I. CHILDHOOD
EVERY Athenian citizen is expected to have children, and all the forces of religion, property, and the state unite to discountenance childlessness. Where no offspring comes, adoption is the rule, and high prices are paid for prepossessing orphans. At the same time law and public opinion accept infanticide as a legitimate safeguard against excess population and a pauperizing fragmentation of the land; any father may expose a newborn child to death either as doubtfully his, or as weak or deformed. The children of slaves are seldom allowed to live. Girls are more subject to exposure than boys, for every daughter has to be provided with a dowry, and at marriage she passes from the home and service of those who have reared her into the service of those who have not. Exposure is effected by leaving the infant in a large earthenware vessel within the precincts of a temple or in some other place where it can soon be rescued if any wish to adopt it. The parental right to expose permits a rough eugenics, and co-operates with a rigorous natural selection by hardship and competition to make the Greeks a strong and healthy people. The philosophers almost unanimously approve of family limitation: Plato will call for the exposure of all feeble children, and of those born of base or elderly parents;1 and Aristotle will defend abortion as preferable to infanticide.2 The Hippocratic code of medical ethics will not allow the physician to effect abortion, but the Greek midwife is an experienced hand in this field, and no law impedes her.*3
On or before the tenth day after birth the child is formally accepted into the family with a religious ritual around the hearth, and receives presents and a name. Usually a Greek has but one name, like Socrates or Archimedes; but since it is customary to call the eldest son after the paternal grandfather, repetition is frequent, and Greek history is confounded with a multiplicity of Xenophons, Aeschineses, Thucydideses, Diogeneses, and Zenos. To avoid ambiguity the father’s name or the place of birth may be added, as with Kimon Miltiadou—Cimon son of Miltiades—orDiodorus Siculus—Diodorus of Sicily; or the problem may be solved by some jolly nickname, like Callimedon—The Crab.5
Once the child is so accepted into the family it cannot lawfully be exposed, and is reared with all the affection that parents lavish upon their children in every age. Themistocles describes his son as the real ruler of Athens; for he, Themistocles, the most influential man in the city, is ruled by his wife, who is ruled by their child.6 Many an epigram in The Greek Anthology reveals a tender parental love:
I wept at the death of my Theonoe, but the hopes centered in our child lightened my sorrows. And now envious Fate has bereaved me of the boy as well. Alas! I am cheated of thee, my child, all that was left to me. Persephone, hear this cry of a father’s grief, and lay the child upon his dead mother’s breast.7
The tragedies of adolescence are eased with many games, some of which will survive the memory of Greece. On a white perfume vase made for a child’s grave a little boy is seen taking his toy cart with him down to Hades.8 Babies have terra-cotta rattles containing pebbles; girls keep house with their dolls, boys fight great campaigns with clay soldiers and generals, nurses push children on swings or balance them on seesaws, boys and girls roll hoops, fly kites, spin tops, play hide-and-seek or blindman’s buff or tug of war, and wage a hundred merry contests with pebbles, nuts, coins, and balls. The marbles of the Golden Age are dried beans shot from the fingers, or smooth stones shot or tossed into a circle to dislodge enemy stones and come to rest as near as possible to the center. As children approach the “age of reason”—seven or eight—they take up the game of dice by throwing square knucklebones (astragali), the highest throw, six, being counted the best.9 The games of the young are as old as the sins of their fathers.