There were two systems of education known to the Greek world, that of Athens and that of Sparta; but in an Athenian, as in a Spartan, household, the first six or seven years of a child’s life were spent at home in the women’s quarter of the house. A Spartan mother, however, only received her child to rear after it had been carefully examined by the elders of the tribe to which the parents belonged: if its physical condition was unsatisfactory it was exposed on Mount Taygetus, there to die or be brought up by Helots. Consequently the Spartan women, who were famed all over Greece for their skill as nurses, had only the best material to work upon.
In both states such education as the children received at this period of life was almost entirely physical. They were taught how to stand, how to sit, and how to walk correctly: on a vase painting in the British Museum, for example, we see a small child moving unsteadily towards its mother, who waits with open arms to receive it, while an instructor with long wand stands in the background. Athenian mothers usually were inclined to delegate the care of their children to a hired nurse, and there is an implied reproof to their indifference in the elaborate precepts that Plato gives in the _Republic_ for the proper management of infants. For example, he combats the idea that a good child should be quiet, and insists upon the importance of constant motion for the young baby, who in an Athenian nursery was often closely bandaged in swaddling clothes and then left to its own resources.
‘The first principle,’ he says, ‘in relation both to the body and the soul of very young creatures is that nursing and moving about by day and night is good for them all, and that the younger they are the more they will need it. Infants should live, if it were possible, as if they were always rocking at sea. Exercise and motion in the earliest years greatly contribute to create a part of virtue in the soul: the child’s virtue is cheerfulness, and good nursing makes a gentle and a cheerful child.’
Greek ears were very sensitive to sounds, and the noise of the uncheerful infant protesting against life was doubtless very trying to the father in the few hours that he spent at home. We have no information of Plato’s practical experience of children, for, as far as we know, he never married, but both he and Aristotle love to criticize the customs of their native city. In the _Politics_, for example, as in the _Republic_, the importance of the child is emphasized.