In comparing the education of Athens with that of Sparta, we are at once struck with two great distinctions: (1) While Spartan education is public, Athenian education is mainly private; (2) While Sparta educates for war, Athens educates for peace. As to the former of these, it is not a little remarkable that, while many of the first thinkers of Greece, including Plato and Aristotle, advocated an entirely public education, Athens never adopted it, or even took any steps in that direction. It seems as if the Athenians felt instinctively that socialistic education, by relieving parents of the responsibility of providing for the education of their own children, was removing a strong moral influence, undermining the family, and jeopardizing liberty. Perhaps the example of Sparta was not without its influence. No liberty-loving people, such as the Athenians were, would consent to merge the family in the State, or to sacrifice private life to public order. As to the second distinction, which was all-pervasive, it divides the two peoples by an impassable gulf and assigns them to two different grades of civilization. And it was one of which both peoples were entirely conscious. While Sparta represented her ideal by a chained Ares, Athens found hers in a Wingless Victory, a form of Athena, the divinity of political and industrial wisdom. As the aim of Sparta was strength, so that of Athens was WISDOM--the wise man in the wise state. By the "wise man," was meant he whose entire faculties of body, soul, and mind were proportionately and coördinately developed; by the "wise state," that in which each class of the population performed its proper function, and occupied its proper relation toward the rest, and this without any excessive exercise of authority. If the Spartan, like the artificially tamed barbarian, submitted to living by rule and command, the Athenian, like the naturally civilized man, delighted to live in a free and natural way (ἀνειμένως διαιτᾶσθαι) governed from within, and not from without. To make possible such life was the aim of Athenian education, which, instead of seeking to merge the man in the State, or to rend the two asunder, treated them as necessary correlates and strove to balance their claims. The endeavor on the part of Athens to steer a middle course between socialism and individualism, is manifest in the fact that, though she had no public system of education, she took great care to see that her citizens were thoroughly educated in the spirit of her institutions, and, indeed, made such education a condition of citizenship, which was thus an academic degree, conferred only after careful examination. By a law of Solon's, parents who had failed to give their sons a proper education lost all claim upon them for support in their old age. Furthermore, Athens subjected all her male citizens to a systematic preparation for civil and military functions, before she allowed them to exercise these.