Hence, when it occurs to a modern reader that the main superiority of our education over the Greek is the early training in the Scriptures--a training, alas! decaying in earnestness every day--an old Athenian or Milesian or Cean would deny the fact, and say that they, too, had an inspired volume, written for their learning, in which all the moral virtues and all the necessaries of faith were contained. The charge of objectionable passages in the old epic would doubtless be retorted by a similar charge against the old Semitic books. § 27. It is well-nigh impossible that in the higher families throughout Greece this moral training should not have begun at home; and there must have been many Greek mothers able and anxious to help, though history is silent about them, and does not even single out individual cases, like the Roman Cornelia, where mothers influenced the moral and intellectual training of their children.[20] Certain it is that here and there we find evidences of a strong feeling of respect to the house-mother which contrast curiously with the usual silence about women. In the “Clouds,” the acme of villany in the young scapegrace who has turned sophist under Socrates’ hands is to threaten violence to his mother.[21] Here it is that Strepsiades exclaims in real horror at the result of such teaching. We also find both Plato and (perhaps in imitation of him) Cicero laying stress upon the purity of speech preserved in the conversation of cultivated women, whose conservative life and tastes rejected slang and novelty, and thus preserved the language pure and undefiled. The very opposite complaint is made concerning the pædagogues, whose often barbarous origin and rude manners were of damage to the youth. § 28. On the question of punishments, both at home and at school, we do not find the Greeks very different from ourselves. There are not in Greek literature any such eloquent protests against corporal punishment as we find in Seneca and Quintilian. They all acknowledge the use and justice of it, and only caution against applying servile punishments to free boys. Indeed, in many later writers, such as Lucian, the severities of schoolmasters are noted; and we have among the Pompeian pictures a scene of a master flogging a boy, who is hoisted on the shoulders of another, with a third holding him up by the heels. These evidences, together with those of the later Romans, on the sounds of woe common in schools, must not be overestimated. They are probably exceptional cases made prominent for satirical purposes, and not implying any peculiar savagery in Greek above modern masters. Most certainly the Greek schoolmaster was not harsher than the lower-class masters in many primary schools, as, for example, the Irish hedge schoolmasters described in Carleton’s “Tales of the Irish Peasantry.”