The founder of the rhetorical schools may be said to have been Isocrates, who, after being a pupil of Socrates', turned against the philosophic tendency, and championed elegant philistinism. The aim of these schools was to turn out clever men of the world, thoroughly acquainted with popular opinions and motives, and capable of expressing themselves glibly, sententiously, and persuasively on any and every subject. They usually made no profession of imparting profound learning or eliciting philosophic thought: indeed, they despised both; but they did seek to impart such an amount of ordinary knowledge as to place their pupils in the chief current of the popular thought of their time. They thus became the bearers of practical education among a people who, having lost their political life without finding any higher, sought to obtain satisfaction in social intercourse. For hundreds of years they exerted an enormous influence, and, indeed, at certain times and places were formidable rivals of the philosophic schools. The first man of Greek race who attempted to found a sect or school outside the State was Pythagoras, and there can be no doubt that all subsequent schools were in some degree modelled upon his. It is true that the Pythagorean school had been broken up and dispersed long before the days of Plato and Aristotle (see p. 54); nevertheless, his followers, scattered over Greece, had carried with them the ideas and principles of their master, and now that Athens had fallen into the condition against which the Pythagorean discipline had been a protest, these ideas found a ready response in the hearts of those men whom the social life of the time could not satisfy. Hence the schools of Plato and Aristotle, which had originally been mere educational institutions, turned, even during the lifetime of the latter, into sects (αἱρέσεις, heresies, as they were called later on), with definite sets of non-political principles, in accordance with which their members tried to shape their lives. It cannot be said that these two schools were in any high degree successful, and the reasons were that they were too purely intellectual, that they made no striking revolt against political life, and that they called for a type of man not easy to find. But, shortly after the death of Aristotle, there arose, almost contemporaneously, two other schools, which exerted an influence, deep and wide, for over six hundred years. These were the Epicurean and the Stoic. Widely as these differed in respect to means, they sought the same end, namely, personal independence, and they sought it by conformity to laws imposed by no human legislator, but by nature. The former took the law of the senses, the latter the law of the spirit, for its guide; and, by a strange contradiction, while the former championed free will, the latter professed fatalism. These four schools were the only ones that ever met with extensive patronage in Athens, and with the