This oath and ceremony must be ancient. The orator Lukourgos[616] includes them among “the ancient laws and customs of the original founders,” and claims that the oath of the Hellenic army at Plataea in 479 was imitated from the oath of the Athenian epheboi. By this solemn act the ephebos accepted the duties and responsibilities of an Athenian citizen. So in Plato’s dialogue, the _Kriton_,[617] where the Laws of Athens are introduced as pleading their cause, they say, “When any one has passed his examination, and has seen the constitution of the city and us, the Laws of Athens, we bid him, if he is dissatisfied with us, to take what is his and go whither he pleases. But if he stays, we consider that he has promised to obey us.” For there is good evidence, besides that which is afforded by the above passage, to show that Athenian boys were taught what the laws of their city were, before they promised to obey them. Thus Aischines says: “When any one is inscribed upon the muster roll of his deme and knows the laws of the city.”[618] Plato puts it even more definitely: “When the children leave school,[619] the city compels them to learn the laws.”[620] So the ephebos knew what he was doing when he swore to obey the law of the land. Meanwhile the tribes had met and each chosen three men of over forty years of age, from whom the assembled people elected one, to look after the epheboi of each tribe.[621] These supervisors were called Sophronistai or Moderators. That these Moderators probably dated back to Solonic times, and possessed a general, but rarely exercised, supervision over all education, I have endeavoured to show in Chapter II. Their province was the morality and discipline of the epheboi, whose military training was naturally controlled by the military officers, the Generals and Taxiarchoi; later, however, when the epheboi ceased to be a military body, these latter functionaries ceased to have any connection with them. Towards the close of the fourth century the people elected a single Kosmetes or Chancellor for the epheboi; he is first mentioned, if a probably spurious passage in the _Axiochos_ is rejected, in an inscription, in which he is associated with the epheboi and Moderators of the year in awarding a crown to Theophanes in the Archonship of Nikostratos (333-332 B.C.).[622] But in 280 B.C., in the list of the officers and masters of the epheboi, the Kosmetes is mentioned, but no Sophronistai:[623] at that time the epheboi were too few to need an officer to each tribe.