Fig. 73.
It is a matter of course that the young people of that day were acquainted with all the games which can be played at social gatherings by children, without any assistance from without. The various games of running, catching, hiding, blind-man’s-buff, etc., in which our young people still take pleasure, were played in Greece in just the same manner, as well as the manifold variety of games with balls, beans, pebbles, coins, etc.
Fig. 74.
Games of ball served as recreation for youths and men, and some of the above-mentioned games of chance, rather than skill, were especially popular with grown-up people, particularly games of dice or “knuckle-bones,” to which we shall refer later on in another section.
Thus our young Athenian spends the first years of his life amid merry play with his companions, under the watchful care of his mother. During the first six years the nursery, where girls and boys are together, is his world, though he is sometimes allowed to run about in the street with boys of his own age. He is not yet troubled with lessons, and although, should he be obstinate or naughty, his mother will sometimes chastise him with her sandal, yet in a family in which a right spirit prevails, the character of the education at this early age is a beneficent mixture of severity and gentleness. Sometimes, it is true, the father does not trouble himself at all about the education of his children, and leaves this entirely to his wife, who may lack the necessary intellectual capacity, or even to a female slave. This, of course, has bad results, and the same happens when the wife, like the mother of Pheidippides, in the “Clouds” of Aristophanes, is too ambitious for her little son, and, in constant opposition to the weak, though well-intentioned, father, spoils him sadly. Let us assume that the boy whose entrance into life we described above, is free from such deleterious influences, and, sound in mind and body, passes in his seventh year out of his mother’s hands into those which will now minister to his intellectual and physical development.