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—