If the Roman boy of whom we are speaking belonged to a very wealthy and distinguished family, he would probably receive his education at home.  Commonly he would go to school.  There were schools, girls’ schools as well as boys’ schools, at Rome in the days of the wicked Appius Claudius.  The schoolmaster appears among the Etruscans in the story of Camillus, when the traitor, who offers to hand over to the Roman general the sons of the chief citizen of Falerii, is at his command scourged back into the town by his scholars.  We find him again in the same story in the Latin town of Tusculum, where it is mentioned as one of the signs of a time of profound peace (Camillus had hurriedly marched against the town on a false report of its having revolted), that the hum of scholars at their lessons was heard in the market-place.  At Rome, as time went on, and the Forum became more and more busy and noisy, the schools were removed to more suitable localities.  Their appliances for teaching were improved and increased.  Possibly maps were added, certainly reading books.  Homer was read, and, as we have seen, the old Latin play-writers, and, afterwards, Virgil.  Horace threatens the book which willfully insists on going out into the world with this fate, that old age will find it in a far-off suburb teaching boys their letters.  Some hundred years afterwards the prophecy was fulfilled.  Juvenal tells us how the schoolboys stood each with a lamp in one hand and a well-thumbed Horace or sooty Virgil in the other.  Quintilian, writing about the same time, goes into detail, as becomes an old schoolmaster.  “It is an admirable practice that the boy’s reading should begin with Homer and Virgil.  The tragic writers also are useful; and there is much benefit to be got from the lyric poets also.  But here you must make a selection not of authors only, but a part of authors.”  It is curious to find him banishing altogether a book that is, or certainly was, more extensively used in our schools than any other classic, the Heroides of Ovid.

These, and such as these, then, are the books which our Roman boy would have to read.  Composition would not be forgotten.  “Let him take,” says the author just quoted, “the fables of Aesop and tell them in simple language, never rising above the ordinary level.  Then let him pass on to a style less plain; then, again, to bolder paraphrases, sometimes shortening, sometimes amplifying the original, but always following his sense.”  He also suggests the writing of themes and characters.  One example he gives is this, “Was Crates the philosopher right when, having met an ignorant boy, he administered a beating to his teacher?” Many subjects of these themes have been preserved.  Hannibal was naturally one often chosen.  His passage of the Alps, and the question whether he should have advanced on the city immediately after the battle of Cannae, were frequently discussed.  Cicero mentions a subject of the speculative kind.  “It is forbidden to a stranger to mount the wall.  A. mounts the wall, but only to help the citizens in repelling their enemies.  Has A. broken the law?”