To make these studies more interesting to the Roman boy, his schoolmaster called in the aid of emulation. “I feel sure,” says Quintilian, “that the practice which I remember to have been employed by my own teachers was any thing but useless. They were accustomed to divide the boys into classes, and they set us to speak in the order of our powers; every one taking his turn according to his proficiency. Our performances were duly estimated; and prodigious were the struggles which we had for victory. To be the head of one’s class was considered the most glorious thing conceivable. But the decision was not made once for all. The next month brought the vanquished an opportunity of renewing the contest. He who had been victorious in the first encounter was not led by success to relax his efforts, and a feeling of vexation impelled the vanquished to do away with the disgrace of defeat. This practice, I am sure, supplied a keener stimulus to learning than did all the exhortations of our teachers, the care of our tutors, and the wishes of our parents.” Nor did the schoolmaster trust to emulation alone. The third choice of the famous Winchester line, “Either learn, or go: there is yet another choice—to be flogged,” was liberally employed. Horace celebrates his old schoolmaster as a “man of many blows,” and another distinguished pupil of this teacher, the Busby or Keate of antiquity, has specified the weapons which he employed, the ferule and the thong. The thong is the familiar “tawse” of schools north of the Border. The ferule was a name given both to the bamboo and to the yellow cane, which grew plentifully both in the islands of the Greek Archipelago and in Southern Italy, as notably at Cannae in Apulia, where it gave a name to the scene of the great battle. The virga was also used, a rod commonly of birch, a tree the educational use of which had been already discovered. The walls of Pompeii indeed show that the practice of Eton is truly classical down to its details.
As to the advantage of the practice opinions were divided. One enthusiastic advocate goes so far as to say that the Greek word for a cane signifies by derivation, “the sharpener of the young” (narthex, nearous thegein), but the best authorities were against it. Seneca is indignant with the savage who will “butcher” a young learner because he hesitates at a word—a venial fault indeed, one would think, when we remember what must have been the aspect of a Roman book, written as it was in capitals, almost without stops, and with little or no distinction between the words. And Quintilian is equally decided, though he allows that flogging was an “institution.”