nsidered by the Romans to be the climax of
education, enabled him to wrest supremacy from the Greek teachers who so
long had enjoyed a monopoly of teaching in the city.

When fifty-three years of age, Quintilian retired from his school, and
devoted himself to authorship. In the first two books of his great work,
"Institutes of Oratory,"[27] he sets forth his ideas on education. This
is the most remarkable treatise on education bequeathed to us by
antiquity.

He taught that as oratory was the climax of Roman education, especial
attention should be given to it. He was not in sympathy with the
prevailing use that was made of oratory. Oratorical contests were
frequent, and they excited popular interest. Courts, lawyers, and public
speakers resorted to all the tricks of speech to win popular favor, and
audiences demanded something startling, dramatic, and unusual.
Quintilian tried to stay this tide, and taught that oratory should
conceal itself. He met, however, with poor success in reforming the
evil.

=Quintilian's Pedagogy.=--His pedagogical teachings, some of which we
present, are of the greatest importance.

1. There should be no corporal punishment, as punishment administered to
slaves is not suitable for children who are to be citizens.

2. Nurses must be irreproachable in life and language, so that children
be not brought in contact with anything impure.

3. Amusements should be turned to account as a means of education.

4. Teachers should be men of ability and of spotless character.

5. Children should begin early with a foreign tongue, as their own
language will come to them naturally in their intercourse with those
about them.

6. Education should begin with the earliest childhood.

7. The forms and names of the letters should be learned simultaneously,
playthings being utilized to assist in this.

8. Care should be taken that children do not acquire a distaste for
learning.

9. In learning to read, advance very slowly.

10. Writing should begin with tracing, and the copies should consist of
moral precepts.

11. The individuality of the child should be studied.

12. Public schools are preferable to other means of education, because
they do not subject the child to greater moral danger, while they
stimulate him by association, friendship, and example, to nobler
endeavor.

13. Under the _literatus_, grammar, composition, music, geometry,
astronomy, and literature are to be studied.

14. The c