Greek education consisted of three main branches, known as gymnastics, music, and grammar. By gymnastics the Greeks meant the physical training in the palestra, an open stretch of ground on the outskirts of the city. Here a private teacher gave instruction in the various athletic sports which were so popular at the national games. The training in music was intended to improve the moral nature of young men and to fit them for pleasant social intercourse. They were taught to play a stringed instrument, called the lyre, and at the same time to sing to their own accompaniment. Grammar, the third branch of education, included instruction in writing and the reading of the national literature. After a boy had learned to write and to read, the schoolmaster took up with him the works of the epic poets, especially Homer, besides _Aesop's Fables_ and other popular compositions. The student learned by heart much of the poetry and at so early an age that he always remembered it. Not a few Athenians, it is said, could recite the entire _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_. [Illustration: AN ATHENIAN SCHOOL (Royal Museum, Berlin) A painting by Duris on a drinking-cup, or cylix. The picture is divided by the two handles. In the upper half, beginning at the left: a youth playing the double flute as a lesson to the boy before him; a teacher holding a tablet and stylus and correcting a composition; a slave (_paedagogus_), who accompanied the children to and from school. In the lower half: a master teaching his pupil to play the lyre; a teacher holding a half- opened roll, listening to a recitation by the student before him; a bearded _paedagogus_. The inner picture, badly damaged, represents a youth in a bath.] ROMAN EDUCATION A Roman boy began his school days at about the age of seven. He learned to read, to write with a stylus on wax tablets, and to cipher by means of the reckoning board, or abacus. He received a little instruction in singing and memorized all sorts of proverbs and maxims, besides the laws of the Twelve Tables. [5] His studying went on under the watchful eyes of a harsh schoolmaster, who did not hesitate to use the rod. After Rome began to come into close contact with Greece, the curriculum was enlarged by the study of literature. The Romans were the first people who made the learning of a foreign tongue an essential part of education. Schools now arose in which the Greek language and literature formed the chief subject of instruction. As Latin literature came into being, its productions, especially the orations of Cicero and the poems of Vergil and Horace, were also used as texts for study. [Illustration: A ROMAN SCHOOL SCENE Wall painting, Herculaneum.]