Gymnasia and palaistrai were built at public expense,[150] that any one might go and exercise himself without charge. These buildings were also open to spectators, so that any one could acquire at any rate a rudimentary knowledge of boxing, wrestling, and the other branches of athletics, by watching his more proficient fellow-citizens practising them. The epheboi received instruction in athletic exercises at the cost of the State. But the children, so far as they received physical training in schools, must have received it in private palaistrai; their lessons are described as taking place “in the house of the paidotribes,” ἐν παιδοτρίβου [en paidotribou]――an idiom which always implies ownership or special rights; and the majority of palaistrai were private buildings, called by their owners’ names. Thus we hear of the palaistrai of Siburtios, of Taureas,[151] and so forth: Siburtios and Taureas were no doubt the paidotribai who taught there. In a later age, when the boys of different palaistrai ran torch races against one another, the palaistra of Timeas is victorious on two occasions, that of Antigenes once.[152] By the system of leitourgiai rich citizens were made chargeable for the expenses of the epheboi of their tribe who were training for the torch races. These races seem to have been the only branch of athletics which was thus endowed; however, they were numerous, even in the smaller country districts, so that many epheboi must have profited by this free training.[153] “Leitourgiai” also provided free instruction in chorus-dancing (which included singing as well as dancing) for such boys as were selected for competition. The rich “choregos” appointed for the year had to produce a chorus of boys belonging to his tribe for some festival, paying all the expenses of teaching and training them himself.[154] It is to this free school that the Solonic law refers when it mentions the “joint attendance of the boys and the dithyrambic choruses”; for it goes on to state that the ordinance with regard to this matter was that the “choregos” should be over forty.[155] In Demosthenes,[156] a certain Mantitheos, who had not been acknowledged by his father at the usual time, “attended school among the boys of the Hippothontid tribe to learn chorus-dancing”: had he been acknowledged, he would have gone to the Acamantid, his father’s tribe. No doubt, if the choregos was keen about gaining a victory, he would give a trial to more than the fifty boys required for a dithyrambic contest. In any case, provided that all the tribes competed, this one contest (and there were several in the course of a year) gave a free education to 500 boys. Xenophon notices that it was the “demos,” the poor majority, who mainly got the advantage of free training under gumnasiarchoi and choregoi:[157] the rich naturally preferred to send their boys to more select schools.[158]