We may note, by the way, that science, i.e.the higher mathematics and astronomy, was reckoned under the head of philosophy, while medicine and jurisprudence had become professional studies,[286] to learn which it was necessary to attach yourself to an experienced practitioner, as with the art of war In the grammar schools, as we may call them, the course was purely literary and humanistic, and it was conducted both in Greek and Latin, but chiefly in Greek, as a natural result of the comparative scantiness of Latin literature.[287] Homer, Hesiod, and Menander were the favourite authors studied; only later on, after the full bloom of the Augustan literature, did Latin poets, especially Virgil and Horace, take a place of almost equal importance.

The study of the Greek poets was apparently a thorough one.

It included the teaching of language, grammar, metre, style, and subject matter, and was aided by reading aloud, which was reckoned of great importance, and learning by heart, on the part of the pupils.

In the discussion of the subject matter any amount of comment was freely allowed to the master, who indeed was expected to have at his fingers' ends explanations of all sorts of allusions, and thus to enable the boys to pick up a great deal of odd knowledge and a certain amount of history, mixed up of course with a large percentage of valueless mythology.
"In grammaticis," says Cicero, "poetarum pertractatio, historiarum cognitio, verborum interpretatio, pronuntiandi quidam sonus."[288] The method, if such it can be called, was not at all unlike that pursued in our own public schools, Eton, for example, before new methods and subjects came in.

Its great defect in each case was that it gave but little opportunity for learning to distinguish fact from fancy, or acquiring that scientific habit of mind which is now becoming essential for success in all departments of life, and which at Rome was so rare that it seems audacious to claim it even for such a man of action as Caesar, or for such a man of letters as Varro.