The Ancients on Raising Excellent Children

Why the Source Comes First

Zevism holds that one must stand at the source. Knowledge can grow through transmission, but the source holds priority. On the raising of children the source is rich. Homer shows the first teachers of heroes; the Egyptian sages left books of instruction from father to son; the Upanishads give the words with which a teacher sent his pupil into life; Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle built whole philosophies of formation; Plutarch, Quintilian and Seneca turned them into practical counsel that parents still use. This page gathers that teaching in order. The 5 stage guides apply it age by age (Zevist Parenting).

The Ages of Life

The Ancients did not see childhood as one undivided time. They divided life into ages, each with its own task.

Solon's Sevens

Solon of Athens, lawgiver and poet, counted life in 10 periods of 7 years. His elegy is preserved by Philo of Alexandria.¹

Solon, fr. 27 West, preserved in Philo, De opificio mundi 104

Παῖς μὲν ἄνηβος ἐὼν ἔτι νήπιος ἕρκος ὀδόντων
φύσας ἐκβάλλει πρῶτον ἐν ἕπτ’ ἔτεσιν·
τοὺς δ’ ἑτέρους ὅτε δὴ τελέσῃ θεὸς ἕπτ’ ἐνιαυτούς,
ἥβης ἐκφαίνει σήματα γιγνομένης·
τῇ τριτάτῃ δὲ γένειον ἀεξομένων ἔτι γυίων
λαχνοῦται, χροιῆς ἄνθος ἀμειβομένης·
τῇ δὲ τετάρτῃ πᾶς τις ἐν ἑβδομάδ’ ἐστὶν ἄριστος
ἰσχύν, ἥν τ’ ἄνδρες σήματ’ ἔχουσ’ ἀρετῆς·

"A boy, not yet at puberty and still an infant, grows the fence of his teeth and first casts them within seven years. When the god completes the next seven years, he shows the signs of coming puberty. In the third, while the limbs are still growing, the chin grows downy and the bloom of the skin changes. In the fourth seven every man is at his best in strength, which men hold as the sign of excellence." (lit.)

The poem goes on through marriage and children in the 5th seven, the mind's full training in the 6th, the height of mind and speech in the 7th and 8th, to the 10th, after which death is no longer untimely. The first 3 sevens, birth to 21, are the years of formation, and they close where Aristotle closes education.

Pythagoras' Four Seasons

Pythagoras, according to Diogenes Laertius, divided human life into 4 parts of 20 years and matched them to the seasons.²

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers 8.10

Παῖς εἴκοσι ἔτεα, νεηνίσκος εἴκοσι, νεηνίης εἴκοσι, γέρων εἴκοσι. αἱ δὲ ἡλικίαι πρὸς τὰς ὥρας ὧδε σύμμετροι· παῖς ἔαρ, νεηνίσκος θέρος, νεηνίης φθινόπωρον, γέρων χειμών.

"Twenty years a boy, twenty years a youth, twenty years a young man, twenty years an old man; and these four periods correspond to the four seasons: the boy to spring, the youth to summer, the young man to autumn, and the old man to winter." (tr. R. D. Hicks)

Childhood is the spring of the soul: everything sown then comes up later.

The Delphic Maxims of the Ages

The maxims of Delphi, carried by Clearchus to Ai Khanoum on the Oxus, close with a rule for each age.³

The last 5 Delphic maxims, inscribed at Ai Khanoum

παῖς ὢν κόσμιος γίνου, ἡβῶν ἐγκρατής, μέσος δίκαιος, πρεσβύτης εὔβουλος, τελευτῶν ἄλυπος.

"As a child, be orderly; as a youth, master of yourself; in middle age, just; in old age, of good counsel; at the end, without grief."

