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As it happened, a brilliant young student in Plato’s school wrote a short work in response to Isocrates’ criticisms: the Protrepticus, a text that became famous in antiquity.

Candidates for higher education would be expected to have tracts of Cicero, Virgil, Isocrates, and Homer by heart.

And it is paralleled by Isocrates, a contemporary of Plato, in those words spoken by the King Nicocles when addressing his governors, “You should be to others what you think I should be to you.”

His style is the very opposite of that of Isocrates and the rhetoricians.

The only good authorities as to this point are the orators Lycurgus and Isocrates, who mention the law prescribing the recitation, but do not say when or by whom it was enacted.