CHAPTER II.

THE EDUCATION OF SENECA.

For a reason which I have already indicated--I mean the habitual
reticence of the ancient writers respecting the period of their
boyhood--it is not easy to form a very vivid conception of the kind of
education given to a Roman boy of good family up to the age of fifteen,
when he laid aside the golden amulet and embroidered toga to assume a
more independent mode of life.

A few facts, however, we can gather from the scattered allusions of the
poets Horace, Juvenal, Martial, and Persius. From these we learn that
the schoolmasters were for the most part underpaid and despised,[5]
while at the same time an erudition alike minute and useless was rigidly
demanded of them. We learn also that they were exceedingly severe in the
infliction of corporeal punishment; Orbilius, the schoolmaster of
Horace, appears to have been a perfect Dr. Busby, and the poet Martial
records with indignation the barbarities of chastisement which he daily
witnessed.

[Footnote 5: For the miseries of the literary class, and especially of
schoolmasters, see Juv, _Sat_. vii.]

The things taught were chiefly arithmetic, grammar--both Greek and
Latin--reading, and repetition of the chief Latin poets. There was also
a good deal of recitation and of theme-writing on all kinds of trite