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.
BLIND BOYS AT DRILL IN “THE LIGHTHOUSE,” NEW YORK CITY
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: