Once more, the following lines do not breathe the spirit of infanticide:
That the custom was deep-rooted when Mohammed arrived on the scene is evident from the fact that Ozaim the Fazarite, according to Abu Tamman, when he decided to save his daughter Lacita, had to conceal that fact from his people, although she was his only child.262
Hunger and famine were undoubtedly the main causes of the practice of getting rid of the female children, although according to Porphyry a boy was sacrificed at Dumat-al Jandal263 and other Arabs sacrificed a virgin annually.
The cannibalistic strain is re-occurring. In the year 378 A. D. a body of Saracens attacking the Goths before Constantinople gave an example of this side of the Arabs.
“Both the Goths and the Saracens were parting on equal terms,” says Ammianus Marcellinus, when “a strange and unprecedented incident gave the final advantage to the eastern warriors; for one of them with long hair, naked—with the exception of a covering around his waist,—shouting a hoarse and melancholy cry, drew his dagger and plunged into the middle of the Gothic host, and after he had slain an enemy, put his lips to his throat and sucked his blood. The barbarians [the Goths] were terrified at this marvellous prodigy and from that time forth when they proceeded on any enterprise, displayed none of their former and usual ferocity, but advanced with hesitating steps.”264
The last line almost leads one to believe that the wily Arab might have been impelled not so much by the cannibalistic strain as by cunning and generalship.
Procopius, in his account of the wars of Justinian, speaks of the far-off Saracens as anthropophagous,265 and according to one Arabian authority at Medina they licked the blood of the man who had been killed in blood revenge. Another custom coming undoubtedly from cannibalistic times is the vow of the mother to drink wine from the skull of the slayer of her son.266
These were the conditions that Mohammed undoubtedly ended by his preaching.
“Come, I will rehearse that which your Lord hath forbidden ye; that is to say that ye be not guilty of idolatry and that ye show kindness to your parents and that ye murder not your children for fear lest ye be reduced to poverty: we will provide for you and them; and draw not near unto heinous crimes, neither openly nor in secret slay the soul which God hath forbidden you to slay unless for a just cause.”267
This, Jalal-ad-din says, was revealed at Medina:
“By God, ye shall surely be called to account for that which ye have falsely devised. They attributed daughters unto God but unto themselves children of the sex which they desire. And when any of them is told the news of the birth of a female, his face becometh black, and he is deeply afflicted: he hideth himself from the people, because of the ill tidings which have been told him; considering within himself whether he shall keep it with disgrace, or whether he shall bury it in the dust.”268
And again he says: “Kill not your children for fear of being brought to want: we will provide for them and for you: verily, killing them is a great sin.” And finally he says: “When the sun shall be folded up; and when the stars shall fall; and when the mountains shall be made to pass away; and when the camels ten months gone with young shall be neglected; and when the wild beasts shall be gathered together; and when the seas shall boil; and when the souls shall be joined again to their bodies; and when the girl who hath been buried alive shall be asked for what crime she was put to death.”269
Wherever the Arab went, he carried his religion and his law. And, bloodthirsty as he was in war, it is to his credit that much was done to check infanticide wherever the Mussulman reigned. The extent to which the law on children was regulated by the Arabs at a time when Europe was in darkness may be seen in “Al Hidaya,” by Shaykh Burhan-ad-din Ali, who died A.H. 591 and was, according to his contemporaries, a distinguished author on jurisprudence.
The Hidaya consists of extracts from a number of the great works on Mussulman jurisprudence in which the authorities on different opinions are set forth together with reasons for preferring any one adjudication.270 In this work an entire book is devoted to the Laqeets, which, it is explained, signified, in the primitive sense, anything lifted from the ground, but later came to mean an abandoned child, and, in the law of the Arab, had come to mean a child that had been cast out from fear of poverty or for other reasons.271
Here it is stated that, when the finder sees a Laqeet under circumstances which suppose that if it is not taken up it may perish, it is not only praiseworthy to adopt a child, but it is incumbent.
Coming centuries after Christ, it is noteworthy to observe that Mohammed was able to instil into his followers such humane doctrines as the freedom of the foundling and its maintenance from the funds drawn from the public treasury at a time when the Christians of Europe were groping vainly as to the proper treatment of infants.
“A foundling is free,” says the Shaykh Burhan-ad-din Ali, “because freedom is a quality originally inherent in man; and the Mussulman territory in which the infant is found is a territory of freemen, whence it is also free: moreover, freemen, in a Mussulman territory, abound more than slaves, whence the foundling is free, as the smaller number is dependent to the greater.”272
Christian philosophy offers few more striking mixtures of humanity and democracy. It was also the law when the foundling was to be maintained, the expense of bringing up the child was to be paid out of the public treasury, and in favor of this law the opinion of Omar was cited. A very good reason given for this was that “where the foundling dies without heirs, his estate goes to the public treasury.”
The person who took up the foundling was known as a Multaqit and it was the law of that day that the Multaqit could not exact any return from the foundling on account of maintenance except where he had been ordered by the magistrate to bring up the foundling at its own expense, in which case the maintenance “is a debt upon the foundling, because, the magistrate’s authority being absolute, he is empowered to exact the return from the foundling.”273
According to Al-Quduri,274 this was the proper thing to do as the letting out was regarded as conducive to the education of the Laqeet. In the Jami Saghir the hiring out of the foundling was opposed on the ground that the Multaqit had no right to turn the faculties of his foundling to his own advantage. The opinion of Shaykh Burhan-ad-din Ali was that Al-Quduri was right and that the child did gain by being let out.
