The children, too, are often permitted to study their lessons aloud even as in the schools of the Orient. All this adds to the buzzing confusion, so that it is claimed that a school causes more noise than a blacksmith at his anvil or the amphitheater applauding a favorite gladiator. The teaching and the flogging keep up through a long season. The school year begins on March 24th, when Platorius painfully counts the entrance fees brought by each scholar, reckoning himself lucky if he does not have to split his gains with the pedagogues who attend a favored few of the children. There is a considerable holiday in summer when it is too hot to study, and children of good family are likely to be attending their parents in the country. There is another interval of about a week at the Saturnalia and over New Year’s Day; another just before the new school year begins in March. Otherwise, except for the more important religious festivals, and the “Nones” (5th or 7th days of each month), the studying and the beating go on, with rather fewer holidays than in the twentieth century. [Illustration: SCHOOL DISCIPLINE.] Platorius is near the bottom of the educational ladder. His fees are only about four sesterces (16 cents) per month per pupil, and he is none too sure of prompt payment. The miserable room costs something for rental. If his pupils fail to progress, their parents storm at him and promptly shift to another master. In short he leads a dog’s life. The green grocer and the copperpot monger who have stalls opposite the school despise him as entirely beneath them. =171. A Superior Type of School.=--Quite different is the atmosphere of Euganor’s schoolroom. He is technically a slave, but a slave of very superior class. The children come to him accompanied not merely by extremely genteel pedagogues but by subordinate slaves, _capsarii_, who carry their books and tablets, and the establishment has a convenient ante-room, where all these gentry can foregather and match gossip, “My master says”--while their charges are being instructed. The school itself is held in an elegant chamber adorned with fine frescos of historical events such as the campaigns of Alexander, speaking statues of great literary figures, and, conspicuous upon the wall, an elaborately painted map of the Roman Empire, “for,” affirms Euganor, “the boys should have daily before their eyes all the seas and lands, and all cities and peoples comprehended therein; for the name and position of places, the distance between them, the source and outflow of rivers, the coastline with all its seaboard, its gulfs and its straits are better taken in by the eye than by the ear.”[105] Euganor, too, has his rod and does not bear it in vain, but he never allows his discipline to degenerate into stupid cruelty. He is, in short, an extremely competent man who studies each of his charges carefully and who would prove an excellent teacher in any schoolroom in any age.