Athenaeus tells the absurd story of a man who had his nurse chew his food for him all his life: Σάγαριν τὸν Μαριανδυνὸν ὑπὸ τοῦ τρυφῆς σιτεῖσθε μὲν μέχρι γήρως ἐκ τοῦ τῆς τίτθης στόματος, ἵνα μὴ μασώμενος πονήσειεν.[101] _The Child in the Nurse’s Arms_ In the beautiful idyllic scene of Iliad, vi, 389 ff., where Hector bids farewell to Andromache and his darling son, it is to the familiar arms of the nurse that the child turns when frightened by the glancing helm: ἂψ δ’ ὁ παὶς πρὸς κόλπον εὐζώνοιο τιθήνης ἐκλίνθη ἰάχων.[102] In those arms he had been carried,[103] and when tired out from his childish play there he had slept on a soft cushion satisfied with every comfort: αὐτὰρ ὅθ’ ὕπνος ἔλοι, παύσαιτό τε νηπιαχεύων, εὕδεσκ’ ἐν λέκτροισιν, ἐν ἀγκαλίδεσσι τιθήνης, εὐνῇ ενι μαλακῇ, θαλέων ἐμπλησάμενος κῆρ.[104] In the Odyssey, too, the faithful Eurycleia is spoken of as carrying Odysseus and laying him in the arms of his grandsire, that the latter might choose for him a name.[105] The author of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter puts these words into the mouth of the goddess-nurse: καί κεν παῖδα νεογνὸν ἐν ἀγκοίνῃσιν ἔχουσα καλὰ τιθηνοίμην.[106] The nurse in Herodotus carried the child each day to the temple of Helen.[107] Iphigenia speaking of Orestes says that she left him at home a young child in the arms of his nurse: ἔλιπον ἀγκάλαισι νεαρὸν τροφοῦ.[108] At the festival of the Amphidromia, it was the nurse who carried the child around the hearth;[109] and in the Nurse-festival (τιθηνίδια) at Sparta, the nurses carried the male children to the temple of Artemis.[110] We know that nurses walked the floor with fretful children in order to soothe them. A good instance of this is given in Menander’s Samia, 26–30 (Capps), where an old nurse fondles a child to her heart’s content, kissing it and calling it soft names, walking around with it until it is quieted. “The homeopathic cure of morbid ‘enthusiasm’ by means of music was, it may be incidentally observed, known to Plato. In a passage of the Laws,[111] where he is laying down the rules for the management of infants, his advice is that infants should be kept in perpetual motion, and live as if they were always tossing at sea. He proceeds to compare the principle on which religious ecstasy is cured by a strain of impassioned music, with the method of nurses, who lull their babes to sleep not by silence but by singing, not by holding them quiet, but by rocking them in their arms.... An external agitation (κίνησις) is employed to calm and counteract an internal. But Plato recognized the principle only as it applied to music and to the useful art of nursing.”