‘This noiseless ball and top so round, This rattle with its lively sound, These bones with which he loved to play, Companions of his childhood’s day; To Hermes, if the god they please, An offering from Philocles.’ Of dance games too, which give exercise both to mind and body, they had an abundant variety; some simple like ‘The Wine-skin and Hatchet,’ which could be played upon the stomach of a complaisant guest, others more elaborate in their dramatic ritual, such as ‘The Swallow’ procession, of which our ‘Jack in the Green’ is a reminiscence. At the beginning of their lives then children were treated in much the same way at Sparta and at Athens; but in the next stage of education, after the period of early childhood was past, there was a sharp divergence between Spartan and Athenian practice. At Sparta boys and girls alike, over the age of seven years, were taken in hand by the state, and given the most thorough of physical trainings. The girls were allowed their meals at home, but otherwise were subjected to the same discipline as the boys. They had to harden their bodies, so that they might bear strong children, and among their sports were wrestling, running, and swimming. They learned to throw the diskos and the javelin; and wearing only the short Doric chiton engaged in contests of speed with youths. The result we may see in the statue of the girl runner, a copy of a fifth-century original, which is now in the Vatican at Rome, and in the description of the Spartan woman envoy in Aristophanes’ play _Lysistrata_, who looked ‘as though she could throttle a bull.’ The boys, for their part, were organized in the strictest fashion into ‘packs’ of sixty-four and into divisions. Each pack fed together, slept together on bundles of reeds for bedding, and played together. They had to go barefoot always, wore only a single garment summer and winter, and provided for their own wants. One boy in the pack was appointed as ‘Bouagor,’ or ‘Herd-leader,’ and could give orders and inflict punishment. Over him was a young man, above twenty years of age, of tried character and courage, the ‘Eiren’ who was in charge of the pack’s organization and lived always with the boys. In control of the whole system was the ‘Paidonomos,’ the minister of education, an elderly citizen of rank and repute who had the ultimate powers of discipline over boys and eirens alike. In the three ranks we see something resembling the prefects, assistant masters, and Heads of our schools: in manner of life there was a close approximation to the boy-scout movement.