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.