Grammar was also taught, and the right use of words. Less usual subjects were geography,[504] art, and metre. Logic was in its infancy, but the growing lad could practise himself in argument by listening to the disputes of the dialecticians. Current conversation was full of ethical and political discussions: in the fourth century there were the philosophical schools of Plato and, later, of Aristotle, and the lectures of Antisthenes the cynic in Kunosarges; and Isokrates taught political science. Lads seem to have been expected to learn something, at any rate, of the laws of their country: no doubt they were taken up to the Akropolis to read Solon’s code: occasionally they may have been present as spectators in the law-courts, in order that they might gain an idea of legal procedure. Those who intended to become speech-writers for the courts would doubtless learn more: they would also attend some well-known writer like Lusias or Isaios, and learn the art of forensic rhetoric.
It must be clearly understood that the whole of this secondary education was purely voluntary. The parent need not send his lad to hear any teaching of the sort: the poorer classes certainly would not. The richer parents could choose what subjects they or their sons preferred: rhetoric or literature, geography or mathematics――it was all one to the State. Teachers came and went: few stayed in Athens long. Their pupils had either to follow them abroad, as Isokrates went to Gorgias in Thessaly, or wait for their next visit. It was only the schools of Isokrates, of the great philosophers, and of a few speech-writers like Lusias and Isaios, that had any permanence in Athens. Isokrates himself had taught in Chios for a time: Plato was more than once in Sicily, and his school had to do without him in his absence. There is a peculiar fluidity about secondary education in Hellas: the teachers are always on the move. Endowed buildings for them there were none: they taught in their own houses and gardens, or in those of rich hosts, or in school-rooms borrowed for the occasion, or in public resorts like the gymnasia, or even in the streets. Consistent or continuous instruction was the exception: the Sophists proper gave it only to a few. The average lad at this time naturally acquired a wide and superficial knowledge of a great number of subjects, just the amount of knowledge which is such a dangerous thing. The lads became Jacks-of-all-trades: Plato, struck with the educational error of wide superficiality, wrote the _Republic_ as a counterblast, preaching “One man, one trade.” This protest is largely directed against the specious superficiality of the Sophists’ teaching.