YOUNG GREEK BOYS AND OLD GREEK SCHOOLS. 811 



and the hero lays it on the ground to embrace the boy; and the 

 affection and motherly anxiety of the Lament of Andromache, 

 have touched the sympathy of the centuries. In Herodotus's story of 

 the infant Cypselus, the baby's smile turns the hired assassins from 

 murder to pity, and destroys their courage till, passing him on from 

 man to man, they leave the child unharmed. Euripides represents 

 Iphigenia bringing her infant brother Orestes to plead for her, 

 though she is already doomed to the sacrifice, a more powerful appeal 

 to the feelings than the most studied eloquence. 



Whooping-cough, measles, scarlatina, and mumps are not spoken 

 of, but that other modern necessity — sleeplessness, walking the night 

 ^vith child in arms — had reached a high degree of cultivation. The 

 Grecian husband, lord of his household, relegated crying child and 

 martyred mother to a separate sleeping room, while he slept " far 

 from the madding crowd." The unpractical old bachelor Plato, in 

 his ideal Republic, urges that two or three stout nurses should always 

 be in readiness to carry about infants, because they gain so much 

 spirit and endurance by this treatment. 



The antique cradle was a flat swing of basket work, as seen in a 

 British Museum terra-cotta relief, in which the infant Bacchus is 

 being carried. Another kind of cradle, in the form of a shoe, also 

 made of basket work, was provided with handles, allowing it to be 

 cai*ried or suspended by ropes and rocked. In the opening scene of 

 Theocritus's Little Hercules, Alcmena uses the bronze shield of the 

 slain Pterelaus as a cradle for the infant hero and his brother; and as 

 she rocks the mighty arm she sings the little lullaby so charmingly 

 paraphrased by Tennyson in the cradle song in The Princess. Nurses 

 and governesses of native birth were often employed by the rich. 

 The highest tone, however, had created a demand for the Spartan 

 nurse, her treatment insuring the child the greatest physical endur- 

 ance. Archytas, the philosopher, has received deserved praise as the 

 inventor of the rattle, which has saved so much in fret and furniture. 



The exposure of children to inclement weather, cold, and fatigue 

 was as strongly advocated by the ancient pure-air enthusiast as by the 

 modern theorist, and generally led to the same result — the destruc- 

 tion of the weak and sickly. Yet this outcome was not at all un- 

 popular, especially at Sparta, where physical vigor, not intellectual 

 prestige, was required. The custom of exposing sickly or deformed 

 children to the wild beasts on the mountains was practiced through- 

 out Greece, and advocated by the greatest moralists. Though the 

 horror of the practice can hardly be reconciled to our Christian train- 

 ing, there is a justification, or rather explanation, all powerful, when 

 judged by the standards of long ago. The father had absolute power 

 of life and death over the child. The state could only in extreme 



