Laid. To my travail’s fruit she gave her breast,
Telling her lord herself had borne the babe.
Now, grown to man with golden-bearded cheeks,
My son, divining, or of someone told,
Journeyed, resolved to find his parents, forth
To Phœbus’ fane. Now Laius my lord,
Seeking assurance of the babe exposed,
If he were dead, fared thither.
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.