Cicero too, as we have seen, seems to have educated his son at home, though he himself is said to have attended a school.  But we may suppose that the ordinary boy of the upper classes went to school, under the care of a paedagogus, after the Greek fashion, rising before daylight, and submitting to severe discipline, which, together with the absolute necessity for a free Roman of attaining a certain level of acquirement, effectually compelled him to learn to read, write, and cipher.[274] This elementary work must have been done well; we hear little or nothing of gross ignorance or neglected education.

There were, however, very serious defects in this system of elementary education.  Not only the schoolmaster himself, but the paedagogus who was responsible for the boy’s conduct, was almost always either a slave or a freedman; and neither slave nor freedman could be an object of profound respect for a Roman boy.  Hence no doubt the necessity of maintaining discipline rather by means of corporal punishment (to which the Romans never seem to have objected, though Quintilian criticises it)[275] than by moral force; a fact which is attested both in literature and art.  The responsibility again which attached to the paedagogus for the boy’s morals must have been another inducement to the parents to renounce their proper work of supervision.[276] And once more, the great majority of teachers were Greeks.  As the boy was born into a bilingual Graeco-Roman world, of which the Greeks were the only cultured people, this might seem natural and inevitable; but we know that in his heart the Roman despised the Greek.  Of witnesses in their favour we might expect Cicero to be the strongest, but Cicero occasionally lets us know what he really thinks of their moral character.  In a remarkable passage in his speech for Flaccus, which is fully borne out by remarks in his private letters, he says that he grants them all manner of literary and rhetorical skill, but that the race never understood or cared for the sacred binding force of testimony given in a court of law.[277] Thus the Roman boy was in the anomalous position of having to submit to chastisement from men whom as men he despised.  Assuredly we should not like our public schoolboys to be taught or punished by men of low station or of an inferior standard of morals It is men, not methods, that really tell in education; the Roman schoolboy needed some one to believe in some one to whom to be wholly loyal; the very same overpowering need which was so obvious in the political world of Rome in the last century B.C.[278]

Of this elementary teaching little need be said here, as it did not bear directly on life and conduct.  There is, however, one feature of it which may claim our attention for a moment.  Both in reading and writing, and also for learning by heart, sententiae [Greek:  gnomai] were used, which remind us of our copy-book maxims.  Of these we have a large collection, more than 700, selected from the mimes