But the mere fact that the legitimacy of the child was incontestable did not save it; many Greeks were discouraged by the thought of the care and trouble children necessitated. Thousands of these little ones seem to have been resented by the Athenians, with what Glotz calls “_singulière vivacité_.”[297] With the intensive and complete education necessary for those reared, some children had to be sacrificed to so complicated and burdensome an enterprise. “No,” says a character in Menander, “there is nothing unfortunate in being a father, unless one is the father of many children.” “Nothing more foolish than to have children,” says a Greek proverb. “To raise children is an uncertain thing,” said the philosopher Democritus; “success is attained only after a life of battle and disquietude. Their loss is followed by a sorrow which remains above all others.” It was not necessary to have children, reasoned the nimble-minded Athenians; many who wished both tranquillity and posterity adopted a young man whose education was already complete. The greater number of exposures should not be attributed, however, to this excessive love of tranquillity. The principal objection to children was their expense. For the daughter, it was necessary to prepare a _dot_: for boys, there was the expense of an education prolonged until they were sixteen or eighteen years of age. The latter imposed the opening of an account not easy to close. “I thought my family now large enough,” says the father of Daphnis in explaining to the new-found son why it was he was exposed.[298] “Sons of the very rich,” said Plato, “who commence to frequent schools at a very early age and leave them late”—the rich themselves did not wish to bring up too many sons to such an expensive life. The rich father of Daphnis considered a son and a daughter a large family. At a pinch, the Athenians would undertake to bring up a first child, but, as a rule, the second was condemned. It was not for themselves, alone, that this was done, they claimed: it was also for their children that the heads of the Greek families dreaded poverty. The direct transmission and equal partition of property among the male children was part of the Greek law, and a fair-sized estate, if broken into many parts, made small provision for many children. Hesiod wished for a single son _par famille_: “Let there be only one son to tend his father’s house: for so shall wealth increase in the dwelling.”[299] And Theognis reproached the citizens for having no other ideal than to bury away treasures for their children. Even in later times, Xenophon speaks of the paternal foresight that led to continual worrying over the care of children yet to be born. It was Diphilus, or Menander, who found in the reality of the Greek life and communicated it to the author of the _Adelphi_, this counsel addressed to the father: “Manage, pinch, and save, to leave them (your sons) as much as you can.”[300]