In Greece, as everywhere else, education[524] commenced in the nursery; and though time has very much obscured all remaining traces of the instruction which the children there received, we are not left on this point wholly without information. From the very day of his birth man begins to be acted on by those causes that furnish his mind with ideas. As his intelligence acquires strength, the five sluices which let in all that flood of knowledge which afterwards overflows his mind, appear to be enlarged, and education at first, and for some time, consists in watching over the nature and quality of the ideas conveyed inward by those channels. It is difficult to say when actual instruction commenced: but among the earliest formal attempts at impressing traditionary knowledge on the infant mind was the repetition by mothers and nurses of fables and stories, not always, if Plato may be credited, constructed with a religious or ethical purpose.[525] They, in fact, introduced into the minds of their children the legends of the mythology, under the forms of which truths of the greatest importance, such as Bacon has developed in his “Wisdom of the Ancients,” lay sometimes concealed, though more frequently, perhaps, they inculcated no useful lesson, but were the mere sportive creations of fancy, or if they contained any moral kernel the shell in which it was cased was too hard for the teeth of the vulgar. Such, for example, as the legend of Zeus in Hesiod mutilating his father Kronos, which, in Plato’s opinion, was not to be delivered to the empty-headed multitude or to untaught children; but, having sacrificed, not a hog, but the most precious victim, in mysterious secrecy to a few. Footnote 524: Among the ancient writers on education, of which the greater number have perished, was Clearchos of Soli, on whom see Voss. de Hist. Græc. i. Athen. xv. 54. Men. in Diog. Laert. p. 4. b. Footnote 525: Rep. ii. t. vi. p. 94.—Cf. Adolph. Cramer, 8, 9. Wholly different from these, however, were the fables[526] properly so called, which, invented apparently by Hesiod,[527] (at least his Hawk and Nightingale is the oldest example extant in Hellenic literature,) were afterwards sprinkled by the greatest poets, through their writings, or spontaneously uttered in pressing emergencies to warn their countrymen against the approaches of tyranny. Archilochos’ Eagle and Fox[528] was famous throughout antiquity, as was likewise the Horse and the Stag, related by Stesichoros[529] to the people of Himera, to put them on their guard against the Machiavellian policy of Gelon. But the most complete, perhaps, of these ancient compositions is the fable of the lion, delivered by Eumenes to the Macedonian generals under his order, when they had been tampered with by Antigonos, who would have persuaded them to disband.[530] Footnote 526: Cf. Suid. v. Καὶ τὸ τοῦ λύκου. i. 1427. Footnote 527: Opp. et. Dies, 202–212. Quintil. v. 2. Footnote 528: