From Plutarch’s mention of stealing from the _men’s_ dining-clubs it may safely be inferred that boys of this age dined apart. Whether it was always in the Eiren’s house cannot be ascertained. After the age of sixteen they must have come into the men’s syssitia; for Xenophon implies that the visitor to Sparta could see lads of that age at dinner and ask them questions: and a visitor would certainly not have dined in a dining-room meant only for boys. Whether the election of members took place at that age, or whether they still went to their fathers’ clubs, is unknown. The education was almost entirely physical. Plutarch, it is true, says that they learnt “letters, because they were useful.”[24] This may have been a later introduction, or perhaps the amount learnt was so little as to justify Isokrates in saying that the Spartans “do not even learn their letters, which are the means to a knowledge of the past, as well as of contemporary events”;[25] he also thought it highly improbable that even “the most intelligent of them would hear of his speeches, unless they found some one to read them aloud.”[26] They had, indeed, little reason to learn to read. Their written laws were very few, and these they learnt by heart, set to a tune. They had nothing to do with commerce or even with accounts; very few of them knew how to count.[27] Hippias, the Sophist, found that all they cared to listen to, were “genealogies of men and heroes, foundations of cities, and archæology generally.” Probably, like the Dorian philosopher Pythagoras, and like Plato, the admirer of all things Dorian, they held that memory was all-important, and that the use of writing weakened it.[28] Besides the State-laws set to music there were songs which praised dead heroes and derided cowards: the diction was plain and simple, the subjects grave and moral; many of them were war-marches; all were incentive to pluck and energy. Rhetoric was, of course, utterly forbidden: a young man who learnt it abroad and brought it home was punished by the Ephors.[28] Spartans learned to be silent as a rule; when they spoke, their remarks were short and much to the point, for they thought it wrong to waste a word.[29] This was definitely taught to the boys, as has been shown above. “If you converse with quite an ordinary Laconian,” says Plato,[30] “at first he seems a mere fool; then suddenly, at the critical point, he flings forth a pithy saying, and his companions seem no better than children compared with him.” This epigrammatic wisdom Plato ironically ascribes to the fact that Laconians really attend Sophists on the sly, and are greater philosophers than any one knows. Many echoes of their terse and grim humour have come down to modern times: such as Leonidas’ remark to his troops at Thermopylae, “Breakfast here: supper in Hades”; and the Spartan’s description of Athens, “All things noble there,” by which he meant that nothing, however base, was counted ignoble.