In Al-Siyar there is given a specific injunction that children must not be slain:
“It does not become Mussulmans to slay women or children or men that are aged, bed-ridden, or blind, because opposition and fighting are the only occasions which make slaughter allowable (according to our doctors), and such persons are incapable of these.”275
In the minute instructions in regard to divorce, much care is given as to the disposition of a child. Where the husband and wife separate, the law was that the child went with the mother, and this was based on a decision of the Prophet.
“It is recorded that a woman once applied to the prophet, saying ‘O, prophet of God! this is my son, the fruit of my womb, cherished in my bosom and suckled at my breast, and his father is desirous of taking him away from me into his own care’; to which the prophet replied, ‘Thou hast a right in the child prior to that of thy husband, so long as thou dost not marry with a stranger.’”276
If the mother of an infant died, the right of Hidana, or infant education, rested with the maternal grandmother. So deeply was this idea imbued that even if the mother were a hated Zimmi or female infidel subject, married to a Mussulman, she was still entitled to the Hidana of her child until the time when the child was capable of forming a judgment with respect to religion. When such a time arrived the child was generally taken from the mother if she continued to be an infidel, in order that no injury might come to it from imbibing the doctrines of a Zimmi.
CHAPTER XII
EXPOSURE BY A CIVILIZED PEOPLE—LACK OF HUMANITY AMONG THE GREEKS—THEIR MYTHOLOGY AN EVIDENCE—CHILDREN IN HOMER.
THAT the people of the greatest nation of antiquity, with all their intellect, their subtlety, their productivity in humanity, art, and moral ideas, were wanting in heart, is the statement of one of the greatest scholars of modern times, a scholar who has also earned the right to be classed among the admirers and defenders of the Greeks.
“Their humanity,” says Mahaffy, “was spasmodic and not constant. Their kindness was limited to friends and family, and included no chivalry to foes or to helpless slaves. Antiphon, in speaking of the danger of conviction on insufficient evidence, mentions the case of the murder of his master by a slave boy of twelve,”277 and had not the slave-boy murderer revealed by his actions the fact that he was guilty of the deed, the murdered man’s whole family would have been put to death on the theory that someone in the family was guilty of the murder, as the real culprit was too young, under the law, to be suspected of crime.
The Greek’s kindness did not extend to his new-born children. We shall see later among the Romans that, from the time of Romulus to the passing of the Roman Empire, there was an upward tendency in the attitude of the Romans toward children. In eight centuries, the Romans changed, from a people indifferent to the fate of the newly-born, to a nation over which the humane Antonines ruled, and ruled successfully.
Among the Greeks, from the time of Homeric legend, which is supposed to be about 1000 B. C., up to the time of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a period of over a thousand years, the Greeks changed not at all in callous indifference as to what became of that portion of their population that was daily exposed. Ardent defenders of the Greeks, like Andrew Lang, see in the fact that little mention is made in the Homeric legend of the exposure of female infants, an indication that “Homeric society with its wealth and its tenderness of heart would not be so cruel” as to expose little girl babies.278
Homer says little of children and the only child to appear directly in the action of the Iliad is the infant son of Hector and Andromache. “When Andromache meets Hector as he is hurrying to the field of battle, the nurse accompanying her carries in her arms the merry-hearted child, whom Hector called Scamandrius, but the rest called him Astyanax (Defender of the City), for Hector alone defended Ilium.’”279 It is true that there is no example of exposure in Homer, though Hephaistos says his mother Hera desired to conceal him because he was lame.280
But why one should expect a tenderness contrary to the history of the race is difficult to imagine, especially in view of the picture Achilles offers, as he drags the slain Hector about the walls of Troy to the lamentations of the dead man’s father and mother.
Wherever there was a Greek colony we have a story of the exposure of some god or hero. Greek mythology might also be said to have had, as one of its foundations, the right of the parent to reject its offspring. The Dorians of Crete pictured even mighty Jove as a victim of this practice, and as being suckled by a goat. He was taken as soon as he was born, to Lystus first, the most ancient city of Crete, and then:
“Hid in a deep cave, ’neath the recesses of the divine earth in the dense and wooded Ægean mount.”281
Among the Mantineians it was said that when Rhea brought forth Poseidon she delivered him “in a sheep cote to be brought up among the lambs.”282
Among the Lemnians, Hephaistos was supposed to have been exposed,283 as was the Dionysus of the Etolians and the Thracians.
