Never was there an education so completely
literary as the organized education of Rome and of her provinces. How
came it that there was any breach between the old and the new?
A question of this kind, involving centuries of history, does not admit
of a perfectly simple answer. It may be very reasonably maintained that
in Rome education killed literature. A carefully organized, universal
system of education, which takes for its material the work of great poets
and orators, is certain to breed a whole army of slaves. The teachers,
employed by the machine to expound ideas not their own, soon erect
systems of pedantic dogma, under which the living part of literature is
buried. The experience of ancient Rome is being repeated in the England
of to-day. The officials responsible for education, whatever they may
uneasily pretend, are forced by the necessities of their work to
encourage uniformity, and national education becomes a warehouse of
second-hand goods, presided over by men who cheerfully explain the mind
of Burke or of Shakespeare, adjusting the place of each, and balancing
faults against merits. But Roman education throughout the Empire had
further difficulties to encounter. To understand these it must be
remembered what Latin literature was. The Latins, when we first discern
them in the dim light of the past, were a small, strenuous, political
people, with a passion for government and war.
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