CHAPTER I.
THEORY OF EDUCATION.—BIRTH OF CHILDREN.—INFANTICIDE.

Whether on education the Greeks thought more wisely than we do or not,^[318] they certainly contemplated the subject from a more elevated point of view. They regarded it as the matrix in which future generations are fashioned, and receive that peculiar temperament and character belonging to the institutions that presided at their birth. Their theories were so large as to comprehend the whole developement of individual existence, from the moment when the human germ is quickened into life until the grave closes the scene, and in many cases looked still further; for the rites of initiation and a great part of their ethics had reference to another world. On this account we find their legislators possessed by extreme solicitude respecting the character of those teachers into whose hands the souls of the people were to be placed, to receive the first principles of good or evil, to be invigorated, raised, and purified by the former, or by the latter to be perverted, or precipitated down the slopes of vice and effeminacy, by which nations sink from freedom to servitude. Among them, moreover, it was never matter of doubt, whether the light of knowledge should be allowed to stream upon the summits of society only, or be suffered to descend into its lower depths and visit the cottages of the poor. Whatever education had to impart was, in most states, imparted to all the citizens, as far as their leisure or their capacity would permit them to receive it. The whole object, indeed, of education among the Greeks was to create good citizens, from which it has by some been inferred that they confined their views to the delivering of secular instruction. But this is to take a narrow and ignorant view of the subject, since religion was not only an element of education but regarded as of more importance than all its other elements taken together. For it had not escaped the Hellenic legislators, that in many circumstances of life man is placed beyond the reach and scrutiny of laws and public opinion, where he must be free to act according to the dictates of conscience, which, if not rightly trained, purified, and rendered clearsighted by religion, will often dictate amiss. It is of the utmost moment, therefore, that in these retired situations man should not consider himself placed beyond the range of every eye, and so be tempted to lay the foundation of habits which, begun in secrecy, may soon acquire boldness to endure the light and set the laws themselves at defiance. Accordingly over those retired moments in which man at first sight appears to commune with himself alone, religion was called in to teach that there were invisible inspectors, who registered, not only the evil deeds and evil words they witnessed, but even the evil thoughts and emotions of the heart, the first impulses to crime in the lowest abysses of the mind. Consistently with this view of the subject, we discover everywhere in Greek history and literature traces of an almost puritanical scrupulousness in whatever appeared to belong to religion, so that in addressing the Athenians St. Paul himself was induced to reproach them with the excesses of their devotional spirit, which degenerated too frequently into superstition. But the original design with which this spirit was cultivated was wise and good, its intention being to rescue men from the sway of their inferior passions,—from envy, from avarice, from selfishness, and to inspire them with faith in their own natural dignity by representing their actions as of sufficient importance to excite the notice, provoke the anger, or conciliate the favour of the immortal gods. This religion, which base and sordid minds regard as humiliating to humanity, was by Grecian lawgivers and founders of states contemplated as a kind of holy leaven designed by God himself, to pervade, quicken, and expand society to its utmost dimensions.

The question which commands so much attention in modern states, viz. whether education should be national and uniform, likewise much occupied the thoughts of ancient statesmen, and it is known that in most cases they decided in the affirmative. It may however be laid down as an axiom, that among a phlegmatic and passive-minded people, where the government has not yet acquired its proper form and developement, the establishment of a national system of education, complete in all its parts and extending to the whole body of the citizens, must be infallibly pernicious. For such as the government is at the commencement such very nearly will it continue, as was proved by the example of Crete and Sparta. For the Cretan legislators, arresting the progress of society at a certain point by the establishment of an iron system of education, before the popular mind had acquired its full growth and expansion, dwarfed the Cretan people completely, and by preventing their keeping pace with their countrymen rendered them in historical times inferior to all their neighbours. In Sparta, again, the form of polity given to the state by Lycurgus, wonderful for the age in which it was framed, obtained perpetuity solely by the operation of his pædonomical institutions. The imperfection, however, of the system arose from this circumstance, that the Spartan government was framed too early in the career of civilisation. Had its lawgiver lived a century or two later, he would have established his institutions on a broader and more elevated basis, so that they would have remained longer nearly on a level with the progressive institutions of neighbouring states. But he fixed the form of the Spartan commonwealth when the general mind of Greece had scarcely emerged from barbarism; and as the rigid and unyielding nature of his laws forbade any great improvement, Sparta continued to bear about her in the most refined ages of Greece innumerable marks of the rude period in which she had risen. From this circumstance flowed many of her crimes and misfortunes. Forbidden to keep pace with her neighbours in knowledge and refinement, which by rendering them inventive, enterprising, and experienced, elevated them to power, she was compelled, in order to maintain her ground, to have recourse to astuteness, stratagem, and often to perfidy.

