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
historical subjects. The arithmetic seems to have been mainly of a very
simple and severely 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 the mother of Hecuba, of the nurse of
Anchises, of the stepmother of Anchemolus, the number of years Acestes
lived, and how many casks of wine the Sicilians gave to the Phrygians?
Yet these were the dispicable _minutiae_ which every schoolmaster was
then expected to have at his fingers' ends, 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.
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