It has, indeed, not been sufficiently noticed, in the various essays on this ephebic training, that the very idea of such a class never occurs in Herodotus or in Thucydides, though it does in Xenophon;[51] and if Plutarch speaks of Alcibiades influencing the ephebi in the gymnasia with his wild schemes of western conquest, we may be sure the historian transferred the titles and notions of his age to older times. In the third century B.C., there are so many inscriptions about this class extant that it must have assumed a most prominent place in Attic life. From that time onward into Roman times, we hear of it constantly, and from many sources. It is impossible that Socrates and his school should not have alluded to it, had it already formally existed. We may therefore infer that though its component parts--the formal enrolment and sacrifices at a certain age, the patrol duties, the gymnastic and musical training, the procession duty at festivals--were developed in the best period of Attic history, their official reduction to a State system of education could not have taken place till later, till the decay of practical public life had given men time to theorize about methods of restoring by education what was irreparably lost. Apparently, the earliest _formal_ notice is in a fragment of the orator Lycurgus, who, in his famous speech on his own management of the Athenian exchequer, alluded to the statue of a certain Epicrates, which had been set up in bronze _on account of his law about the ephebi_. We cannot tell whether this was a special enactment or not. But it _may_ have been the very law which established this famous system, so praised and sought after by all the Hellenistic world in Roman days. If so, the establishment would date from the very time when it proved of little real importance to the history of Attica or of the world.