The Spartan system, it is well known, made at first, and for some ages, little or no use of books. But this, at certain stages of society, was scarcely an evil;^[319] for knowledge can be imparted, virtues implanted and cherished, and great minds ripened to maturity without their aid. The teacher, in this case, rendered wise by meditation and experience, takes the place of a book, and by oral communication, by precept, and by example, instructs, and disciplines, and moulds his pupil into what he would have him be. By this process both are benefited. The preceptor’s mind, kept in constant activity, acquires daily new force and expansion; and the pupil’s in like manner. In a state, therefore, like that of Sparta, in the age of Lycurgus, it was possible to acquire all necessary knowledge without books, of which indeed very few existed. But afterwards, when the Ionian republics began to be refined and elevated by philosophy and literature, Sparta, unable to accompany them, fell into the background: still preserving, however, her warlike habits she was enabled on many occasions to overawe and subdue them.

Among the Athenians,^[320] though knowledge was universally diffused, there existed, properly speaking, no system of national education. The people, like their state, were in perpetual progress, aiming at perfection, and sometimes approaching it; but precipitated by the excess of their intellectual and physical energies into numerous and constantly recurring errors. While Sparta, as we have seen, remained content with the wisdom indigenous to her soil, scanty and imperfect as it was, Athens converted herself into one vast mart, whither every man who had anything new to communicate hastened eagerly, and found the sure reward of his ingenuity. Philosophers, sophists, geometricians, astronomers, artists, musicians, actors, from all parts of Greece and her most distant colonies, flocked to Athens to obtain from its quick-sighted, versatile, impartial, and most generous people that approbation which in the ancient world constituted fame. Therefore, although the laws regulated the material circumstances of the schools and gymnasia, prescribed the hours at which they should be opened and closed, and watched earnestly over the morals both of preceptors and pupils, there was a constant indraught of fresh science, a perpetually increasing experience and knowledge of the world, and, consequent thereupon, a deep-rooted conviction of their superiority over their neighbours, an impatience of antiquated forms, and an audacious reliance on their own powers and resources which betrayed them into the most hazardous schemes of ambition.

But, by pushing too far their literary and philosophical studies, the Athenians were induced at length to neglect the cultivation of the arts of war, which they appeared to regard as a low and servile drudgery. And this capital error, in spite of all their acquirements and achievements in eloquence and philosophy,—in spite of their lofty speculation and “style of gods,” brought their state to a premature dissolution; while Sparta, with inferior institutions, and ignorance which even the children at Athens would have laughed at, was enabled much longer to preserve its existence, from its impassioned application to the use of arms, aided, perhaps, by a stronger and more secluded position. From this it appears that of all sciences that of war is the chiefest, since, where this is cultivated, a nation may maintain its independence without the aid of any other; whereas the most knowing, refined, and cultivated men, if they neglect the use of arms, will not be able to stand their ground against a handful even of barbarians. They mistake, too, who look upon literature and the sciences as a kind of palladium against barbarism,^[321] for a whole nation may read and write, like the inhabitants of the Birman empire, without being either civilised or wise; and may possess the best books and the power to read them, without being able to profit by the lessons of wisdom they contain, as is proved by the example of the Greeks and Romans, who perished rather from a surfeit of knowledge than from any lack of instruction. But it is time, perhaps, to quit these general speculations, and proceed to develope, as far as existing monuments will enable us, the several systems of education which prevailed in the different parts of Greece.