Plato's and Aristotle's Timetables

Plato's Laws sets apart the first 3 years, given to motion, song and the middle state between pain and pleasure, and then the years from 3 to 6, given to play under the care of nurses; at 6 formal training begins.⁴ Aristotle's Politics gives the most exact ancient timetable: to 5, no lessons and no forced labor, only movement and play, with games that imitate later pursuits; from 5 to 7, watching the lessons to come; from 7 to puberty, the first period of education; from puberty to 21, the second.⁵

The Ancient Calendar of Childhood

Sources for the calendar: the Suda on the Amphidromia; Macrobius on the dies lustricus; Philostratus on the crowning at the Anthesteria; Plutarch on Sparta; Ovid on the Liberalia; Aristotle on the ephebeia; the Laws of Manu on the rites of India; the Instruction of Any; and the modern studies listed below.^{6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14}

Homer: The First Teachers

The oldest Greek picture of education is a picture of persons, not of schools. Achilles was raised by 2 teachers. The first was Chiron the Centaur, wisest of his kind, who also taught Jason and Asclepius; Pindar sings of the young Achilles, at 6 years old, running down lions and boars and carrying them back to Chiron.¹⁵ The second was Phoenix, sent by Peleus to go with the young man to war and teach him "to be both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds".¹⁶ Phoenix reminds Achilles that he made him what he is, holding him on his knees as a baby and feeding him.¹⁶

Homer also gives the charge of the fathers: "always to be the best and to stand above others", spoken by Peleus to Achilles and by Hippolochus to Glaucus.¹⁷ And he gives the Goddess as teacher: Athena takes the shape of Mentor to guide the young Telemachus into manhood.¹⁸

The Homeric lesson is the first and simplest of all: a child is formed by a person. The method, the school and the book come later.

Egypt: The Teaching of Fathers to Sons

The Egyptians wrote down the wisdom of fathers for their sons in books of instruction (sebayt), among the oldest literature of education on earth. The Instruction of Ptahhotep, set in the Old Kingdom and known from Middle Kingdom copies, opens with humility before learning.¹⁹

The Instruction of Ptahhotep, maxim 1, tr. Miriam Lichtheim

"Don't be proud of your knowledge, / Consult the ignorant and the wise; / The limits of art are not reached, / No artist's skills are perfect; / Good speech is more hidden than greenstone, / Yet may be found among maids at the grindstones."

Ptahhotep tells the father to do all that is good for a son who is upright and takes after him, "he is your son, your ka begot him, don't withdraw your heart from him", and he closes with a hymn to listening.¹⁹

The Instruction of Ptahhotep, epilogue, tr. Miriam Lichtheim

"Useful is hearing to a son who hears; / If hearing enters the hearer, / The hearer becomes a listener. / Hearing well is speaking well. … / A son who hears is a follower of Horus, / It goes well with him when he has heard. / When he is old, has reached veneration, / He will speak likewise to his children, / Renewing the teaching of his father."

The chain is the whole of education: the father teaches, the son listens, the son grows old and teaches his own children. The New Kingdom sage Any adds the duty owed to the mother, who nursed him 3 years and watched over him daily when he went to school, with bread and beer at home.¹³ The scribe's apprentice began with the Kemit, a book of model letters copied again and again, and with the Teaching of Khety, a father's counsel to his son Pepy on the way to school.²⁰ What all these books teach, at bottom, is Ma'at: right order, truth and justice in every act (Ma'at).

India: The Teacher as a God

The Vedic world formed the young through a sequence of rites, the saṃskāras, and through years of study in the house of a teacher. The Laws of Manu place the naming on the 10th or 12th day, the first solid food in the 6th month, the first tonsure in the 1st or 3rd year, and the initiation into Vedic study, the upanayana, between the 8th and 12th years counted from conception.¹² At the end of study the teacher spoke the convocation of the Taittirīya Upaniṣad.²¹

Taittirīya Upaniṣad 1.11.1-2

vedam anūcyācāryo 'ntevāsinam anuśāsti | satyaṃ vada | dharmaṃ cara | svādhyāyān mā pramadaḥ |
mātṛdevo bhava | pitṛdevo bhava | ācāryadevo bhava | atithidevo bhava |

"After having taught the Veda, the teacher instructs the pupil: Say what is true! Do thy duty! Do not neglect the study of the Veda! … Let thy mother be to thee like unto a god! Let thy father be to thee like unto a god! Let thy teacher be to thee like unto a god! Let thy guest be to thee like unto a god!" (tr. F. Max Müller)

The first word is Satya, the Truth that the Temple names as the first pillar around the throne of Zeus (Satya, Ma'at and Arete). The parents and the teacher are to be honored as Gods: the same structure Aristotle found in the love of children for parents.

