a familiar statement or maxim from a poet is put forward to be refuted or supported, or for you to argue first against it and then for it.  Or some historical situation may be proposed, and the student asked to set forth the wisest or most just course in the circumstances.  “Hannibal has beaten the Romans at Cannae:  shall he or shall he not proceed directly to attack Rome?  Examine the question as if you were Hannibal.”  Much of this appears theoretically sound enough.  Unfortunately the subjects were generally either hopelessly threadbare or possessed no bearing upon real life.  “We are learning,” says Seneca, “not for life, but for the school.”  The only novelty which could be given to the treatment of old abstract themes or puerile questions was novelty of phrase, and the one great mark of the literature of this time is therefore the pursuit of the striking expression, of something epigrammatic or glittering.  A speech was judged by its purple patches of rhetoric, not by the soundness of its thoughts.  Prizes, apparently of books, were offered in these Roman schools, and a prize would go to the youth who could tell you in the most remarkable string of brilliant language what was your duty towards your country, or what were the evils of anger, or for what reasons it is right for a father to disown his son.  Meanwhile parents would look in at the school from time to time and listen to the boys declaiming, and it is easy to see with the mind’s eye the father listening, like the proud American parent at a “graduation” day, to his gifted offspring “speaking a piece.”

Education commonly stopped at this point.  If the rhetorical training is taken early, the boy is now about sixteen; but there was nothing to prevent the oratorical course from following instead of preceding the “coming of age.”  In this case we will suppose that it has preceded.  The youth has now received a good literary training and considerable practice in the art of speech-making.  He knows enough of elementary arithmetic to keep accounts, or, in special cases—­where he is intended for certain professional careers—­he may understand some geometry and the principles of mechanics and engineering.  He may or may not have learned to sing, and enough of music to play creditably on lyre or harp.  Unlike the young Greek, he will not necessarily have been made to recognise that gymnastic training is an essential part of education.  He may indulge in such exercises by way of pastime or for health; he may, and generally will, have been taught athletics; but he does not acknowledge that they have any practical bearing upon his aptitude for either warfare or civil life.

It is hard to gauge the intellect of the average Roman youth of sixteen; all we know is that, while the best of literature, science, art, and philosophy was left to be undertaken by Greeks, the Romans seized upon whatever learning had an appreciable practical bearing, and that, as men capable of administering and directing, they left their intellectual and artistic superiors far behind.