Among Hellenic legislators the care of children commenced before their birth. Their mothers were subject while pregnant to the operation of certain rules; their food and exercises were regulated, and in most cases the laws, or at least the manners, required them to lead a sedentary, inactive, and above all a tranquil life.^[322] Physicians, guided by experience, prescribed a somewhat abstemious diet; and wine was prohibited, or only permitted to be taken with water, which, where reason is consulted, we find to be the practice at the present day. But Lycurgus, in the article of exercise, gave birth to, or, at least, sanctioned, customs wholly different.^[323] Even while enceinte his women were required to be abroad, engaged in their usual athletic recreations, eating as before and drinking as before.

On this occasion, too, as on all others, the deep-rooted piety of the nation displayed itself. Prayers and sacrifices were habitually offered up by all married persons for children, as afterwards by Christian ladies to the saints;^[324] and these of course were not discontinued, when it appeared by unequivocal signs that their desires had begun to receive their fulfilment. What the divinities were whom on these occasions the Athenian matrons invoked under the name of Tritopatores, it seems difficult to determine. Demon in Suidas^[325] supposes them to be the winds; but Philochoros, the most learned of ancient writers on the antiquities of Attica, imagined them to be the first three sons of Helios and Gaia. According to some they were called Cottos or Coros, Gyges or Gyes, and Briareus; according to others Amalcides, Protocles, and Protocleon, the watchers and guardians of the wind. There are authors, moreover, by whom they have been confounded with the Dii Kabyri of Samothrace.

During the period of their confinement women were supposed to be under the protection of Eileithyia. This goddess, who by Olen the Lycian was considered older than Kronos,^[326] had the honour as certain mythical legends relate, of being the mother of love,^[327] though several ancient authors appear to have confounded her with Pepromene or Fate, others with Hera, and others again with Artemis or the moon. The traditions of the mythology respecting this divinity were various. Her worship seems to have made its first appearance among the Greeks in the island of Delos, whither she is said to have come from the country of the Hyperboreans, to lend her aid to Leto, when beneath the palm tree, which Zeus caused to spring up over her,^[328] she gave birth to the gods of night and day. From that time forward she was held in veneration by the Delians, who in her honour offered up sacrifices, chaunting the hymns of Olen, whence we may infer she was a Pelasgian deity.

From thence her name and worship were diffused through the other islands and states of Hellas; though the Cretans pretended that she was born at Amnisos in the Knossian territory, and was a daughter of Hera. The Athenians, who erected a temple to Eileithyia appeared to favour both traditions, since of the two statues which were found in her fane the more ancient was said to have been brought from Delos by Erisicthon, while the second, dedicated by Phædra, came from Crete. Among the Athenians, alone, as an indication of the national modesty, the wooden images of this mysterious divinity were significantly veiled to the toes.^[329]

The simple delicacy of remoter ages required women to be attended, while becoming mothers, by individuals of their own sex. But the contrary practice, now general among civilised nations, prevailed early at Athens, where the study of medicine, in which the accoucheur’s^[330] art is included, was prohibited to women and slaves. The consequences bear stronger testimony to the refined taste and truly feminine feelings of the Athenian ladies than a thousand panegyrics. Numbers, rather than submit to the immodest injunctions of fashion, declined all aid, and perished in their harems: observing which, and moved strongly by the desire to preserve the lives of her noble-minded countrywomen, a female citizen named Agnodice, disguised as a man, acquired a competent knowledge of the theory and practice of physic in the medical school of Herophilos; she then confided her secret to the women who universally determined to avail themselves of her services, and in consequence her practice became so extensive that the jealousy of the other practitioners was violently excited. In revenge, therefore, as she still maintained her disguise, they preferred an accusation against her in the court of Areiopagos as a general seducer. To clear herself Agnodice made known her sex, upon which the envious Æsculapians prosecuted her under the provisions of the old law. In behalf of their benefactress the principal gentlewomen appeared in court, and mingling the highest testimony in favour of Agnodice with many bitter reproaches, they not only obtained her acquittal, but the repeal of the obnoxious law, and permission for any free woman to become an accoucheuse.^[331]

