The _Axiochos_ also states that the ten Sophronistai, elected to guard the morals of the epheboi, exercised control over lads also. These officials probably took their rise in the days of Solon: the regulation that they must be over forty harmonises with the other enactments of those days; and, although they died out at the end of the fourth century, they were revived under the Roman Empire. Now it is most unlikely that the archaistic legislators of imperial times would have revived an office which had only existed during the closing decades of the fourth century. Solon is known to have appointed a magistracy specially to deal with the children;[189] and, if these magistrates were not the Sophronistai, all trace of his creation has been lost, which is most unlikely to have happened. So the Sophronistai probably date from early times. Their duty was a general supervision of the morals of the young; their chief function would be to prosecute, on behalf of the State, parents and schoolmasters who infringed Solon’s moral regulations. But such prosecutions would usually be undertaken by private individuals concerned in the case, and so this magistracy tended to become a sinecure. It may even have ceased to exist after the fall of the Areiopagos. But it seems to have revived under the restored democracy for a while (if the _Axiochos_ belongs to Aischines the Sokratic), to sink again in the middle of the century. At the close of the century it revives once more with the changes in the ephebic system, and finally perishes when the epheboi became too few to need ten officers to supervise their morals. An account of the Sophronistai of this later period will be given in connection with the epheboi. [Illustration: PLATE II. THE FLUTE LESSON――THE BOY’S TURN _Wiener Vorlegeblätter_, Series C, Plate 4. From a Kulix by Hieron, now at Vienna.] The strategoi[190] exercised a superintendence over the epheboi during their two years’ training as recruits, as would naturally be expected. Late in the fourth century they appear also to have been connected with the local schools in Attica; an inscription at Eleusis, which Girard assigns to 320 B.C., thanks the strategos Derkulos for the diligence which he had shown in supervising the education of the children there.[191] Whether they exercised such functions in the days when their military duties were more important, is more than doubtful. But any Athenian magistrate could interest himself in the schools, no doubt, and intervene to check abuses.[192] * * * * *