Take for example poor Platorius who, having failed as an inn-keeper at Ostia, is trying to earn a living by leasing a vacant shop near the Insula Flavia. The shallow room opens directly upon the noisy street, and the passing throngs divert the children, while the clamors of the children distress all the semi-invalids in the big insula. Every thrashing by the master attracts a knot of brutal idlers just outside. Platorius’s school is of the lowest grade, but he has to make a certain pretence of learning by setting up a few chipped busts of Homer, Virgil, Horace, etc., and erecting a high seat (_cathedra_) for himself. His class sits before him on long backless benches. There are no desks, and every child holds his smudgy wax-covered tablets uncomfortably upon his knee, as he copies or erases with his stylus.[103] To all the better schools the children come each accompanied by his or her “pedagogue,” much after the Greek manner; a private slave being especially assigned to each boy or girl, and obligated to lead his charge to and from school, help with the lessons, guard the child’s morals, and even assist in chastising.[104] But few of Platorius’s pupils come from parents who can afford the luxury of a pedagogue for their children. They appear by themselves so early in the morning in winter time that they have to bear smoky lanterns; the most self-sufficient of them being “the sons of centurions, with satchels and tablets hung on their left arms, and carrying every Ides (middle of the month) their fee of eight brass pieces each.” [Horace.] Each boy has devoured a crust before leaving home and the school continues without recess until noon when there is an intermission of fair length to get the prandium or at least to buy some sausages from the street dealers, and perhaps to indulge in a short siesta. After that the deafening study is resumed, and there is relief in the neighboring tenements only when the school is dismissed towards dusk. =170. Scourging, Clamors, and Other Abuses of Cheap Schools.=--A school is no asset to the neighborhood. Vainly do the satiric poets implore a teacher to “be kind to his scholars” and to “lay aside his Scythian scourge with its horrible thongs” and his “terrible cane, the schoolmaster’s scepter.” Poor Platorius knows well enough that the type of parents who employ him believes the old maxim “he who is not flogged is not educated.” The Romans are a military people and the ideal of a school is always somewhat the stern discipline of the centurion with his vinestock (see p. 323). Precepts in many a classroom are enforced with curses and blows, and Seneca has declared in disgust that it is a common thing “to find a man in a violent passion teaching you that to be in a passion is wrong.”