ks with
a select circle of younger men--including Varro and Cicero--and
sometimes also went over outlines of speeches with the authors,
or put similar outlines into the hands of his friends. This was
instruction, but Stilo was not a professional schoolmaster; he
taught literature and rhetoric, just as jurisprudence was taught
at Rome, in the character of a senior friend of aspiring young men,
not of a man hired and holding himself at every one's command.

Course of Literature and Rhetoric

But about his time began also the scholastic higher instruction
in Latin, separated as well from elementary Latin as from Greek
instruction, and imparted in special establishments by paid
masters, ordinarily manumitted slaves. That its spirit and method
were throughout borrowed from the exercises in the Greek literature
and language, was a matter of course; and the scholars also consisted,
as at these exercises, of youths, and not of boys. This Latin
instruction was soon divided like the Greek into two courses;
in so far as the Latin literature was first the subject of
scientific lectures, and then a technical introduction was given
to the preparation of panegyrics, public, and forensic orations.
The first Roman school of literature was opened about Stilo's time
by Marcus Saevius Nicanor Postumus, the first separate school for
Latin rhetoric about 660 by Lucius Plotius Gallus; but ordinarily
instructions in rhetoric were also given in the Latin schools of
literature. This new Latin school-instruction was of the most
comprehensive importance. The introduction to the knowledge of
Latin literature and Latin oratory, such as had formerly been
imparted by connoisseurs and masters of high position, had
preserved a certain independence in relation to the Greeks.
The judges of language and the masters of oratory were doubtless
under the influence of Hellenism, but not absolutely under that of
the Greek school-grammar and school-rhetoric; the latter in particular
was decidedly an object of dread. The pride as well as the sound
common sense of the Romans demurred to the Greek assertion that
the ability to speak of things, which the orator understood and felt,
intelligibly and attractively to his peers in the mother-tongue
could be learned in the school by school-rules. To the solid
practical advocate the procedure of the Greek rhetoricians, so
totally estranged from life, could not but appear worse for the
beginner than no preparatio