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JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY.

JOHN PENTLAND MAHAFFY, an Irish classical scholar and historian, born at Chapponnaire, on Lake Geneva, Switzerland, Feb. 26, 1839. He was educated in Germany till he entered Trinity College, Dublin, in 1856. He gained his fellowship by competition in 1864, and became Professor of Ancient History in 1871. He was decorated with the gold cross of the Order of the Saviour by the King of Greece in 1877; and became an Honorary Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford, in 1882. He is examiner and lecturer in Trinity College, Dublin, in classics, philosophy, music, and modern languages. Besides many papers in periodicals and reviews, he has published a translation of Kuno Fischer's "Commentary on Kant " (1866); "Twelve Lectures on Primitive Civilization" (1868); "Prolegomena to Ancient History" (1871); "Kant's Critical Philosophy for English Readers" (1871); "Greek Social Life from Homer to Menander " (1874); "Greek Antiquities" (1876); "Rambles and Studies in Greece" (1876); "Greek Education" (1881); "History of Classical and Greek Literature" (1880); "Report on the Irish Grammar Schools" (1880); "The Decay of Modern Preaching" (1882); "The Story of Alexander's Empire" (1886); "Greek Life and Thought" (1887); "Art of Conversation" (1887); "The Greek World Under Roman Sway" (1890); "Greek Pictures” (1890); "Problems in Greek History" (1892); "Life and Teaching of Descartes" (1894); "The Empire of the Ptolemies" (1895); "Survey of Greek Civilization" (1896); and is editor of the English edition of Duruy's "Roman History."

CHILDHOOD IN ANCIENT LIFE.

(From "Old Greek Education.")

We find in Homer, especially in the "Iliad," indications of the plainest kind that Greek babies were like the babies of modern Europe: equally troublesome, equally delightful to their parents, equally uninteresting to the rest of society. The famous. scene in the sixth book of the "Iliad," when Hector's infant, Astyanax, screams at the sight of his father's waving crest, and

the hero lays his helmet on the ground that he may laugh and weep over the child; the love and tenderness of Andromache, and her pathetic laments in the twenty-second book, are familiar to all. She foresees the hardships and unkindnesses to her orphan boy," who was wont upon his father's knees to eat the purest marrow and the rich fat of sheep, and when sleep came upon him, and he ceased his childish play, he would lie in the arms of his nurse, on a soft cushion, satisfied with every comfort." So again, a protecting goddess is compared to a mother keeping the flies from her sleeping infant; and a pertinacious friend, to a little girl who, running beside her mother, begs to be taken up, holding her mother's dress and delaying her, and with tearful eyes keeps looking up till the mother denies her no longer. These are only stray references, and yet they speak no less clearly than if we had asked for an express answer to a direct inquiry. So we have the hesitation of the murderers sent to make away with the infant Cypselus, who had been foretold to portend danger to the Corinthian Herods of that day. The smile of the baby unmans or should we rather unbrutes? the first ruffian, and so the task is passed on from man to man. This story in Herodotus is a sort of natural Greek parallel to the great Shakspearean scene, where another child sways his intended torturer with an eloquence more conscious and explicit, but not perhaps more powerful, than the radiant smile of the Greek baby. Thus Euripides, the great master of pathos, represents Iphigenia bringing her infant brother Orestes to plead for her, with that unconsciousness of sorrow which pierces us to the heart more than the most affecting rhetoric. In modern art a little child playing about its dead mother, and waiting with contentment for her awaking, is perhaps the most powerful appeal to human compassion which we are able to conceive.

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On the other hand, the troubles of infancy were then as now very great. We do not indeed hear of croup, or teething, or measles, or whooping-cough. But these are occasional matters, and count as nothing beside the inexorable tyranny of a sleepless baby. For then as now, mothers and nurses had a strong prejudice in favor of carrying about restless children, and so soothing them to sleep. The unpractical Plato requires that in his fabulous Republic two or three stout nurses shall be in readiness to carry about each child; because children, like gamecocks, gain spirit and endurance by this treatment! What they really gain is a gigantic power of torturing their mothers. Most chil

dren can readily be taught to sleep in a bed, or even in an armchair, but an infant once accustomed to being carried about will insist upon it; and so it came that Greek husbands were obliged to relegate their wives to another sleeping-room, where the nightly squalling of the furious infant might not disturb the master as well as the mistress of the house. But the Greek gentleman was able to make good his damaged rest by a midday siesta, and so required but little sleep at night. The modern father in northern Europe, with his whole day's work and waking, is therefore in a more disadvantageous position.

Of course very fashionable people kept nurses; and it was the highest tone at Athens to have a Spartan nurse for the infant, just as an English nurse is sought out among foreign noblesse. We are told that these women made the child hardier, that they used less swathing and bandaging, and allowed free play for the limbs; and this, like all the Spartan physical training, was approved of and admired by the rest of the Greek public, though its imitation was never suggested save in the unpractical speculations of Plato.

