It was in education that the discipline is most characteristically “Spartan.” From birth to death the Spartan was in the grip of an iron system. Indeed, it began before birth, for the Spartans are the only people in history who have dared to carry out the principles of modern eugenics. They trained the bodies of their girls with running[28] and wrestling and throwing of quoits and javelins, that when the time came they might bear stalwart sons, and bear them bravely. “The Law-giver,” says Plutarch, “put away all coquettishness and hysteria and effeminacy by making the girls strip for processions, dances, and choruses at the temples, with the youths present as spectators. This stripping of the maidens involved no shame, for modesty was there and lewdness was absent, but it produced unaffected manners and a desire for physical fitness, and it gave the female sex some taste of a not ignoble pride, in that they too had their share of manly worth and ambition to excel. Whence came to them that thought which is expressed in the traditional repartee of Leonidas’ wife Gorgo. A foreign woman remarking to her, ‘You Laconians are the only women who rule the men,’ ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we are the only women who are the mothers of _men_.’” The strongest moral suasion compelled Spartan men to marry. The marriage customs of Sparta were peculiar and carry us back to the remotest antiquity. The bridegroom carried off his bride by a pretence of violence, and the bride cut her hair short and dressed like a man. There was no marriage feast; the young husband dined at his mess-table, visited his young wife by stealth, and returned to barracks. Sometimes a wife bore children to a man whose face she had never seen. The child was not considered to belong to his father, but to the city. “The Law-giver thought it absurd to take trouble about the breed of horses and dogs, and then let the imbecile, the elderly, and the diseased bear and beget children.” There was another celebrated Spartan repartee about adultery: “We have no adulterers in Sparta.” “Suppose you had, what is the penalty?” “The fine is a big bull that jumps over Taygetus and drinks from the Eurotas.” “My dear sir, how could there be such a monstrous animal?” [Illustration: Plate PLATE 23.--Running Girl. _Anderson._] “My dear sir, how could there be adultery at Sparta?” At birth the babe was taken away from its parent to a hall where the elders of the tribe sat to examine it. If it was plump and strong they said, “Rear it.” If not it was exposed to die in a cleft of the mountain. “For they thought better, both for it and the city, that it should die than that it should live if it was not naturally healthy and strong. That was why the women washed it with wine instead of water as a test of its strength.” They had scientific methods of rearing babies, no swaddling-clothes, no fear of the dark or solitude. Foreigners used to hire Laconian women for their nurses.