman civilisation in which the Teutonic nations of the North received their first lessons in culture. After several premature attempts, medieval Europe rediscovered ancient Hellas and her pupil Rome at the time of the Renaissance. Since that time the influence exerted by Hellenism upon modern civilisation has been continuous and incalculable. How much of that influence remains unassimilated, how far it is still needed, may perhaps be realised best by passing straight from the Elgin marbles or a play of Sophocles to a modern crowd or to modern literature.

Hellas has thus been the educator of the world to an extent of which not even Perikles ever dreamed. How then, it may naturally be asked, did the teacher of the nations teach her own sons and daughters? If so many peoples have been at school to learn the lessons of Hellenism, what was the nature of the schools of ancient Hellas? How did those wonderful city-states, which produced in the course of a few centuries a wealth of unsurpassed literature, philosophy and art, whose history is immortalised by the names of Thermopylae and Marathon, train their young citizens to be at once patriots and art-critics, statesmen and philosophers, money-makers and lovers of literature? They must have known not a little about education, those old Hellenes, it is natural to suppose. Have the schools, like the arts and literature and spirit, of Hellas any lesson for the modern world? These are the questions which the present work will attempt in some measure to answer.

In some measure only; for the spirit of Hellas cannot be caught at second hand: it consists in just those subtler elements of refined taste and perfect choice of expression which cannot but be lost in a translation or a photograph. In like manner, the secret of Hellenic education cannot be reproduced by any mere accumulation of bald facts and wiseacres' deductions. It is easy for the modern theorist to give an exact account of his ideal school; he has only to tabulate the subjects which are to be studied, the books which are to be read, and the hours at which his mechanical children are to be stuffed with the required mass of facts. But the Hellenic schoolmaster held that education dealt not with machines but with children, not with facts but with character. His object was to mould the taste of his pupils, to make them "love what is beautiful and hate what is ugly." And because he wished them to love what is beautiful in art and literature, in nature and in human life, he sought to make his lessons attractive, in order that the subjects learnt at school might not be regarded with loathing in after life. Education had to be charming to the young; its field was largely music and art and the literature which appeals most to children, adventure and heroism and tales of romance expressed in verse. The music is all but gone, and of the art only a few fragments remain; the primary schools of Hellas have left to modern research only portions of their literature. Their attractiveness must be judged from the poems of Homer. But the charm of education lies mainly in the methods of the teacher; and of these posterity can know little. Scholars may piece together the books which were read and the exercises which were practised, but of the method in which they were taught, of their order and arrangement and respective quantities, nothing can be known. There is the raw material, the human boy, and of the tools wherewith the masters fashioned him, some relics are left; but of the way in which the artist used those tools, of the true inwardness of his handicraft and skill, not all the diligence of Teutonic research can recover a trace. The young art-student will learn little of Michel Angelo or Raphael, if he focusses his attention simply on the materials and the tools which they employed: to grasp their spirit he must go to the Sistine Chapel or to the Dresden Gallery, and contemplate their masterpieces. In like manner the student of Hellenic education ought to consider not its materials and tools, but rather its results and ideals. He must look with his own eyes and imagination upon the Aegina pediment or the "Hermes" of Praxiteles, if he wishes to comprehend the objects of the Doric and Ionic schools. This he must do for himself, since no book can do it for him. All that this work can hope to do is to furnish some few ideas about the tools wherewith the Hellenic schoolmasters tried to fashion the boys at their disposal into the masterpieces bodied forth in the "Hermes" and the Aeginetan figures: the skilled fingers and the imaginative brains which used the tools are for ever beyond the reach of the scholar and the archaeologist.

The "Hermes," with his physical perfection and his plenitude of intellect, with the features of an artist and the brow of a thinker, may be taken as the ideal of the fully developed Athenian education of the early fourth century B.C. The Aeginetan figures stand in the same relation to the Spartan and Cretan schools; these heroic figures have the bodily harmoniousness, the narrow if deep thought, the hardness of the Dorian temper. Perhaps it is not fanciful to see in the so-called "Theseus" of the Parthenon an earlier ideal of Athenian training, when it aimed at rather less of dreamy contemplation, at a less sensuous and more strenuous mode of life. If this be so, that glorious figure bodies forth the very ideal of Periclean and Imperial Athens at her grandest moment, before the ruin caused by the long war with Sparta.

