Round temple by the Tiber, probably to be identified as the temple of Hercules Victor: one of the rare
examples of a Greek-style marble building in Rome before Augustan times. Sponsored in the late second
century B.C. by the rich merchant M. Octavius Herrenus, it lacks the emphatic entrance and high
podium of Roman Italic temples. The entablature is missing and the present roof is modern.
The crux of the matter was education, for to the Greeks their paideia was their culture. By tradition the
upper-class Roman boy absorbed political and legal experience from his father's friends, and spent the
campaigning season, from the age of seventeen, with the army. But the Greeks had developed a pattern
of formal study, first of literature (primarily Homer), and then rhetoric and, for some, philosophy.
Aemilius Paullus provided his sons with a bevy of Greek masters, even in music and hunting, and a