These schools, the teachers of which were known as _rhetors_, furnished a type of education representing a sort of collegiate education for the period. They were oratorical in purpose, because the orator had become the Roman ideal of a well-educated man (R. 24). During the life of the Republic the orator found many opportunities for the constructive use of his ability, and all young men ambitious to enter law or politics found the training of these schools a necessary prerequisite. They were attended for two or three years by boys over sixteen, but only the wealthier and more aristocratic families could afford to send their boys to them. In addition to oratorical and some legal training, these schools included a further linguistic and literary training, some mathematical and scientific knowledge, and even some philosophy. The famous "Seven Liberal Arts" of the Middle Ages--Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic; Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Astronomy--all seem to have been included in the instruction of these schools. [23] The great studies, though, were the first three and some Law, Music being studied largely to help with gestures and to train the voice, Geometry to aid in settling lawsuits relating to land, Dialectic (logic) to aid in detecting fallacies, and Astronomy to understand the movements of the heavenly bodies and the references of literary writers. [24] There was much work in debate and in the declamation of ethical and political material the fine distinctions in Roman Law and Ethics were brought out, [25] and there was much drill in preparing and delivering speeches and much attention given to the factors involved in the preparation and delivery of a successful oration (R. 25). [Illustration: FIG. 24. A ROMAN SCHOOL OF RHETORIC. This picture, which has been drawn from a description, shows a much better type of school than that of the _ludi_.] These schools became very popular as institutions of higher learning, and continued so even after the later Emperors, by seizing the power of the State, had taken away the inspiration that comes from a love of freedom and had thus deprived the rhetorical art of practical value. The work of the schools then became highly stilted and artificial in character, and oratory then came to be cultivated largely as a fine art. [26] Men educated in these schools came to boast that they could speak with equal effectiveness on either side of any question, and the art came to depend on the use of many and big words and on the manners of the stage. Such ideals naturally destroyed the value of these schools, and stopped intellectual progress so far as they contributed to it.