Sparta: Endurance

Sparta built the most famous and the harshest education of antiquity. Its nurses were sought across Greece because they raised infants unswaddled, contented, unafraid of the dark and of being alone, and free of whimpering.⁹ At 7 the boys were taken by the state and enrolled in companies under one discipline, where they learned to share both their games and their studies.⁹ They were trained to endure hunger, cold and pain, and to speak briefly and to the point.

Zevism keeps what Sparta proved: that children can be raised fearless, contented, hardy and sparing of words. It leaves what Sparta did to prove it: the exposure of infants judged weak and the cruelty of the agoge. The Temple holds crimes against children to be an abomination (Children Ethics). Endurance is built by training; cruelty builds only fear.

Pythagoras: Silence, Number and the Honor of Parents

The Pythagorean community joined the training of the mind in number and harmony with a severe training of character: silence for new pupils, self-examination each day, and reverence for the Gods, the heroes and the parents. Iamblichus records the first speech of Pythagoras to the young men of Croton.²²

Iamblichus, On the Pythagorean Way of Life 8.38

ἐπαγωγῆς δὲ ἕνεκα ταῦτα ἔλεγε πρὸς τὸ περὶ πλείονος ποιεῖσθαι τοὺς γονεῖς ἑαυτῶν, οἷς ἔφη τηλικαύτην ὀφείλειν αὐτοὺς χάριν ἡλίκην ἂν ὁ τετελευτηκὼς ἀποδοίη τῷ δυνηθέντι πάλιν αὐτὸν εἰς τὸ φῶς ἀγαγεῖν.

"He said these things to lead them to value their own parents more highly, to whom, he said, they owed as much gratitude as a dead man would repay to one who could bring him back to the light." (lit.)

The Golden Verses that carry the Pythagorean teaching open with the order of honor: the immortal Gods first, as the law establishes them, then the heroes, then the parents and the nearest kin.²³ They close the day with the threefold review: "Where did I go wrong? What did I do? What duty did I leave undone?" (The Tested Intellect). Pythagoras himself, Diogenes Laertius reports, told his pupils to say those words on entering their houses.²⁴

Plato: The Formation of the Soul

Plato wrote more on education than any other ancient philosopher, in the Republic and above all in the Laws. His teaching on children can be gathered in 7 propositions.

• The beginning is everything. The young soul takes the stamp that is pressed on it; therefore stories, songs and companions must be chosen with care.²⁵
• Education is the right training of pleasure and pain. Before the child can reason, the child must learn to love what deserves love and hate what deserves hatred; when reason arrives, it finds a friend.²⁶
• Music and gymnastics together. Rhythm and harmony sink deepest into the soul; the body trained without the Muses grows harsh, the soul trained without the body grows soft.²⁷
• No compulsion in learning. A free soul learns nothing slavishly; teach children by play, and you will see what each is fitted for.²⁸
• The infant needs motion and the middle state. Rocking and song; neither grief nor a flood of pleasure; the gracious calm that is the condition of a God.⁴
• Play rehearses life. The child who will be a builder plays at building.²⁹
• Elders must feel shame before the young. Leave children reverence, not gold; teach by doing what you counsel.³⁰

Plato's own definition of education stands at the head of all of them.²⁶

Plato, Laws II, 653b-c

παιδείαν δὴ λέγω τὴν παραγιγνομένην πρῶτον παισὶν ἀρετήν· ἡδονὴ δὴ καὶ φιλία καὶ λύπη καὶ μῖσος ἂν ὀρθῶς ἐν ψυχαῖς ἐγγίγνωνται μήπω δυναμένων λόγῳ λαμβάνειν, λαβόντων δὲ τὸν λόγον, συμφωνήσωσι τῷ λόγῳ ὀρθῶς εἰθίσθαι ὑπὸ τῶν προσηκόντων ἐθῶν, αὕτη ’σθ’ ἡ συμφωνία σύμπασα μὲν ἀρετή.