Mention is made by ancient writers of several rude and hardy tribes, whose women, like those of HindùstânHindùstân at the present day, stood in very little need of the midwife’s aid. Thus Varro,^[332] speaking of the rough shepherdesses of Italy, observes that among the countrywomen of Illyria, bringing forth children was regarded as a slight matter; for that, stepping aside from their work in the fields, they would return presently with an infant in their arms, having first bathed it in some fountain or running stream, appearing rather to have found, than given birth to, a child. Nor are the manners of these uncultivated people at all altered in modern times, as appears from an anecdote related to Pietro Vittore,^[333] by Francesco Sardonati, professor of Latin at Ragusa, who said that he saw a woman go out empty-handed to a forest for wood, and return shortly afterwards with a bundle on her head and a new-born infant in her arms. At Athens, however, where the women were peculiarly tender and delicate, the young mother remained within doors full six weeks,^[334] when the festival of the fortieth day was celebrated, after which she went forth, as our ladies do to be churched, to offer up sacrifices and return thanks in the temple of Artemis or some other divinity.

New-born infants, when designed to be reared, were at Athens and in the rest of Greece bathed in cold water: at Sparta in wine, with the view of producing convulsions and death should the child be feeble, whereas, were its constitution strong and vigorous, it would thus they imagined, “acquire a greater degree of firmness, and get a temper in proportion, as Potter^[335] expresses it, like steel in the quenching.” Swaddling-bands^[336] also, in use throughout the rest of Greece, were banished from Sparta, which led the way therefore to that improved system of infant management advocated by Rousseau, Lacépède and others,^[337] and now generally adopted in this country, though but partially in France. The ceremonies and customs of the Greeks were a kind of symbolical language, many times containing important meaning, and always perhaps indicative of the character and familiar feelings of the race. Much stress was laid on the thing wherein the infant was placed upon its entrance into the world. This, among the Athenians, consisted of a wrapper adorned with an embroidered figure of the Gorgon’s head, the device represented on the shield of Athena, tutelar divinity of the state. From the beginning every citizen seemed thus to be placed under the immediate shelter of that goddess’s ægis which should be extended over him in peace and in war. In other parts of Greece the child’s first bed, and too frequently his last, was a shield.^[338] In accordance with this custom we find Alcmena cradling her twin boys Heracles and Iphicles in Amphytrion’s buckler; and the same practice prevailed, as might have been expected, at Sparta, where war constituted to men the sole object of life.^[339] Elsewhere other symbols spoke to the future sense rather than the present of the new citizen. In agricultural countries the military symbol was replaced by a winnowing van, not unfrequently of gold or other costly materials;^[340] though it may be doubted whether the word so rendered meant not rather a cradle in the form of that rustic implement.

In another custom, long on these occasions observed, we discern traces of that serpent-worship which at different epochs diffused itself so widely over the world. Among opulent and noble families at Athens new-born children were laid on golden amulets in the form of dragons by which they were supposed to commemorate Athena’s delivery of Erichthonios to the care of two guardians of that description.^[341]

