endowed property. In another respect, these were the first schools of higher
education, beyond the level of the elementary schooling of the youth cohort
of the city-state, the ephebes who went through athletic and military drill
together, along with some training in music and poetry (Marrou, 1964). The
philosophical schools put on a formal and material foundation the commercial
education in advanced subjects which the Sophists had pioneered.
The Academy, founded around 380 in Athens, was originally a park and
public gymnasium outside the city; Plato subsequently purchased a garden and
built houses for lodging students and visitors (DSB, 1981: 11:27). Members
took their meals in common (following Pythagorean precedent) and were
expected to contribute financially according to their means. Plato nominated
his successor; subsequently the scholarch was elected. The organization was
legally recognized as a religious fraternity dedicated to the Muses and thus as
a property-conveying unit. The organization of the other schools founded at
this time is less well known. There were famous schools at Megara, a day’s
journey from Athens; at Elis, near the site of the Olympic games in the
northwest Peloponnesus (120 miles from Athens); more remotely, at the Greek
colony of Cyrene on the African coast; and at Cyzicus, a colony of Miletus,
on the Propontus (Sea of Marmara) in Asia Minor.
A different type of school was founded at the same time: Isocrates, like
virtually all the other founders a pupil of Socrates, founded in Athens the first
school of rhetoric (Marrou, 1964: 119–136, 267–281). Isocrates’ school be-
came the model for the dominant form of higher education in the Greek and
Roman world, eclipsing in numbers the schools of philosophy. For centuries
thereafter rhetoricians and philosophers were professional rivals over the ter-
ritory of higher education (Marrou, 1964: 287–290). Another institutional
development more closely tied to philosophy had taken place a generation
earlier (in the late 400s), when Hippocrates founded his school of medicine on
the island of Cos at the southeast corner of the Ionian coast, a reform move-
ment at the traditional shamanistic medical center of the Asclepiads. The
followers or associates of Hippocrates apparently soon split, with a rival
medical school appearing at Cnidus, the neighboring port on the mainland
(DSB, 1981: 6:422–424). Now the intellectual field was beginning to divide in
yet another dimension than the rivalries under the law of small numbers:
rhetoric and medicine eventually became professional specialties in their own
right, fields of attention increasingly cut off from philosophy. But in the
founding generations, these disciplines added to the struggle within the central
attention space, aggravating the crisis of overcrowding. The medical schools
were carriers of some of the main philosophical positions; and the rhetoricians
overlapped with the activities of Aristotle’s school, as Aristotle played off their
concepts in a crucial component of his philosophical synthesis.92 •^ The Skeleton of Theory