In historic Greece, music came to be an essential part of the education of every free man. Even free women learnt it. Along with music went poetry, and when this came to be written down, it was termed "letters." As every free man came to be his own minstrel and his own rhapsode, the professional minstrel and rhapsode disappeared, and the Homeric poems even, in order to be preserved from oblivion, were committed to writing by an enlightened tyrant--Pisistratus. The first portion of the Greek people that attained a degree of civilization demanding an education for hours of leisure, was the Æolian race, and particularly the Asiatic portion of it. Accordingly we find that all the earliest musicians and poets, didactic and lyric, are Æolians--Hesiod, Terpander, Arion, Alcæus, Sappho, Pittacus, etc. Lesbos seems to have taken the lead in this "higher education." The last five names all belong to that island, which produced also the earliest Greek historian and prose-writer--Hellanicus. But the Æolians, though earliest in the field, were soon outstripped by the other two races, the Doric and the Ionic. Æolian education and culture never advanced beyond music and lyric poetry. It knew no drama, science, or philosophy. The Æolians were followed, almost simultaneously, by the Dorians and Ionians, who pursued two widely divergent directions. The former borrowed the lyric education and culture of the Æolians, and produced several lyric poets of distinguished merit--Tyrtæus, Alcman, Ibycus, Stesichorus: nay, they even advanced far enough to take the first steps in science, philosophy, and dramatic poetry. Pythagoras, Epicharmus, Sophron, Xenarchus, and Susarion were all Dorians. But the progress of the race was retarded and finally checked by rigid political institutions of a socialistic character, which, by suppressing individual initiative, reduced the whole to immobility. The Ionians, on the contrary, borrowing freely from both Æolians and Dorians, and evolving ever freer and freer institutions, carried education and culture to a point which has never been passed, and rarely, if ever, reached, in the history of our race. And when they ceased to grow, and decay set in, this was due to exactly the opposite cause to that which stunted them among the Dorians; namely, to excessive individualism, misnamed liberty. Individualism ruined Athens. Although education assumed different forms among different portions of the Greek race, there are certain features that seem to have been common to all these forms during the epoch of the "Old Education." Two of these deserve attention. _First._ Education was everywhere a branch of statecraft, and the State itself was only the highest educational institution. This was equally true whether the schools were public, as at Sparta, or private, as at Athens. Everywhere citizenship was a degree, conferred only upon sons of free citizens, after a satisfactory examination (δοκιμασία).