But under certain circumstances, instead of the joy and gladness by which the noble and the great are greeted on their entrance into the world, the birth of a child was, as in Thrace,^[342] an event fraught with sorrow and misery. It announced in fact the approach of an enemy, of one who, if he survived, must snatch from them a portion of what already would scarcely sustain life. Together with the announcement of his birth, therefore, came the awful consciousness that war must be made on him—that he must in short be cast forth, a scape-goat for the sins of society, not for his own—that his parents who should have cherished him, whose best solace he should have been, must steel their hearts and close fast their ears against the voice of nature, and become his executioners. The poor-laws of Greece, or rather their substitutes for poor-laws, were exceedingly imperfect, and foundling hospitals had not been introduced. They got rid of their surplus population, as many nations still do, by murder; for infanticide, under various forms, has more or less prevailed in all civilised countries, if the term civilised can properly be applied to nations among whom crimes so demoralising are habitually perpetrated. No doubt the sullen reluctance of a father to imbrue his hands in the blood of his child produced daily many a heart-rending scene; no doubt the sting of want must have been keenly felt before the habit of slaughter was confirmed;—but the fashion once set, children were thrown into an earthen pot and exposed in mountainous and desert places to perish of cold, or fall a prey to carnivorous birds^[343] or wolves, as coolly as they are murdered by their young and frail mothers in our own Christian land.

Under all circumstances, however, the parents thus criminal are objects of pity. Misery is blind, and crime is blind. But what shall we say to those priests of humanity, those sacred and reverend interpreters of nature,—the philosophers who come forward to sanction and justify the practice? It would be criminal to disguise the fact, that both Plato and Aristotle, the great representatives of the wisdom of the Pagan world,^[344] conceived infanticide, under certain circumstances, to be allowable. Near, therefore, as the former stood to the truths of Christianity, there was still a cloud between him and them. What he saw, he saw through a glass darkly. Christ had not then stamped the seal of divinity upon human nature, had not shed abroad that light by which alone we discover the true features of crime, no less than the true features of holiness. Philosophy is beautiful; but with the beauty of one involuntarily polluted. Religion alone, breathing of heaven, radiant with light, reflected on its whole form from the face of God, is lovely altogether without spot or blemish. The Greeks wanting this guide went astray. They looked at the question of population as coarse utilitarians,—all but the gross, unintellectual Thebans, who, relying on the vast fertility of their soil, or led by some better instinct, on this point soared high above their cultivated neighbours, an example of how the foolish things of this world, even in the unregenerate state of nature, may sometimes confound the wise. Among the Tyrrhenians,^[345] likewise, a people of Pelasgian origin, infanticide was unknown, probably because among them it was accounted no disgrace to be the parents of illegitimate offspring; indeed the sense of shame could not, in any case, be very keen among a people whose female slaves served naked at table, and where even the ladies appeared at public entertainments in the same state, drinking bumpers and joining freely in the conversation of the men.

In the modern world to take the life of an infant is a capital offence, yet we see with how little fear or ceremony the law is set at nought. It will, therefore, readily be supposed that in those countries of antiquity where neither law nor public opinion opposed the practice, but in some cases winked at, in others enjoined it, the number of child-murders must have been enormous. Sparta very naturally took the lead in this guilty course.^[346] Here it was not permitted to private individuals to make away with their offspring stealthily, and with those marks of shame and compunction inseparable from individual guilt. The state monopolized the right to Herodise, and by sharing the criminality among great numbers appeared to silence the objections of conscience. Fathers were compelled by law to bring their new-born infants to certain officers, old, grave men,^[347] who held their sittings in the Lesche of their tribe, and after due deliberation determined on the claim of each child to live or die. By what rules they decided, rude and ignorant of physiology as they were, it would now be impossible positively to affirm. Little skill no doubt had they in detecting the latent seeds of robustness and physical energy, still less those of splendid mental endowments lurking in the crimson countenance of helpless infancy. They who might have proved the wise and good of their generation no doubt often went instead of the mere animal. However, giving orders that the strong and apparently healthy should be nursed, the weakly and delicate, often the noblest men, and the bravest soldiers, as witness Lucius Sulla, were condemned to be cast like so many puppy dogs into the Apothetæ, a deep cavern at the foot of Mount Taygetos. This den of death relieved the Spartans from the necessity of erecting workhouses or enacting poor-laws. The surplus population went into that pit.

