Arabian Nights, i. 286. Lane’s Translation. Mischievous no doubt the boys of Hellas were, as boys will everywhere be, and many pranks would they play in spite of the crabbed old slaves set over them by their parents; on which account, probably, it is that Plato considers boys, of all wild beasts the most audacious, plotting, fierce and intractable.[536] But the urchins now found that it was one thing to nestle under mamma’s wing at home, and another to delve under the direction of a didaskalos, and at school-hours, after the bitter roots of knowledge. For the school-boys of Greece tasted very little of the sweets of bed after dawn. “They rose with the light,” says Lucian, “and with pure water washed away the remains of sleep, which still lingered on their eyelids.”[537] Having breakfasted on bread and fruit, to which through the allurements of their pædagogues they sometimes added wine,[538] they sallied forth to the didaskaleion, or schoolmaster’s lair as the comic poets jocularly termed it,[539] summer and winter, whether the morning smelt of balm, or was deformed by sleet or snow, drifting like meal from a sieve down the rocks of the Acropolis. Footnote 536: De Legg. vi. t. viii. p. 41. Creuzer. de Civ. Athen. p. 556. Footnote 537: Amor. § 44. Footnote 538: Athen. xiii. 61. sqq. Footnote 539: Poll. iv. 19. Aristophanes has left us a picture, dashed off with his usual grotesque vigour, of a troop of Attic lads marching on a winter’s morning to school.[540]