Examples of tender attachment are also met with in real life. Demosthenes furnishes a typical illustration in Oration, xlvii. “I explained to the interpreters the attachment of the woman to our family, the cause of my having her in my house, and that she had lost her life in the defense of my property. She had no kind of family connection with me, except that she had been my nurse.”
In contrast to these, we have but few instances of unkindness on the part of the nurse. However, the perversity of human nature is exemplified in the illustration Plutarch gives: “For nurses, who are often rubbing the dirt off their infants, sometimes tear the flesh and put them to torture.”[201] This contrary note is again struck in Stobaeus,[202] where the lack of skill and teasing humor of some nurses is portrayed. The child is hungry, the nurse obliges it to sleep; it is thirsty, she gives it a bath; it is sleepy, she keeps it awake by shaking rattles in its ears. Aristophanes, too, does not spare those nurses who rob their nurslings of a part of their meal.[203] Though the chattering[204] and tippling propensities[205] of the nurse are sometimes referred to, we do not read that they led her to neglect the child. In fact, neglect and unkindness to children are not characteristic of the Greek nurse as popularly conceived. Of this we have ample evidence from the number of metaphors employed in the literature wherein the nurse figures and always in a good sense. One’s fatherland is frequently called a nurse, since the care and nurture bestowed on a man by his country is like that given the child by the nurse. We read of the much-nourishing nurse, Greece (Ἑλλάδος ἀμητῆρα πολυθρέπτοιο τιθήνης);[206] your motherland, most beloved nurse (γῇ τε μητρί, φιλτάτῃ τροφῷ;)[207] this, thy country, nursed thee:
(οὔτ’ ἐννομ’ εἶπας οὐτε προσφιλὲς πόλει τῇδ’, ἥ σ’ ἔθρεψε, τήνδ’ ἀποστερῶν φάτιν;)[208]
Apollo may love me as caring for his dear nurse, i. e. the island of Delos (Κύνθιος αἰνήσῃ με φίλης ἀλέγοντα τιθήνης),[209] and many other examples. The dinner table is styled the nurse of life (βίου τιθήνη).[210] The dove keeping the snake from her brood is an all-attentive nurse:
(δράκοντες ὥς τις τέκνων ὑπερδέδοικεν λεχαίων δυσευνάτορας πάντροφος πελειάς.)[211]