To a certain extent, and in a mitigated form, the same practice prevailed at Athens. Here, however, it was more a matter of custom than of law, and in this respect differed materially^[348] from the practice of Sparta, that it was left entirely to the father to determine the fate of his children. Accordingly, the more cold-blooded had recourse to murder, while the less atrocious exposed them in jars in desert places to perish, or in the thronged and crowded quarters of the city in the hope that they might excite in others that compassion, which he, their father, denied them.^[349] And humane individuals were often found who, like our Squire Allworthy, would sympathise with these deserted creatures.^[350] Numerous examples occur in the comic poets. In these cases poverty was no doubt the motive, particularly when boys were exposed; but even wealthy persons, reasoning like the Rajpoots of northern India, would prefer exposing their daughters, to the care and expense of educating them to an uncertain destiny. On these occasions the child was dressed and swaddled more or less carefully, placed in a large earthen vessel called a chytra,^[351]—the same in which soup was made, and which ought, therefore, to have awakened humane associations,—and laid at the mouth of some cave without the walls, or in such situations as I have above described. To this custom allusion is made in the anecdote of a foundling, who amusing himself by rolling a chytra before him with his foot, “What! exclaimed some one desirous of reminding him of his origin, have you the impiety to kick your mother in the belly?”^[352]

Sometimes when the object was rather to escape shame than to shun the expense of education, rings, jewels, or other valuable tokens were suspended about the child, or put along with it into the chytra.^[353] And in the comic writers these usually assist in bringing about a discovery. If they fell into the hands of the poor the costly marks of noble birth, always held in honour by the ignorant and needy, would perhaps tempt them to preserve and cherish the off-cast, as in the case of Shakespeare’s Perdita, or in the event of death, would defray the expenses of their funerals. Sometimes superstition operated on their minds, urging them into a mock show of sharing their possessions with the little wretches they abandoned.^[354] Thus Sostrata, wife of Chremes, in the Self-tormentor delivered along with her little daughter to the person who was to expose it, a ring from her own finger to be left with the child, that should it die it might not be wholly deprived of all share of their property. Such also is the behaviour of Creusa in Euripides; for Hermes, whom the poet introduces unfolding the argument of the drama, relates that when the young princess laid her new-born son to perish in the cavern, where he had been conceived, she took off her costly ornaments and with them decked her devoted boy.^[355]

From another part of the same play it may be inferred that children were often exposed on the steps of Apollo’s temple at Delphi, and nurtured by the Pythoness.^[356] Indeed the priestess, on discovering Ion, who had been brought thither by Hermes from Attica, concludes at once that some unfortunate Delphian girl^[357] is his mother, and adopts him under that impression. From the sequel it would appear that such children were the slaves of the temple, and under the immediate protection of the god.^[358]

In the plain of Eleutheræ, near the temple of Dionysos, is a cavern, and close beside it a fountain. Here, according to the poets, Antiope brought forth Zethos and Amphion, twin sons of Zeus, whom, to conceal her shame, she abandoned where they were born. The infants were immediately afterwards discovered by a shepherd, who, having bathed them in the neighbouring spring, took them to his cot, where they were brought up as his own children.^[359] The catastrophe of many an ancient play was brought about by a discovery of the real characters of persons who had been exposed in infancy. Thus Œdipus, whose story is too well known to need repetition, was abandoned on Mount Cithæron. The daughters of Phineus,^[360] of whom nothing else has come down to us, had been cast forth in infancy and preserved, and were afterwards brought to be put to death on the same spot; by alluding to which their lives were saved. The sons,^[361] likewise, of Tyro, Peleus and Neleus, were deserted by their mother, who placed them in a little bark or chest on the banks of the Enipeus, a circumstance which served afterwards to reveal the parentage of the twins. The story of Romulus and Remus, who were thus abandoned by their vestal mother, is familiar to every reader; and from the example of Moses recorded in the sacred volume, we may infer that the exposing of children was common in remoter ages in Egypt. Pindar,^[362] in relating the birth of the prophet Iamos, presents us with a poetical picture of one of these unhappy transactions. Evadne, daughter of Poseidon by the river-nymph Pitana, dwelling at the court of Æpytos a king of Arcadia, going forth, like the daughters of the Patriarchs, to draw water from a fountain, is overtaken by her birth-pangs.

