forts of Cato in the field of politics, produce at once
a comical and a melancholy impression; we may smile at the creed
and its propagators, but still it is a grave matter when even able men
begin to addict themselves to absurdity.

Training of Youth
Sciences of General Culture at This Period

The training of youth followed, as may naturally be supposed,
the course of bilingual humane culture chalked out in the previous epoch,
and the general culture also of the Roman world conformed
more and more to the forms established for that purpose by the Greeks.
Even the bodily exercises advanced from ball-playing, running,
and fencing to the more artistically-developed Greek gymnastic contests;
though there were not yet any public institutions for gymnastics,
in the principal country-houses the palaestra was already to be found
by the side of the bath-rooms. The manner in which the cycle
of general culture had changed in the Roman world during the course
of a century, is shown by a comparison of the encyclopaedia of Cato(2)
with the similar treatise of Varro "concerning the school-sciences."
As constituent elements of non-professional culture, there appear in Cato
the art of oratory, the sciences of agriculture, of law, of war,
and of medicine; in Varro--according to probable conjecture--grammar,
logic or dialectics, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy,
music, medicine, and architecture. Consequently in the course
of the seventh century the sciences of war, jurisprudence,
and agriculture had been converted from general into professional
studies. On the other hand in Varro the Hellenic training of youth
appears already in all its completeness: by the side of the course
of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy, which had been introduced
at an earlier period into Italy, we now find the course which had
longer remained distinctively Hellenic, of geometry, arithmetic,
astronomy, and music.(3) That astronomy more especially,
which ministered, in the nomenclature of the stars, to the thoughtless
erudite dilettantism of the age and, in its relations to astrology,
to the prevailing religious delusions, was regularly and zealously
studied by the youth in Italy, can be proved also otherwise;
the astronomical didactic poems of Aratus, among all the works
of Alexandrian literature, found earliest admittance into the instruction
of Roman youth. To this Hellenic course there was added the study
of medicine, which was retained from