§124. Discipline.--The discipline seems to have been really Roman in its severity, if we may judge from the picture of a school above referred to (§120) and by the grim references to the rod and ferule in Juvenal and Martial. Horace has given to his teacher, Orbilius, a deathless fame by the adjective _plāgōsus_. From Nepos we learn that then as now teachers might have appealed to the natural emulation between well-bred boys, and we know that prizes, too, were offered. Perhaps we may think the ferule well deserved when we read of the schoolboy's trick immortalized by Persius. The passage (III, 44 f.) is worth quoting in full: _Saepe oculōs, meminī, tangēbam parvus olīvō,_ _Grandia sī nōllem moritūrī verba Cātōnis_ _Discere et īnsānō multum laudanda magistrō!_[2] [Footnote 2: "Often, I remember, as a small boy I used to give my eyes a touch with oil, if I did not want to learn Cato's grand dying speech, sure to be rapturously applauded by my wrong-headed master."] §125. End of Childhood.--There was no special ceremony to mark the passing of girlhood into womanhood, but for the boy the attainment of his majority was marked by the laying aside of the crimson-bordered _toga praetexta_ and the putting on of the pure white _toga virīlis_. There was no fixed year, corresponding to the twenty-first with us, in which the _puer_ became _iuvenis_; something depended upon the physical and intellectual development of the boy himself, something upon the will or caprice of his _pater familiās_, more perhaps upon the time in which he lived. We may say generally, however, that the _toga virīlis_ was assumed between the fourteenth and seventeenth years, the later age belonging to the earlier time when citizenship carried with it more responsibility than under the Empire and demanded a greater maturity. §126. For the classical period we may put the age required at sixteen, and if we add to this the _tīrōcinium_ (§117), which followed the donning of the garb of manhood, we shall have the seventeen years after the expiration of which the citizen had been liable in ancient times to military duty. The day was even less precisely fixed. We should expect the birthday at the beginning of the seventeenth year, but it seems to have been the more usual, but by no means invariable, custom to select for the ceremony the feast of Liber which happened to come nearest to the seventeenth birthday. This feast was celebrated on the 17th of March and was called the _līberālia_. No more appropriate time could have been selected to suggest the freer life of manhood upon which the boy was now about to enter.