Every one must have observed, as well as Plato,[412] that children are no sooner born than they exhibit unequivocal signs of passion and anger, in the moderating and directing of which consists the chiefest difficulty of education. Most men, through the defect of nature or early discipline, live long before they acquire this mastery, which many never attain at all. Generally, however, where it is possessed, much may certainly be attributed to that training which begins at the birth, so that of all the instruments employed in the[413] forming of character, the nurse is probably the most important. Of this the ancients generally appear to have been convinced, and most of all the Spartans and Athenians. The Lacedæmonian nurses, on whom the force of discipline had been tried, enjoyed a high reputation throughout Greece, and were particularly esteemed at Athens.[414] They no doubt deserved it. To them may be traced the first attempt to dispense with those swathes and bandages which in other countries confined the limbs, and impeded the movements of infants, and by their skilful and enlightened treatment, combined with watchfulness and tender solicitude, they are said to have preserved their little charges from those distortions so common among children. But their cares extended beyond the person. They aimed at forming the manners, regulating the temper, laying the foundation of virtuous habits, at sowing in short the seeds, which in after life, might ripen into a manly, frank, and generous character. In the matter of food, in the regulating of which, as Locke confesses, there is much difficulty, the Spartan nurses acted up to the suggestions of the sternest philosophy, accustoming the children under their charge, to be content with whatever was put before them, and to endure occasional privations without murmuring. Over the fear of ghosts too they triumphed. Empusa and the Mormolukeion, and all those other hideous spectres which childhood associates with the idea of darkness, yielded to the discipline of the Spartan nurse.[415] Her charge would remain alone or in the dark, without terror, and the same stern system, which overcame the first offspring of superstition, likewise subdued the moral defects of peevishness, frowardness, and the habit of whining and mewling, which when indulged in render children a nuisance to all around them. No wonder therefore, these Doric disciplinarians were everywhere in request. At Athens it became fashionable among the opulent to employ them, and Cleinias, as is well known, placed under the care of one of these she-pædagogues that Alcibiades, whose ambitious character, to be curbed by no restraints of discipline or philosophy, proved the ruin of his country and the scourge of Greece.[416] Footnote 412: