To quit, however, this melancholy topic: while the poor, as we have seen, were driven by despair to imbrue their hands in the blood of their offspring, their more wealthy neighbours celebrated the birth of a child^[373] with a succession of banquets and rejoicings. Of these, the first was held on the fifth day from the birth, when took place the ceremony called Amphidromia, confounded by some ancient authors with the festival of the tenth day.^[374] On this occasion the accoucheuse or the nurse, to whose care the child was now definitively consigned,^[375] having purified her hands with water,^[376] ran naked^[377] with the infant in her arms, and accompanied by all the other females of the family, in the same state, round the hearth,^[378] which was regarded as the altar of Hestia, the Vesta of the Romans. By this ceremony the child was initiated in the rites of religion and placed under the protection of the fire goddess, probably with the same view that infants are baptized among us.

Meanwhile the passer-by was informed that a fifth-day feast was celebrating within, by symbols suspended on the street-door, which, in case of a boy, consisted in an olive crown; and of a lock of wool, alluding to her future occupations, when it was a girl.^[379] Athenæus, apropos of cabbage, which was eaten on this occasion, as well as by ladies “in the straw,”^[380] as conducing to create milk, quotes a comic description of the Amphidromia from a drama of Ephippos, which proves they were well acquainted with the arts of joviality.

A sacrifice^[382] was likewise this day offered up for the life of the child, probably to the god Amphidromos, first mentioned, and therefore supposed to have been invented by Æschylus.^[383] It has moreover been imagined that the name was now imposed, and gifts were presented by the friends and household slaves.^[384]

But it was on the seventh day that the child generally received its name,^[385] amid the festivities of another banquet; though sometimes this was deferred till the tenth.^[386] The reason is supplied by Aristotle.^[387] They delayed the naming thus long, he says, because most children that perish in extreme infancy die before the seventh day, which being passed they considered their lives more secure. The eighth day was chosen by other persons for bestowing the name, and, this considered the natal day, was solemnized annually as the anniversary of its birth, on which occasion it was customary for the friends of the family to assemble together, and present gifts to the child, consisting sometimes of the polypi and cuttle-fish^[388] to be eaten at the feast. However the tenth day^[389] appears to have been very commonly observed. Thus Euripides:^[390]

Aristophanes, too, on the occasion of naming his Bird-city, which a hungry poet pretends to have long ago celebrated, introduces Peisthetæros saying,

Connected with this custom, there is a very good anecdote in Polyænos, from which Meursius^[392] infers that there existed among the Greeks something like the office of sponsor. Jason, tyrant of Pheræ, most of whose stratagems were played off against members of his own family, had a brother named Meriones, extremely opulent, but to the last degree close-fisted, particularly towards him. When at length a son was born to Jason, he invited to the Nominalia many principal nobles of Thessaly, and among others his brother Meriones, who was to preside over the ceremonies. In these he was probably occupied the whole day, during which, under pretence, apparently, of providing some choice game for his guests, the tyrant went out for a few hours with his dogs and usual followers. His real object, however, soon appeared. Making direct for Pagasæ, where his brother’s castle stood, he stormed the place, and seizing on Meriones’ treasures, to the amount of twenty talents, returned in all speed to the banquet. Here, by way of showing his fraternal consideration, he delegated to his brother the honour of pouring forth the libations, and bestowing the name, which was the father’s prerogative. But Meriones receiving from one of the tyrant’s attendants a hint of what had taken place, called the boy “Porthaon,” or the “Plunderer.”^[393] At Athens the feast and sacrifice took place at night, with much pomp, and all the glee which such an occasion was calculated to inspire.^[394]

On the bestowing of the name Potter’s information is particularly full. He is probably right, too, in his conjecture, that in most countries the principal object of calling together so great a number of friends to witness this ceremony was to prevent such controversies as might arise when the child came out into the business of the world. But at Athens the Act of Registration^[395] rendered such witnesses scarcely necessary. The right of imposing the name belonged, as hinted above, to the father, who likewise appears to have possessed the power afterwards to alter it if he thought proper. They were compelled to follow no exact precedent; but the general rule resembled one apparently observed by nature, which, neglecting the likeness in the first generation, sometimes reproduces it with extraordinary fidelity in the second. Thus, the grandson inheriting often the features, inherited also very generally the name of his grandfather,^[396] and precisely the same rule applied to women; the granddaughter nearly always receiving her grandmother’s name.^[397] Thus, Andocides, son of Leagoras, bore the name of his grandfather; the father and son of Miltiades were named Cimon; the father and son of Hipponicos, Cleinias.^[398] The orator Lysias formed an exception to this rule, his grandfather’s name having been Lysanias.^[399] In short, though there existed no law upon the subject, yet ancient and nearly invariable custom operated with the force of law.^[400]