The stream of Hellenism ran in two currents. Underlying the local diversity, which made every little town ethically and artistically distinct from its neighbour, was the fundamental difference between Dorian and Ionian. Clearly marked in every aspect of life, this difference was most marked in the schools. Sparta and Crete on the one hand, and Athens, followed closely by her Ionian and Aeolic allies and at a greater distance by the rest of civilised Hellas, on the other, develop totally different types of education. The young Spartan is enrolled at a fixed age in a boarding-school: everything he learns or does is under State-supervision. Perfect grace and harmony of body is his sole object: he is hardly taught his letters or numbers. The young Athenian goes to school when and where his parents like; learns, within certain wide limits, what they please; ends his schooling when they choose. He learns his letters and arithmetic, studies literature and music, and, at a later date, painting, besides his athletic exercises, at a day-school. When he grows older, he may add rhetoric or philosophy or science or any subject he pleases to this earlier course. The State interferes only to protect his morals, and to enforce upon him two years of military training between the ages of eighteen and twenty.

The superficial differences between the Athenian and the Spartan type of school are so striking that at first sight they appear to have no one principle in common. It will therefore be necessary to keep the two types apart at first and discuss their details separately. But the Hellenic thinkers recognised certain deep-seated similarities beneath the superficial contradictions, and it became the object of educational philosophy to blend the two types into a perfect system. As soon as a deeper study has been made of the theory of education in Hellas, the distinctions of practice begin to vanish away and the similarities of ideal and aim become more and more apparent. When the survey of both practice and theory, which is the object of this work, has been completed, it should be possible to grasp and estimate the common principles, which, amid much variety of detail, governed the schools of Hellas.

PART I

THE PRACTICE OF EDUCATION

EDUCATION AT SPARTA AND IN CRETE

According to a current legend, which Herodotos, owing to his Ionian patriotism, is eager to contradict, Anacharsis the Scythian, on his return from his travels, declared that the Spartans seemed to him to be the only Hellenic people with whom it was possible to converse sensibly, for they alone had time to be wise. The full Spartan citizen certainly had abundant leisure. He was absolutely free from the cares of money-making, for he was supported by an hereditary allotment which was cultivated for him by State-serfs. He had no profession or trade to occupy him. His whole time was spent in educating himself and his younger countrymen in accordance with Spartan ideas, and in practising the Spartan mode of life. The Spartans divided their day between various gymnastic and military exercises, hunting, public affairs, and "leschai" or conversation-clubs, at which no talk of business was permitted; the members discussed only what was honourable and noble, or blamed what was cowardly and base. They were on the whole a grave and silent people, but they had a terse wit of their own, and there was a statue of Laughter in their city. They were always in a state of perfect training, like the "wiry dogs" of Plato's Republic. They were strong conservatives; innovation was strictly forbidden. The unfortunate who made a change in the rules of the Ball-game was scourged. In the Skias or Council-chamber still hung in Pausanias' time the eleven-stringed lyre which Timotheos had brought to Sparta, only to have it broken; and the nine-stringed lyre of Phrunis met the same fate. Having once accepted the seven-stringed lyre from Terpander, the Spartans never permitted it to be changed. They had also a talent for minute organisation; both their army and their children were greatly subdivided. Every one at Sparta was a part of a beautifully organised machine, designed almost exclusively for military purposes.

In this strangely artificial State, it was essential that the future citizens should be saturated with the spirit of the place at an early age. There were practically no written laws. Judges and rulers acted on their own discretion. This was only possible if a particular stamp of character, a particular outlook and attitude, were impressed upon every citizen. Consequently, education was the most important thing at Sparta. It was both regulated and enforced by the State. It was exactly the same for all. The boys were taken away from home and brought up in great boarding-schools, so that the individualising tendencies of family life and hereditary instincts might be stamped out, and a general type of character, the Spartan type, alone be left in all the boys. For boarding-schools have admittedly this result, that they impose a recognisable stamp, a certain similarity of manner and attitude, upon all the boys who pass through them.

Therefore, as soon as a child was born at Sparta, it was taken before the elders of the tribe to which its parents belonged. If they decided that it was likely to prove sickly, it was exposed on Mount Ta?getos, there to die or be brought up by Helots or Perioikoi. Sparta was no place for invalids. If the infant was approved, it was taken back to its home, to be brought up by its mother. Spartan women were famous for their skill in bringing up children. Spartan nurses were in great demand in Hellas. They were eagerly sought after for boys of rank and wealth like Alkibiades. The songs which they sang to their charges and the rules which they enforced made the children "not afraid of the dark" or terrified if they were left alone; not addicted "to daintiness or naughty tempers or screaming"; in fact, "little gentlemen" in every way.

