The F lorentine Codex and Codex Mendoza present parallel accounts of the lives of young girls and boys. Like their sisters, Aztec boys began being treated as workers at about four years old. But there were no stereotyped skilled tasks in which they were trained at this early age to be compared to the spinning and weaving skills of girls. Instead, they labored in a variety of tasks while learning the discipline required of them. But theirs was a task deferred, symbolized at birth when the midwives told them their destiny was to die as warriors, and at first bathing, when she presented them with a small shield and arrows. The parents of the newborn boy would immediately have dedicated him to eventual training either as a priest in the calmecac, or as a warrior in thetelpochcalli. Once they left their birth house to live and be trained in either of these disciplines, young boys were required to sweep the building and keep it clean. At night, they kept watch at the temples or took part in the singing and dancing that was a major part of their schooling. During the day, at least some of these boys went out in the city streets, and on certain feast days took part in mock attacks on people. The transition of boys to adulthood was phrased in terms of participation in warfare. When young men entered the field of battle the first time, their hair style marked them as novices. They were required to capture an enemy warrior in single combat. Their capture led to a celebration in their home nieghborhood when they returned, and was marked by a change in hair style. Some young men remained in the telpochcalli as professional soldiers, continuing to accrue elaborations of hairstyle, lip ornaments, and fancy capes as they added to their tally of captives. Successful and well-known, these warriors took part in the dances, races, and ballgames that marked the ritual calendar. Still part of the household in which they were born, where celebrations followed each conquest, the lives and day-to-day contacts of the young warriors were distinct from those of their family. They would not know the detail of the daily round, or the local gossip. Unlike their sisters who stayed in the house and picked up news in the marketplace, the young men lacked the practical knowledge that they would need when they returned to the household to marry. When a young man's parents decided he was to marry, and formally separated him from his peers and elders in the telpochcalli, he was symbolically cut off from his former life. As much as the young wife was urged in oratory to her duty to continue the lineage, the young man was counseled by his elders in the same way. His new family addressed him as if he were a newborn child again, in virtually the same words the midwife had used at his birth. From the status of one distinguished by his own actions, in control through his prowess of his destiny, the new husband found himself a subordinate expected to work the land, or assist in the household craft, or traffic in the marketplace as part of the corporate work of survival. While he no longer heard the speeches celebrating his capture, the same language was used toward his wife as she gave birth. His own role as elder brother was defined as had been that of the young girl: to carry the burdens of his younger siblings. Instead of the glorious life after death as attendant to the sun, or as the spirit of a butterfly or hummingbird, the former warrior now could expect only the long cold journey to the underworld land of the dead. With time, the younger men became the elders of their own households, and became the voice for the virtues of work, respect for authority, and contribution to the household. But sometimes the older men must have remembered the brief time during their youth when, dressed in full regalia, flush with their own courage and the sense of mortality, they danced and sang in the streets under the eyes of admiring crowds.