Thus reading aloud and recitations from the great poets attained a double object: the schoolboy was taught to enounce accurately and read rhythmically; he was made familiar at the same time with the choicest extracts of the best masters in the older literature. I have already spoken of Homer; but the lyric poets, like Tyrtæus, and the gnomic, like Theognis, were also largely used at school. Indeed, it is not a little remarkable how many of these old poets were themselves called schoolmasters. This school use gave rise to _chrestomathies_, or selections of suitable passages; and there are many critics who think that our present texts of Theognis represent such a selection. The “Golden Verses” of Pythagoras, the many collections of proverbs, or ὑποθῆκαι, point to the same practice. Written books were still scarce, libraries very exceptional, and thus the boy’s education was far more prosecuted by dictation and by conversation than nowadays. Without doubt this made them less learned, but more intelligent and ready, than we are; and there are even in the days of Hellenic decay complaints of the increase of books, of the lust after much reading and various lore.[31] We are told that in Sparta and Crete all children learned hymns to the gods, and metrical statements of the laws, to be sung to fixed melodies; and this (if a fact) has justly been called a political as well as religious catechism. § 35. It was very late in the history of Hellenism that any mention of the learning of foreign languages meets us. Even in the wide studies pursued at Alexandria, no systematic course in languages is ever mentioned; and people still had recourse in international business to those who happened to be born of mixed marriages, or by some other accident had been compelled to acquire a second tongue. There is, indeed, much curious evidence that the Greeks, being really bad linguists, found great difficulty in acquiring the Latin tongue, even when it became the language of the rulers of the world.[32] Strabo[33] notes that whenever historical treatises were composed in foreign languages, they were inaccessible to the Greeks, while the Romans did nothing but copy partially and imperfectly what the Greeks had said--a remark which might now be sarcastically applied to the relations of German and English philology. This Greek inability to learn, or contempt of, foreign languages reminds us of the French of to-day, whose language, until lately, held the place in Europe which Greek held in the Roman Empire, when every respectable person knew Greek, and when the Senate were able to receive and treat with foreign ambassadors speaking in Greek.[34] We have above noted the danger actually threatening that children might learn Greek so early and exclusively as to speak their native tongue with a foreign accent--a state of things which the Romans would have resented strongly in their rulers--in that respect widely different from the English people of to-day. Thus the