In Epidaurus it is said that Coronis, when she gave birth to Æsculapius, “exposed the infant on that mountain which at present they call Titthion, but which was before denominated Myrtion; the name of the mountain being changed, because the infant was suckled by one of those goats which fed upon the mountain.”284
In Argos, when Crotopos reigned, a grandson was born to him, but the infant’s mother, fearing the wrath of her father, “exposed the child to perish. In consequence of this, it happened that the infant was torn to pieces by the dogs that guarded the royal cattle.”285
In Arcadia, Auge, when she was delivered of Telephus, “concealed him in the mountain Parthenion, and he was there suckled by a hind.”286
In his disappointment at not having a son born to him, Jasus had the Arcadian Atalanta exposed on the Parthenian hill287; the ancestor of all the Athenians, Ion, and the founders of Thebes, Amphion, and Zethus, were exposed on the same Mount Citharion where Œdipus was exposed. Amphion afterward married Niobe and their twelve children, six boys and six girls, were killed by Apollo.288
Perhaps we can best judge the attitude of the Homeric Greeks toward children by the later point of view of the flower of Greek intellect. There is not a line in Plato to indicate that the practices we regard as so reprehensible were at all abhorrent to him. In fact, there are passages that would indicate that he not only regarded infanticide as inevitable, but as unobjectionable; and in any case, the incidental references to the practices of his day show that the matter was one that had given him no concern and had not disturbed his philosophic calm. Thus, Plato has Socrates say in the Theætetus289:
“Then this child, however he may turn out, which you and I have with difficulty brought into the world. And now that he is born, we must run round the hearth with him, and see whether he is worth rearing, or is only a wind-egg and a sham. Is he to be reared in any case, and not exposed? or will you bear to see him rejected, and not get into a passion if I take away your first-born?”
And in another place, Socrates emphasizes not the sacredness of the life of the child, but the material advantages that accrued to its progenitors290:
“Must we not then, first of all, ask whether there is any one of us who has knowledge of that about which we are deliberating? If there is, let us take his advice, though he be one only, and not mind the rest; if there is not, let us seek further counsel. Is this a slight matter about which you and Lysimachus are deliberating? Are you not risking the greatest of your possessions? For children are your riches; and upon their turning out well or ill depends the whole order of their father’s house.”
Is it true that, aside from the laws of Gortyna, which were excavated in 1884 on the island of Crete,291 and the injunctions of Lycurgus, as given to us by Plutarch, we have no positive declaration as to the attitude of the legislator in reference to children; but what is lacking in positive legislation is made up by the plethora of literary allusions, going to show a condition singularly heartless. It is interesting to note that the laws of Gortyna, which represent a period of civilization about 500 years before Christ, are not as humane as the law ascribed to Romulus by Dionysius of Halicarnassus, though the Greek laws are those of a people supposedly more civilized than the tribes then beginning their history on the Capitoline Hill. There was a prohibition in the first law ascribed to Romulus: and the extent of the law, as far as we may presume to judge it, was to urge caution on the people who were about to destroy their offspring. Under the Roman law, all children were to be kept for a short time at least, this limiting the power of the father to kill, whereas the law of Gortyna emphasized the power of the father in the matter of the life and death of the child; in one specific instance, it gives the mother direct permission to do away with the infant.
“If a woman bear a child,” so ran the Cretan laws, “while living apart from her husband (after divorce), she shall carry it to the husband at his house, in the presence of three witnesses; and if he do not receive the child, it shall be in the power of the mother either to bring up or expose it. If a female serf bear a child while living apart, she shall carry it to the master of the man who married her, in the presence of two witnesses. And if he do not receive it, the child shall be in the power of the master of the female serf. But, if she should marry the same man again before the end of the year, the child shall be in the power of the master of the male serf, and the one who carried it and the witnesses shall have preference in taking the oath. If a woman living apart should put away her child before she has presented it as written, she shall pay, for a free child, fifty staters, for a slave, twenty-five, if she be convicted.
“But if the man have no house, to which she may carry it, or she do not see him, if she put away her child, there shall be no penalty. If a female serf should conceive and bear without being married, the child shall be in the power of the master of the father.”292
In prehistoric times, the chief of the yevos exercised his right of domain over his own house, by deciding whether children should be brought up or exposed. The reason back of this practice was undoubtedly economic: “the fact of yesterday is the doctrine of today,” says Junius.
The Hellenes in their attitude toward children were as all the Aryan people, and, with few exceptions, as most primitive people where moral ideas had little developed; the right of the male parent to kill his child if he so willed is, with variations, a relic of the Stone Age.
Among the Greeks, the practice was well established, for, wherever we find a Greek colony, the traditions of the people show that either a notable human or some mythical god began his history with the story of exposure.
At Athens infanticide was especially common. Aristophanes refers to it in a way that shows it was an accepted practice. The first poet of humanity, Euripides, dwells at great length, in the story of Ion, on the exposure of an infant toward the end of the fifth century; and in “The Phœnician Maidens,” he has Jocasta tell the story of the exposure of Œdipus293:
Enter Jocasta.
In the fourth century B. C., the favourite figure in the comedy of the day was the child that had been exposed and saved, and afterwards found by its parents. Terence and Plautus afterward used this theme frequently, and undoubtedly their comedies were all borrowed from the Greek. Strange as it may seem in the cultured and refined city of Athens with its great philosophers and its wonderful art, the object of jest was a starving and dying infant. Glotz, in discussing the motives of this frequent exposure of infants in Athens, ascribed to the shame of young women an initiatory prominence. Viewing the subject more broadly, however, we know that shame really plays a minor part.
More frequently than not, the exposure of the infant was ordered by the male parent. It was a live question, current and customary, that the father was obliged to face every time a child was born: would he raise it or would he expose it? As with all primitive peoples, the child was his absolute property.294 On the fifth day, the Amphidromia took place. If one interprets literally the passage in the Theætetus of Plato, one must conclude that this ceremony for receiving an infant into the house was rigorously followed out in all cases, and that before the altar of Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, the father finally decided and proclaimed whether he intended to keep the child and protect it, or to abandon it. On the other hand, a father who did not wish to recognize his child probably needed no preliminary ceremony for such a decision; if it was decided to abandon it, there was probably no Amphidromia.
