In 1885, a Roman cemetary was discovered near Krško where they found a tombstone dedicated to Gaius Marcius Ceiler. The writing on it reveals that Ceiler was a teacher by profession. Tombstones mentioning this profession are quite a rare find in the area of the old Roman empire, particularly in its provinces.

Since Romans often abbreviated the inscriptions on their tombstones to gain more space, their meaning is not always completely clear. The abbreviation GR. found on Gaius’s tombstone could for example mean he was teaching literature (lat. Grammaticus) or Greek language (lat. Graecus).

In the times of the Roman Empire schools were private and education was not mandatory. Nonetheless, each Roman city had at least one primary school teacher in the early days of the empire already. Children between the ages of 7 and 11 years visited primary school, which developed after the ancient Greek model, to learn reading, writing and arithmetic. The lessons were very strict and students were sometimes spanked by their teacher. Young men could choose to continue their schooling with a grammarian to attain the equivalent of a high school education. There, they read mostly poetry and literature, and also became acquainted with astronomy, geography and physics. They wrote subjects down on small waxed wooden tablets and used a stylus instead of a pencil.