The school hours were arranged to suit the time of meals in the boys’ homes. After the early breakfast, taken at sunrise, the boy sets off to his teacher, with whom he remained till noon. Then came the midday meal, followed by a siesta, and then afternoon school. Discipline was lax. The schoolmaster certainly had a rod to assist him in maintaining order, but his social inferiority deprived him of any real authority. Children would bring their pet dogs to school and play with them under the master’s chair. The master usually was sitting, a position which an Athenian despised as unworthy of a free-born man, and we have the typical schoolmaster pictured for us on a vase by Euphronios. He is a small, ill-developed man, with a bald head and a prominent nose. His body twisted, he leans forward with a threatening gesture, his forefinger raised in warning. In his left hand there is a stylus, for a writing-lesson is in progress; his stick with crooked handle and formidable knobs lies convenient to his right. He is drawn by a malicious hand with something of the caricaturist’s touch, but he is thoroughly alive and evidently closely resembles a real original. We may imagine that not unlike him even in bodily form was the schoolmaster in the third mime of Herondas who beats his idle pupil with his bull’s tail strap until he is ‘black and blue like a spotted snake.’ The ordinary system of elementary education at Athens, as followed by boys from seven to fourteen, consisted of three parts: letters, music and gymnastics, presided over by the grammatiste, kithariste, and pædotribe respectively. The grammatiste taught reading, writing and simple arithmetic, and his methods, on the evidence of the papyri and ostraka which have recently been discovered in Egypt, were not very much unlike those of a modern school. We have long lists of alphabets, and of simple and difficult combinations of letters; passages for dictation and recitation, the conjugation of verbs, and elementary grammatical rules. The kithariste taught ‘music’; i.e. the words of the lyric poets and the simple lyre accompaniment which went with the words. In general estimation he ranked a little higher than the grammatiste, but they both taught under the same conditions, and usually in the same building. The pædotribe was a much more important person than the other two, and his teaching, which directed the boy’s physical development upon scientific lines, lasted usually till manhood. He taught the rules of health, ‘dancing’ in the Greek sense of the word, and especially the five exercises of the pentathlon, which aimed at producing a perfect, all-round athlete. The palæstra was his school-room, and he was always sure of eager pupils and interested spectators.