Clarke

their eyes, to be taken as a pastime.’8 Though he disapproved o

While engaged on them and ‘forced to apply their minds to difficult problems and not let their attention wander, being trained and sharpened in these disciplines they can more easily and quickly grasp and learn subjects which are more important and valuable’. Just as primary education prepares for the secondary stage (the enkuklios paideia), so the latter, for Isocrates, is a training and preparation for ‘philosophy‘.17

These subjects, he says, are useful only so far as they prepare the mind as opposed to engaging it permanently

To give one more illustration of the same point of view

a freeborn boy should acquire some knowledge both of rhetoric and of the other encyclic subjects but ‘should learn them in a cursory manner, so as to acquire as it were a taste of them (for it is impossible to be a complete master of everything),