The names of children were often in remote antiquity derived from some circumstance attending their birth, or in the history of their parents. Sometimes, too, their own deeds, as in the case of modern titles, procured them a name; or perhaps some misfortune which befell them. Thus, Marpissa, in Homer, being borne away^[401] by Apollo, obtained the name of Halcyone, because her mother, like the Halcyon, was inconsolable for the loss of her offspring.^[402] Scamandrios, son of Hector, was denominated Astyanax, because his father was τοῦ ἄστεος ἄναξ, “the defender of the city;”^[403] and Odysseus, metamorphosed by the Romans into Ulysses, is supposed to have been so called τοῦ ἄστεος ἄναξ διὰ τὸ ὀδυσσέσθαι τοῦ Αὐτολυκου, from the anger of Autolychos.^[404] Again, the son of Achilles, at first called Pyrrhos, as our second William, Rufus, from the colour of his hair, afterwards obtained the name of Neoptolemos, “the youthful warrior,” from his engaging at a very early age in the siege of Troy. It came, in aftertimes, to be considered indecorous for persons of humble condition to assume the names of heroic families. Thus, the low flatterer Callicrates, at the court of Ptolemy the Third, was thought to be audacious because he bestowed upon his son and daughter the names of Telegonos and Anticleia, and wore the effigy of Odysseus in his ring, which appeared to be claiming kindred with that illustrious chief. In fact, to prevent the profanation of revered names, the law itself forbade them to be adopted by slaves or females of bad character,^[405] though, in defiance of its enactments, we find there were hetairæ, who derived their appellation from the sacred games of Greece, Nemeas, Isthmias, and Pythionica.^[406]

But of this enough: we now proceed to the management and education of children, beginning with their earliest infancy. In old times the women of Greece always suckled their own offspring, and for the performance of this office they were excellently adapted by nature,^[407] since they had no sooner become mothers than their breasts filled so copiously with milk than it not only flowed through the nipple, but likewise transpired through the whole bosom. On the little derangements of the system peculiar to nurses the Greeks entertained many superstitious opinions; for instance, they conceived those thread-like indurations which sometimes appear in the breasts to be caused by swallowing hairs, which afterwards come forth with the milk, on which account the disorder was called Trichiasis.^[408] The nourishment supplied by mothers so robust and lactiferous was often so rich and abundant as, like over-feeding, to cause spasms and convulsions, supposed to be most violent when they happened during the full moon, and began in the back. The usual remedy among nurses would appear to have been wine, since Aristotle,^[409] in speaking of the disorder, observes that white, particularly if diluted with water, is less injurious than red, though even from the former he thought it better to abstain. The administering of aperient medicines and the absence from everything that could cause flatulence, he considered the only safe treatment. Nurses, however, sometimes placed much reliance on the brains of a rabbit.^[410]

In Plato’s Republic the nurses were to live apart in a distinct quarter of the city, and suckle indiscriminately all the children that were to be preserved; no mother being permitted to know her own child.^[411]

Every one must have observed, as well as Plato,^[412] that children are no sooner born than they exhibit unequivocal signs of passion and anger, in the moderating and directing of which consists the chiefest difficulty of education. Most men, through the defect of nature or early discipline, live long before they acquire this mastery, which many never attain at all. Generally, however, where it is possessed, much may certainly be attributed to that training which begins at the birth, so that of all the instruments employed in the^[413] forming of character, the nurse is probably the most important. Of this the ancients generally appear to have been convinced, and most of all the Spartans and Athenians. The Lacedæmonian nurses, on whom the force of discipline had been tried, enjoyed a high reputation throughout Greece, and were particularly esteemed at Athens.^[414] They no doubt deserved it. To them may be traced the first attempt to dispense with those swathes and bandages which in other countries confined the limbs, and impeded the movements of infants, and by their skilful and enlightened treatment, combined with watchfulness and tender solicitude, they are said to have preserved their little charges from those distortions so common among children. But their cares extended beyond the person. They aimed at forming the manners, regulating the temper, laying the foundation of virtuous habits, at sowing in short the seeds, which in after life, might ripen into a manly, frank, and generous character. In the matter of food, in the regulating of which, as Locke confesses, there is much difficulty, the Spartan nurses acted up to the suggestions of the sternest philosophy, accustoming the children under their charge, to be content with whatever was put before them, and to endure occasional privations without murmuring. Over the fear of ghosts too they triumphed. Empusa and the Mormolukeion, and all those other hideous spectres which childhood associates with the idea of darkness, yielded to the discipline of the Spartan nurse.^[415] Her charge would remain alone or in the dark, without terror, and the same stern system, which overcame the first offspring of superstition, likewise subdued the moral defects of peevishness, frowardness, and the habit of whining and mewling, which when indulged in render children a nuisance to all around them. No wonder therefore, these Doric disciplinarians were everywhere in request. At Athens it became fashionable among the opulent to employ them, and Cleinias, as is well known, placed under the care of one of these she-pædagogues that Alcibiades, whose ambitious character, to be curbed by no restraints of discipline or philosophy, proved the ruin of his country and the scourge of Greece.^[416]

