[Illustration: AN ATHENIAN SCHOOL (Royal Museum, Berlin) A painting by Duris on a drinking-cup, or cylix. The picture is divided by the two handles. In the upper half, beginning at the left: a youth playing the double flute as a lesson to the boy before him; a teacher holding a tablet and stylus and correcting a composition; a slave (paedagogus), who accompanied the children to and from school. In the lower half: a master teaching his pupil to play the lyre; a teacher holding a half- opened roll, listening to a recitation by the student before him; a bearded paedagogus. The inner picture, badly damaged, represents a youth in a bath.]
ROMAN EDUCATION
A Roman boy began his school days at about the age of seven. He learned to read, to write with a stylus on wax tablets, and to cipher by means of the reckoning board, or abacus. He received a little instruction in singing and memorized all sorts of proverbs and maxims, besides the laws of the Twelve Tables. [5] His studying went on under the watchful eyes of a harsh schoolmaster, who did not hesitate to use the rod. After Rome began to come into close contact with Greece, the curriculum was enlarged by the study of literature. The Romans were the first people who made the learning of a foreign tongue an essential part of education. Schools now arose in which the Greek language and literature formed the chief subject of instruction. As Latin literature came into being, its productions, especially the orations of Cicero and the poems of Vergil and Horace, were also used as texts for study.
[Illustration: A ROMAN SCHOOL SCENE
Wall painting, Herculaneum.]
[Illustration: YOUTH READING A PAPYRUS ROLL Relief on a sarcophagus. The papyrus roll was sometimes very long. The entire Iliad or Odyssey might be contained in a single manuscript measuring one hundred and fifty feet in length. In the third century A.D. the unwieldy roll began to give way to the tablet, composed of a number of leaves held together by a ring. About this time, also, the use of vellum, or parchment made of sheepskin, became common.]
TRAVEL AND STUDY ABROAD
Persons of wealth or noble birth might follow their school training by a university course at a Greek city, such as Athens, Alexandria, or Rhodes. Here the Roman youth would listen to lectures on philosophy, delivered by the deep thinkers whom Greece still produced, and would profit by the treasures of art and science preserved in these ancient capitals. Many famous Romans thus passed several years abroad in graduate study. During the imperial age, as we have already seen, [6] schools of grammar and rhetoric arose in the West, particularly in Gaul and Spain, and attracted students from all parts of the empire.
90. MARRIAGE AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN
ENGAGEMENTS
A young man in Athens or in Rome did not, as a rule, marry immediately on coming of age. He might remain a bachelor for several years, sometimes till he was thirty or over. The young man's father had most to do with the selection of a wife. He tried to secure for his son some daughter of a friend who possessed rank and property equal to his own. The parents of the two parties would then enter into a contract which, among other things, usually stated how large a dowry the bride's father was to settle on his daughter. An engagement was usually very little a matter of romance and very much a matter of business.