Doubt as to the paternity of the child, to judge by the history and literature of the times, was of frequent occurrence and this usually led to exposure. Agis, King of Sparta, refused to recognize Leotychides, a son born of his wife.295 In the Hecyra of Terence, the Athenian Pamphile does not wish to serve as father to an infant of another. Perseria, “having viewed at an amorous crisis a statue of Andromeda,” conceals her infant from her husband.296 At Gortyna, the divorced woman had to present her son to her former husband; if that man did not take it, then the woman had her choice between nourishing it or exposing it. In most cases, the disavowal of paternity meant the exposure of the infant.
But the mere fact that the legitimacy of the child was incontestable did not save it; many Greeks were discouraged by the thought of the care and trouble children necessitated. Thousands of these little ones seem to have been resented by the Athenians, with what Glotz calls “singulière vivacité.”297 With the intensive and complete education necessary for those reared, some children had to be sacrificed to so complicated and burdensome an enterprise.
“No,” says a character in Menander, “there is nothing unfortunate in being a father, unless one is the father of many children.”
“Nothing more foolish than to have children,” says a Greek proverb. “To raise children is an uncertain thing,” said the philosopher Democritus; “success is attained only after a life of battle and disquietude. Their loss is followed by a sorrow which remains above all others.”
It was not necessary to have children, reasoned the nimble-minded Athenians; many who wished both tranquillity and posterity adopted a young man whose education was already complete. The greater number of exposures should not be attributed, however, to this excessive love of tranquillity. The principal objection to children was their expense. For the daughter, it was necessary to prepare a dot: for boys, there was the expense of an education prolonged until they were sixteen or eighteen years of age. The latter imposed the opening of an account not easy to close.
“I thought my family now large enough,” says the father of Daphnis in explaining to the new-found son why it was he was exposed.298
“Sons of the very rich,” said Plato, “who commence to frequent schools at a very early age and leave them late”—the rich themselves did not wish to bring up too many sons to such an expensive life. The rich father of Daphnis considered a son and a daughter a large family.
At a pinch, the Athenians would undertake to bring up a first child, but, as a rule, the second was condemned. It was not for themselves, alone, that this was done, they claimed: it was also for their children that the heads of the Greek families dreaded poverty. The direct transmission and equal partition of property among the male children was part of the Greek law, and a fair-sized estate, if broken into many parts, made small provision for many children. Hesiod wished for a single son par famille: “Let there be only one son to tend his father’s house: for so shall wealth increase in the dwelling.”299 And Theognis reproached the citizens for having no other ideal than to bury away treasures for their children. Even in later times, Xenophon speaks of the paternal foresight that led to continual worrying over the care of children yet to be born.
It was Diphilus, or Menander, who found in the reality of the Greek life and communicated it to the author of the Adelphi, this counsel addressed to the father: “Manage, pinch, and save, to leave them (your sons) as much as you can.”300
But it was not only the poor who found exposure expedient, although they had an excuse; they “had not the heart to leave their misery to their progeny like a grave and dolorous malady.”
To a philosopher of the first century after Christ, it appeared as the greatest scandal, however, that a number of fathers “who did not have the excuse of poverty, who were well off and even opulent, should dare to refuse food to the puny infants in order to enrich their elders, should dare to kill their brothers in order that the living might have the greater patrimony.”301
This was indeed the Greek excuse or explanation—some of the children had to be sacrificed that others might be raised. The head of a Greek family, if asked why he had exposed some of his children, would have probably answered in the words of the Scythian Anacharsis, “Because I love the children I have.” This was the principal reason alleged by the Greeks for exposing their progeny on the highways, and the father of Daphnis, when he reclaims him, admits this to the son he had exposed.302
In the religious and social ideas of the ancients, the female child was of little importance—a son alone perpetuating the race. The daughter was hardly a member of the family in which she was born, from the day of her birth until the day she was married. On that day, she passed into the possession of her husband and became his, body and soul. Up to the time she was married, she was in charge of her parents: after that time, she did not even exist for them.
On the contrary, it was a sacred duty to bring up a boy. To raise one, was to provide against all possible trouble; whereas a girl was an expensive luxury, a sacrifice for which there was no compensation, and for this reason, in the legend, the father of Atalanta refused to bring up his daughter.
“Do you remember,” asks Sostrata of her husband in the Heautontimorumenos, “me being pregnant, and yourself declaring to me, most peremptorily, that if I should bring forth a girl, you would not have it brought up?”303 Thus it was that Antiphili, although of good family, was exposed by order of her mother.
One has but to read the fragments of the new comedy to see how the Greeks plainly preferred boys, and under what various artifices they disclosed their dislike to girl children.
Half of the Florilegium of Stobius is composed of extracts under the title—“How much better are male children.” In the first rank, he cites Euripides, and after him the authors of the new comedy, Menander at the head. Posidippus indicated crudely the rule of conduct adopted by most Athenians: “The son is brought up even if one is poor: the daughter is exposed, even if one is rich.”
