In the Odyssey, too, the faithful Eurycleia is spoken of as carrying Odysseus and laying him in the arms of his grandsire, that the latter might choose for him a name.[[105]] The author of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter puts these words into the mouth of the goddess-nurse:

καί κεν παῖδα νεογνὸν ἐν ἀγκοίνῃσιν ἔχουσα

καλὰ τιθηνοίμην.[[106]]

The nurse in Herodotus carried the child each day to the temple of Helen.[[107]] Iphigenia speaking of Orestes says that she left him at home a young child in the arms of his nurse:

ἔλιπον ἀγκάλαισι νεαρὸν τροφοῦ.[[108]]

At the festival of the Amphidromia, it was the nurse who carried the child around the hearth;[[109]] and in the Nurse-festival (τιθηνίδια) at Sparta, the nurses carried the male children to the temple of Artemis.[[110]] We know that nurses walked the floor with fretful children in order to soothe them. A good instance of this is given in Menander’s Samia, 26–30 (Capps), where an old nurse fondles a child to her heart’s content, kissing it and calling it soft names, walking around with it until it is quieted. “The homeopathic cure of morbid ‘enthusiasm’ by means of music was, it may be incidentally observed, known to Plato. In a passage of the Laws,[[111]] where he is laying down the rules for the management of infants, his advice is that infants should be kept in perpetual motion, and live as if they were always tossing at sea. He proceeds to compare the principle on which religious ecstasy is cured by a strain of impassioned music, with the method of nurses, who lull their babes to sleep not by silence but by singing, not by holding them quiet, but by rocking them in their arms.... An external agitation (κίνησις) is employed to calm and counteract an internal. But Plato recognized the principle only as it applied to music and to the useful art of nursing.”

This perpetual motion used by the nurse is referred to in the Timaeus,[[112]] and Aristotle thinks “it is of advantage to have all the movements made (of the bodies of infants) that it is possible to have made in the case of creatures so young.”[[113]] Plato lays down regulations for the nurses to carry the children into the fields, to the temples, and on visits to their acquaintances until they are able to stand alone. He would have them carried until the end of the third year, lest their limbs should be distorted by standing on them too soon: καὶ δὴ καὶ τὰς τροφοὺς ἀναγκάζωμεν νόμῳ ζημιοῦντες τὰ παιδία ἢ πρὸς ἀγροὺς ἢ πρὸς ἱερὰ ἢ πρὸς ὀικείους ἀεί πῃ φέρειν, μέχριπερ ἂν ἱκανῶς ἵστασθαι δυνατὰ γίγνηται, καὶ τότε διευλαβουμένας, ἔτι νέων ὄντων μή πῃ βίᾳ ἐπερειδομένων στρέφηται τὰ κῶλα ἐπιπονεῖν φερούσας, ἕως ἂν τριέτες ἀποτελεσθῇ τὸ γενόμενον;[[114]] This is doubtless the reason why there is no mention made of a contrivance to keep the children’s limbs straight like the “serperastra”[[115]] in use among the Romans.[[116]] The Greeks were careful to develop the body and to have it well-shapen. In the Pseudo-Plutarchian Essay, De Liberis Educandis, the writer thinks it necessary for the members of children to be shapen aright as soon as they are born: ὥσπερ γὰρ τὰ μέλη τοῦ σώματος εὐθὺς ἀπὸ γενέσεως πλάττειν τῶν τέκνων ἀναγκαῖόν ἐστι.[[117]] In the De Virtute, the author tells us that this is the work of the nurses: αἱ τίτθαι ταῖς χερσὶ τὸ σῶμα πλάττουσι.[[118]] Plato, speaking of the influence of stories on the minds of children, says that we must persuade the nurses and the mothers to form the souls of their children by these stories πολὺ μᾶλλον ἢ τὰ σώματα ταῖς χερσὶν.[[119]] This practice continued down to the days of Galen as is shown from the following: τὰ κῶλα διαπλάττουσι αἱ τροφοὶ τῶν βρεφῶν ὥσπερ κήρινα.[[120]]

Cradles

The nurse had various contrivances in which to place the children after they were lulled to sleep. We read that Alcmena cradled her children in a shield:

χάλκειον κατέθηκεν ἐπ’ ἀσπίδα.[[121]]