The higher teaching of the Sophists and of Socrates, which was at best desultory, passed into the hands of successors like Plato and Isocrates, who established regular schools, and subjected their pupils to a regular course of training. This was all the more necessary, as the training given by Socrates had no definite limits, and his tendency was to keep young men talking and discussing ethical problems when they ought to have turned to practical life. Leisure was, indeed, in such high repute among the old Greeks that idleness was not reprehended as it should have been. The orthodox party made this objection with much force to the school or following of Socrates. In the case of Plato there was a regular course of higher philosophy, and his principal pupils became, in their turn, philosophic teachers. But the school of Plato was even more than that of Socrates a university training, for which there may even have been a matriculation examination, if we adopt literally the statement that no one was allowed to enter without knowing elementary geometry. The great fault of Plato, as of Socrates, was that he did not introduce men to public or practical life, but made them philosophers or idlers. In science, indeed, this special training was of great service, and the history of geometry would have been very different without these speculators. But the Platonic pupil when completely trained was professedly, according to the master himself, disinclined to join in politics, and only to be persuaded by his sense of duty and the willing obedience of the public. It is on account of the same sort of exclusiveness, even monastic in its strictness, that the famous brotherhood of Pythagoras deserves but a small place in any general history of Greek education. Admission to this brotherhood was only obtained through a strict novitiate, and the object of it was to combine peculiar religious asceticism with an aristocratic policy, and a sort of club life antagonistic to ordinary society. We have, unfortunately, only few authentic details concerning this sect, and know it best from the few echoes of it in early, and the many in later, Platonism. But it, too, may be regarded as a higher intellectual or university training, combined with collegiate life and its restraints, thus anticipating in spirit that feature which makes the English universities so peculiar among the modern seats of learning in Europe.