Seekers After God | Page 8

must have bitterly rued the day when, with her husband and her young children, she left the quiet retreat of a life in Cordova. Each of the three boys grew up to a man of genius, and each of them grew up to stain his memory with deeds that had been better left undone, and to die violent deaths by their own hands or by a tyrant's will. Mela died as we have seen; his son Lucan and his brother Seneca were driven to death by the cruel orders of Nero. Gallio, after stooping to panic-stricken supplications for his preservation, died ultimately by suicide. It was a shameful and miserable end for them all, but it was due partly to their own errors, partly to the hard necessity of the degraded times in which they lived.
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 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.
For this kind of verbal criticism and fantastic archaeology Seneca, who had probably gone through it all, expresses a profound and very rational contempt. In a rather amusing passage[6] he contrasts the kind of use which would be made of a Virgil lesson by a philosopher and a grammarian. Coming to the lines,
"Each happiest day for mortals speeds the first, Then crowds disease behind and age accurst,"
the philosopher will point out why and in what sense the early days of life are the best days, and how rapidly the evil days succeed them, and consequently how infinitely important it is to use well the golden dawn of our being. But the verbal critic will content himself with the remark that Virgil always uses fugio of the flight of time, and always joins "old age" with "disease," and consequently that these are tags to be remembered, and plagiarized hereafter in the pupils' "original composition." Similarly, if the book in hand be Cicero's treatise "On the Commonwealth," instead of entering into great political questions, our grammarian will note that one of the Roman kings had no father (to speak of), and another no mother; that dictators used formerly to be called "masters of the people;" that Romulus perished during an eclipse; that the old form of reipsa was reapse, and of se ipse was sepse; that the starting point in the circus which is now called creta, or "chalk," used to be called caix, or carcer; that in the time of Ennuis opera meant not only "work," but also "assistance," and so on, and so on. Is this true education? or rather, should our great aim ever be to translate noble precepts into daily action? "Teach me," he says, "to despise pleasure and glory; afterwards you shall teach me to disentangle difficulties, to distinguish ambiguities, to see through obscurities; now teach me what is necessary." Considering the condition of much which in modern times passes under the name