CHAPTER XIII
FEMALE CHILDREN NOT DESIRABLE AMONG GREEKS—PRECAUTIONS FOR SAVING EXPOSED CHILDREN—ORNAMENTS AS A MEANS OF IDENTIFICATION—ADOPTION UNDER STRANGE CIRCUMSTANCES.
THE Greeks who exposed their children hoped, as a rule, they might possibly be saved by others and precautions were frequently taken to this end. The gruesome task of doing away with the infant was generally entrusted to a slave or to a midwife, who were willing, apparently, to undertake many services.304 The time usually chosen was early in the day, inasmuch as the child would perish if it passed the entire night without attracting attention.
The lexicographers and the scholiasts of the time speak of children being left in deserted places. In the “golden days,” they were placed where they could be seen. There is evidence that the most frequented places were the most popular—the hippodromes, the entrances to the temples, and the sacred grottoes, where they would be most in evidence. A watch was kept on the place or it was revisited, in order to be sure of the fate of the infant.
Care was usually taken to wrap the child up carefully. When Laymonde, the shepherd, discovered Daphnis, the child was being suckled by a goat. “Struck with natural astonishment, he advances closer to the spot and discovers a lusty and handsome male child with far richer swathing clothes than suited its fortune in being thus exposed; for its little mantle was of fine purple, and fastened by a golden clasp; and it had a little sword with a hilt of ivory.”305
The jests of Aristophanes show that more often children were exposed in large copper pots with two handles, called kutrai (κυτρἀι). The Athenians had been in the habit of making sacrifices to some of their divinities in these kutrai, and it is likely that when children were first abandoned, they were placed in these receptacles that they might invoke the protection of the immortals. Recent excavations at Gezer and Tell Ta’Andkk show children were sacrificed in a similar way.
Various objects were placed with the child when it was so exposed. Creusa, the daughter of Erectheus, King of Athens, when she exposed Ion, the son whom she had secretly borne to Apollo, “observant of the customs of her great progenitors,” in addition to leaving with him what ornaments she had, also added:
This, and the sacred bandelettes, were always the symbols of inviolability.
This final act of maternal affection, characteristic of both the human and the barbaric side of Greek parents, became, in time, a widespread custom. When the child was exposed, there was generally placed alongside of it a small basket or collection of trinkets. The royal daughter of Erechtheus attached to the neck of her son many precious ornaments, including a serpent of massive gold. The shepherd Laymonde found on Daphnis a clasp of gold and a small ivory sword. Among the very poor, hand-made collars, shoulder straps, with various trinkets of little worth, were used to mark the infant.
In all this, dramatists saw but a means to establish the identity of the hero and heroine and an assistance to the dénouement. The ceremony, with its pathos and its strangeness, was, to tragic as well as to comic writers, but a means to end the fifth act. The pity of it all never seems to have occurred to the Greek mind.
It was rare that the father or the child-mother who renounced the infant had any real desire to find it when better days came. The real wish was that the child might be taken up by some stranger before death came and the trinkets were an inducement to befriend the child.
If, on the other hand, the child should die, the feeling was that these ornaments would assure for it a happy life on the other side of the Styx.
For this reason the favoured objects of mothers were amulets; and, as in the case of the serpent placed around the neck of Ion, Creusa hoped to invoke the aid of Minerva, who had guarded her ancestor, Erichthonius, with two dragons; the object being to watch over the child’s existence. These gewgaws were supposed to give the infant exposed all the rights of a suppliant.
As to how far these ceremonies of supplication were successful, as to how far they commended the unfortunate infant to the public, is a grave question. From the religious and literary myths one might imagine that the greater number of the infants were saved. We read of Hephaistus, nourished by the Sintians or by Thetis; of Atalanta by a bear; of Zeus and Dionysos, nursed by the nymphs; the shepherds found and received Telephus, Amphion, and Œdipus; Ion, by a priestess, and Sirus, by a beggar.
Greek artists frequently show a Satyr holding in his arms a newly-born that he had found on the road.
Poets of the new comedy delight to represent their heroes, or, more frequently, their heroines, as people who had gone through the trial of exposure and were raised by either courtesans, shepherds, or innkeepers. It is in this way that Menander, among others, shows us Silenium growing up in the house of Melænis to whom she has been given by the evil woman who picked her up307; Casina treated as a daughter by the brave Cleostrata.308
Longus, in this way, brings Daphnis and Chloë into the cabin of a goatherd.
But these examples prove little about the actual conditions, only going to show the facility of the writers of the time, and Glotz suggests that these scenes flattered the Athenians, who liked to think of themselves as a philanthropic people.
Apparently, the first impulse when a child was found was to ignore it, for the attitude of Athenian society was probably well expressed by Longus when he said:
“Those who seek paternity are many.”
In fact, the author of Daphnis and Chloë says that when Daphnis was first seen by the shepherd being suckled by a goat, “Laymonde (the shepherd) resolved to leave it to its fate, and to carry off only the tokens; but feeling afterward ashamed at the reflection, that in doing so he should be inferior in humanity, even to a goat, he waited for the approach of night and then carried home the infant with the tokens.”309
Old Megacles, the father of Chloë, in the same story seeks to excuse himself for having exposed his daughter, by a number of bad reasons: he did not have the means, it was a moment of weakness, he hoped that the nymphs would take pity on the child: and then, there were so many people who did not have children, etc. The most interesting of his reasons, however, is the statement that he had spent his fortune equipping theatrical choruses!
