Cicero had one boy, and for several years two, to look after, one his own son Marcus, born in 65 B.C., and the other Quintus, the son of his brother, a year older.  Of these boys, until they took the toga virilis, he says hardly anything in his letters to Atticus, though Atticus was the uncle of the elder boy.  Only when his brother Quintus was with Caesar in Gaul do we really begin to hear anything about them, and even then more than once, after a brief mention of the young Quintus, he goes off at once to tell his brother about the progress of the villas that are being built for him.  But it is clear that the father wished to know about the boy as well as about the villas;[254] and in one letter we find Cicero telling Quintus that he wishes to teach his boy himself, as he has been teaching his own son.  “I’ll do wonders with him if I can get him to myself when I am at leisure, for at Rome there is not time to breathe (nam Romae respirandi non est locus)."[255] It is clear that the boys, who were only eleven and twelve in this year 54, were being educated at home, and as clear too that Cicero, who was just then very much occupied in the courts, had no time to attend to them himself.  Young Quintus, we hear, gets on well with his rhetoric master; Cicero does not wholly approve the style in which he is being taught, and thinks he may be able to teach him his own more learned style, though the boy himself seems to prefer the declamatory method of the teacher.[256] The last entry in these letters to the absent father is curious:[257] “I love your Cicero as he deserves and as I ought.  But I am letting him leave me, because I don’t want to keep him from his masters, and because his mother is going away,—­and without her I am nervous about his greediness!” Up to this point he has written in the warmest terms of the boy, but here, as so often in Cicero’s letters about other people, disapprobation is barely hinted in order not to hurt the feelings of his correspondent.

The one thing that is really pleasing in these allusions is the genuine desire of both parents that their boys shall be of good disposition and well educated.  But of real training or of home discipline we unluckily get no hint.  We must go elsewhere for what little we know about the training of children.  Let us now turn to this for a while, remembering that it means parental example and the discipline of the body as well as the acquisition of elementary knowledge.  Unfortunately, no book has survived from that age in which the education of children was treated of.  Varro wrote such a book, but we know of it little more than its name, Catus, sive de liberis educandis.[258] In the fourth book of his de Republica Cicero seems to have dealt with “disciplina puerilis,” but from the few fragments that survive there is little to be learnt, and we may be pretty sure that Cicero could not write of this with much knowledge or experience.  The most famous passage is that in which he quotes