2/8 Ou times of Ejiropean History ^. / Fig. 115. ScRiBBLiNGS OF Sicilian Schoolboys on a Brick in the Days of the Roman Empire In passing a brickyard these school- boys of seventeen hundred -years ago amused themselves in scribbling school exercises in Greek on the soft clay bricks before they were baked. At the top a lit- tle boy who was still making capitals care- fully wrote the capital letter S (Greek S) ten times, and under it the similar letter K, also ten times. These he followed by •the words " turtle " (XEAfiNA), " mill " .(MTAA), and "pail" (KAAOS), all in cap- itals. Then an older boy, who could do more than write capitals, has pushed the little chap aside and proudly demonstrated his superiority by writing in two lines an exercise in tongue gymnastics (like " Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers," etc.), which in our letters is as follows : Nai neai nea naia neoi temon, hos neoi ha naus This means : " Boys cut new planks for a new ship, that the ship might float." A third boy then added two lines at the bot- tom. The brick illustrates the spread of Greek (p. 232) as well as provincial educa- tion under the Roman Empire (p. 282) /duced ish^d Much as Athens in the days of greatest Athenian power, so the vision of the greatness of the Roman State stirred the imagination of the time. Roman literature now reached its highest level. Qic- ero, the most cultivated man Rome ever pro-. duced (p. 2 6 5), had per- ished at the hands of Antony's brutal sol- diery as one of the last sacrifices of the long- civil war. He had drunk deep at the foun- tains of Greek culture. There were many edu- cated men in Rome who had enjoyed sim- ilar opportunities, and, like Cicero too, had been shaken by the ter- rible ordeal of the death struggles of the Republic. Horace, the greatest poet of the time, had fraternized with the as- sassins of Caesar, and in the ensuing struggle had faced the future Augustus on the field