As a rule, when adoption did take place it was not for the benefit of the child. In many instances, those who wished to adopt a son waited and adopted a grown-up one so as not to have the trouble and expense of educating him.
As set forth in the plays, it was apparently not infrequent that a courtesan sought to attach a lover, or a wife a husband who was slipping away from her, by adopting a child and passing it off as her own. It was to this subterfuge that Silenium, in the Cistellaria of Plautus, owes her life. Speaking of the incident, the Procuress in the play, says:
“But once upon a time, that girl (Silenium) who has gone hence in tears, from a lane I carried her off a little child exposed.... I made a present of her to my friend, this courtesan, who had made mention of it to me that somewhere I must find for her a boy or a girl, just born, that she herself might pass it off as her own.
“As soon as ever the opportunity befell me I immediately granted her request in that which she had asked me. After she had received this female child from me, she at once was brought to bed of the same female child which she had received from me.... She said that her lover was a foreigner.”310
It is hardly likely, however, that many courtesans in real life were willing to be so encumbered, and perhaps, as Demosthenes says, this was only the sort of thing one “sees in tragedies,” like the fatal and convenient malady described by Heine as a sort of “fifth act sickness.”
That the substitution of foundlings and exposed children was frequent in Greece is evident, however, from the many plays bearing this name. Cratinus the younger was the author of a piece called The Substituted Child [ὑποβολιμάιος], and the title was also used by Menander. Athenæus quotes from a play by Alexis entitled The Suppositious Child311 and from one by Epinicus called the Suppositious Damsels [ὑποβολλομενᾶι] and from312 another by Crobylus called the Pseudo-Suppositious Child (Falsus suppositus).313
In the Thesmophoriazusæ, Aristophanes depicts the father of Euripides, Mnesilochus, as making a tactless defence of his son-in-law at the festival of Thesmophoria by abusing the very women he would placate.
“And I know another woman,” he says “who for ten days said she was in labour, till she purchased a little child while her husband went about purchasing drugs for a quick delivery. But the child an old woman brought in a pot with its mouth stopped with honeycomb that it might not squall. Then, when she that carried it nodded, the wife immediately cried out: ‘Go away, husband, go away, for methinks that I shall be immediately delivered.’ For the child kicked against the bottom of the pot. And he ran off delighted, while she drew out the stoppage from the bottle and it cried out. And then the abominable old woman who brought the child, runs smiling to the husband, and says: ‘A lion has been born to you, a lion; your very image, in all other respects whatever, and its nose is like yours, being crooked like an acorn cup.’”314
That there was a class of people who looked on children in the light of good or bad bargains we must assume from the certainly serious words of Demosthenes in his oration against Midias. In his attack on his physical assailant, Demosthenes says that the real mother of Midias was a wise woman because she got rid of him as soon as he was born, whereas the woman who adopted him was a foolish woman because she made a bad bargain.
“And why?” asks the orator, “because the one sold him as soon as he was born, while the other, when she might have obtained a better for the same price, bought Midias.”
Ion,315 when he meets his father for the first time and learns that he had been exposed, congratulates himself on having escaped slavery, indicating that in all probability the majority of children saved after they had been exposed by their parents were saved by the professional slave dealers. The general view, however, was that children were cheap, Xenophon,316 declaring that “good slaves when they had children generally become still better disposed, but bad ones increase their power to do mischief.”
Only in two instances as far as we know did the law of the Greeks reach out to protect the child against the destroying whim of the parent. According to Ælian317 the Thebans were not allowed to expose their children or leave them in a wilderness under the pain of death. If the father were extremely poor, the child, whether male or female, had to be brought to the magistrate in its swaddling clothes, and there delivered to some person who would agree to bring up the child and when it was grown up, take it into service and have the benefit of its labour in return for its education.
As to the other instance of the law protecting the child it has been truly said that all that Lycurgus did was to insist that all “fit” children should be raised.
“If,” says Plutarch,318 “they (the Spartans) found it puny and ill-shaped, they ordered it to be taken to what was called the Apothetæ, a sort of chasm under Taygetus, as thinking it neither for the good of the child itself, nor for the public interest, that it should be brought up, if it did not from the very outset, appear made to be healthy and vigorous.”
And this was the most “protecting” move of the ancient Greeks.
CHAPTER XIV
FIRST RECOGNITION OF RIGHTS OF CHILDREN—LAWS OF ROMULUS AND OF NUMA POMPILIUS—THE TWELVE TABLES—ATTITUDE OF PARENTS SHOWN IN TERENCE—PATRIA POTESTAS SPARINGLY USED.
IT is interesting to think that what might be called the legal movement which fructified in the United States, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, had its beginning in the eighth century B. C. in Rome; it is doubly interesting that legend ascribes to Romulus the first interest in what can conservatively be called the child protection movement.
Like all other lawmakers—even legendary ones—especially those who sought to prepare and safeguard their states for and against hostile neighbours, the first concern of the founder of Rome was a strong nation; and a strong nation meant necessarily as many adult males in good health and physical condition as possible. Soldiers were more important than other human beings; in this the supposed founder followed the spirit of his time and the standard of his age of development.
