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§ 8. 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 practised 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 Christians. 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 infanticidessss1 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.