The school-system of Rome now developed to a height which has only been reached once more by education in the second half of the nineteenth century, and of which many civilised nations still fall far short. For the children of the free workers, of both sexes, there was general and free elementary instruction in the later Empire. Boys and girls sat together on the benches of the _literator_ in the open porticoes, and the girls of the more wealthy went on to the secondary schools of the _grammaticus_, as their brothers did. Many women had slave-tutors teaching them Greek letters and philosophy. The marble chambers of the rich, with their rare birds nesting in the cedar roof, their silver furniture and Greek vases, and all the treasures of Persia, did, indeed, often echo with voluptuous music, and draw their heavy curtains upon scenes such as unthinking wealth inspires in every age; but they resounded, too, with feminine discussions of Greek philosophy and poetry, and Roman politics, and they smiled on types of womanhood that preserved all the character of the old Republic, with all the interest in art and thought and life of the new Empire. It is so commonly believed that this enlargement of the liberty and power of the Roman women led to a general degradation of character that I must linger for a moment on the point. The popular idea of an entire corruption of Rome in the first century is quite discarded by modern scholarship. The English reader will find the finest and truest picture of that maligned age in Dr. Samuel Dill's _Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, in which the current exaggeration is fully refuted.[8] The popular notion rests almost entirely on the satires of Juvenal, a bohemian writer, anti-feminist and anti-aristocratic, who hung on the fringe of society to catch what dubious morsels he could of idle chatter and exaggerated scandal. It would be more reasonable to take Father Vaughan's strictures on the "smart set" as a full picture of English society than to take Juvenal's less conscientious gossip about a few wealthy women as a complete picture of Rome. A careful reader will soon see that Juvenal lashes Roman women for their culture and for innocent fads, as much as for vice. As Letourneau says: "Neither the satires of the poets nor the objurgations of moralists suffice to prove that the Roman woman was essentially inferior to her male companion." The moralist he seems to have in mind is Seneca; but Seneca expressly claimed that woman was the mental and moral equal of man, and he lived in a circle of fine, cultivated ladies. The morbidity of a few of the wealthier women--a morbidity that has a parallel in every age of luxury and change, in both sexes--does not characterise the sex; and, as to the larger class of less wealthy women, Dr. Dill adds: "In his [Juvenal's] own modest class female morality ... was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age" (p. 76).