The Athenians believed that training which aimed only at money-making, or bodily strength, or mere cleverness apart from intelligence, was mean and vulgar and did not deserve to be called education. True education, they held, made a child long to be a good citizen and taught him both how to rule and to obey. It must not be supposed that the Athenians despised wealth or the power of wealth. Only a wealthy state could have built the Parthenon or celebrated the great Panathenaic Festival, but the Athenians despised mere money-making, and they believed that a man's success was not to be measured by the amount of money he had made, {223} but by the use to which he put it, and they believed that an education which taught a boy to be industrious and thrifty, to despise self-indulgence and luxury, to think straight and see clearly, would make him a better citizen than one which aimed only at making him a successful man of business. So they aimed at giving every boy a good education. First among things, [said one of their teachers], I reckon human education. For if you begin anything whatever in the right way, the end will probably be right also. The nature of the harvest depends upon the seeds you sow. If you plant good education in a young body, it bears leaves and fruit the whole life long, and no rain or drought can destroy it.[1] The Athenian boy went to school when he was seven years old. At this age he was placed in the charge of a pedagogue, a trusted slave who accompanied him when he went to school, carried his books for him, and helped him, when necessary, with his lessons. The pedagogue was also expected to keep him in good order, to teach him good manners, to answer all his many questions, and to punish him whenever he thought fit, which was probably very often. Schools opened early, so early that Solon made a law forbidding schoolmasters to open their schools before sunrise and requiring them to be closed before sunset, so that the boys should not have to walk about the dark and empty streets. The Athenian {224} boy, then, had to be early astir. "He gets up at dawn, washes the sleep from his eyes, and puts on his cloak. Then he goes out from his father's house with his eyes fixed upon the ground, not looking at anyone who meets him." (A modest and unassuming appearance in public was required of every boy.) "Behind him follow attendants and pedagogues, bearing in their hands the implements of virtue, writing-tablets or books containing the great deeds of old, or, if he is going to a music-school, his well-tuned lyre."[2]