Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/834

810 the evidence of the classic authors, and the researches of the archæologists are the sole means of enlightenment. Naturally enough, the most desirable information, the common everyday facts, are difficult to obtain.

A training of the youth, at one time military in its nature and very similar to the German system, was required of the grown-up youth or ephebi. These requirements were hung up in bronze or carved in stone to be read by the Greeks, not yet favored with the printing press. These announcements were continued even after the compulsory military service had been discarded and other studies had taken their place. These enactments, together with the Parthenon frieze procession, furnish us almost our only information of the Greek college system proper.

Plato and Aristotle, in their ideal "states," have given us some knowledge of a reliable nature; though we can not depend on them any more than we could twenty centuries hence on Bellamy's Looking Backward as a mirror of nineteenth-century life. In his Protagoras, however, Plato's account of the Greek boy's training is both clear and practical. The comic poets furnish us more valuable information, though party spirit and satire oftentimes make the "find" doubtful. Herodotus, Xenophon, and Pausanias yield by far the most valuable intelligence that we derive from written evidence.

The vase paintings, gems, urns, and temple friezes which the excavator of to-day is continually bringing to light in great numbers are a most sure and interesting source of information. Athens Sparta, Mycenae, the islands of the Greek seas, and even Italy have produced many a powerful witness from their buried past.

As the education of a child begins with the very first admonition in its infancy and ends only with the grave, a few hints about the Grecian baby may not be amiss. On the fifth or seventh day the infant went through the ceremony of purification. This was called the "run-around day," because at that time the child was carried several times around the burning altar. The family on this day enjoyed a festive meal; the doors were decorated with wool for a girl and with a crown of olive for a boy. On the tenth day the young hopeful was named; a sacrifice was made, and another feast was held. At this time the infant was given presents of metal and clay, and the mother received painted vases from relatives and friends. The classic baby was not unlike that little monarch of to-day—the joy and the terror of his subjects. The mother's love was as great and the helpless innocence of the child as powerful then as now. The scene in the sixth book of the Iliad, where Hector's infant screams with fright at the fluttering plume on his father's helmet,