Plato used human society as material from which to construct an organization artistically perfect and representing political order, just as Pheidias or Praxiteles used clay as a material from which to construct the human being artistically perfect and representing the soul of man. With this fine organism of the ideal state Plato incorporated his conception of childhood in its two relations of singing and being sung to. He thought of the child as a member of the three-fold chorus of life: and when he set these choirs hymning the divine strain, he made the recipients of the revelation to be themselves children, the forming elements of the growing, organic state. Certainly it is a wide arc which is spanned by these three great representatives of Greek art, and in passing from Homer to Sophocles, and from Sophocles to Plato, we are not merely considering the epic, the tragic, and the philosophic treatment of childhood in literature; we are discovering the development of the conception of childhood in a nation which has communicated to history the eidolon of the fairest humanity. It is scarcely too much to speak of it as the evolution of a soul, and to find, as one so often finds in his study of Greece, the outline of the course of the world’s thought. The old, formal view of antiquity, which once placed Grecian life almost beyond the pale of our human sympathy, and made the men and women cold marble figures in our imagination, has given place to a warmer regard. Through literary reproduction, which paraphrases Greek life in the dramatic art of Browning and Fitzgerald, gives us Spencerian versions of Homer, or, better still, the healthy childlike recital in Mr. Palmer’s version of the Odyssey, and enables us to sit down after dinner with Plato, Mr. Jowett being an idiomatic interpreter; through the discoveries of Schliemann and others, by which the mythic and heroic ages of Greece are made almost grotesquely familiar,—we are coming to read Grecian history, in Niebuhr’s felicitous phrase, as if it really happened, and to lay aside our artificial and distant ways of becoming familiar with Greek life. Yet the means which have led to this modern attitude toward classic antiquity are themselves the product of modern life; the secrets of Greek life are more open to us now because our own life has become freer, more hospitable, and more catholic. It is a delight to us to turn from the marble of Pheidias to the terra cotta of the unknown modelers of the Tanagra figurines, while these homelike, domestic images serve as interpreters, also, of the larger, nobler designs. So we have recourse to those fragments of the Greek Anthology which give us glimpses of Greek interiors, and by means of them we find a side-light thrown upon the more majestic expressions of poetic and dramatic art.