No doubt the discipline of the children was strict, but then the parents lived just as strictly themselves. There were no luxuries for any one at Sparta: the houses and furniture were as plain as the food. But there is a charming picture of Agesilaos riding on a stick to amuse his children; and the Spartan mothers, if stern towards cowardice, seem to have been keenly interested in their children's development; they were by no means nonentities like Athenian ladies.

The children slept at home till they were seven; but at an early age were taken by their fathers to the "Pheiditia" or clubs where the grown men spent those hours during which they stayed indoors and took their meals. About fifty men attended each of these clubs. The children sat on the floor near their fathers. Each member contributed monthly a "medimnos" of barley-meal, eight "choes" of wine, five "mnai" of cheese, two and a half "mnai" of figs, and some very cheap relish; if he sacrificed to a god, he gave part of the victim to his "mess," and if he was successful in hunting , he brought his spoils to the common table. There was also the famous black broth, made by the hereditary guild of State cooks, which only a life of Spartan training and cold baths in the Eurotas could make appetising; yet elderly Spartans preferred it to meat. Perhaps a fragment of Alkman represents a high-day at one of these clubs: "Seven couches and as many tables, brimming full of poppy-flavoured loaves, and linseed and sesamum, and in bowls honey and linseed for the children."

Generally speaking, therefore, the Spartan schools were only for the sons of "Peers" , that is, those who paid the subscriptions. But a certain number of other boys were admitted, provided that their food was paid for. A rich Spartan might, if he chose, select certain other boys to be educated with his own son or sons, and pay their expenses meanwhile. The number of these school-companions depended on the number of contributions in kind which he was capable of supplying. The school-companions could thus attend the Spartan schools; but they did not become citizens when they grew up, unless they revealed so much merit that the Spartan State gave them the franchise.

From what classes were these school-companions drawn? Sometimes they were foreigners, sons either of distinguished guest-friends of leading Spartans, or of refugee-settlers in Laconia. Thus Xenophon's two sons were educated at Sparta. These foreign boys were called ???????? or Foster-children. Xenophon mentions "foreigners from among the ???????? ." If these Foster-children, when grown up, remained in Sparta they possessed no civic rights. A passage in Plato refers to the difficulty which was experienced in getting these Foster-children to accept this humble position. It is interesting to note that Sparta thus precedes Athens as an educational centre to which boys from foreign cities came to receive their schooling.

More often Spartan parents chose Helots to be school-companions of their sons. Thus Plutarch speaks of "two of the foster-brothers of Kleomenes, whom they call Mothakes." The name Mothax was applied to these educated Helots. They seem to have been notorious for the way in which they presumed upon their position, if we may assume a connection between Mothax and Mothon, a term which is used for the patron deity of impudence in Aristophanes, and elsewhere is the name of a vulgar dance. They were not enfranchised when their school-days were over, and had to settle down to slavish duties, unless they showed peculiar merit. But several of the most distinguished Spartans, including Lusandros, were enfranchised Mothakes.

Xenophon, in a passage which has already been quoted, mentions "gentlemen-volunteers of the Perioikoi and certain foreigners of the so-called Foster-children and bastards of the Spartiatai, very goodly men and not without share in the honourable things in the State." If most of the authorities are right in regarding "the honourable things" as a Spartan phrase for their educational system--and there is good ground for this view--then this passage shows that illegitimate sons, and perhaps eminent Perioikoi, passed through the public schools at Sparta although, however, neither were called Foster-children, a name reserved for distinguished foreigners. The Helots who shared the education were known as Mothakes, and sometimes as ????????? , school-companions; but they do not seem to have been called ???????? , "Foster-children."

During the best period of Spartan history, none of these extra pupils, ???????? , Mothakes, illegitimate children, and eminent Perioikoi, were enfranchised unless they showed peculiar merit. At a later date, perhaps, any one who passed through the schools became a Spartan citizen. Plutarch makes this a part of Lukourgos' system; but that is improbable. Such a custom would only arise in the days of Spartan decay and depopulation. On the other hand, any Spartan boys who flinched before the hardships of their national education, lost their status, and were disfranchised, if they did not persevere.

