Pythagoras and Vitruvius. Rome erected monuments to power, but the arrangements were Greek ideals of beauty. 4. Education The Greek Curriculum of Rome By the first century BCE, a Roman child’s education was nearly entirely Greek. From alphabet to rhetoric, the system followed the structure created by Greek proponents centuries before. Boys from noble families learned to read Homer before they read Virgil. They studied figure from Euclid, sense from Aristotle, and rhetoric from Demosthenes. Greek preceptors — frequently slaves or freemen