peristyle, find a large number of consecutive chambers devoted mainly to
the philosophers, as lecture-rooms and auditories for their classes
and followers. On the north side of the peristyle is a double portico
containing the _exedrae_, or seats of the sophists, where each most
cunning rhetorician delivered his opinions _ex cathedrâ_, and lay in
wait for any passer whom he could insnare into an argument. The groves
of the great western court were probably used by the lounger, the
contemplative, and the studious, if we may judge by numerous seats and
benches, at convenient intervals. On the south side of these was again a
double portico; and on the north, outside the pillars, the _xystus_,
or covered porch, where the athletes exercised in winter and in bad
weather. The arena was twelve feet wide, and sunk a foot and a half
below a marginal path of ten feet, where spectators could walk. On the
north and south sides of the whole building were wings, of less width,
extending nearly its entire length. That on the north contained
the _stadium_, or foot-race course, which was, however, sometimes
disconnected from the gymnasium. The south wing was of like dimensions,
and adorned with plane-trees and walks, forming a more private retreat.

It will be readily conceived that this vast area was not devoted
exclusively to physical exercises. Logic, rhetoric, and metaphysics
claimed their place in this common focus of the city's life, and were
the delight of the subtile Greeks. The Socratic reasoning and the
syllogisms of Aristotle met here on common ground. The Stoics, with
their stern fatalism, derived their name from the _stoae_, or porticos;
the Peripatetics imparted their ambulatory instructions under the
plane-trees of the Lyceum--and Plato reasoned in the Academy, which he
held with his school, and into which no ungeometrical mind was to enter.
And though some dog of a Cynic might despise the union of the ornamental
with the useful, and claim austerity as the rule of life, yet to the