As the learning of foreign languages was quite beneath the notions of the Greek gentleman, who rather expected all barbarians to learn _his_ language, the habit of employing foreign nurses, so useful and even necessary to good modern education, was well-nigh unknown. It would have been thought a great misfortune to any Hellenic child to be brought up speaking Thracian or Egyptian. Accordingly, foreign slave attendants, with their strange accent and rude manners, were not allowed to take charge of children till they were able to go to school, and had learned their mother tongue perfectly. But the women’s apartments, in which children were kept for the first few years, are closed so completely to us that we can but conjecture a few things about the life and care of Greek babies. A few late epigrams tell the grief of parents bereaved of their infants. Beyond this, classical literature affords us no light. The backwardness in culture of Greek women leads us to suspect that then, as now, Greek babies were more often spoiled than is the case among the serious Northern nations. The term “Spartan mother” is, however, still proverbial; and, no doubt, in that exceptional State discipline was so universal and so highly esteemed that it penetrated even to the nursery. But in the rest of Greece we may conceive the young child arriving at his schoolboy age more wilful and headstrong than most of our more watched and worried infants. Archytas, the philosopher, earned special credit for inventing the rattle, and saving much damage to household furniture by occupying children with this toy. FOOTNOTES: [2] Δ 130. [3] Π 7. [4] Herod. v. 93. [5] Exposing children, instead of killing them, left open the chance that some benevolent person would save them, from pity, or avaricious person sell them as slaves--a result which, no doubt, often occurred. Thus the parents could console their consciences with a hope that the benevolence of the gods had prevented the natural consequences of their inhuman act. CHAPTER II. EARLIER CHILDHOOD.