There is also no cause for surprise that boys often shammed illness and did little things to their eyes so that mother or father might keep them from their books for a while.  There were of course academies of a better class than these schools open to the street, and probably Publius Silius would be taken to one where his “guardian” waits with others in an antechamber, while he is himself being taught in a room where the walls are pictured with historical or mythological scenes, or with charts or maps, and where there stand busts of eminent writers.  The boys are seated on benches or forms, and the master on a high-backed chair.  When the pupil is called upon to repeat a lesson, he stands up before the teacher; when the whole class is to deliver a dictated passage it rises and delivers it all together, in orthodox sing-song style.

[Illustration:  FIG. 95.—­HORSING A BOY. (After Saechs.)]

Somewhere towards eleven o’clock there is an interval, and the boys go home for lunch or buy something from the seller of rissoles or sausages in the street.  In the afternoon—­when the schoolmaster has taken his own luncheon and probably his short siesta—­they return to school, putting in altogether about six hours of lessons in the day.

That boys and girls went to the same elementary schools is not absolutely provable from any explicit statement to that effect; but there are one or two passages in literature which point almost certainly to that conclusion.  It is at least undeniable that girls, and even big girls, went to school, and that in those schools they were taught by men.  One schoolmaster is addressed by the poet as “detestable to both boys and girls.”  We have seen that in maturity the Roman woman lived in no sort of seclusion; and it is reasonable to suppose that as a girl she was treated in much the same way as girls in a mixed school of to-day.  Nevertheless it is also almost certain that such mixed schools were only those of the common people, or of the lower middle classes:  the daughters of the better-circumstanced would be instructed at home by private tutors.  There they would learn to read and write both Greek and their native Latin, to play upon the lyre or harp, to dance—­Roman dancing being more a matter of gesture with hands and body than of movement with the feet—­and to carry themselves with the bearing fit for a Roman lady.  To teach the household duties was the function of the mother.

At Rome, as with us, there was, first, a primary education, pure and simple, given in the schools of those who would nowadays be registered as teachers of primary subjects.  Next there was what we should call a secondary or high-school education, given by a “grammar master,” in which the education was almost wholly literary.  The same school might doubtless employ a special arithmetic master, and also a teacher of music, but mainly the business of such an establishment was theoretically to prepare the boy for a proper