Education recognized as all-important in ancient Greece, and even made compulsory by the great lawgivers. In Homer’s time, children taught obedience, respect for the aged, and modesty of deportment; sons instructed in the use of weapons and gymnastic exercises; daughters, in domestic economy and virtue. Homer’s epics long the chief text-books on all subjects. Reading and writing, accomplishments of the earliest periods. An ignorant Greek an anomaly. Even among the Spartans, who affected contempt for literature, reading and writing were practised. The magistrates and their officers were provided with wooden cylinders of the same size; when one desired to communicate, he wound a strip of parchment round his cylinder and wrote his message thereon; then, removing the strip, he sent it to the other party, who was enabled to read it by rolling it upon his own cylinder in the same folds. In the golden age, common schools were the glory of Greece; the rudiments of education everywhere taught. The importance of grammar urged by Plato, who was the first to explain the difference between nouns and verbs; articles and conjunctions distinguished by Aristotle, and also differences of number and case. The foundation of scientific grammar laid by the Stoics, who recognized eight parts of speech. Those who could afford it completed their education at the Lyceum, Academy, or some other celebrated school, often paying most extravagantly for instruction in rhetoric and philosophy. Some teachers charged their pupils as much as $2,000 apiece for a course of lectures. Foreign languages were never studied by the Greeks. Many private libraries were established during the golden age, but no circulating or public libraries. As early as 400 B.C. Athens carried on quite a trade in manuscripts, one quarter of the market-place being called “the book-mart.” Books were generally abundant and cheap, being copied by slaves, but rare works were very costly. Plato paid $1,600 for three books. (_The reader is referred to Becker’s “Charicles; or, Illustrations of the Private Life of the Ancient Greeks.”_) Wooden tablets for accounts sold for 18 cts. each about 400 B.C. A small blank book of two wax tablets was worth less than a penny. Pencils are said to have been invented 408 B.C. by Apollodorus, the self-styled “Prince of Painters.” CHAPTER VI. _THE ALEXANDRIAN PERIOD._ =Decline of Letters.=—The triumph of the Doric states over Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) gave the first blow to the intellectual power of Greece. Literary decay forthwith set in; its progress was hastened by internal dissensions, and completed when liberty was hopelessly extinguished by Philip of Macedon and his successors.