Plato, however, while framing at will an imaginary system, and though inclined upon the whole to laconise, adheres, in some respects, to the customs of his country, and ordains that infants be confined by swaddling bands till two years old. From the mention of this age, it may be inferred that children commonly did not walk much earlier at Athens, which is the case in the East, as we may learn from the story of Ala-ed-deen Abushamet. Plato would also have nurses to be vigorous and robust women, much inclined to frequent the temples, in order, probably, to introduce into the minds of their charges early impressions of religion, and to stroll about the fields and public gardens until the children could run alone; and even then, and until they were three years old, he urged the necessity of their being frequently carried, to prevent crooked legs and malformed ankles. But because all this might press hard on one nurse, several were employed, as among ourselves,^[417] and a kind of Nursery Governess overlooked the whole. The Gerula or under-nurse was, in later times, the person upon whom fell the principal labour of bearing the infant about; but in remoter ages the Greeks, more particularly their royal and noble families, employed in this capacity a Baioulos^[418] or nurse-father, who, as in the case of Phœnix, was sometimes himself of illustrious birth. Cheiron, too, the Pelasgian mountain prince, performed this sacred office for the son of his friend Peleus.

Our readers, we trust, will not be reluctant to enter a Greek nursery,^[419] where the mother, whatever might be the number of her assistants, generally suckled her own children. Their cradles were of various forms, some of which like our own required rocking,^[420] while others were suspended like sailors’ hammocks from the ceiling, and swung gently to and fro when they desired to pacify the child or lull it to sleep:^[421] as Tithonos is represented in the mythology to have been suspended in his old age.^[422] Other cradles there were in the shape of little portable baskets wherein they were carried from one part of the harem to another.^[423] It is probable, too, that as in the East the children of the opulent were rocked in their cradles wrapped in coverlets of Milesian wool.

Occasionally in Hellas,^[424] as everywhere else, the nurse’s milk would fail, or be scanty, when they had recourse to a very original contrivance to still the infant’s cries; they dipped a piece of sponge in honey which was given it to suck.^[425] It was probably under similar circumstances that children were indulged in figs; the Greeks entertaining an opinion that this fruit greatly contributed to render them plump and healthy. They had further a superstition that by rubbing fresh figs upon the eyes of children they would be preserved from ophthalmia.^[426]

The Persians attributed the same preventive power to the petals of the new-blown rose.^[427] When a child was wholly or partly dry-nursed, the girl who had charge of it would under pretence of cooling its pap, commonly made of fine flour of spelt,^[428] put the spoon into her own mouth, swallow the best part of the nourishment, and give the refuse to the infant, a practice attributed by Aristophanes to Cleon, who swallowed, he says, the best of the good things of the state himself, and left the residue to the people.^[429]

All the world over the singing of the nurse has been proverbial. Music breathes its sweetest notes around our cradles. The voice of woman soothes our infancy and our age, and in Greece, where every class of the community had its song, the nurse naturally vindicated one to herself.^[430] This sweetest of all melodies—

was technically denominated Katabaukalesis, of which scraps and fragments only, like those of the village song which lingered in the memory of Rousseau, have come down to us. The first verse of a Roman nursery air, which still, Pignorius^[431] tells us, was sung in his time by the mothers of Italy, ran thus:—

The Sicilian poet, whose pictures of the ancient world are still so fresh and fragrant, has bequeathed to us a Katabaukalesis of extreme beauty and brevity which I have here paraphrastically translated:^[432]—

The philosopher Chrysippos^[434] considered it of importance to regulate the songs of nurses, and Quintilian,^[435] with a quaint but pardonable enthusiasm, would have the boy who is designed to be an orator placed under the care of a nurse of polished language and superior mind. He observes,^[436] too, that children suckled and brought up by dumb nurses, will remain themselves dumb, which would necessarily happen had they no other person with whom to converse. When the infant was extremely wakeful the soothing influence of the song was heightened by the aid of little timbrels and rattles hung with bells.

