SCHOOLBOYS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23121, 20 August 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

SCHOOLBOYS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD

By E. M. BLAIKLOCK

the papyri which our own clay has recovered from the sands of Egypt is an ill-spelt, ill-written little letter which makes us thirst for more. When bad boy Theon wrote his petulant note to his father he did not know that he was to enjoy a unique distinction, and that his letter was to be the one authentic word of the ancient schoolboy to another age. Where are they, the boys who laboriously incised their tables on the clay tablets we find in the temple schools of Babylon? Where are the lads of Egypt? They had no bottles of milk in morning school, but their mothers brought them each three rolls and two jugs of beer to be consumed in school. "A boy who wanted more," says an Egyptian document, "is a gluttonous creature.'' Were there Oliver Twists? Where are the boys of Greece and Rome? Gone without a voice. But we have Theon. Emancipated Child A spoilt child was Theon. Indeed, he has the honour of being catalogued thus in a collection of papyrus documents: "Theon (spoilt boy), letter of, p. 297." What a fate! Judge now whether he deserved it. This is what lie wrote to the indulgent father after whom ho was named: "Theon to Theon his father, greeting. A fine tiling you did I Left mo behind when you went

What We Learn from Egyptian Papyri

to town! If you refuse to take me with you to Alexandria, I won't write you» a letter, speak to you, or wish you goodday. I won't shake hands with you, or ever greet you again. If you refuse to take me. that's what's up! And my mother is saying to my brother, 'He drives me mad! Take him out!' You did a fine thing! A lovely present you sent me, a lovely one! They lied to me the* day you sailed. Send for me, or I won't eat and I won't drink. There now! I pray for your health." Quite an up-to-date emancipated child, one would say. He has the impudence to sign himself, after all that, by his pet name, Theonas! Did Theon starve to death, or did his father send for him? I think we can safely picture Theonas in the' boulevards of Alexandria, freed from inhibitions and developing his ego. Too Good to be True But we are grateful to Theon. Without him we should be left to wonder at the perfect children of the ancients. They sit in rows in the adult literature of Greece and Rome, strikingly good, too good to be true, something like our friends' children on a visit. Theon, praise the lad, takes us Home on a working day, and gives us the comforting assurance that perhaps after all there is not a vital 'secret of childtraining we have lamentably missed. Meet, for instance, this paragon in Lucian. Lucian, by the way, was a satirist with some sense of humour. "He gets up at dawn, washes the sleep

out of his eyes and puts on his coat. Then he leaves for school with his eyes fixed upon the ground. There he labours diligently at his intellectual pursuits and exercises his limbs." The account then goes into details about the rest of the perfect little student's day, and concludes, "When evening sets the limit to his work, he pays the necessary tribute to his st-omach and retires to rest." Well now! Did he run amok at night? We peer at the ancient page and not a glimmer of a smile is there on Lucian's face. He meant it. When we look elsewhere in ancient literature, it is the same story. In the letters of Pliny the lads who occasionally appear are all "nice little boys with a nice cake of soap." Martial writes a poem to a schoolmaster urging him to give his "guileless troop" a holiday! Juvenal, mordant cynic though he was, gets all soft and sentimental over little boys studying hard to be like Cicero and Demosthenes. "Swots," the third form at the Grammar School would dub them! Bad Boy Kottalos

In desperation we turn to Aristophanes, comedian of Greece. Here he is picturing the schoolboys of those ancient days it was his conservative policy to praise. But humour has gone from the poet's page. With a catch in his voice he pictures the lads of father's day, marching to school, rain or fine, singing patriotic songs, for all the world like little Nazis goose-stepping to the Horst Wessel song. And sure enough, on the vase of Douris, which pictures a school scene, here they are standing reciting like little adults, prim and proper. One touch of humanity only! One perfect child has brought his little brother, who sucks his thumb behind the teacher's chair. In Theon's Egypt lived Herondas, who wrote a plav, another recent discovery. Perhaps Theon was the poet's model for Kottalos, and in that case we still have 110 proof that there was more than one bad boy in the ancient world. Kottalos has played truant, and his stern mother brings him to Lampriskos, the schoolmaster. "Flog him," she says, "across the shoulders until his wicked soul is all but out of him." "Right," says Lampriskos. "Hoist him up," he says to a prefect. . There is an ancient wall painting of such a flogging. The prefect holds the victim in the postion in which firemen are reputed to hold theirs, as they run down the ladder after a top floor rescue. The rest of the class sits in shocked virtue. "I'll teach him manners," says Lampriskos. "Where's* my strap, the stinging cow's tail?" "Not the stinger, sir," wails Kottalos. Lampriskos plies the strap, but mother is unsatisfied. "Go on," she says, "leather him till sunset." "Why lie's as striped as a water-snake!" "Well," she throws the word over her shoulder as she goes, "When he's done his reading, good or bad, give him twenty more." "Yah!" says Kottalos, presumably aside, for the ancient text has 110 stage directions. Disillusioned Parents It is to be hoped that Lucian's model child, and the boys on the vase of Douris grew up to fulfil all expectations. Parents were sometimes disillusioned. There is an awful deed of disownment among the papyri, in which a father casts off two sons and two daughters. "Thinking to find you a comfort to my age, submissive and obedient, you in your prime have set yourselves against me like rancorous beings. Wherefore I reject and abhor you." There are three pages of it! Theon's father, and Kottalos' mother had different methods. We hope the results were equally good. They would all have been surprised to know that we would exchange much rock-carved screed of kings for an essay by Theon or Kottalos on "What I did in my holidays." Masefield is right. There are interesting folk besides "princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers, in the ancient as well as in the modern world.