The last remark is not just. The daily exercises of the young Spartans,--jumping, running, wrestling, playing with lances and at quoits,--could not be regarded as intellectual occupations. On the other hand, in learning to talk, the young Athenians learned also to feel and to think. 21. THE SCHOOLS OF ATHENS.--The Athenian legislator, Solon, had placed physical and intellectual training upon the same footing. Children, he said, ought, above everything else, to learn “to swim and to read.” It seems that the education of the body was the chief preoccupation of the Athenian republic. While the organization of schools for grammar and music was left to private enterprise, the State took a part in the direction of the gymnasia. The director of the gymnasium, or the gymnasiarch, was elected each year by the assembly of the people. Nevertheless, Athenian education became more and more a course in literary training, especially towards the sixth century B.C. The Athenian child remained in the charge of a nurse and an attendant up to his sixth or seventh year. At the age of seven, a pedagogue, that is, a “conductor of children,” usually a slave, was charged with the oversight of the child. Conducted by his pedagogue, the pupil attended by turns the school for grammar, the _palestra_,[24] or school for gymnastics, and the school for music. The grammarian, who sometimes gave his lessons in the open air, in the streets and on the public squares, taught reading, writing, and mythology. Homer was the boy’s reading-book. Instruction in gymnastics was given in connection with instruction in grammar. It was begun in the palestra and continued in the gymnasium. Instruction in music succeeded the training in grammar and gymnastics. The music-master, or _citharist_, first taught his pupils to sing, and then to play upon the stringed instruments, the lyre and the cithara. We know what value the Athenians attributed to music. Plato and Aristotle agree in thinking that the rhythm and harmony of music inspire the soul with the love of order, with harmoniousness, regularity, and a soothing of the passions. We must recollect, moreover, that music held a large place in the actual life of the Greeks. The laws were promulgated in song. It was necessary to sing in order to fulfil one’s religious duties. It was held that the education of Themistocles had been neglected because he had not learned music. “We must regard the Greeks,” says Montesquieu, “as a race of athletes and fighters. Now those exercises, so proper to make men hardy and fierce, had need of being tempered by others which could soften the manners. Music, which affected the soul through the organs of the body, was exactly adapted to this purpose.”[25] In the elementary schools of Athens, at least at the first, the current discipline was severe. Aristophanes, bewailing the degeneracy of his time, recalls in these terms the good order that reigned in the olden school:[26]--