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ssss1 P. 819.

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§ 7. 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,ssss1 a protecting goddess is compared to a mother keeping the flies from her sleeping infant, and a pertinacious friendssss1 to a little girl who, running beside her mother, begs to be taken up, holding her dress and delaying her, and with tearful eyes the child 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 say unbrutes?—the first ruffian, and so the task is passed on from man to man. This story in Herodotusssss1 is a sort of natural Greek parallel to the great Shakespearian 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.