We must go elsewhere for what little we know about the training of children.

Let us now turn to this for a while, remembering that it means parental example and the discipline of the body as well as the acquisition of elementary knowledge.

Unfortunately, no book has survived from that age in which the education of children was treated of.

Varro wrote such a book, but we know of it little more than its name, _Catus, sive de liberis educandis_.[258] In the fourth book of his _de Republica_ Cicero seems to have dealt with "disciplina puerilis," but from the few fragments that survive there is little to be learnt, and we may be pretty sure that Cicero could not write of this with much knowledge or experience.
The most famous passage is that in which he quotes Polybius as blaming the Romans for neglecting it;[259] certainly, he adds, they never wished that the State should regulate the education of children, or that it should be all on one model; the Greeks took much unnecessary trouble about it.

The Greeks of his own time whom Cicero knew did not inspire him with any exalted idea of the results of Greek education; but we should like to know whether in this book of his work on the State he did not express some feeling that on the children themselves, and therefore on their training, the fortunes of the State depend.
Such had been the feeling of the old Romans, though their State laid down no laws for education, but trusted to the force of tradition and custom.