The schoolroom was probably of the traditional type. The furniture was very simple. There were no desks (as we may infer, e.g. from the well-known fresco at Herculanum and the bas-relief at the Louvre)[622] and the pupils wrote on their knees. The benches on which they sat were arranged around the chair of the teacher. On the walls would be pictures of great historical events and geographical maps[623] according to Seneca’s principle ‘homines amplius oculis quam auribus credunt’.[624] A gravestone relief discovered at Neumagen near Trèves shows a tutor in a comfortable seat holding a roll of papyrus. On either side sit two elder sons also reading from rolls, while a younger son stands on the right with his wax tablets, furnished with a handle, waiting for his writing lesson. The stone dates from the first centuries of the Christian era, and probably represents a private school in the home of a wealthy Gaul who wished to boast of the good education which he had given his children.[625] We do not hear much about private tuition, but the old Roman custom of having a household slave to teach the rudiments must have persisted in the wealthy families of Gaul. Paulinus of Pella gives the impression that he had such training,[626] and Sidonius writes to Simplicius[627] that it is his duty to admonish his sons who are spoiled and refuse to submit to his assiduous care—which suggests, as Hodgkin remarks, that he was their tutor. In the schools a ‘chair’ (_cathedra_) was occupied by the teacher, who was variously called ‘professor’, ‘praeceptor’, or, more rarely, ‘magister’, and a _schola_ meant the number of people grouped under one _cathedra_, just as, in the official language of the time, it meant a group of officials serving under one head—soldiers, servants of the palace, and so forth.[628]