§ 31. What is far more interesting is the remnant now discovered of the pictorial teaching of children, by hanging up in the schoolroom illustrations of the Trojan and other legends. By the researches of Böttiger and O. Jahn,[27] it appears that we still have the fragments of such a table in the _tabula Iliaca_ of Theodorus, preserved at the Capitoline Museum in Rome. These were large pictures, in a series, with names or words of explanation attached to them. Thus we have one picture (from “Iliad” Α) of Chryses praying Agamemnon to restore his daughter, beside him a wagon loaded with ransom, and under each figure, and under the wagon respectively, _Agamemnon_, _Chryses_, _the ransom_. Other extant pictures illustrate the third and twenty-fourth books of the “Iliad.” The “Odyssey” was similarly treated, so that there seems to have been a traditional and widely circulated pictorial compendium of the Homeric poems used, at all events, in later Greek and in Roman schools. There are also chronological and historical fragments of the same kind still extant, so that it is more than probable that even in classical days Greek boys were not without the benefit of illustrated school-books, or at least school-sheets, as the elegiac distich on the back of one of them suggests.[28] The use of these pictures on the walls explains the constant appearance of a long wand in the master’s hand, which is more characteristic of him than the rod of punishment, though this, too, was not missing. THE SUBJECTS AND METHOD OF EDUCATION--THE THREE R’S. § 32. The usual subdivision of education was into three parts: _letters_ (γράμματα), including reading, writing, counting, and learning of the poets; _music_ in the stricter sense, including singing and playing on the lyre; and lastly _gymnastic_, which included dancing. These were under the special direction of three classes of masters, the _grammatists_ (to be distinguished from γραμματικός, used in a higher sense), the _citharistes_, and the _pædotribes_. It is said that at Sparta the education in reading and writing was not thought necessary, and there have been long discussions among the learned whether the ordinary Spartan in classical days was able to read. We find that Aristotle adds a fourth subject to the three above named--drawing, which he thinks requisite, like music, to enable the educated man to judge rightly of works of art. But there is no evidence of a wide diffusion of drawing or painting among the Greeks, as among us; and the same may be said of swimming on the gymnastic side, though the oft-quoted proverb, μηδὲ νεῖν μηδὲ γράμματα--_he can neither swim nor read_--has led the learned to assert a general knowledge of swimming, at least at Athens.