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Show SCHOOL LIFE IN ANCIENT ROME. The school masters were for the most part underpaid and despised while, at the same time, and erudition, alike ?? and useless, was rigidly ?? of them. We learn also that they were exceedingly severe in the infliction of corporal punishment. Orbitius, the school master of Horace, appears to have been a perfect Dr. Enshy; and the poet Martial records with indignation the barbarities of chastisement which he daily witnessed. The things taught were chiefly arithmetic, grammar, both Latin and Greek, and repetition of the chief Latin poets. There was also a good deal of recitation and of theme-writing on all kinds of trite historical subjects. The arithmetic seems to have been mainly of a very simple and ?? practical kind, especially the computation of interest and compound interest, and the philology generally, both grammar and criticism, was singularly narrow, uninteresting and useless. Of what conceivable advantage can it have been to any human being to know the name of ??, of the stepmother of Ancheniolus, the number of years Acrates lived, and how many casks of wine the Sicilians gave to the Phrygians? Yet these were the despicable ?? which every school-master was expected to have at his finger's end, and every boy scholar to learn at the point of the ferule-trash which was only fit to be unlearned the moment it was known.-Dean Farrar. |