Early in the fourth century there arose established secondary schools in Athens. Plato began to teach Logic and Philosophy, Isokrates Rhetoric, not for a few weeks at a time, but permanently: their courses lasted three or four years. Characteristically, there was no State organisation or interference; Isokrates taught in his own house, near the Lukeion, Plato in his garden near Kolonos and in the Akademeia. Their pupils came from all parts of the civilised world, staying in Athens during their course of study. Plato imposed a preliminary examination in mathematics upon his pupils; Isokrates only commended a knowledge of such subjects. The students of these two schools became recognised features of Athenian life.
Plato led his pupils towards intellectual research and a life of retirement; the tendency of the school was markedly aristocratic, and several of the lads became tyrants in after life. Isokrates inculcated the practical life: his teaching was meant as a preparation for success in society and politics. But as his school naturally was only for the comparatively wealthy and leisured classes, it also tended to be aristocratic; however, it produced some of the leading democratic statesmen of the day.
Besides these two great schools others grew up. It is hard to distinguish exactly between the boys who went to Isokrates in order to learn political speaking and those who went to a “logographos” like Lusias or Demosthenes to learn forensic oratory. The “logographoi” do not seem to have claimed to impart culture, but only technical instruction: they are thus on the boundary line of education. But Demosthenes went to the “logographos” Isaios to get precisely the instruction which Isokrates had refused him: so it is hard to make a clear distinction. I shall therefore give a short sketch of the “logographoi” also.[529]
By the time that these schools began to establish themselves the Sophists were beginning to die out. Times were harder in the fourth century, and fewer people had money to spend on these expensive teachers. The intellectual movement of the Periclean age had spent itself, and the desire for universal knowledge was no longer so keen. Moreover, it is quite probable that settled schools, like that of Isokrates at Athens, were forming in many of the great centres: it is known that Isokrates himself taught for a while in Chios. The great demerit of the Sophists’ teaching, namely, that it was too much in a hurry and gave no time for personal endeavour on the part of the pupil, had been recognised: and the result was that the Sophists settled down in a single place and gave continuous courses of instruction.