Text: Northern Autumn
Edited by Beiqiu
In the Roman world, it was decided after birth whether or not to raise a newborn. A positive judgment means that the process of welcoming the child into the family and community will begin, while a negative judgment means that the child will be separated from the family of origin, and they will either die or be picked up and raised by someone else after being kicked out.
Before reliable fetal sex discrimination tests were developed in the 20th century, infanticide was the only means of sex selection in relation to offspring. The question is whether such control should be understood as control over fertility and the family.
Fabian Drexler disagrees, at least for infanticide in early modern Japan. Scholars have also raised broader questions about the definition of parity based solely on fertility, which requires further consideration. Here, emphasis will be placed on whether the Roman source itself included an explanation of other forms of family restrictions, or whether it was seen as a unique practice.
Discussions about upbringing are cautiously limited, since Maya's role as a reporter of the newborn's physical condition is limited to those in the family who make practical decisions: the most critical is the father, and anyone who raises a child is likely to have the power of the father.
At this point, other factors are taken into account outside the scope of medicine or midwifery, with family economics being most frequently mentioned in the sources. This comes in two forms, one for the poor and the other for those who have enough resources and don't have to worry about extra mouths to feed themselves, but who are more concerned with the functioning of the partial inheritance system in a world where inherited wealth is key.
Roman law stipulated that all legal offspring, male or female, were automatic heirs, and they must receive a fair share of the inheritance unless they were expressly denied the right to inheritance. Raising more children can be understood as weakening the economic prospects of those who are already integrated into the family, although this is not the only way of thinking, and even if the older offspring have already passed the most dangerous years of their lives, there are risks in deciding not to raise those who are born later.
A few decades before Solanus wrote, the Stoic moralist Muthonius Rufus strongly supported the thesis that all born children should be raised, which was more or less Stoic's position. Musonius left his greatest anger on those who exposed the baby "without even poverty as an excuse", deciding not to raise the offspring born later, "so that those born early may inherit greater wealth".
In the Greek novels of the second century AD, Daphnes and Chloe, both of whom were revealed, were raised as slaves so that they could eventually marry happily. Daphnes' father, Dionyssophens, explained that he was married very early and that by the time the fourth child, another boy, was born, he was already lucky enough to have two sons and a daughter.
He thought his family was "big enough" to release the baby, a decision he later regretted because his eldest son and daughter subsequently died of the same disease within a day.
Dionysophanes, delighted when he found his abandoned children and glad that he and his wife would receive more support in their later years, tried to reassure his other surviving son that his fortune was enough to make both of his children wealthy. Although the eldest son, Chloe was exposed so that her father could continue to pay for the public expenditures necessary to maintain her citizenship, which is again a matter of regret because the expected future offspring failed to materialize.
Returning to Musonius Rufus, it should be emphasized that his arguments are essentially those of citizens. Having many children is a citizen's duty to the state and to the gods, although both the community and the family reap the benefits that far outweigh the pragmatic excuses he deals with to limit future generations. The failure to raise a child who has already been born is the main means of this immoral and harmful restriction and therefore the main point of attack, but Musonius also praised various measures against abortion and contraception, public rewards for parents of multiple births and punishment for childlessness.
The focus is on fertility; He opposed any attempt to deliberately limit the number of children born and retained in a citizen's marriage, and was in favor of encouraging mass births in discourse and practice. He clearly sees risk exposure as the main threat to his maximizing momentum, but as part of a broader practice with the same goals and outcomes.
Most of them still arise in a relationship that gives them recognition and support, mainly between marriages between persons who cannot enter into a full marriage under Roman law. These are not babies born to a "single" woman, who society believes should not have children, or by the wrong man, such as adultery. Although the latter few women may expose their offspring, the number involved may be small.
Regardless of the source, a sufficient number of newborns were exposed and then picked up by others to such an extent that the raising of outcasts, a kind of "foster care", became a regular event in the Roman world, somewhat regulated. In contrast to later periods, no place was designated to receive abandoned babies, and no state or charity was involved in receiving them. Instead, it seems that certain places are informally referred to as places where newborns will be released and can be taken away by anyone who wants.
As mentioned earlier, the main destination for exposure was slavery: exposed babies were picked up by individuals to be raised as slaves and raised in a more organized, business-like manner. Around the same time, the satirist Juvenal viciously attacked wealthy women who were allegedly unwilling to bear the burden of pregnancy or the pain and danger of childbirth, thus fueling the nasty suppository child trade, which was nasty because men were fooled and noble blood was thus tarnished.
