r line, "Either learn, or go: there
is yet another choice--to be flogged," was liberally employed. Horace
celebrates his old schoolmaster as a "man of many blows," and another
distinguished pupil of this teacher, the Busby or Keate of antiquity,
has specified the weapons which he employed, the ferule and the thong.
The thong is the familiar "tawse" of schools north of the Border. The
ferule was a name given both to the bamboo and to the yellow cane, which
grew plentifully both in the islands of the Greek Archipelago and in
Southern Italy, as notably at Cannae in Apulia, where it gave a name to
the scene of the great battle. The _virga_ was also used, a rod
commonly of birch, a tree the educational use of which had been already
discovered. The walls of Pompeii indeed show that the practice of Eton
is truly classical down to its details.

As to the advantage of the practice opinions were divided. One
enthusiastic advocate goes so far as to say that the Greek word for a
cane signifies by derivation, "the sharpener of the young" (_narthex,
nearous thegein_), but the best authorities were against it. Seneca is
indignant with the savage who will "butcher" a young learner because he
hesitates at a word--a venial fault indeed, one would think, when we
remember what must have been the aspect of a Roman book, written as it
was in capitals, almost without stops, and with little or no distinction
between the words. And Quintilian is equally decided, though he allows
that flogging was an "institution."

As to holidays the practice of the Roman schools probably resembled that
which prevails in the Scotch Universities, though with a less
magnificent length of vacation. Every one had a holiday on the "days of
Saturn" (a festival beginning on the seventeenth of December), and the
schoolboys had one of their own on the "days of Minerva," which fell in
the latter half of March; but the "long vacation" was in the summer.
Horace speaks of lads carrying their fees to school on the fifteenth of
the month for eight months in the year (if this interpretation of a
doubtful passage is correct). Perhaps as this was a country school the
holidays were made longer than usual, to let the scholars take their
part in the harvest, which as including the vintage would not be over
till somewhat late in the autumn. We find Martial, however, imploring a
schoolmaster to remember that the heat of July was not favorable to
learning, and suggesting that he shou