Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/835

Rh and the hero lays it on the ground to embrace the boy; and the affection and motherly anxiety of the Lament of Andromache, have touched the sympathy of the centuries. In Herodotus's story of the infant Cypselus, the baby's smile turns the hired assassins from murder to pity, and destroys their courage till, passing him on from man to man, they leave the child unharmed. Euripides represents Iphigenia bringing her infant brother Orestes to plead for her, though she is already doomed to the sacrifice, a more powerful appeal to the feelings than the most studied eloquence.

Whooping-cough, measles, scarlatina, and mumps are not spoken of, but that other modern necessity—sleeplessness, walking the night with child in arms—had reached a high degree of cultivation. The Grecian husband, lord of his household, relegated crying child and martyred mother to a separate sleeping room, while he slept "far from the madding crowd." The unpractical old bachelor Plato, in his ideal Republic, urges that two or three stout nurses should always be in readiness to carry about infants, because they gain so much spirit and endurance by this treatment.

The antique cradle was a flat swing of basket work, as seen in a British Museum terra-cotta relief, in which the infant Bacchus is being carried. Another kind of cradle, in the form of a shoe, also made of basket work, was provided with handles, allowing it to be carried or suspended by ropes and rocked. In the opening scene of Theocritus's Little Hercules, Alcmena uses the bronze shield of the slain Pterelaus as a cradle for the infant hero and his brother; and as she rocks the mighty arm she sings the little lullaby so charmingly paraphrased by Tennyson in the cradle song in The Princess. Nurses and governesses of native birth were often employed by the rich. The highest tone, however, had created a demand for the Spartan nurse, her treatment insuring the child the greatest physical endurance. Archytas, the philosopher, has received deserved praise as the inventor of the rattle, which has saved so much in fret and furniture.

The exposure of children to inclement weather, cold, and fatigue was as strongly advocated by the ancient pure-air enthusiast as by the modern theorist, and generally led to the same result—the destruction of the weak and sickly. Yet this outcome was not at all unpopular, especially at Sparta, where physical vigor, not intellectual prestige, was required. The custom of exposing sickly or deformed children to the wild beasts on the mountains was practiced throughout Greece, and advocated by the greatest moralists. Though the horror of the practice can hardly be reconciled to our Christian training, there is a justification, or rather explanation, all powerful, when judged by the standards of long ago. The father had absolute power of life and death over the child. The state could only in extreme