Whether they also approved of a diet of marrow and mutton suet, which Homer, in the passage just cited, considers the luxury of princes, does not appear. As Homer was the Greek Bible, an inspired book containing perfect wisdom on all things, human and divine, — there must have been many orthodox parents who followed his prescription. But we hear no approval or censure of such diet. Possibly marrow may have represented our cod-liver oil in strengthening delicate infants. But as the Homeric men fed far more exclusively on meat than their historical successors, some vegetable substitute, such as olive oil, must have been in use later on. Even within our memory, mutton suet boiled in milk was commonly recommended by physicians for the delicacy now treated by cod-liver oil. The supposed strengthening of children by air and exposure, or by early neglect of their comforts, was as fashionable at Sparta as it is with many modern theorists; and it probably led in both cases to the same result, the extinction of the weak and delicate. These theorists parade the cases of survival of stout children - that is, their exceptional soundness as the effect of this harsh treatment, and so satisfy themselves that experience confirms their views. Now with the Spartans this was logical enough; for as they professed and desired nothing but physical results, as they despised intellectual qualities and

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esteemed obedience to be the highest of moral ones, they were perhaps justified in their proceeding. So thoroughly did they advocate the production of healthy citizens for military purposes, that they were quite content that the sickly should die. In fact, in the case of obviously weak and deformed infants, they did not hesitate to expose them in the most brutal sense, cold and draughts, but to the wild beasts in the mountains.

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This brings us to the first shocking contrast between the Greek treatment of children and ours. We cannot really doubt, from the free use of the idea in Greek tragedies, in the comedies of ordinary life, and in theories of political economy, that the exposing of new-born children was not only sanctioned by public feeling, but actually practiced throughout Greece. Various motives combined to justify or to extenuate this practice. In the first place, the infant was regarded as the property of its parents, indeed of its father, to an extent inconceivable to most modern Europeans. The State only, whose claim overrode all other considerations, had a right for public reasons to interfere with the dispositions of a father. Individual human life had not attained what may be called the exaggerated value derived from sundry superstitions, which remains even after those superstitions have decayed. And moreover, in many Greek States, the contempt for commercial pursuits, and the want of outlet for practical energy, made the supporting of large families cumbersome, or the subdivision of patrimonies excessive. Hence the prudence or the selfishness of parents did not hesitate to use an escape which modern civilization condemns as not only criminal but as horribly cruel. How little even the noblest Greek theorists felt this objection appears from the fact that Plato, the Attic Moses, sanctions infanticide under certain circumstances or in another form, in his ideal State. In the genteel comedy it is often mentioned as a somewhat painful necessity, but enjoined by prudence. Nowhere does the agony of the mother's heart reach us through their literature, save in one illustration used by the Platonic Socrates, where he compares the anger of his pupils, when first confuted out of their prejudices, to the fury of a young mother deprived of her first infant. There is something horrible in the very allusion, as if in after life Attic mothers became hardened to this treatment. We must suppose the exposing of female infants to have been not uncommon, until the just retribution of barrenness fell upon the nation, and the population dwindled away by a strange atrophy.

In the many family suits argued by the Attic orators, we do not (I believe) find a case in which a large family of children is concerned. Four appears a larger number than the average. Marriages between relations as close as uncle and niece, and even half-brothers and sisters, were not uncommon; but the researches of modern science have removed the grounds for believing that this practice would tend to diminish the race. It would certainly increase any pre-existing tendency to hereditary disease; yet we do not hear of infantile diseases any more than we hear of delicate infants. Plagues and epidemics were common enough; but as already observed, we do not hear of measles, or whoopingcough, or scarlatina, or any of the other constant persecutors of our nurseries.

As the learning of foreign languages was quite beneath the notions of the Greek gentleman, who rather expected all barbarians to learn his language, the habit of employing foreign nurses, so useful and even necessary to good modern education, was well-nigh unknown. It would have been thought a great misfortune to any Hellenic child to be brought up speaking Thracian or Egyptian. Accordingly foreign slave attendants, with their strange accent and rude manners, were not allowed to take charge of children till they were able to go to school and had learned their mother tongue perfectly.

But the women's apartments, in which children were kept for the first few years, are closed so completely to us that we can but conjecture a few things about the life and care of Greek babies. A few late epigrams tell the grief of parents bereaved of their infants. Beyond this, classical literature affords us no light. The backwardness in culture of Greek women leads us to suspect that then, as now, Greek babies were more often spoilt than is the case among the serious northern nations. The term "Spartan mother" is, however, still proverbial; and no doubt in that exceptional State, discipline was so universaf and so highly esteemed that it penetrated even to the nursery. But in the rest of Greece, we may conceive the young child arriving at his schoolboy age more willful and headstrong than most of our more watched and worried infants. Archytas the philosopher earned special credit for inventing the rattle, and saving much damage to household furniture by occupying children with this toy.

The external circumstances determining a Greek boy's education were somewhat different from ours. We must re