at his results.”  From the small inn-keeper to the great capitalist, every man of business needed to be perfectly at home in reckoning sums of money.  The magistrates, especially quaestors and aediles, had staffs of clerks who must have been skilled accountants; the provincial governors and all who were engaged in collecting the tributes of the provinces, as well as in lending the money to enable the tax-payers to pay (see above, 71 foll.), were constantly busy with their ledgers.  The humbler inhabitants of the Empire had long been growing familiar with the Roman aptitude for arithmetic.[284]

Grais ingenium, Grais dedit ore rotundo Musa loqui, praeter laudem nullius avaris.  Romani pueri longis rationibus assem discunt in partes centum diducere.  “Dicat films Albini:  si de quincunce remota est uncia, quid superat? poteras dixisse.” “triens.” “eu! rem poteris servare tuam."[285]

This familiar passage may be quoted once more to illustrate the practical nature of the Roman school teaching and the ends which it was to serve.  Utilitarian to the backbone, the ordinary Roman, like the ordinary British, parent, wanted his son to get on in life; it was only the parent of a higher class who sacrificed anything to the Muses, and then chiefly because in a public career it was de rigueur that the boy should not be ignorant or boorish.

When the son of well-to-do parents had mastered the necessary elements, he was advanced to the higher type of school kept by a grammaticus, and there made his first real acquaintance with literature; and this was henceforward, until he began to study rhetoric and philosophy, the staple of his work.  We may note, by the way, that science, i.e. the higher mathematics and astronomy, was reckoned under the head of philosophy, while medicine and jurisprudence had become professional studies,[286] to learn which it was necessary to attach yourself to an experienced practitioner, as with the art of war In the grammar schools, as we may call them, the course was purely literary and humanistic, and it was conducted both in Greek and Latin, but chiefly in Greek, as a natural result of the comparative scantiness of Latin literature.[287] Homer, Hesiod, and Menander were the favourite authors studied; only later on, after the full bloom of the Augustan literature, did Latin poets, especially Virgil and Horace, take a place of almost equal importance.  The study of the Greek poets was apparently a thorough one.  It included the teaching of language, grammar, metre, style, and subject matter, and was aided by reading aloud, which was reckoned of great importance, and learning by heart, on the part of the pupils.  In the discussion of the subject matter any amount of comment was freely allowed to the master, who indeed was expected to have at his fingers’ ends explanations of all sorts of allusions, and thus to enable the boys to pick up a great deal of odd knowledge and a certain