At seven the boys were taken away from home, and organised in a most systematic way into "packs" and "divisions." These were the "ilai," which probably contained sixty-four boys, and the "agelai," whose numbers are unknown. These packs fed together, slept together on bundles of reeds for bedding, and played together. The boys had to go barefoot always, and wore only a single garment summer and winter alike. They were all under the control of a "Paidonomos" or "Superintendent of the boys," a citizen of rank, repute, and position, who might at any moment call them together, and punish them severely if they had been idle: he had attendants who bore the ominous name of Floggers. So, as Xenophon grimly remarks, a spirit of discipline and obedience prevailed at Sparta. In order that the boys might not be left without control, even when the Paidonomos was absent, any citizen who might be passing might order them to do anything which he liked, and punish them for any faults which they committed. The most sensible and plucky boy in each pack was made a Prefect over it, and called the Bou?gor, or "Herd-leader"; the rest obeyed his orders and endured his punishments.

The elder men stirred up quarrels among the boys in order to see who was plucky. Over every school was set one of the young men over twenty who had a good reputation both for courage and for morality. He was called the Eiren. He kept an eye on their battles, and used them as servants at home for his supper; he ordered the bigger boys to bring him firewood, and the smaller to collect vegetables. The only way by which such supplies could be obtained was by stealing them from the gardens and the men's dining-clubs. Apparently, then, the boys dined with him in his house; they were supplied with a scanty meal by their parents to eat there, and were encouraged to make up the deficiency by stealing. "When the Eiren had finished supper, he ordered one of the boys to sing, and to another he propounded some question which needed a thoughtful answer, such as, 'Who is the best of the grown-ups?' For such particular questions are more stimulating than generalities like 'What is virtue?' or 'What is a good citizen?' The answer had to be accompanied by a concise reason; failure was punished by a bite on the hand. Elder men watched, saying nothing at the time, but rebuking the Eiren severely afterwards if he was too strict or too lenient."

Thus we find at Sparta a prefect-system and fagging. But the sense of responsibility produced in the elder boys at English public schools and the practice which they acquire in exercising authority were prevented at Sparta by the perpetual presence of grown men, which made Laconian schools more like French Lyc?es. There is no class of professional schoolmasters; the Eiren, the Paidonomos, and any elder who chooses, give the instruction freely and gratuitously. Education, being so simple, cost nothing at Sparta.

The education was almost entirely physical. Plutarch, it is true, says that they learnt "letters, because they were useful." This may have been a later introduction, or perhaps the amount learnt was so little as to justify Isokrates in saying that the Spartans "do not even learn their letters, which are the means to a knowledge of the past, as well as of contemporary events"; he also thought it highly improbable that even "the most intelligent of them would hear of his speeches, unless they found some one to read them aloud." They had, indeed, little reason to learn to read. Their written laws were very few, and these they learnt by heart, set to a tune. They had nothing to do with commerce or even with accounts; very few of them knew how to count. Hippias, the Sophist, found that all they cared to listen to, were "genealogies of men and heroes, foundations of cities, and archaeology generally." Probably, like the Dorian philosopher Pythagoras, and like Plato, the admirer of all things Dorian, they held that memory was all-important, and that the use of writing weakened it. Besides the State-laws set to music there were songs which praised dead heroes and derided cowards: the diction was plain and simple, the subjects grave and moral; many of them were war-marches; all were incentive to pluck and energy.

Rhetoric was, of course, utterly forbidden: a young man who learnt it abroad and brought it home was punished by the Ephors. Spartans learned to be silent as a rule; when they spoke, their remarks were short and much to the point, for they thought it wrong to waste a word. This was definitely taught to the boys, as has been shown above. "If you converse with quite an ordinary Laconian," says Plato, "at first he seems a mere fool; then suddenly, at the critical point, he flings forth a pithy saying, and his companions seem no better than children compared with him." This epigrammatic wisdom Plato ironically ascribes to the fact that Laconians really attend Sophists on the sly, and are greater philosophers than any one knows. Many echoes of their terse and grim humour have come down to modern times: such as Leonidas' remark to his troops at Thermopylae, "Breakfast here: supper in Hades"; and the Spartan's description of Athens, "All things noble there," by which he meant that nothing, however base, was counted ignoble.

The Spartans must not be regarded as wholly averse to literature. They knew Homer, and thought him the best poet of his class, although the manner of life he inculcated was Ionic, not Doric. Alkman spent his life at Sparta, and has left one splendid song for a chorus of Laconian girls. Aristophanes could put a fine chorus into the mouths of Laconians, though its subject is noticeably warlike. For it was war-poems that the Spartans liked. "They care naught for the other poets," says the Athenian orator, Lukourgos, "but for Turtaios they care so exceedingly that they made a law to summon every one to the king's tent, when they are on a campaign, to hear the poems of Turtaios, considering that this would make them most ready to die for their country."

