Twice in his old age Horace alludes rather disparagingly to his schooldays in Rome: he was taught, he says, out of a translation from Homer by an inferior Latin writer (Ep. II, i, 62, 69), and his master, a retired soldier, one Orbilius, was "fond of the rod" (Ep. II, i, 71). I observe that the sympathies of Horatian editors and commentators, themselves mostly schoolmasters, are with Orbilius as a much enduring paedagogue rather than with his exasperated pupil. We know from other sources that the teacher was a good scholar and a noted teacher, and that, dying in his hundredth year, he was honoured by a marble statue in his native town of Beneventum; but like our English Orbilius, Dr. Busby, he is known to most men only through Horace's resentful epithet;--"a great man," said Sir Roger de Coverley, "a great man; he whipped my grandfather, a very great man!" The young Englishman on leaving school goes to Oxford or to Cambridge: the young Roman went to Athens. There we find Horace at about nineteen years of age, learning Greek, and attending the schools of the philosophers; those same Stoics and Epicureans whom a few years later the first great Christian Sophist was to harangue on Mars' Hill. These taught from their several points of view the basis of happiness and the aim of life. Each in turn impressed him: for a time he agreed with Stoic Zeno that active duty is the highest good; then lapsed into the easy doctrine of Epicurean Aristippus that subjective pleasure is the only happiness. His philosophy was never very strenuous, always more practical than speculative; he played with his teachers' systems, mocked at their fallacies, assimilated their serious lessons. [Illustration: _Alinari photo._] [_Palace of the Conservators, Rome._ BRUTUS.]