Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/710

 694 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

second the Lives of Suetonius furnishes the sources. Two chapters are devoted to a "Contrast Between the Earlier and the Later Periods of Roman Education" and to the "Survival of Early Roman Educational Ideals in the Later Period." Plautus and Tacitus in the first, and Cornelius Nepos, Suetonius, Tacitus, and Marcus Aurelius in the latter instance, are the sources. The sources for the third period of Hellenized Roman education are the Satires and Epistles of Horace, the Epigrams of Martial, the Epistles of Seneca, the Lives of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius, Musonius, the Letters of Pliny the Younger, and the Satires of Juvenal. This period concludes the volume with a chapter on the "The Orator as the Ideal of Roman Education" (with Cicero's dialogue On Oratory as the source), and a chapter on the "Scientific Exposition of Roman Education" (with selections from the Institutes of Quintilian).

Of the other work the author gives the following succinct account :

Professedly a text-book, this volume, while not pretending to be an exhaustive history of the subject, aims to give more than a superficial outline containing a summary of trite generalizations. The merits which the author has sought to incorporate are (i) to furnish a body of historical facts sufficient to give the student concrete material from which to form generalizations; (2) to suggest, chiefly by classification of this material, interpretations such as will not consist merely in unsupported generaliza- tions; (3) to give, to some degree, a flavor of the original sources of information ; (4) to make evident the relation between educational develop- ment and other aspects of the history of civilization; (5) to deal with educational tendencies rather than with men; (6) to show the connection between educational theory and actual school work in its historical develop- ment; (7) to suggest relations with present educational work.

The book, in other words, aims to meet the needs of the average student of the history of education needs which involve, on the one hand, a widening and deepening of the general background of knowledge of human culture, as achieved in the successive efforts of the race toward self-instruction, and, on the other hand, a more definite conception of the meaning, nature, process, and purpose of education which will "lift him above the narrow prejudices, the restricted outlook, the foibles, and the petty trials of the average schoolroom, and afford him the fundamentals of an everlasting faith as broad as human nature and as deep as the life of the race."