It is a subject that has been very completely worked out, and an excellent summary of the results will be found in the little volume on Roman education written by the late Professor A.S.Wilkins, just before his lamented death: but he was describing its methods without special reference to its defects, and it is these defects on which I wish more particularly to dwell.[248] Let us notice, in the first place, how little is said in the literature of the time, including biographies, of that period of life which is now so full of interest to readers of memoirs, so full of interest to ourselves as we look back to it in advancing years.

It may be that we now exaggerate the importance of childhood, but it is equally certain that the Romans undervalued the importance of it.

It may be that we over-estimate the value of our public-school life, but it is certain that the Romans had no such school life to be proud of.
Biography was at this time a favourite form of literature, and some of the memoirs then written were available for use by later writers, such as Valerius Maximus, Suetonius, and Plutarch; yet it is curious how little has come down to us of the childhood or boyhood of the great men of the time.

Plutarch indeed was deeply interested in education, including that of childhood, and we can hardly doubt that he would have used in his Roman Lives any information that came in his way.

He does tell us something, for which we are eternally indebted to him, of old Cato's method of educating his son,[249] and something too, in his _Life of Aemilius Paullus_,[250] of the education of the eldest son of that family, the great Scipio Aemilianus.