When the boy had got beyond this elementary training, he entered upon the studies of the grammaticus. Now the school-training as a whole after the fourth century is said to have been based on the seven liberal arts of Martianus Capella, described in his marriage of Mercury and Philologia. This work had for its foundation Varro’s ‘IX libri disciplinarum’, and had an influence which went down through the Middle Ages. But in the department of the grammarian there were no neatly divided compartments for Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music, each with its special master. Grammarians specialized in one branch or another (as Victorius at Bordeaux in antiquarian research[370]), and the edicts of the emperors speak of special masters in shorthand, book-copying, arithmetic, architecture.[371] But there is no ground for thinking that these were to be found in the ordinary school: it is much more likely that they existed to train slaves or specialists for particular posts in the imperial offices. It is hardly conceivable that Ausonius should have dealt with some thirty Bordeaux teachers (of whom several were grammarians) without indicating such a division, had it existed. The actual method of conducting the lesson is indicated by Eumenius. ‘Ibi’ (in the new schools of Autun) ‘adulescentes optimi discant, nobis quasi sollemne carmen praefantibus.’[372] The teacher would select a passage and read it out slowly to his pupils with proper attention to punctuation, pronunciation, expression, and metre.[373] Clearness and effectiveness of intonation were specially practised with a view to the later rhetorical declamations. But the reason for the universal stress on elocution in antiquity went deeper than the exigencies of practical life. The written words had a soul which the grammaticus by reading strove to revive. ‘The office of the art “Grammatikê” is so to deal with the Grammata as to recover from them all that can be recovered of that which they have saved from oblivion, to reinstate as far as possible the spoken word in its first impressiveness and musicalness.’[374] Such, as Professor Murray points out, is the doctrine of the official teachers. Dionysius Thrax (who was the first to write a τέχνη γραμματική), in enumerating the six parts of Grammatikê, mentions as the most essential reading aloud κατὰ προσῳδίαν, ‘with just the accent, the cadences, the expression, with which the words were originally spoken, before they were turned from λόγοι to γράμματα, from winged words to permanent letters’.[375] Ausonius makes a special point of it to his grandson: Do you with varied intonation read A host of verses; let your words succeed Each other with the accent and the stress Your master taught you. Slurring will repress The sense of what you’re reading; and a pause Adds vigour to an overburdened clause.[376] This was the framework of every lesson.