=172. Methods of Teaching.=--All Roman schools are small. The idea of vast “graded” establishments where year after year pupils are passed from teacher to teacher and at last “graduated” has occurred to no man. Platorius conducts his school entirely alone. Euganor has a couple of efficient monitors, but neither he nor Platorius tries to handle more than say thirty pupils. Many of Euganor’s pupils came to him while little more than babies and will only leave him when actually ready for the rhetoric schools. He is largely responsible for their entire elementary education, although many of the higher class children know the Latin and Greek alphabet and can spell a little before being put under his charge. This is no place for a real discussion of the actual forms of education. First there comes the mere teaching of reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, with very little use of books, the master dictating sentences and correcting the tablets whereon the children write them down. Such a teacher as Platorius may have a few musty rolls of papyrus which his charges are allowed to handle gingerly, but “First Readers” as understood in later schools are unknown. Euganor is better off, and a considerable library is at his disposal, although barring a few books of fables it contains little that is directly appealing to children. In the poorer schools the average master congratulates himself if his charges stay long enough to become fairly literate, but the better establishments, of course, accomplish far more. When a child can once read with tolerable fluency, and can write the characters on his wax tablets without wandering from the traced lines or needing too many corrections, he begins to have the great poets, especially Virgil and Horace in Latin and Homer in Greek, pounded into him. He is compelled to learn very long passages of such authors by heart,[106] and as an especially desirable exercise he is forced to translate both from Greek into Latin and also from Latin into Greek. Since many of Euganor’s pupils will presumably become orators, they are furthermore aided to improve their diction also in every possible manner, to acquire a good stock of metaphors, and to have on hand a great supply of apt, pungent quotations. All the possible meanings in the literary texts are explained, likewise the mythological, historical, and geographical allusions, etc. The study of literature thus becomes what is really a form of a “General Information” course.