His mother had not wished to send Brutus to school, afraid her little boy would be exposed to children of inferior rank and wealth, and worried that his studious nature would be laughed at. Better that Brutus have his own tutor at home. But then Brutus's stepfather had insisted that this only son needed the stimulus and competition of a school. "Some healthy activity and ordinary playmates'' was how Silanus had put it, not precisely jealous of the first place Brutus held in Servilia's heart, more concerned that when Brutus matured he should at least have learned to associate with various kinds of people. Naturally the school Aurelia recommended was an exclusive one, but pedagogues who ran schools had a distressingly independent turn of mind that led them to accept bright boys from less rarefied backgrounds than a Marcus Junius Brutus, not to mention two or three bright girls. With Servilia for mother, it was inevitable that Brutus should hate school, though Gaius Cassius Longinus, the fellow pupil of whom Servilia approved most, was from quite as good a family as a Junius Brutus. Brutus, however, tolerated Cassius only because to do so kept his mother happy. What had he in common with a loud and turbulent boy like Cassius, enamored of war, strife, deeds of great daring? Only the fact that he had quickly become teacher's pet had managed to reconcile Brutus to the awful ordeal of school. And fellows like Cassius. Unfortunately the person Brutus most yearned to call friend was his Uncle Cato; but Servilia refused to hear of his establishing any kind of intimacy with her despised half brother. Uncle Cato was descended, she never tired of reminding her son, from a Tusculan peasant and a Celtiberian slave, whereas in Brutus were united two separate lines of exalted antiquity, one from Lucius Junius Brutus, the founder of the Republic (who had deposed the last King of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus), and the other from Gaius Servilius Ahala (who had killed Maelius when Maelius had attempted to make himself King of Rome some decades into the new Republic).