A very characteristic anecdote is told of Anacreon apropos of nurses.^[437] A good-humoured wench with a child in her arms happening one day to be sauntering more nutricum, through the Panionion, or Grand Agora of Ionia, encountered the Teïan poet, who returning from the Bacchic Olympos, found the streets much too narrow for him, and went reeling hither and thither as if determined to make the most of his walk. The nurse, it is to be presumed, felt no inclination to dispute the passage with him; but Anacreon attracted, perhaps, by her pretty face, making a timely lurch, sent both her and her charge spinning off the pavement, at the same time muttering something disrespectful against “the brat.” Now, for her own part, the girl felt no resentment against him, for she could see which of the divinities was to blame; but loving, as a nurse should, her boy, she prayed that the poet might one day utter many words in praise of him whom he had so rudely vituperated; which came to pass accordingly, for the infant was the celebrated Cleobulos, whose beauty the Teïan afterwards celebrated in many an ode.^[438]

Traces of the remotest antiquity still linger in the nursery. The word baby, which we bestow familiarly on an infant, was with little variation, in use many thousand years ago among the Syrians, in whose nursery dialect babia^[439] had the same signification. Tatta, too, pappa and mamma^[440] were the first words lisped by the children of Hellas. And from various hints dropped by ancient authors, it seems clear that the same wild stories and superstitions that still flourish there haunted the nursery of old. The child was taught to dread Empusa or Onoskelis or Onoskolon,^[441] the monster with one human foot and one of brass, which dwelt among the shades of night and glided through dusky chambers and dismal passages to devour “naughty children.” The fables which filled up this obscure part of Hellenic mythology, were scarcely less wild than those the Arabs tell about their Marids, their Efreets, and their Jinn; for Empusa, the phantom minister of Hecate,^[442] could assume every various form of God’s creatures, appearing sometimes as a bull, or a tree, or an ass, or a stone, or a fly, or a beautiful woman.^[443] Shakspeare, having caught, perhaps, some glimpse of this superstition, or inventing in a kindred spirit, attributes a similar power of transformation to his mischievous elf in the Midsummer Night’s Dream, located on Empusa’s native soil.

It was this spectral being that was said to appear to those who performed the sacrifices to the dead, to men overwhelmed with misfortune,^[444] and travellers in remote and dismal roads; as happened to the companions of Apollonios of Tyana who, in journeying on a bright moonlight night, were startled by the appearance of Empusa, which having stood twice or thrice in their way, suddenly vanished.^[445] To protect themselves against this demon the superstitious were accustomed to wear about them a piece of jasper, either set in a ring, or suspended from the neck.^[446]

The Lamia, too, fierce and beautiful, the ancestress of our “White ladies,” and of the Katakhanas or Vampire of the modern Greeks, roamed through solitary places to terrify, delude, or destroy good folks, big or little, who might lose their way amid moonlit crags or shores made white with bones and sea-shells. They loved to relate “around the fire o’ nights,” how Lamia had once been a beautiful woman caressed and made the mother of a fair son by Zeus; how Hera through jealousy had destroyed the boy; and how, thereupon Lamia took to the bush and devoted her wretched immortality to the destroying of other women’s children.^[447] According to another form of the tradition there were many Lamiæ, so called from having capacious jaws, inhabiting the Libyan coast,^[448] somewhere about the Great Syrtis, in the midst of sand hills, rocks, and wastes of irreclaimable aridity. Formed above like women of surpassing beauty, they terminated below in serpents. Their voice was like the hissing of an adder, and whatever approached them they devoured.^[449]

Another race of wild and grotesque spirits were the Kobaloi,^[450] companions of Dionysos, who doubtless subsist still in our woods and forests under the name of goblins and hobgoblins. Our Elves and Trolls and Fairies appear likewise to belong to the same brood, though in these northern latitudes, they have become less mischievous and more romantic, delighting the eyes of the wayfarers by their frolics and gambols, instead of devouring him.