ABSTRACT
We have already seen in Chapter 5 that the mother's presence and intimate physical involvement with the small child was not prized as much by the ancients as by modern experts. This view in part reflects a difference in theories of learning. While the idea of small children learning the fundamentals of a discipline was not unknown in the ancient world - witness especially Quintilian Ins!. Or. 1.1.19 - serious learning was seen as beginning later. The modern stress on the importance of the early years for emotional and social development was to an extent paralleled by ancient ideas on moral development. Where Bowlby (1952) argued that small children deprived of a mother or mother substitute would develop into delinquents and social misfits, Favorinus claimed that babies would imbibe low servile morals with a nurse's milk, (Au I. Gell. NA 12.1.17) and Quintilian feared for the foundations of grammar learned at the knee of a foreign-born nurse or paedagogus.1
