volume 24, pages 466-467).

EDUCATION: Rome.

"If we cast a final glance at the question of education, we shall find but little to say of it, as far as regards the period before Cicero. In the republican times the state did not trouble itself about the training of youth: a few prohibitory regulations were laid down, and the rest left to private individuals. Thus no public instruction was given; public schools there were, but only as private undertakings for the sake of the children of the rich. All depended on the father; his personal character and the care taken by the mother in education decided the development of the child's disposition. Books there were none; and therefore they could not be put into the hands of children. A few rugged hymns, such as those of the Salii and Arval brothers, with the songs in Fescennine verse, sung on festivals and at banquets, formed the poetical literature. A child would hear, besides, the dirges, or memorial verses, composed by women in honour of the dead, and sometimes, too, the public panegyrics pronounced on their departed relatives, a distinction accorded to women also from the time of Camillus. {686} Whatever was taught a boy by father or mother, or acquired externally to the house, was calculated to make the Roman 'virtus' appear in his eyes the highest aim of his ambition; the term including self-mastery, an unbending firmness of will, with patience, and an iron tenacity of purpose in carrying through whatever was once acknowledged to be right. The Greek palestra and its naked combatants always seemed strange and offensive to Roman eyes. In the republican times the exercises of the gymnasium were but little in fashion; though riding, swimming, and other warlike exercises were industriously practised, as preparations for the campaign. The slave pædagogus, assigned to young people to take charge of them, had a higher position with the Romans than the Greeks; and was not allowed to let his pupils out of his sight till their twentieth year. The Latin Odyssey of Livius Andronicus was the school-book first in use; and this and Ennius were the only two works to create and foster a literary taste before the destruction of Carthage. The freedman Sp. Carvilius was the first to open a school for higher education. After this the Greek language and literature came into the circle of studies, and in consequence of the wars in Sicily, Macedon, and Asia, families of distinction kept slaves who knew Greek. Teachers quickly multiplied, and were either liberti, or their descendants. No free-born Roman would consent to be a paid teacher, for that was held to be a degradation. The Greek language remained throughout the classical [age] one for Romans: they even made their children begin with Homer. As, by the seventh century of the republic, Ennius, Plautus, Pacuvius, and Terence, had already become old poets, dictations were given to scholars from their writings. The interpretation of Virgil began under Augustus, and by this time the younger Romans were resorting to Athens, Rhodes, Apollonia, and Mitylene, in order to make progress in Greek rhetoric and philosophy. As Roman notions were based entirely on the practical and the useful, music was neglected as a part of education; while, as a contrast, boys were compelled to learn the laws of the twelve tables by heart. Cicero, who had gone through this discipline with other boys of his time, complains of the practice having begun to be set aside; and Scipio Æmilianus deplored, as an evil omen of degeneracy, the sending of boys and girls to the academies of actors, where they learnt dancing and singing, in company with young women of pleasure. In one of these schools were to be found as many as five hundred young persons, all being instructed in postures and motions of the most abandoned kind. ... On the other hand, the gymnastic exercises, which had once served the young men as a training for war, fell into disuse, having naturally become objectless and burdensome, now that, under Augustus, no more Roman citizens chose to enlist in the legions. Still slavery was, and continued to be, the foremost cause of the depravation of youth, and of an evil education. ... It was no longer the mothers who educated their own children: they had neither inclination nor capacity for such duty, for mothers of the stamp of Cornelia had disappeared. Immediately on its birth, the child was intrusted to a Greek female slave, with some male slave, often of the worst description, to help her. ... The young Roman was not educated in the constant companionship of youths of his own age, under equal discipline: surrounded by his father's slaves and parasites, and always accompanied by a slave when he went out, he hardly received any other impressions than such as were calculated to foster conceit, indolence, and pride in him."

_J. J. I. Döllinger, The Gentile and the Jew,