It cannot have escaped notice how large a part is played by children in the spectacular appointments of the Greek drama. Those symbolic processions, those groups of human life, those scenes of human passion, are rendered more complete by the silent presence of children. They serve in the temples; their eyes are quick to catch the coming of the messenger; they suffer dumbly in the fate that pulls down royal houses and topples the pillars of ancestral palaces. It was impossible that it should be otherwise. The Greek mind, which found expression in tragic art, was oppressed by the problems, not alone of individual fate, but of the subtle relations of human life. The serpents winding about Laokoön entwined in their folds the shrinking youths, and the father’s anguish was for the destiny which would not let him suffer alone. Yet there is scarcely a child’s voice to be heard in the whole range of Greek poetic art. The conception is universally of the child, not as acting, far less as speaking, but as a passive member of the social order. It is not its individual life so much as its related life which is contemplated. We are related to the Greeks not only through the higher forms of literature, but through the political thought which had with them both historical development and speculative representation. It comes thus within the range of our inquiry to ask what recognition of childhood there was in writings which sought to give an artistic form to political thought. There is a frequent recurrence by Plato to the subject of childhood in the state, and we may see in his presentation not only the germinal relation which childhood bears, so that education becomes necessarily one of the significant functions of government, but also what may not unfairly be called a reflection of divinity.