We pass to the position which riding held in Athenian education. The two richest classes in the State were liable to service in the cavalry. They had to supply their own horses, which were examined and, if unfit, rejected; but the State paid them a sum of £8 annually for maintenance and arms in time of peace. As, however, the number of the citizen cavalry never rose above 1000, the whole of these two classes can never have been so employed at once: the remainder served in the heavy infantry. The two Hipparchoi elected for the year, and their subordinates, the ten Phularchoi, who each commanded a tribal contingent, on coming into their office, would note how many of the thousand who had served in the former year were no longer liable to service owing to age, and would fill up the vacancies; they would also make good those gaps which occurred from time to time during their term of office owing to wounds or death or sudden poverty. To secure a recruit, they had only to go to some rich and active young man who was not already serving; if he refused to be enrolled, they could prosecute him. The training often began before eighteen, for Xenophon speaks of persuading the recruit’s guardians,[460] from whom he would be free at that age. So Teles mentions the horse-breaker as among the teachers of the lad in the secondary stage of education. No doubt it took some training to make an efficient cavalryman, and the Hipparchoi liked to take the recruits young; but to keep a stud was the favourite amusement of a rich young Athenian, and many would learn to ride without any view to military efficiency. As the Hellenes rode without stirrups, mounting was one of the great difficulties of the young rider, and figures chiefly on the vases. Often they used the long cavalry-spear as a vaulting-pole.[461] Otherwise a groom or the master gave the pupil a leg up: on a vase[462] in the British Museum the master is seen simply pushing the boy into his seat. A comic poet,[463] who has left us a picture of the young recruits learning to ride under the eye of their Phularchoi, speaks only of mounting and dismounting.[464] “Go to the Agora,” says the speaker to his slave, “to the Hermai, where the phularchoi keep coming, and to the pretty disciples whom Pheidon is teaching to mount their steeds and to get down again.” Xenophon, among much sound advice to the young rider about buying, training, and keeping his horse, gives the Hipparchos the following suggestions:――