The duties of citizenship were also impressed upon the boys in other and more direct ways, especially its supreme duty, at any rate in those days, of military service. The schools of Sparta and Crete were one long training for war. The other States set apart two years of the boy’s life, those from eighteen to twenty, as a period of conscription, during which he was at the service of his city and under the orders of the military authorities, learning tactics and the use of arms, and being practised in the life of camps and forts. The young recruit took a solemn oath of allegiance to his country and its constitution: the sacredness of his civic duties was impressed upon him from the first. The first function of his new officers was to take him on a personally conducted tour, so to speak, of the national temples, that he might realise something of the religious life and history of his country. His weapons were solemnly presented to him in the theatre of Dionusos, before the assembled people; they were sacred, and to lose them in battle or disgrace them by cowardice was not only dishonourable, it was impious. Nor were the boys allowed to grow up in ignorance of the constitution of their city: the ephebos of eighteen had to be acquainted with the laws, some of which he had probably learnt in the music-school, set to a tune. Every means was taken of making the boys realise that they were members of a community, to whose prosperity and happiness their own advantage or pleasure must be subordinated. In this way grew up the strong Hellenic sense of an obligation of utter self-sacrifice on behalf of the State.