se stories of the great men of the
past are so detached from their historical surroundings that they
could not possibly serve as helps in the practical conduct of life;
they might indeed do positive mischief, by leading a shallow reasoner
to suppose that what may have been justifiable at one time and under
certain circumstances, regicide, for example, or exposure of oneself
in battle, is justifiable at all times and in all circumstances. Such
an appeal failed also by discouraging the habit of thinking about the
facts and problems of the day; and right-minded men like Cicero and
Cato the younger both suffered from this weakness of a purely literary
early training. Another drawback is that this teaching inevitably
exaggerated the personal element in history, at the very time too when
personalities were claiming more than their due share of the world's
attention; and thus the great lessons which Polybius had tried to
teach the Graeco-Roman world, of seeking for causes in historical
investigation, and of meditating on the phenomena of the world you
live in, were passed over or forgotten.

But so far as the study of language, of artistic diction, of
elocution, and intelligent reading could help a boy to prepare himself
for life, this education was good; more especially good as laying a
foundation for the acquirement of that art of oratory which, from old
Cato's time onwards, had been the chief end to be aimed at by all
intending to take part in public life. Cato indeed had well said to
his son, "Orator est, Marce fili, vir bonus dicendi peritus,"[290]
thus putting the ethical stamp of the man in the first place; and
his "rem tene, verba sequentur" is a valuable bit of advice for all
learners and teachers of literature. But more and more the end of all
education had come to be the art of oratory, and particularly the art
as exercised in the courts of law, where in Cicero's time neither
truth nor fact was supreme, and where the first thing required was
to be a clever speaker,--a vir bonus by all means if you were so
disposed. But to this we shall return directly.

In such schools, if he were not educated at home, the boy remained
till he was invested with the toga virilis, or pura. In the late
Republic this usually took place between the fourteenth and
seventeenth years;[291] thus the two young Ciceros seem both to have
been sixteen when they received the toga virilis, while Octavian and
Virgil were just fifteen, and the son