According to the legend, Romulus, having made peace with the Sabines and become the king of both people on the death of Tatius, was bent on making the new city impregnable, working out a system of government that, in the mind of the historian, was worthy of “a man of great military accomplishments, personal courage and extremely capable of instituting the most perfect sort of government.”319
To the end that there might be as perfect a fighting machine as possible, Romulus pledged his people to bring up all males except those who were lame or monstrous from birth. To the same end, and according to the same authority, he pledged them to bring up the first-born of the females—and in this he acted purely in the spirit of the time and as the founder of a warlike race. Personal interest may be conceded, inasmuch as he would have been the victim of the practice of exposing children had his uncle Amulius had his way.320
In his introduction to the Institutes of Justinian,321 Sandars declares that Roman law will be better understood if those interested will apprehend the distinction between the contribution of Romulus and the tribe of Ramnes, who dwelt on the Palatine Hill, and the contribution of Numa and the Titienses who dwelt on the Capitoline and the Quirinal. The two races combined to make a united society, the Ramnes bringing distinct ideas of public law and, in the dimmest days of history, presenting the features of a carefully organized polity. “When the tribe went out to war it did not conquer lands for the benefit of individuals, but for the whole people.”322
The Titienses, or Quirites, on the other hand, were of Sabine extraction. To them are traceable the private law, and, what is of interest to us, the peculiar notions of the family and of property. The great peculiarity of the Sabine law, or as it was called by the Latin writers, the jus Quirium, was the form of the manus—the hand. The manus was the conqueror’s sign of conquest, or rather the insignia of the freebooter; all he laid hand upon became absolutely his; he could deal with it as he pleased. All that his wife and children had, also belonged to him, to be done with as he willed—even their lives. This was the Sabine contribution to what afterward became “Roman Law,” when the Sabine tribes of the Capitoline Hill and the Ramnes tribe of the Palatine united to form the city of Rome.
Nowhere in law or history is there so interesting a duality as this origin of Rome and the Roman law, and no single custom arising as it did, has affected civilization as strangely and so widely. To think of a tribe living at Fleet Street super-imposing a law on a tribe living at Westminster, or a clan having its habitat in Wall Street grafting a law upon a people fortressed and buttressed in Madison Square Garden—taking either section of London or New York as an example of the extent of the Rome of that day—it seems impossible that such a law, thus accepted, should become the law of the world, and remain so for centuries.
This power of the Roman father over the very lives of his children was called the patria potestas and nowhere else in a civilized community was there anything like it.323 He had the power to sell his children, he had the power to mutilate them, he had the power to kill them; and it is because there is evident first, in the laws ascribed to Romulus, an intention to abate that power, not only for military purposes but for what we would now call humane reasons, that I have referred to the first Roman lawmaker as an innovator along lines which have been historically neglected.
It matters little whether or not the Romulus of Plutarch and Dionysius existed; it does matter that the human note was in the laws of his time, and that citizens of the new city were enjoined not only to bring up all healthy male children—and at least one female child—but that all children must be allowed to live until they were three years old, unless they were lame or monstrous.
Surely here was the beginning of some recognition of the rights of children. Even the lame and the monstrous in the eyes of this early lawgiver had some rights, for it was further decreed that parents in doing away with them must act not entirely on their own judgment.
“These (the lame and monstrous infants) he allowed their parents to expose, provided they first showed them to five of their neighbours and these also approved of it, and besides other penalties he punished those who disobeyed this law with the confiscation of half their fortunes.”324
It may be contended perhaps that we are giving high attributes to one who is not much more than a mythical person, but no other explanation of the law of Romulus is offered than that already referred to in Dionysius.
Despite the credit given to Numa Pompilius, by both Plutarch and Gibbon, Romulus gains by the comparison, although Numa amended one of the laws of Romulus in the matter of the right of a father to control a son up to the point of being able to sell him as a slave.325
“If a father gives his son leave to marry a woman who, by law, is to partake of his sacrifices and fortunes, he shall no longer have power of selling his son”—such was the amendment of Numa for which Plutarch commends the Sabine lawmaker; but in amending the law of Romulus permitting a father to sell his children, the second king of Rome was actuated by the idea of making it attractive for the young women to marry; doubtless he was having no easy time in eradicating the differences between the two warlike tribes first brought together under his predecessor. Lessening the power of the parents, as he did in the most material degree,326 it was for the purpose of general polity and the accomplishment of his own harmonious designs, rather than for what I like to call, even in that early day, humanitarian reasons. There was no consideration of the child, or the female as such in Numa’s amendment. His object was to make marriages more desirable that there might be more male Romans.327
As a matter of fact, declaration of the power of the father over the women and children of his family was nothing more on the part of Romulus than the codification of the laws of the past, with the softening provisos to which I have already referred. The power of the father to imprison, scourge, or sell his son for a slave, or put him to death, was not lessened even when that son had risen to the highest honours of the State, as we shall see later.
Expulsion of the kings and the establishment of the Republic is dated B. C. 509, some two hundred and fifty years after the reputed founding of the city. With this stern period begins a series of thrilling examples of the use made of the patria potestas—stories that in themselves show how the power of the father extended over the life of the child, even when the child had become a man, and that man had been honoured by the State as was Cassius Viscellinus. The latter, although a tribune of the people and the author of the first Agrarian Law, was tried in the house of his own father, who, after having him whipped, “commanded him to be put to death and his estate consecrated to Ceres.”328
That there was little progress made in the next great step in the history of Roman law, by which of course one refers to the adoption of the laws of the Twelve Tables, was because those laws were practically the codification of the ancient customary law of the people, despite the story that the patricians dispatched three commissioners to Athens to bring home a copy of the laws of Solon. Acrid political fights, uncertain and sometimes corrupt administration of the law, led to the commission empowered to draw up what afterward became the Twelve Tables and the foundation of the whole fabric of the Roman law.
