If the mother of an infant died, the right of _Hidana_, or infant education, rested with the maternal grandmother. So deeply was this idea imbued that even if the mother were a hated _Zimmi_ or female infidel subject, married to a Mussulman, she was still entitled to the _Hidana_ of her child until the time when the child was capable of forming a judgment with respect to religion. When such a time arrived the child was generally taken from the mother if she continued to be an infidel, in order that no injury might come to it from imbibing the doctrines of a _Zimmi._ CHAPTER XII EXPOSURE BY A CIVILIZED PEOPLE—LACK OF HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS—THEIR MYTHOLOGY AN EVIDENCE—CHILDREN IN HOMER. That the people of the greatest nation of antiquity, with all their intellect, their subtlety, their productivity in humanity, art, and moral ideas, were wanting in heart, is the statement of one of the greatest scholars of modern times, a scholar who has also earned the right to be classed among the admirers and defenders of the Greeks. “Their humanity,” says Mahaffy, “was spasmodic and not constant. Their kindness was limited to friends and family, and included no chivalry to foes or to helpless slaves. Antiphon, in speaking of the danger of conviction on insufficient evidence, mentions the case of the murder of his master by a slave boy of twelve,”[277] and had not the slave-boy murderer revealed by his actions the fact that he was guilty of the deed, the murdered man’s whole family would have been put to death on the theory that someone in the family was guilty of the murder, as the real culprit was too young, under the law, to be suspected of crime. The Greek’s kindness did not extend to his new-born children. We shall see later among the Romans that, from the time of Romulus to the passing of the Roman Empire, there was an upward tendency in the attitude of the Romans toward children. In eight centuries, the Romans changed, from a people indifferent to the fate of the newly-born, to a nation over which the humane Antonines ruled, and ruled successfully. Among the Greeks, from the time of Homeric legend, which is supposed to be about 1000 B. C., up to the time of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a period of over a thousand years, the Greeks changed not at all in callous indifference as to what became of that portion of their population that was daily exposed. Ardent defenders of the Greeks, like Andrew Lang, see in the fact that little mention is made in the Homeric legend of the exposure of female infants, an indication that “Homeric society with its wealth and its tenderness of heart would not be so cruel” as to expose little girl babies.[278]