They do not seem to have had any special mechanical contrivances for learning to walk. In the time of the Empire baskets furnished with wheels are mentioned. Apparently they were in no great hurry about this. For the first year or two the nurses carried the children out into the fields, or took them to visit their relations, or brought them to some temple; then they let them crawl merrily on the ground, and on numerous vase pictures we see children crawling on all fours to some table covered with eatables, or to their toys. (Compare the Stele, represented in Fig. 62, on which a child has crawled to its mother and is trying to raise itself.) When the child made its first attempt at walking, prudent nurses took care that it should not at first exert its feeble legs too much, and so make them crooked; though Plato probably goes too far when he desires to extend this care to the end of the third year, and advises nurses to carry the children till they have reached that age. [Illustration: FIG. 63.] Children’s dress must have given but little trouble during these first years. At home--at any rate in summer--boys either ran about quite naked or else [Illustration: FIG. 64.] with only a short jacket open in front, like the little boy with the cart in Fig. 63. The girls, however, had long dresses reaching to their feet, fastened by two ribbons crossing each other in front and behind. Naughty children were brought to obedience or quiet by threats of bogies, but, curiously enough, these Greek bogies were all female creatures, such as Medusae or witches: “Acco,” “Mormo,” “Lamia,” “Empusa,” etc.; and when the children would not stay quiet indoors, they seem to have threatened them with “The horses will bite you.” The mothers and nurses used to tell the children all sorts of legends and fairy tales--Aesop’s Fables were especially popular--and little stories from mythology or other tales of adventure, which often began, like ours, with the approved “Once upon a time.” Among the many poetical legends of gods and heroes there were, it is true, some which were morally or aesthetically objectionable, and the philosophers were not wrong in calling attention to the danger which might lie in this intellectual food, supplied so early to susceptible childish minds; yet this was undoubtedly less than what is found in our own children’s stories. [Illustration: FIG. 65.]