As the laws of the Twelve Tables represented the earliest fight against privilege, it would be too much to expect that they should contain any amelioration of the statute which gave the father the right to sell or kill his children. Even the language of the laws, in the fragments which have come down to us, shows in rugged, concise, and sternly imperative style that the law gained the respect in which it eventually came to be held, by no soft or easy methods.329
“If the complainant summon the defendant before the magistrate, he shall go; if he do not go, the plaintiff may call a bystander to witness, and take him by force;” this is the first section of the first paragraph of the laws of the Twelve Tables.
Where there was so much sternness, and where every family was presided over by a parent who had the right to inflict death as a punishment for disobedience, the disciplinary attitude of the Roman mind naturally became such, no matter what it had been in the beginning, that tender or human emotions had but little place. It is not surprising therefore that the one extract of the laws of the Twelve Tables, relating to our subject, should deal curiously, abruptly, and sharply with the power of the father to sell his son, a power that was diminished only after the son’s spirit must have been entirely extinguished.
Si pater filium ter venum duit, filius a patre liber esto—if a father sells his son three times, let the son then go free of the father. In other words, three times did the father have the right to dispose of his son as a slave; and, while a slave might purchase his freedom, by paying his master, the son of a Roman citizen did not become free until the father had abused his right and misused the potestas three times.330
One sees the Rome of the Republic in the plays of Terence and Plautus, and the attitude of the parents toward exposure is vividly shown in the Heautontimorumenos of the former.
Nearly always the exposed child died. Occasionally some escaped through the tenderness or cupidity of some passer-by who would pick up an exposed child either out of pity or for the material profit that came with the possession.
Sometimes mothers who were obliged to obey the orders of their husbands, arranged to have their children rescued. The comedy of Terence goes to show what the attitude of the father was under such circumstances. It is indeed, as De Gour says, “a chapter of the morals of the Greeks and Romans seen in action.”
Chremes, departing on a long voyage, orders his wife, Sostrata, who is about to have a child, to expose the child if it should turn out to be a girl. In obeying this order, she hopefully places a ring with the child.
Years later she meets the child at a bath and is given (by her own daughter) a ring to guard. Sostrata recognizes the ring and when she sees her husband the following dialogue ensues:
Sos. (turning ’round). Ha! my husband!
Chrem. Ha! my wife!
Sos. I was looking for you.
Chrem. Tell me what you want.
Sos. In the first place, this I beg of you, not to believe that I have ventured to do anything contrary to your commands.
Chrem. Would you have me believe you in this, although so incredible? Well, I will believe you.
Sos. Do you remember my being pregnant, and yourself declaring to me, most peremptorily, that if I should bring forth a girl, you would not have it brought up?
Chrem. I know what you have done, you have brought it up.
Sos. Not at all; but there was here an elderly woman of Corinth, of no indifferent character; to her I gave it to be exposed.
Chrem. O Jupiter! that there should be such extreme folly in a person’s mind.
Sos. Alas! what have I done?
Chrem. And do you ask the question?
Sos. If I have acted wrong, my dear Chremes, I have done so in ignorance.
Chrem. This, indeed, I know for certain, even if you were to deny it, that in everything you both speak and act ignorantly and foolishly: how many blunders you disclose in this single affair! For, in the first place, then, if you had been disposed to obey my orders, the child ought to have been dispatched; you ought not in words to have feigned her death, and in reality to have left hopes of her surviving. But that I pass over; compassion, maternal affection, I allow it. But how finely you did provide for the future! What was your meaning? Do reflect. It’s clear, beyond a doubt, that your daughter was betrayed by you to this old woman, either that through you she might make a living by her, or that she might be sold in open market as a slave. I suppose you reasoned thus: “Anything is enough, if only her life is saved.” What are you to do with those who understand neither law, nor right and justice? Be it for better or for worse, be it for them or against them, they see nothing except just what they please.
Sos. My dear Chremes, I have done wrong, I own; I am convinced. Now this I beg of you; inasmuch as you are more advanced in years than I, be so much the more ready to forgive; so that your justice may be some protection for my weakness.
Chrem. I’ll readily forgive you doing this, of course; but Sostrata, my easy temper prompts you to do amiss. But, whatever this circumstance is, by reason of which this was begun upon, proceed to tell it.
Sos. As we women are all foolishly and wretchedly superstitious, when I delivered the child to her to be exposed, I drew a ring from off my finger and ordered her to expose it, together with the child; that if she should die, she might not be without some portion of our possessions.331
Chrem. That was right; thereby you proved the saving of yourself and her.332
Sos. (holding out the ring). This is the ring.
Chrem. Whence did you get it?
Sos. From the young woman whom Bacchis brought with her.
Chrem. What does she say?
Sos. She gave it to me to keep for her, whilst she went to bathe. At first I paid no attention to it; but after I looked at it, I at once recognized it, and came running to you.
Chrem. What do you suspect now, or have you discovered, relative to her?