This final act of maternal affection, characteristic of both the human and the barbaric side of Greek parents, became, in time, a widespread custom. When the child was exposed, there was generally placed alongside of it a small basket or collection of trinkets. The royal daughter of Erechtheus attached to the neck of her son many precious ornaments, including a serpent of massive gold. The shepherd Laymonde found on Daphnis a clasp of gold and a small ivory sword. Among the very poor, hand-made collars, shoulder straps, with various trinkets of little worth, were used to mark the infant. In all this, dramatists saw but a means to establish the identity of the hero and heroine and an assistance to the _dénouement_. The ceremony, with its pathos and its strangeness, was, to tragic as well as to comic writers, but a means to end the fifth act. The pity of it all never seems to have occurred to the Greek mind. It was rare that the father or the child-mother who renounced the infant had any real desire to find it when better days came. The real wish was that the child might be taken up by some stranger before death came and the trinkets were an inducement to befriend the child. If, on the other hand, the child should die, the feeling was that these ornaments would assure for it a happy life on the other side of the Styx. For this reason the favoured objects of mothers were amulets; and, as in the case of the serpent placed around the neck of Ion, Creusa hoped to invoke the aid of Minerva, who had guarded her ancestor, Erichthonius, with two dragons; the object being to watch over the child’s existence. These gewgaws were supposed to give the infant exposed all the rights of a suppliant. As to how far these ceremonies of supplication were successful, as to how far they commended the unfortunate infant to the public, is a grave question. From the religious and literary myths one might imagine that the greater number of the infants were saved. We read of Hephaistus, nourished by the Sintians or by Thetis; of Atalanta by a bear; of Zeus and Dionysos, nursed by the nymphs; the shepherds found and received Telephus, Amphion, and Œdipus; Ion, by a priestess, and Sirus, by a beggar. Greek artists frequently show a Satyr holding in his arms a newly-born that he had found on the road. Poets of the new comedy delight to represent their heroes, or, more frequently, their heroines, as people who had gone through the trial of exposure and were raised by either courtesans, shepherds, or innkeepers. It is in this way that Menander, among others, shows us Silenium growing up in the house of Melænis to whom she has been given by the evil woman who picked her up[307]; Casina treated as a daughter by the brave Cleostrata.[308] Longus, in this way, brings Daphnis and Chloë into the cabin of a goatherd.