After all, the objects of the Spartan education were not intellectual acuteness and the accumulation of knowledge, but discipline, endurance, and victory in war. Discipline was taught by the perpetual presence of authority, and by very severe punishments. Spartan boys were practically never left to their own devices: perhaps that is the secret of the moral failure of nearly every Spartan who was given a position of authority outside Lakedaimon; for responsibility requires practice. Endurance was taught by their whole mode of life. They went barefooted, with a single garment, played and danced naked under the hot Laconian sun; there were no ointments or luxurious baths for their bodies, only the Eurotas for a swim, and a bundle of reeds for a bed. The food which the boys received was very scanty: often they were turned out into the country in the early morning to provide food for themselves for the whole day by stealing.

This organised stealing was a feature of Spartan education. At an early age, as we have seen, the small boys were sent out to steal firewood and vegetables for the Eiren who had charge of them. Later they were driven out into the country, to forage for themselves at the expense of the farms. There was a definite age at which it was customary to begin stealing. The articles which might be stolen were fixed by law, and the legal limits might not be transgressed. It must be remembered that much property in Laconia was held in common. Any one, for instance, who was belated while hunting might take what food he pleased from a country house, and even break open seals to get at provisions. The Spartans also used one another's dogs and horses freely, without permission. It is therefore absurd to say that the system taught the boys to be dishonest. If the State agrees to declare certain articles to be common property, it is no longer stealing if one citizen removes them from the house of another: he is no more dishonest than a man who picks blackberries or buttercups in England. At one of the English public schools, tooth-mugs used to be a recognised article of plunder. The small fags were expected to keep their particular dormitory supplied with them, at the expense of others. They were punished by the wronged dormitory if caught in the act of removing them: but ingenuity in such thefts was regarded as praiseworthy. There was a certain number of these mugs belonging to the whole house; they were common property, and could therefore be purloined without dishonesty.

In their institutions of the foraging parties and Secret Service, the Spartans show a clear appreciation of boy-nature, as well as a keen eye for methods of military training. Moderns are beginning to realise that the average boy has so much of the primitive and natural man in him that, unless he is permitted to "go wild" and live the savage life at intervals, he is apt to become riotous and lawless. Hence in recent days the institution of camps for boys in England and "Seton Indians" in America. The Spartans, alone of Hellenes, fully recognised this peculiarity of boys, and met it with the foraging expeditions and secret service. The Athenian boy was not thus provided for until he became an ephebos; hence the Athenian streets were full of young Hooligans, while the aristocratic lads developed more refined, if more vicious, methods of giving vent to their instincts. In these country-expeditions alone the Spartan boys had an opportunity of escaping from the presence of their elders and developing habits of self-reliance and responsibility. Had Sparta made better use of these opportunities, the fate of her Empire after Aigospotamoi might have been different.

A frequent occupation of all ages at Sparta was hunting. This, too, they recognised to be an excellent training for soldiers, since it involved courage in meeting wild beasts, skill and ingenuity in tracking them, and hardships of all sorts in the forests and on the mountains. Laconia was full of game, and Laconian hounds were famous. The successful huntsman gave what he had killed to enrich the meals of his dining-club, and so won much popularity.

Fighting was encouraged at all ages; there were organised battles, somewhat resembling football matches, for the epheboi, in a shady playing-field surrounded by rows of plane trees and encircled by streams, access to it being given by two bridges. After a night spent in sacrifice, two teams of epheboi proceeded to this field. When they came near it, they drew lots, and the winners had the choice of bridges by which to enter the ground, selecting no doubt in accordance with the direction of sun and wind, as a modern football captain, who has won the toss, selects the end of the ground from which he will start playing. The epheboi fought with their hands, kicked, bit, and even tore out one another's eyes, in the endeavour to drive the opposing team back into the water.

The grown men were also encouraged to fight by the following device. The Ephors selected three of them, who were called Hippagretai. Each of these three selected one hundred companions, giving a public explanation in each case why he chose one man and rejected the others. So those who had been rejected became foes to those who were selected, and kept a close watch over them for the slightest breach of the accepted code of honour. Each party was always trying to increase its strength or perform some signal service to the State, in order to strengthen its own claims. The rivals also fought with their fists whenever they met.

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