Furthermore, in the early stages of life the training of the body was regarded as more essential than the training of the mind. When his education was finished, the Athenian boy knew his elements, he could wrestle and box, he could recite Homer and play the lyre, he could swim and dance: but of ‘useful’ knowledge, so called, and especially of that horrid travesty that we call ‘technical education,’ he possessed nothing. In most of the qualities of discipline, as Plato complains, the Athenian system was lacking; but it had one great practical virtue: it kept the mean, and neither over-stimulated nor yet over-repressed a boy’s natural attitude towards imparted knowledge. An Athenian, when he emerged from boyhood and became a man, was neither a pedant nor a barbarian. In the fifth century B.C. it was realized that with growing animals the demands of the body must come before the demands of the spirit. Physical perfection, if it is to be won at all, must be secured in youth: the final training of the mind can be left to a later stage of life. The method had its obvious defects, but at least it did not create that distaste for all study which more perfect theories of education have often produced. An Athenian till the end of his life was always eager and ready to learn. There were two systems of education known to the Greek world, that of Athens and that of Sparta; but in an Athenian, as in a Spartan, household, the first six or seven years of a child’s life were spent at home in the women’s quarter of the house. A Spartan mother, however, only received her child to rear after it had been carefully examined by the elders of the tribe to which the parents belonged: if its physical condition was unsatisfactory it was exposed on Mount Taygetus, there to die or be brought up by Helots. Consequently the Spartan women, who were famed all over Greece for their skill as nurses, had only the best material to work upon. In both states such education as the children received at this period of life was almost entirely physical. They were taught how to stand, how to sit, and how to walk correctly: on a vase painting in the British Museum, for example, we see a small child moving unsteadily towards its mother, who waits with open arms to receive it, while an instructor with long wand stands in the background. Athenian mothers usually were inclined to delegate the care of their children to a hired nurse, and there is an implied reproof to their indifference in the elaborate precepts that Plato gives in the _Republic_ for the proper management of infants. For example, he combats the idea that a good child should be quiet, and insists upon the importance of constant motion for the young baby, who in an Athenian nursery was often closely bandaged in swaddling clothes and then left to its own resources.