The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

It was during the reign of Antoninus that Tertullian was born.

Under Antoninus’s philosophic successor the alimentary institution was further developed, Marcus Aurelius showing his interest by putting the supervision under a person of prætorian or consular rank.[360] He upheld the rights of children, going one step further in the direction of freedom by ending the tyrannical power of the father to oblige his son to put away his wife, if the latter were disagreeable to the head of the family.

With Marcus Aurelius vanished the humane emperors—they had reigned long. Culminating in his beneficent sway the Stoic philosophy, from Aristotle to Marcus Aurelius, kept developing, in the midst of surroundings the least encouraging. The Stoics, with their ideas of humanity, of mutual good will and moral equality, arrived at almost the same conclusions regarding religion and the same sentiment regarding humanity as did the followers of the Christian religion, although working from an entirely different source. The one reached its conclusion through the medium of patrician orators, philosophers, and emperors, the other through the slaves, the distressed, and those for whom life faced an unbroken wall.

From Aurelius to Septimus Severus there is little but bloodshed in Roman history. The selection of Papinian, the greatest of Roman jurists, as his adviser is in a way the greatest claim to fame that Severus has.[361] Among his many laws was one that permitted the sons of a condemned criminal to retain the rights the father had over freedmen, which was considered a great indulgence—benignissime rescripsit. He condemned to temporary exile the woman who, by practising abortion, had deprived her husband of the hope of children.

Of the bloody reign of Caracalla it is to be noted principally that he changed the lex Julia in such a way as to deprive paternity of its privileges. Those who were not married (cœlebs) and those who were married and had no children (orbus) suffered in regard to their inheritances as they had under the old law, but Caracalla filled his treasury by sweeping into the fiscus all the caduca.

While the barbarians are now beginning to press down on the northern frontiers of the Empire and the Christians beginning to rapidly and swiftly permeate the vast domain, there is little but a bloody chronicle of making and unmaking of emperors up to Diocletian. Even when persecuted and proscribed, says Ortolan, Christianity had a liberalizing and softening effect on the progress of jurisprudence and legislation. The softening effect was also the effect of a new understanding. Trajan, one of the greatest of the humane emperors, had come from Spain, and Diocletian, who temporarily braced up the Roman legions, put energy into the government, and held the barbarians in check, was himself from a family of freedmen. The best of the patrician blood had become thoroughly impregnated with Stoic ideas, although it was true that the jurists who had obtained their philosophy from Greece and were given the task of defending existing law and institutions were still against the new religion. Though the persecutors under Diocletian were unusually severe, theirs was the final burst of oppression before the new religion was to triumph in having the head of the great Roman Empire, Diocletian’s own successor, Constantine, accept the despised faith.

It matters little whether Constantine’s conversion was a political move, based on a desire to absorb a growing and powerful organization. This was a century in which things were happening and his was a reign (306 or 313–337) that marked a long turn in the road in the attitude of the State toward the child. Despite the progress that had been made, the practice of murdering and exposing new-born children was becoming more and more frequent in the provinces, and especially in Italy.[362]

It was due to poverty, says Gibbon,[363] and the principal causes of distress were the unendurable taxes. The historian declares that “moved by some recent and extraordinary instances of despair,” Constantine addressed an edict[364] to all the cities of Italy and afterward to those of Africa, directing that immediate and sufficient aid be given by magistrates to parents who produced children that they were too poor to bring up. Against the opinion of Gibbon is set that of Godefroy that it was not some unusual bit of misery, some “Mary Ellen case,” that moved the Emperor to take this significant step.

The edict was published on May 12, 315 A. D., a few months before his victory over Licinius. The Christians had prophesied to Constantine that he would be victorious and he was more than likely to be influenced by their point of view, especially that of Lactantius, the noted rhetorician and teacher, to whom he had entrusted the education of his son, Crispus. Lactantius had just written his work on The Divine Institutes, designed to supersede the less complete treatises of Minucius Felix, Tertullian, and Cyprian. He had dedicated the work to Constantine, and perhaps had conversed with him about it, discussing one particular chapter in which the Christian Father had inveighed, with his accustomed grace but with unusual force, against infanticide and the sale and exposure of infants. A new day, indeed, had come—the proud Emperor of the mighty Romans sits high on his throne, listening to, and moved by—a Christian Father!