the war, and she had been glad to take employment in the house of the wealthy alien. She had more education than was commonly given to Athenian ladies, but this is not to say much, and Hermione would have fared but ill for teaching, according at least to our standard if her father had not always found time even in his busiest days, to supplement her education. The housekeeper was a Laconian woman. She, too, had found her way into the family through circumstances connected with the war. She had been nurse in a wealthy Athenian household. Before the war it had been the fashion, my readers should know, for the upper classes at Athens to get their nurses from Sparta. A true Spartan, a daughter that is, of the military aristocracy that ruled Laconia and its dependencies, it was, of course, impossible to obtain, but girls from the farmer class that cultivated the lands of their soldier masters often sought situations in other countries. This was the case with Milanion, who as the youngest of the five daughters of a Laconian farmer, had been delighted to find a place with an Athenian lady, Melissa, wife of Demochares, at a salary which almost equalled her father’s income. This was just before the commencement of the long war. She had been nurse to Melissa’s five children when the disastrous expedition to Sicily brought irretrievable ruin upon her employer’s family. Demochares was one of the army that surrendered with Nicias, was thrown with his comrades into that most dreadful of prisons, the stone-quarries of Syracuse, and died of a fever[Pg 32] before the end of the year. His property had consisted, for the most part, of farms in the island of Chios, and when Chios revolted from Athens, the widow and her children were reduced to something very like poverty. Nothing was left to them but a small farm at Marathon, and as it so happened, the rent of the house which Hippocles unable, as has been said, to own real property in Attica, had been accustomed to hire. The establishment had to be broken up, the slaves being sold and the free persons looking for employment elsewhere. Milanion was about to return, much against her will, to Laconia, where her long residence at Athens would have rendered her an object of suspicion and dislike, when an opening suddenly presented itself in the family of Hippocles. Pontia’s long illness had come to a fatal end, and the widower was looking for an experienced woman to take charge of the young Hermione. Milanion seemed to him exactly the person that he wanted, and she, on the other hand, was delighted to come to him. As her charge grew older, her duties as nurse gradually changed into the duties of a housekeeper. She had come to her new situation accompanied by a middle-aged woman, a Marian by birth, Manto by name, whom Hippocles
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