For the duties of such an aristocracy did not consist in heaping up riches; their position was comparatively independent of their financial successes. Their work was, in brief, to govern and to fight. They composed the electorate of the State, which chose the magistrates; they alone were members of the public Assembly; they alone were eligible for office. They sat as dikastai――jurymen and justices in one――in the law-courts; they made the laws and they administered them. The national honour and morality lay in their hands, for they controlled alike the foreign and the home policy of the State. They formed, too, the cultured circle which governed natural taste; it was their criticism which shaped the art of the vase-painters, the architects, the sculptors, the bronze-makers, and the countless other artistic tradesmen, the style of the orators, the literature of dramatists and dithyrambists, the music of the choric composers. When governors and administrators were needed for the outlying districts of the Athenian or Spartan Empires, or if officers were required to lead local levies to battle, any citizen, rich or poor, might be sent. The citizens, too, formed the core of the fleets and armies in the best days of Hellas. The object of Hellenic education was to produce this type of citizen――a man capable of governing, of fighting, and of setting the taste and standards of his country. Thus the schools of Hellas correspond in England not to the national schools, but to the “public schools.” I do not mean to assert that the English public-school boy stands, in after life, in the position of the Hellenic citizen to the bulk of the population. English democracy rests on a wider basis than Athenian or Florentine, and, in theory at any rate, the exclusive power of the “upper classes” is at an end. None the less it is true that from among the boys educated at the public schools comes a very considerable part of the generals and military officers, of the clergy, of the squires, of the Justices of the Peace and other administrators of the law, of the governors and officials required by the Indian Empire and the various dependencies and Crown Colonies, of the members of Parliament and statesmen at home. If the influence of the public schools of England upon the governing and fighting of the nation is less than that which the schools of Hellas were able to exercise, their influence upon national taste and standards in art and culture and literature is probably in no way inferior. It is therefore their duty to train their pupils’ characters, that they may be fit and able administrators, governors, and justices; and their tastes, that their criticism and demands may rightly direct the culture of the nation. In striving after these ends, the public schools of England may, I think, take not a few hints from the like-motived schools of Hellas. INDEX Abacus, illustrated, 104 Aegina pediment, 5 Aeolian harmony, 240, 241 Aeschylus, 245