But it is clear that the father wished to know about the boy as well as about the villas;[254] and in one letter we find Cicero telling Quintus that he wishes to teach his boy himself, as he has been teaching his own son.

"I'll do wonders with him if I can get him to myself when I am at leisure, for at Rome there is not time to breathe (nam Romae respirandi non est locus)."[255] It is clear that the boys, who were only eleven and twelve in this year 54, were being educated at home, and as clear too that Cicero, who was just then very much occupied in the courts, had no time to attend to them himself.

Young Quintus, we hear, gets on well with his rhetoric master; Cicero does not wholly approve the style in which he is being taught, and thinks he may be able to teach him his own more learned style, though the boy himself seems to prefer the declamatory method of the teacher.[256] The last entry in these letters to the absent father is curious:[257] "I love your Cicero as he deserves and as I ought.

But I am letting him leave me, because I don't want to keep him from his masters, and because his mother is going away,--and without her I am nervous about his greediness!" Up to this point he has written in the warmest terms of the boy, but here, as so often in Cicero's letters about other people, disapprobation is barely hinted in order not to hurt the feelings of his correspondent.
The one thing that is really pleasing in these allusions is the genuine desire of both parents that their boys shall be of good disposition and well educated.

But of real training or of home discipline we unluckily get no hint.