"I term, then, the goodness that first comes to children education. When pleasure and love, and pain and hatred, spring up rightly in the souls of those who are unable as yet to grasp a rational account; and when, after grasping the rational account, they consent thereunto that they have been rightly trained in fitting practices: this consent, viewed as a whole, is goodness." (tr. R. G. Bury)

Xenophon: The School of Justice

Xenophon, the soldier and pupil of Socrates, gives 3 pictures that every parent can use. In the Cyropaedia the Persian boys go to school to learn justice as Greek boys go to learn letters; they try among themselves the charge of ingratitude; they learn self-control and obedience by watching their elders practice both every day.³¹ In the Memorabilia, Socrates reasons with his own son Lamprocles, angry at his mother, reminding him of everything she bore for him, and teaches him that ingratitude to parents is the one ingratitude the city itself punishes.³² And in the same book Xenophon preserves the Choice of Heracles, told by Prodicus: the young hero at the crossroads between Arete and Kakia, at the age when the young become their own masters.³³

Aristotle: Habit, Leisure and the Ages of Education

Aristotle gave the theory that explains why the early years decide so much: moral virtue comes from habit (ἔθος), and the very word for character, ἦθος, is formed from it; a person becomes just by doing just acts, brave by doing brave ones.³⁴ From this follows his most famous sentence on education: it makes no small difference whether a person is habituated one way or another from youth, but a very great difference, "or rather all the difference".³⁴ He accepts Plato's definition.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II.3, 1104b11-13

διὸ δεῖ ἦχθαί πως εὐθὺς ἐκ νέων, ὡς ὁ Πλάτων φησίν, ὥστε χαίρειν τε καὶ λυπεῖσθαι οἷς δεῖ· ἡ γὰρ ὀρθὴ παιδεία αὕτη ἐστίν.

"Hence the importance, as Plato points out, of having been definitely trained from childhood to like and dislike the proper things; this is what good education means." (tr. H. Rackham)

In the Politics he gives the timetable of education and the 4 subjects: letters, gymnastics, music and drawing; he warns against hard training before puberty; he insists that the aim of education reaches beyond usefulness to the right use of leisure, the life worthy of a free human being.^{5, 35} In the Ethics he adds 2 insights for parents: that education given by a father to his own child can be fitted to the child as a physician fits treatment to a patient, and that the love of children for their parents has the form of the love of human beings for the Gods.^{36, 37}

Rome: Fathers, Teachers and the Reverence Owed to a Child

Cato the Elder

Plutarch tells how Cato the Elder refused to hand his son to a slave tutor and taught the boy himself: letters, the laws, arms, riding, boxing, enduring heat and cold, swimming the Tiber; he wrote out his history of Rome in large letters for the boy, and guarded his speech before him as before the Vestal Virgins.³⁸

Quintilian

Quintilian, the first teacher of rhetoric to draw a salary from the Roman state, wrote the most complete ancient account of early education in the first book of his Institutio Oratoria. His counsel, in order:

• Expect much of every child. Most children are quick to reason and ready to learn; dullness is as rare as a monstrous birth; when promise fails, the fault is the lack of care.³⁹
• Choose the first voices. The nurse's speech must be correct, and the parents as educated as possible, mothers as much as fathers.⁴⁰
• Do not waste the years before 7. Memory is strongest then; begin letters early, through play, with ivory letters to handle.⁴¹
• Let learning be a game. Never let the child learn to hate study before being able to love it; question, praise, let the child rejoice in success.⁴²
• Give rest and play. Play is a sign of a lively mind, and rest renews the student; character shows itself in play.⁴³
• Never flog. Beating is disgraceful, fit only for slaves, and hardens the child instead of correcting them.⁴³

Seneca

Seneca, writing On Anger, gave the method for raising children's spirit without letting it turn to rage: the spirit grows with freedom and is crushed by slavery; guide it with the rein and the spur; let the child suffer nothing humiliating or servile; let the child obtain nothing by anger; keep flattery far from childhood, and let the child hear the truth.⁴⁴ In his letters he gave the reason why parents teach by example: "the way is long if one follows precepts, but short and helpful, if one follows patterns".⁴⁵

Juvenal and Musonius

Juvenal gave the rule of reverence: "maxima debetur puero reverentia", the greatest reverence is owed to a child, so that the father about to do wrong should let his infant son stand in the way.⁴⁶ Musonius Rufus argued that daughters should be educated as sons are, because philosophy is the practice of nobility and nothing else.⁴⁷

Plutarch: The Treatise and the Lives

The treatise On the Education of Children, transmitted at the head of Plutarch's Moralia, is the most complete practical handbook of ancient parenting. Its counsels, chapter by chapter, form a curriculum of their own.⁴⁸

