As to holidays the practice of the Roman schools probably resembled that which prevails in the Scotch Universities, though with a less magnificent length of vacation.  Every one had a holiday on the “days of Saturn” (a festival beginning on the seventeenth of December), and the schoolboys had one of their own on the “days of Minerva,” which fell in the latter half of March; but the “long vacation” was in the summer.  Horace speaks of lads carrying their fees to school on the fifteenth of the month for eight months in the year (if this interpretation of a doubtful passage is correct).  Perhaps as this was a country school the holidays were made longer than usual, to let the scholars take their part in the harvest, which as including the vintage would not be over till somewhat late in the autumn.  We find Martial, however, imploring a schoolmaster to remember that the heat of July was not favorable to learning, and suggesting that he should abdicate his seat till the fifteenth of October brought a season more convenient for study.  Rome indeed was probably deserted in the later summer and autumn by the wealthier class, who were doubtless disposed to agree in the poet’s remark, a remark to which the idlest schoolboy will forgive its Latin for the sake of its admirable sentiment: 

     “Aestate pueri si valent satis discunt.”  “In summer boys learn
     enough, if they keep their health.”

Something, perhaps, may be said of the teachers, into whose hands the boys of Rome were committed.  We have a little book, of not more than twoscore pages in all, which gives us “lives of illustrious schoolmasters;” and from which we may glean a few facts.  The first business of a schoolmaster was to teach grammar, and grammar Rome owed, as she owed most of her knowledge, to a Greek, a certain Crates, who coming as ambassador from one of the kings of Asia Minor, broke his leg while walking in the ill-paved streets of Rome, and occupied his leisure by giving lectures at his house.  Most of the early teachers were Greeks.  Catulus bought a Greek slave for somewhat more than fifteen hundred pounds, and giving him his freedom set him up as a schoolmaster; another of the same nation received a salary of between three and four hundred pounds, his patron taking and probably making a considerable profit out of the pupils’ fees.  Orbilius, the man of blows, was probably of Greek descent.  He had been first a beadle, then a trumpeter, then a trooper in his youth, and came to Rome in the year in which Cicero was consul.  He seems to have been as severe on the parents of his pupils as he was in another way on the lads themselves, for he wrote a book in which he exposed their meanness and ingratitude.  His troubles, however, did not prevent him living to the great age of one hundred and three.  The author of the little book about schoolmasters had seen his statue in his native town.  It was a marble figure, in a sitting posture, with two writing desks beside it.  The favorite authors