His first efforts will probably consist either of tracing letters through a stencil, or of forming them from a copy while the master guides his hand.  He will next write a series of words—­the good old copybook method with the good old copybook maxims.  It is only when he has gained some proficiency that he will be allowed to write upon paper or parchment with ink and with a split reed for pen.  In such a case the backs of useless documents come in handy, and particularly serviceable are the rolls containing the poems of the numerous authors whom no one wants to read, but whose books thus find one of their ultimate uses, another being to wrap up spices or salt fish.  His arithmetic will be merely such as will enable him to make up accounts.  The Roman numerals did not lend themselves easily to the method now adopted of calculating on paper, and the Roman pupil therefore reckoned partly with his fingers, partly by means of counters laid or strung upon a board.  At this he became remarkably proficient, and at mental arithmetic there is reason to believe that he could beat the modern boy hollow.  Along with the reckoning he would also necessarily learn his tables of weights and measures.  “Two-and-a-half feet one step; two steps one pace; a thousand paces one mile.”  So he said or sang, and a mile—­mille, “a thousand” paces—­remains our own word to this day, even though it has come to signify an eccentric 1760 yards.

That Roman boys bore no love to school or schoolmaster is little wonder.  Perhaps Publius may be fortunate; but if his schoolmaster is of the ordinary type he will be an irascible loud-voiced person, who bawls and scolds and thrashes.  It will be a common thing to find, as Seneca puts it, a man “in a violent passion teaching you that to be in a passion is wrong.”  The doctrine went that “he who is not flayed is not educated.”  The methods of the military centurion may have had something to do with creating this behaviour, but there is perhaps another excuse to be found for the Roman pedagogue.  His school, if of the inferior kind, is like any other shop, a place open to the street, whether on the ground floor or in the balcony-like entresol.  There is no cloistered privacy about his instruction.  To such a place at a very early hour come the boys “creeping unwillingly.”  When the days are short the school opens before daybreak, and the smoky lamps and lanterns create an evil smell and atmosphere in the raw and chilly morning.  That is no time to be amiable towards inattention or stupidity.  There were many other circumstances to try the temper, and the Roman temper, except among the highest classes, was, as it is, quick and loud.  No real boy who had been a Roman school but knew what it was to have ears pinched and to take his punishment on his hands with the cane or the tawse.  Many had been “horsed,” in the way depicted in the illustration.