The example of the Stoics, who taught in the city, was followed by other schools, after that the successive devastations of the neighborhood of Athens by Philip V. of Macedon (200 B.C.), and by Sulla, had injured the gardens and groves of both Kynosarges, Academy, and Lykeion. We hear of the _Ptolemeion_ and _Diogeneion_ as the fashionable places of resort, then Hadrian’s gymnasium--all within the town, and all the gift of individual founders--the Diogenes in question being a condottiere who commanded the second King Demetrius’s troops in Attica, 225 B.C. There is some slight evidence that this man’s gymnasium was used for beginners, and possibly they may even have resided there; for we hear that scholars often set up _huts_ (καλύβια) near the house of their favorite teachers. There were libraries in connection with Ptolemy’s and Hadrian’s gymnasia. Indeed, it seems, in later days, that such was the danger of a riot if professors lectured in any public building, that they built private theatres for themselves, attached to their own houses, and elegantly appointed. In these we may be sure that their teaching took the form of a lecture, not of disputation or of catechising. This latter kind of lesson was very popular in Socrates and Plato’s time; but Aristotle already severed it from his regular discourses, and held his philosophic conversations with his pupils walking in the _Peripatos_: hence the title of his school. § 81. We only know now the names of those professors who lived for the world and for posterity, and strove to teach by publishing their works. In an age when originality was dead, and the highest ability consisted in the best commentary on Plato and Aristotle, this literary activity, once admired and praised, seems to us, for the most part, idle subtlety. Even in rhetoric all the laws and models were fixed; Longinus only shows us a modern and æsthetic appreciation of beauty in style, which we do not find in earlier rhetors. But, of all the scholarchs at Athens, none are now of the least consideration save the heads of the Neo-Platonic school; and even these were but followers of this strange, fascinating doctrine, already preached in Alexandria and in Rome, which strove to give a new meaning to the metaphysic of the Academy, and accommodate it to the spiritual wants of earnest heathen, in the face of Christianity.