§ 34. From the accounts we have of the teaching of the alphabet, as implied in Plato’s “Cratylus,” and described by Dionysius (the rhetor) in illustrating Demosthenes’ eloquence, it was not carried on in an analytical, but a synthetical, way. Children were not taught words first and then to analyze them, but started with individual letters, then learned their simplest combinations, and so on. Nor is this method ever likely to be supplanted by the other, at least in the case of stupid children. But we do hear of one curious attempt to make the alphabet an agreeable study in the so-called _grammatical tragedy_ of Callias, about 400 B.C. This was the time when (in the archonship of Eucleides) the newer Ionic alphabet of twenty-four letters was introduced, and apparently ordered to be used in schools. The work of Callias was, accordingly, a poetical kind of A B C book, in which the single letters in turn spoke the prologue. The choral parts seem to have been refrains working out the simpler combinations of vowels with each consonant. The seven vowels were also introduced before the schoolmaster as female characters. But more we do not know, and it is probable that the book was only called _tragedy_ from its external form, not from any plot.[29] The use of mnemonic verses to help children was, no doubt, as old as education; but we should have been glad to know the divisions of letters followed by Callias; for up to the times of the Sophists there was no proper analysis of the alphabet, and it is to them that we owe such studies as Plato’s “Cratylus,” which, though sound as to the alphabet, is wonderfully childish as to etymology. Still, the popular knowledge of 400 B.C. must have been a long way behind the “Cratylus.”