For this kind of verbal criticism and fantastic archaeology Seneca, who had probably gone through it all, expresses a profound and very rational contempt.  In a rather amusing passage[6] he contrasts the kind of use which would be made of a Virgil lesson by a philosopher and a grammarian.  Coming to the lines,

     “Each happiest day for mortals speeds the first,
      Then crowds disease behind and age accurst,”

the philosopher will point out why and in what sense the early days of life are the best days, and how rapidly the evil days succeed them, and consequently how infinitely important it is to use well the golden dawn of our being.  But the verbal critic will content himself with the remark that Virgil always uses fugio of the flight of time, and always joins “old age” with “disease,” and consequently that these are tags to be remembered, and plagiarized hereafter in the pupils’ “original composition.”  Similarly, if the book in hand be Cicero’s treatise “On the Commonwealth,” instead of entering into great political questions, our grammarian will note that one of the Roman kings had no father (to speak of), and another no mother; that dictators used formerly to be called “masters of the people;” that Romulus perished during an eclipse; that the old form of reipsa was reapse, and of se ipse was sepse; that the starting point in the circus which is now called creta, or “chalk,” used to be called caix, or carcer; that in the time of Ennuis opera meant not only “work,” but also “assistance,” and so on, and so on.  Is this true education? or rather, should our great aim ever be to translate noble precepts into daily action?  “Teach me,” he says, “to despise pleasure and glory; afterwards you shall teach me to disentangle difficulties, to distinguish ambiguities, to see through obscurities; now teach me what is necessary.”  Considering the condition of much which in modern times passes under the name of “education,” we may possibly find that the hints of Seneca are not yet wholly obsolete.

[Footnote 6:  Ep. cviii.]

What kind of schoolmaster taught the little Seneca when under the care of the slave who was called pedagogus, or a “boy-leader” (whence our word pedagogue), he daily went with his brothers to school through the streets of Rome, we do not know.  He may have been a severe Orbilius, or he may have been one of those noble-minded tutors whose ideal portraiture is drawn in such beautiful colours by the learned and amiable Quintilian.  Seneca has not alluded to any one who taught him during his early days.  The only schoolfellow whom he mentions by name in his voluminous writings is a certain Claranus, a deformed boy, whom, after leaving school, Seneca never met again until they were both old men, but of whom he speaks with great admiration.  In spite of his hump-back, Claranus appeared even beautiful in the eyes of those who knew him well, because his virtue and good sense left a stronger impression than his deformity, and “his body was adorned by the beauty of his soul.”