Paidonomos

The warden of the boys. A magistracy, not a schoolmaster's post: Xenophon says the office was given to a man drawn from those eligible for the highest honours, and that he carried the power to punish. He went about with a body of young men bearing whips, so that discipline was never further away than the next street.

Xenophon frames the office as the hinge of the whole system. Elsewhere in Greece a boy was handed to a household slave for supervision; in Sparta the state took the responsibility and armed it. Plutarch gives the same picture and adds the detail that any citizen present could correct any boy, and that a boy so corrected could not complain to his father.