In 111 AD, he replied to a letter from Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia-Pontus, in which the controversy over the status and maintenance of "those called threptoi" affected "the whole province", emphasizing the inviolability of free procreation. Footnote 67 If this status is confirmed, at the end of the story, they do not have to "buy back their freedom".
Pliny's description of the scenario is not one in which Threptoi's free birth status is disputed; The question is simply to pay compensation. Thus, this situation is characterized by knowledge of what happened, not ignorance or concealment, whether this knowledge belongs to parents, rescuers, third parties, or is shared by all of them.
As Evans Grubbs points out, this openness changes how one should understand the practice, or at least some version of it. It shows that some expositi did return to their original homes, if not in the idyllic way Daphnis and Chloe imagined. In fact, this may have been planned all along.
This coincides with the view that adverse exposure is primarily a response to a particular crisis. For example, crop failures, for whatever reason, or internal family disasters, rather than poverty itself. For ordinary Romans, children were priceless economically, as well as socially and culturally, despite the large sums of money initially spent, as Saskia Hin demonstrates.
If desperate circumstances force them to give birth to a newborn, it is likely to be a hope for future recovery and, when the situation improves, thus positioning itself in adaptive strategies and methods of family constraints developed to spread the burden of fertility and improve fertility outcomes. For wealthy and "single" women, the situation is different.
By discussing the redistributive, circular aspects of exposure, the overlap with adoption has become apparent. Attention switches from the loss column to the gain column of the household ledger, and transactions become more formal, stable, and secure, but the basic pattern is shared. In Roman adoption, a person who has no direct heir can obtain a more or less fully formed heir from another lineage to inherit his surname, cult, and property.
More complex inheritance strategies and specific political goals can also be pursued in this way, but the abundance of surviving legal discourse makes it clear that support for family continuity is at the heart of the system, and that adoptive families should roughly replicate natural families. The adoptee should also come from a family that can afford him to move elsewhere, and in fact, his actions are ideally beneficial to both parties.
Trentius, who appears in an example collected by Valerius Maximus at the beginning of the first century AD, raised eight sons and adopted one, intending to enrich them all by his inheritance. More typical is the case of Lucius Aemilius Paulus, who was descended from a noble family.
After defeating the Macedonian king Perseus in the decisive battle of Pidna in 167 BC, his story is often retelled. Valerius Maximus said that earlier, he gave up two of his four sons in favor of adopting him and providing heirs to two other prominent families of republican Rome, the Fabi family and the Sipione family, the childless branch.
While the adopted sons thrived, the young boys died, and a few days later, he celebrated Pedner's victory. This upbringing, the emotional and material resources invested, its formative role, the physical and moral similarity between the parents and offspring that it formed, left its mark and was neither eliminated nor replaced by an official transfer to a new family.
In addition, the ideal is continuity of birth, upbringing and inheritance: biological children are preferred and adoption is secondary, valid but not identical in a social or personal sense. The practice of less formal foster care and raising the offspring of others may create a closer emotional bond, but without the same legal result: a foster child cannot be an heir in the same way as an adopted son.
Adoption is a transaction involving a Roman citizen and requires the consent of both parties, the adopter and the adoptee's father. In the absence of any of these conditions, raising children without legally integrating them into the family is the only option, and there are a range of reasons to follow this practice, especially below the elite.
This also means that any offspring born to a female slave of a master, because they follow the status of the mother, cannot be adopted, and although it is theoretically possible to adopt a child born out of wedlock, there is no evidence that this has ever happened if the mother was a citizen.
The adoptee's status, at least in elite circles, is untenable in society, and his inheritance will undoubtedly be challenged in court, with a certain chance of success.
The Romans' focus on adopting adults rather than young children made the distance between adoptive and "natural" families greater than in most modern societies, and it was all the more far-fetched to bring this practice under the banner of "procreation." Adoption was, and still is, clearly part of a joint system in which procreation is the substance. For example, the success of assisted reproductive technology is the reason for the recent decline in the number of adoptions in the UK, which suggests a fundamental link.
The ancient Romans' decision on whether to attempt to have or raise a child was certainly determined by the existence of an adult adoption system. In these considerations, it cuts off both directions. Its primary role may be to serve as insurance against future losses, thereby underwriting a lower-than-expected fertility regime, as in various East Asian contexts.
But the practice also provides support for additional offspring, and the sons born can be beneficially gifted to other families. The entanglement between adoption and procreation is varied.
Everyone is working for the continuation of the family, in order to have children, to have their names, their status, the cult and whatever property they may have, to connect with future generations.