Generally, it would appear, illegitimate children were exposed in the neighbourhood of the Gymnasium, in the Cynosarges, because, as suggested by Suidas, Heracles, who was himself a bastard, had a temple there.

On the subject of infanticide the Thebans,^[363] as I have said, entertained juster sentiments than the rest of their countrymen. By their institutions it was made a capital crime; but because severe laws would not furnish the indigent with the means of supporting the children they were forbidden to kill, they by another enactment provided for their maintenance. If a poor man found himself unable to support an addition to his family, he was commanded to bear his children immediately from the birth, wrapped in swaddling-clothes, to the magistrates, who disposed of them for a small sum to wealthy people in want of children or servants: for, according to the Theban laws, they who undertook the charge of foundlings, if they may be so called, were entitled to their services in return for their nursing and education.

Connected with infanticide is another subject equally important, but of very difficult treatment; that is practices to destroy the infant before the birth.^[364] In modern nations all such offences are theoretically visited with very severe punishment by the law, and public opinion so strongly condemns them that no one solicitous of upholding a respectable character in society will dare to be their apologist. It was otherwise in antiquity. The greatest dread of a superabundant population was in many states felt, and led to customs and acts of a very nefarious nature; for some classes of which, if not for all, writers of highest eminence are found to plead. Thus Pliny,^[365] commonly a great declaimer in behalf of virtue, admits that some artificial limit should be put to female productiveness; and Aristotle, despite his far nobler and more generous ethics, had on this point no loftier views. The regulations also of the Cretan Minos—but let them remain in the obscurity which encompasses his entire code.

Among the Romans several modern writers appear to suppose the existence of more humane feelings, for which it would certainly have been difficult to account. An ancient law attributed to Romulus has misled them. By this it was enacted that no male child should be exposed; and that of daughters the first should be permitted to live, while the others having been brought up till they were three years old, might then if judged expedient be destroyed.^[366] The legislator, it is argued, knew human nature too well to fear that parents who had preserved their children three years would after that take away their lives. But infants exceedingly mutilated or deformed might be killed at once, having first been shown to five neighbours, and these neighbours, like the overseers of murder at Lacedæmon, were probably lax in interpreting the law, which, acknowledging the principle, would easily tolerate variations in the practice.^[367] Be this, however, as it may, child-murder and child dropping were in imperial times of ordinary occurrence at Rome. There was in the Herb-market a pillar called the “Milky column,”^[368] whither foundlings were brought to be suckled by public nurses, or to be fed with milk—for the passage in Festus may be both ways interpreted, and their numbers would seem to have been considerable. The Christian writers constantly object the practice of infanticide to the Romans. “You cast forth your sons,” says Tertullian,^[369] “to be picked up and nourished by the first woman that passes.” And the poor, as Ambrose remarks, would desert and expose their little ones, and if caught deny them to be theirs.^[370] Others adopted more decisive measures, and instead of exposing strangled them.^[371] Probably, moreover, it was the atrocious device of legislators to get rid of their superabundant population that gave rise to the rite of child-sacrificing known to have prevailed among the Phœnicians, who passed their children through fire to Moloch; and among their descendants the Carthaginians,^[372] who offered up infants to their gods, as at the present day our own idolatrous subjects in the East cast forth their first-born infants on islands at the mouth of the Ganges, to be devoured by the alligators. In China Christianity has performed for infancy the same humane duty as in ancient Rome, as many of the converts made by the Jesuits consisted of foundlings whom they had picked up when cast forth by their parents to perish in the streets.