rusticorum mascula militum proles, Sabellis docta ligonibus versare glebas et severae matris ad arbitrium recisos portare fustis.[265]

It was an education also in demeanour, and especially in obedience[266] and modesty.  In that chapter of Plutarch’s Life of Cato which has been already quoted, after describing how the father taught his boy to ride, to box, to swim, and so on, he goes on, “And he was as careful not to utter an indecent word before his son, as he would have been in the presence of the Vestal Virgins.”  The pudor of childhood was always esteemed at Rome:  “adolescens pudentissimus” is the highest praise that can be given even to a grown youth;[267] and there are signs that a feeling survived of a certain sacredness of childhood, which Juvenal reflects in his famous words, “Maxima debetur puero reverentia.”  The origin of this feeling is probably to be found in the fact that both boys and girls were in ancient times brought up to help in performing the religious duties of the household, as camilli and camillae (acolytes); and this is perhaps the reason why they wore, throughout Roman history, the toga praetexta with the purple stripe, like magistrates and sacrificing priests.[268] It is hardly necessary to say that this religious side of education was an education in the practice of cult, and not in any kind of creed or ideas about the gods; but so far as it went its influence was good, as instilling the habit of reverence and the sense of duty from a very early age.  Though the Romans of Cicero’s time had lost their old conviction of the necessity of propitiating the gods of the State, it is probable that the tradition of family worship still survived in the majority of households.

Again, we may be sure that the idea of duty to the State was not omitted in this old-fashioned education.  Cato wrote histories for his son in large letters, “so that without stirring out of the house, he might gain a knowledge of the illustrious actions of the ancient Romans, and of the customs of his country”:  but it is significant that in the next two or three generations the writers of annals took to glorifying—­and falsifying—­the achievements of members of their own families, rather than those of the State as a whole.  Boys learnt the XII Tables by heart, and Cicero tells us that he did this in his own boyhood, though the practice had since then been dropped.[269] That ancient code of law would have acted, we may imagine, as a kind of catechism of the rules laid down by the State for the conduct of its citizens, and as a reminder that though the State had outgrown the rough legal clothing of its infancy, it had from the very beginning undertaken the duty of regulating the conduct of its citizens in their relations with each other.  Again, when a great Roman died, it is said to have been the practice for parents to take their boys to hear the funeral oration in praise of one who had done great service to the State.[270]