THE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM. At birth the child was examined by a council of elders (R. I), and if it did not appear to be a promising child it was exposed to die in the mountains. If kept, the mother had charge of the child until seven if a boy, and still longer if a girl. At the beginning of the eighth year, and until the boy reached the age of eighteen, he lived in a public barrack, where he was given little except physical drill and instruction in the Spartan virtues. His food and clothing were scant and his bed hard. Each older man was a teacher. Running, leaping, boxing, wrestling, military music, military drill, ball-playing, the use of the spear, fighting, stealing, and laconic speech and demeanor constituted the course of study. From eighteen to twenty was spent in professional training for war, and frequently the youth was publicly whipped to develop his courage and endurance. For the next ten years--that is, until he was thirty years old--he was in the army at some frontier post. At thirty the young man was admitted to full citizenship and compelled to marry, though continuing to live at the public barrack and spending his energies in training boys (R. 1). Women and girls were given gymnastic training to make them strong and capable of bearing strong children. The family was virtually suppressed in the interests of defense and war. [9] The intellectual training consisted chiefly in committing to memory the Laws of Lycurgus, learning a few selections from Homer, and listening to the conversation of the older men. As might naturally be supposed, Sparta contributed little of anything to art, literature, science, philosophy, or government. She left to the world some splendid examples of heroism, as for example the sacrifice of Leonidas and his Spartans to hold the pass at Thermopylae, and a warning example of the brutalizing effect on a people of excessive devotion to military training. It is a pleasure to turn from this dark picture to the wonderful (for the time) educational system that was gradually developed at Athens. 2. _The old Athenian education_ SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS. Athenian education divides itself naturally into two divisions--the old Athenian training which prevailed up to about the time of the close of the Persian Wars (479 B.C.) and was an outgrowth of earlier tribal observances and practices, and later Athenian education, which characterized the period of maximum greatness of Athens and afterward. We shall describe these briefly, in order.