• Nature, reason and habit must run together, like good soil, a skilled farmer and sound seed (4).
• Mothers should nurse their own children, because the bond grows in nursing; where they cannot, nurses of good character must be chosen (5).
• The young soul is soft wax; what is stamped on it stays (5).
• Companions, attendants and teachers must be chosen with the greatest care, teachers of blameless life and proven skill (6-7).
• Education is the only possession of a human being that is immortal and divine (8).
• Philosophy is the head and crown of all education, because from it the young learn to revere the Gods, honor parents, respect elders and obey the laws (10).
• The body must be trained too, for strength and for health (11).
• Children must be led by encouragement and reason, never by blows, with praise and reproof in turn (12).
• Tasks must be measured, because the soul grows by fitting labors and drowns in excessive ones, and all of life is divided between rest and work (13).
• Memory must be trained, because Memory is the mother of the Muses (13).
• Fathers must forgive the faults of youth, remembering that they too were young, yet guard the young from flatterers and corrupting company (16-18).
• Above all, fathers must make themselves a clear example, so that children see their fathers' lives as in a mirror (20).

Plutarch's own Lives, written to show character through deeds, became for centuries the book from which the young of Europe learned what greatness looks like; his essays On Listening to Lectures and How the Young Man Should Study Poetry guide the young person through the years of freedom.⁴⁹

Marcus Aurelius: The Inheritance

The emperor-philosopher opened his private notebook with a reckoning of what he had received from each person who formed him.⁵⁰

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 1.1-1.2 and 1.4

Παρὰ τοῦ πάππου Οὐήρου τὸ καλόηθες καὶ ἀόργητον. Παρὰ τῆς δόξης καὶ μνήμης τῆς περὶ τοῦ γεννήσαντος τὸ αἰδῆμον καὶ ἀρρενικόν. … Παρὰ τοῦ προπάππου τὸ μὴ εἰς δημοσίας διατριβὰς φοιτῆσαι καὶ τὸ ἀγαθοῖς διδασκάλοις κατ’ οἶκον χρήσασθαι καὶ τὸ γνῶναι ὅτι εἰς τὰ τοιαῦτα δεῖ ἐκτενῶς ἀναλίσκειν.

"From my Grandfather Verus, a kindly disposition and sweetness of temper. From what I heard of my Father and my memory of him, modesty and manliness. … From my Grandfather's Father, to dispense with attendance at public schools, and to enjoy good teachers at home, and to recognize that on such things money should be eagerly spent." (tr. C. R. Haines)

Every parent writes such a list in the child's soul, line by line, whether they mean to or not.

The Consensus of the Ancients

Across Greece, Rome, Egypt and India the best of the Ancients converge on 12 principles. They are the foundation of Zevist parenting.

• The beginning decides. The young soul is soft wax; what is stamped first stays longest.
• Character comes from habit. Virtue is trained by doing, long before it is understood.
• Feeling is educated before reason. The child learns to love the good and hate the shameful before being able to explain why.
• Example outweighs precept. Children become what their elders do.
• Learning begins in play. Compulsion makes nothing stay in the soul.
• Music and gymnastics belong together. The soul and the body are trained as one.
• Truth is taught first. The Persians taught it with the bow; the Upanishad's convocation begins with it; Egypt's instructions rest on Ma'at.
• Parents and teachers are honored next to the Gods. Gratitude to parents is a sacred duty.
• Correction serves improvement, never cruelty. Plutarch and Quintilian refused the rod.
• Freedom is given step by step. The rein and the spur, until the young person governs themselves.
• The passage to adulthood is marked before the Gods. The Ephebeia, the toga of manhood, the convocation.
• The aim is excellence. Always to be the best, a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.

What Zevism Keeps and What It Leaves

Zevism keeps all 12 principles. It leaves what its own ethics forbid: the exposure of infants, the beating of children, the cruelty of the Spartan agoge, the delivery of children into the hands of slaves, and the exclusion of daughters from education. The Temple holds that crimes against children are an abomination and a sin against the Eternal Gods, that every discipline must have the improvement of the child as its only motive (Children Ethics), and that the Ephebeia belongs to all young people regardless of sex (The Ephebeia). The source is kept; its errors are not.