When the unconscious imitation of heroic ideals passed into a conscious philosophy of life, it was necessary that that philosophy should be shown to be consonant with current beliefs, by being formulated, so to speak, in terms of the current standards; and when, soon afterwards, the conception of education, in the sense in which the term has ever since been understood, arose, it was inevitable that the ancient poets should be the basis of that education. Literature consisted, in effect, of the ancient poets. Literary education necessarily meant the understanding of them. “I consider,” says Protagoras, in the Platonic dialogue which bears his name,[66] “that the chief part of a man’s education is to be skilled in epic poetry; and this means that he should be able to understand what the poets have said, and whether they have said it rightly or not, and to know how to draw distinctions, and to give an answer when a question is put to him.” The educators recognized in Homer one of themselves: he, too, was a “sophist,” and had aimed at educating men.[67] Homer was the common text-book of the grammar-schools as long as Greek continued to be taught, far on into imperial times. The study of him branched out in more than one direction. It was the beginning of that study of literature for its own sake which still holds its ground. It was continued until far on in the Christian era, partly by the schools of textual critics, and partly by the successors of the first sophists, who sharpened their wits by disputations as to Homer’s meaning, posing difficulties and solving them: of these disputations some relics survive in the _Scholia_, especially such as are based upon the _Questions_ of Porphyry.[68] But in the first conception, literary and moral education had been inseparable. It was impossible to regard Homer simply as literature. Literary education was not an end in itself, but a means. The end was moral training. It was imagined that virtue, no less than literature, could be taught, and Homer was the basis of the one kind of education no less than of the other. Nor was it difficult for him to become so. For though the thoughts of men had changed, and the new education was bringing in new conceptions of morals, Homer was a force which could easily be turned in new directions. All imaginative literature is plastic when it is used to enforce a moral; and the sophists could easily preach sermons of their own upon Homeric texts. There was no fixed traditional interpretation; and they were but following a current fashion in drawing their own meanings from him. He thus became a support, and not a rival. The _Hippias Minor_ of Plato furnishes as pertinent instances as could be mentioned of this educational use of Homer.