The whole family being thus addicted to philosophy, it is no wonder if our author was initiated betimes in study, to which he was naturally inclined; in pursuit of which he was so happy to fall into good hands at first, being recommended to the care of Ammonius, an Egyptian, who, having taught philosophy with great reputation at Alexandria, and from thence travelling into Greece, settled himself at last in Athens, where he was well received, and generally respected. At the end of Themistocles his life, Plutarch relates, that being young, he was a pensioner in the house of this Ammonius; and in his Symposiacks he brings him in disputing with his scholars, and giving them instruction: for the custom of those times was very much different from these of ours, where the greatest part of our youth is spent in learning the words of dead languages. The Grecians, who thought all barbarians but themselves, despised the use of foreign tongues; so that the first elements of their breeding was the knowledge of nature, and the accommodation of that knowledge, by moral precepts, to the service of the public, and the private offices of virtue: the masters employing one part of their time in reading to, and discoursing with, their scholars, and the rest in appointing them their several exercises either in oratory or philosophy, and setting them to declaim and to dispute amongst themselves. By this liberal sort of education, study was so far from being a burden to them, that in a short time it became a habit; and philosophical questions and criticisms of humanity were their usual recreations at their meals. Boys lived then as the better sort of men do now; and their conversation was so well-bred and manly, that they did not plunge out of their depth into the world, when they grew up, but slid easily into it, and found no alteration in their company. Amongst the rest, the reading and quotations of poets were not forgotten at their suppers, and in their walks; but Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles, were the entertainment of their hours of freedom. Rods and ferulas were not used by Ammonius, as being properly the punishment of slaves, and not the correction of ingenuous freeborn men; at least to be only exercised by parents, who had the power of life and death over their own children; as appears by the example of this Ammonius, thus related by our author: