This moral gymnastic, it was thought, was often best practised away from a man’s old associations. Consequently some philosophers advised their students to leave home and study elsewhere. They went into “retreat,” either in another city or in solitude. Against this also there was a reaction. In a forcible oration on the subject, Dio Chrysostom argues, as a modern Protestant might argue, against the monastic system.[250] “Cœlum non animum mutant,” he says, in effect, when they go from city to city. Everywhere a man will find the same hindrances both within and without: he will be only like a sick man changing from one bed to another. The true discipline is to live in a crowd and not heed its noise, to train the soul to follow reason without swerving, and not to “retreat” from that which seems to be the immediate duty before us. The extent to which moral discipline and the system of “retreats” went on is uncertain, because they soon blended, as we shall see, with Christianity, and flowed with it in a single stream. (2) But out of the ideas which they expressed, and the ideals which they held forth, there grew up a class of men which has never since died out, who devoted themselves “both by their preaching and living” to the moral reformation of mankind. Individual philosophers had had imitators, and Pythagoras had founded an ascetic school, but neither the one nor the other had filled a large place in contemporary society. With the revived conception of philosophy as necessarily involving practice, it was necessary that those who professed philosophy should be marked out from the perverted and degenerate world around them, in their outer as well as in their inner life. “The life of one who practises philosophy,” says Dio Chrysostom, “is different from that of the mass of men: the very dress of such a one is different from that of ordinary men, and his bed and exercise and baths and all the rest of his living. A man who in none of these respects differs from the rest must be put down as one of them, though he declare and profess that he is a philosopher before all Athens or Megara or in the presence of the Lacedæmonian kings.”[251] The distinction was marked in two chief ways: (1) A philosopher let his beard grow, like the old Spartans. It was a protest against the elaborate attention to the person which marked the fashionable society of the time. (2) A philosopher wore a coarse blanket, usually as his only dress. It was at once a protest against the prevalent luxury in dress and the badge of his profession. “Whenever,” says Dio Chrysostom, “people see one in a philosopher’s dress, they consider that he is thus equipped not as a sailor or a shepherd, but with a view to men, to warn them and rebuke them, and to give not one of them any whit of flattery nor to spare any one of them, but, on the contrary, to reform them as far as he possibly can by talking to them and to show them who they are.”[252]