The arithmetic seems to have been mainly of a very simple and severely practical kind, especially the computation of interest and compound interest; and the philology generally, both grammar and criticism, was singularly narrow, uninteresting, and useless.

Of what conceivable advantage can it have been to any human being to know the name of the mother of Hecuba, of the nurse of Anchises, of the stepmother of Anchemolus, the number of years Acestes lived, and how many casks of wine the Sicilians gave to the Phrygians?
Yet these were the dispicable _minutiae_ which every schoolmaster was then expected to have at his fingers' ends, and every boy-scholar to learn at the point of the ferule--trash which was only fit to be unlearned the moment it was known.
For this kind of verbal criticism and fantastic archaeology Seneca, who had probably gone through it all, expresses a profound and very rational contempt.

In a rather amusing passage[6] he contrasts the kind of use which would be made of a Virgil lesson by a philosopher and a grammarian.

Coming to the lines, "Each happiest day for mortals speeds the first, Then crowds disease behind and age accurst," the philosopher will point out why and in what sense the early days of life are the best days, and how rapidly the evil days succeed them, and consequently how infinitely important it is to use well the golden dawn of our being.

But the verbal critic will content himself with the remark that Virgil always uses _fugio_ of the flight of time, and always joins "old age" with "disease," and consequently that these are tags to be remembered, and plagiarized hereafter in the pupils' "_original_ composition." Similarly, if the book in hand be Cicero's treatise "On the Commonwealth," instead of entering into great political questions, our grammarian will note that one of the Roman kings had no father (to speak of), and another no mother; that dictators used formerly to be called "masters of the people;" that Romulus perished during an eclipse; that the old form of _reipsa_ was _reapse_, and of _se ipse_ was _sepse_; that the starting point in the circus which is now called _creta_, or "chalk," used to be called _caix_, or _carcer_; that in the time of Ennuis _opera_ meant not only "work," but also "assistance," and so on, and so on.