=Spartan Education: Its Aim and Early Stages.=--Among the states of ancient Greece, Sparta possessed the earliest education of which we have any extended information. Its citizens dwelt in the midst of hostile peoples they had subjugated, and this made it necessary to produce a race of hardy and patriotic warriors. Strength, courage, and obedience to the laws were held as the aim of education. The Spartan educational system was intended to serve the state, and the rights of the individual were given little or no consideration. State control began with birth. The infant was immediately inspected by a council of elders, and, if he were sickly or deformed, he was ‘exposed’ to die in the mountains; but if he appeared physically promising, he was formally adopted by the state and left with his mother for rearing until seven. At that age the boys were placed in charge of a state officer and ate and slept in a kind of public barracks. Here their life became one of constant drill and discipline. In addition to hard beds, scanty clothing, and little food, they were given a graded course in gymnastics. Besides ball-playing, dancing, and the _pentathlum_--running, jumping, throwing the discus, casting the javelin, and wrestling--the exercises included boxing, and even the brutal _pancratium_, in which any means of overcoming one’s antagonist--kicking, gouging, and biting, as well as wrestling and boxing--was permitted. [Sidenote: Little intellectual or moral training.] The Spartan boys, however, received only a little informal training in the way of intellectual education. They simply committed to memory and chanted the laws of Lycurgus and selections from Homer, and they listened to the conversation of the older men during the meals at the common table, and were themselves exercised in giving concise and sensible answers to questions put to test their wisdom. Every adult was also required to choose as his constant companion or ‘hearer’ a youth to whom he might become an ‘inspirer.’ [Sidenote: Military training.] =Training in Youth and Manhood: Results.=--When a youth reached eighteen, he began the distinctive study of warfare. For two years he was trained in the use of arms and skirmishing, and every ten days had his courage and his physique tested by being whipped before the altar of Artemis. Then he regularly entered the army, and for ten years guarded some border fortress and lived upon the coarsest of fare. When he became thirty, he was considered a man and forced to marry at once, but even then he could visit his wife only clandestinely and was still obliged to live in common with the boys and assist in their training. [Sidenote: Similar education of girls.]