If Homer occupied the first place in literary education, other leading authors were not neglected. All the great poets were made useful. “Orpheus taught ceremonial rites and abstinence from bloodshed, and Mousaios medicine and oracles, and Hesiod the tillage of land, the seasons of fruits and ploughing.”[260] Hesiod probably served more as a theological handbook than as a manual of agriculture; the moral precepts to Perses in the _Works and Days_ probably also found favour with schoolmasters. The fourth-century comic poet Alexis gives an interesting catalogue of a school library.[261] Besides Orpheus, Hesiod, and Homer, who have been mentioned already, there are Epicharmos, Choirilos, the author of an epic poem on the Persian war, and what is called vaguely “tragedy,” probably meaning a selection from the great tragedians. We can see from Plato’s attacks that Aeschylus and Euripides must have been important in the schools, and we know that Athenian gentlemen were expected to be able to recite them at dinner-parties, and must therefore have learnt them by heart. The vague words “tragedy” and “comedy” are similarly used of the recitations of the boys at Teos. Various editions of moral precepts were also popular. Among these were _The Precepts of Cheiron_, or Cheironeia, supposed to have been given by the wise Centaur to his pupil Achilles and put into verse by Hesiod; on a vase at Berlin three boys are seen reading this work with apparent interest. The extant lines of Theognis are often supposed to represent a school edition of the poet’s works, containing the more improving portions. The lyric poets were taught at the lyre-school, and I shall discuss them later. Alexis also mentions “all sorts of prose works” in the school library. The only one of these to which he gives a more definite name is a cookery-book by Simos. But that is only introduced for the sake of a joke; such a work would not, of course, figure in an Athenian school. Aesop may have been a prose work read in schools; it was considered the sign of an ignoramus “not to have thumbed Aesop,” or to be able to quote him.[262] Such moral works as Prodikos’ _Choice of Herakles_ were probably popular in schools. The case of Lusis in Plato suggests that some of the old nature-philosophers may have been read. No doubt the school library varied according to the taste of the master, and his freedom of choice may have led to some curious selections. But on the whole prose works very rarely figured in the elementary schools, partly because they were usually too technical, still more because the artistic and literary sense of the Hellenes regarded poetry, if only because of its greater beauty and its imaginative value, as better for educational purposes than prose.