and funeral monuments will survive to perpetuate their grateful
memory.


50. The Training of Athenian Girls.--Until about seven years old
brothers and sisters grow up in the Gyneconitis together. Then the
boys are sent to school. The girls will continue about the house
until the time of their marriage. It is only in the rarest of
cases that the parents feel it needful to hire any kind of tutor
for THEM. What the average girl knows is simply what her mother
can teach her. Perhaps a certain number of Athenian women (of good
family, too) are downright illiterate; but this is not very often
the case. A normal girl will learn to read and write, with her
mother for school mistress.[*] Very probably she will be taught
to dance, and sometimes to play on some instrument, although this
last is not quite a proper accomplishment for young women of good
family. Hardly any one dreams of giving a woman any systematic
intellectual training.[+] Much more important it is that she
should know how to weave, spin, embroider, dominate the cook, and
superintend the details of a dinner party. She will have hardly
time to learn these matters thoroughly before she is "given a
husband," and her childhood days are forever over (see section 27).

[*]There has come down to us a charming Greek terra-cotta (it is
true, not from Athens) showing a girl seated on her mother's knee,
and learning from a roll which she holds.

[+]Plato suggested in his "Republic" (V. 451 f.) that women should
receive the same educational opportunities as the men. This was
a proposition for Utopia and never struck any answering chord.