d to learn by playthings, which ingeniously combined
instruction and amusement. Ivory letters--probably in earlier times a
less costly material was used--were put into his hands, just as they are
put into the hands of children now-a-days, that he might learn how to
form words. As soon as reading was acquired, he began to learn by heart.
"When we were boys," Cicero represents himself as saying to his brother
Quintus, in one of his Dialogues, "we used to learn the 'Twelve
Tables.'" The "Twelve Tables" were the laws which Appius of evil fame
and his colleagues the decemvirs had arranged in a code. "No one," he
goes on to say, "learns them now." Books had become far more common in
the forty years which had passed between Cicero's boyhood and the time
at which he is supposed to be speaking; and the tedious lesson of his
early days had given place to something more varied and interesting.

Writing the boy learned by following with the pen (a sharp-pointed
_stylus_ of metal), forms of letters which had been engraved on tablets
of wood. At first his hand was held and guided by the teacher. This was
judged by the experienced to be a better plan than allowing him to shape
letters for himself on the wax-covered tablet. Of course parchment and
paper were far too expensive materials to be used for exercises and
copies. As books were rare and costly, dictation became a matter of much
importance. The boy wrote, in part at least, his own schoolbooks. Horace
remembers with a shudder what he had himself written at the dictation of
his schoolmaster, who was accustomed to enforce good writing and
spelling with many blows. He never could reconcile himself to the early
poets whose verse had furnished the matter of these lessons.

Our Roman boy must have found arithmetic a more troublesome thing than
the figures now in use (for which we cannot be too thankful to the Arabs
their inventors) have made it. It is difficult to imagine how any thing
like a long sum in multiplication or division could have been done with
the Roman numerals, so cumbrous were they. The number, for instance,
which we represent by the figures 89 would require for its expression no
less than _nine_ figures, LXXXVIIII. The boy was helped by using the
fingers, the left hand being used to signify numbers below a hundred,
and the right numbers above it. Sometimes his teacher would have a
counting-board, on which units, tens, and hundreds would be represented
by variously colo