reverential, though less intellectually developed, than the best type of young Athenian—­a nascent soldier and servant of the state, not, like most young Athenians of ability, a nascent orator.  And as he would be only half way through his education at an age when many Greeks had finished theirs, he would be more conscious of his own immaturity.  We feel at once how different he would be from the clever lads who swarmed at Athens, youths with an infinite capacity for picking holes, and capable of saying something plausible on every subject under the sun.”

If we note, with Mr. Newman, that Aristotle here makes if anything too little of intellectual training (as indeed may also be said of our own public schools), and add to his picture something more of that knowledge which, when united with an honest will and healthy body, will almost infallibly produce a sound judgment, we shall have a type of character eminently fitted to share in the duties and the trials of the government of such empires as the Roman and the British.  But at Rome, in the age of Cicero, such a type of character was rare indeed; and though this was due to various causes, some of which have been already noticed,—­the building up of a Roman empire before the Romans were ripe to appreciate the duties of an imperial state, and the sudden incoming of wealth in an age when the idea of its productive use was almost unknown,—­yet it will occur to every reader that there must have been also something wrong in the upbringing of the youth of the upper classes to account for the rarity of really sound character, for the frequent absence of what we should call the sense of duty, public and private.  I propose in this chapter to deal with the question of Roman education just so far as to show where in Cicero’s time it was chiefly defective.  It is a subject that has been very completely worked out, and an excellent summary of the results will be found in the little volume on Roman education written by the late Professor A.S.  Wilkins, just before his lamented death:  but he was describing its methods without special reference to its defects, and it is these defects on which I wish more particularly to dwell.[248]

Let us notice, in the first place, how little is said in the literature of the time, including biographies, of that period of life which is now so full of interest to readers of memoirs, so full of interest to ourselves as we look back to it in advancing years.  It may be that we now exaggerate the importance of childhood, but it is equally certain that the Romans undervalued the importance of it.  It may be that we over-estimate the value of our public-school life, but it is certain that the Romans had no such school life to be proud of.  Biography was at this time a favourite form of literature, and some of the memoirs then written were available for use by later writers, such as Valerius Maximus, Suetonius, and Plutarch; yet it is curious how little has come down to us of the childhood or