When did this Secondary Education begin? Aristotle, counting back from ἐφηβεία [ephêbeia], assigns three years to it.[133] He has just commended the arrangement of education, not on hard and fast lines, but in accordance with the natural growth of the individual: so he must mean his ἐφηβεία [ephêbeia] to vary from seventeen to eighteen.[134] Thus he puts the beginning of secondary education at fourteen or fifteen, the average age of ἥβη [hêbê] in Hellas, as in Rome. From ἥβη [hêbê] till twenty-one the young Athenian was a μειράκιον [meirakion]. Thus in point of age the παῖς [pais] of the primary schools corresponds to the Roman “impubes,” and the μειράκιον [meirakion] to the “adolescens”; but μειράκιον [meirakion] and παῖς [pais] are used very loosely, and the former word is often replaced by νεανίσκος [neaniskos]. We shall, as a rule, call the pupils of the primary schools boys, and those of the secondary lads. Fourteen did not, however, represent an exact point at which it was compulsory to leave the primary school. Sons of the poor left earlier; rich or unoccupied Athenians might remain later: Sokrates even attended a lyre-school among the boys when he was middle-aged. The primary schoolmasters started advanced classes in astronomy and mathematics to suit elder pupils.[135] In the palaistrai there were separate classes of boys and lads, who were only supposed to meet on feast-days;[136] in the _Charmides_, however, grown men, lads, boys, and quite tiny boys are all exercising together. Many lads, especially in earlier times, did not attend the schools at all, but gave their time to gymnastics and whatever else they pleased.[137] Xenophon relates this as one of the demerits of the Athenian system.[138] The mental attainments of a lad who is apparently but little over fourteen are sketched in Plato’s _Lusis_. The lad Lusis knows how to read and write, and how to string and play the lyre. He recognises a quotation from Homer, and has even come across the “prose treatises of the very wise, who say that like must always be friendly to like; these are the men who reason and write about the Universe and Nature.”[139]