Utilitarian to the backbone, the ordinary Roman, like
the ordinary British, parent, wanted his son to get on in life; it
was only the parent of a higher class who sacrificed anything to the
Muses, and then chiefly because in a public career it was _de rigueur_
that the boy should not be ignorant or boorish.
When the son of well-to-do parents had mastered the necessary
elements, he was advanced to the higher type of school kept by a
_grammaticus_, and there made his first real acquaintance with
literature; and this was henceforward, until he began to study
rhetoric and philosophy, the staple of his work. We may note, by the
way, that science, i.e. the higher mathematics and astronomy,
was reckoned under the head of philosophy, while medicine and
jurisprudence had become professional studies,[286] to learn which it
was necessary to attach yourself to an experienced practitioner, as
with the art of war In the grammar schools, as we may call them, the
course was purely literary and humanistic, and it was conducted both
in Greek and Latin, but chiefly in Greek, as a natural result of the
comparative scantiness of Latin literature.
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