As a rule, when adoption did take place it was not for the benefit of the child. In many instances, those who wished to adopt a son waited and adopted a grown-up one so as not to have the trouble and expense of educating him.
As set forth in the plays, it was apparently not infrequent that a courtesan sought to attach a lover, or a wife a husband who was slipping away from her, by adopting a child and passing it off as her own. It was to this subterfuge that Silenium, in the Cistellaria of Plautus, owes her life. Speaking of the incident, the Procuress in the play, says:
“But once upon a time, that girl (Silenium) who has gone hence in tears, from a lane I carried her off a little child exposed.... I made a present of her to my friend, this courtesan, who had made mention of it to me that somewhere I must find for her a boy or a girl, just born, that she herself might pass it off as her own.
“As soon as ever the opportunity befell me I immediately granted her request in that which she had asked me. After she had received this female child from me, she at once was brought to bed of the same female child which she had received from me.... She said that her lover was a foreigner.”[310]
It is hardly likely, however, that many courtesans in real life were willing to be so encumbered, and perhaps, as Demosthenes says, this was only the sort of thing one “sees in tragedies,” like the fatal and convenient malady described by Heine as a sort of “fifth act sickness.”
That the substitution of foundlings and exposed children was frequent in Greece is evident, however, from the many plays bearing this name. Cratinus the younger was the author of a piece called The Substituted Child [ὑποβολιμάιος], and the title was also used by Menander. Athenæus quotes from a play by Alexis entitled The Suppositious Child[311] and from one by Epinicus called the Suppositious Damsels [ὑποβολλομενᾶι] and from[312] another by Crobylus called the Pseudo-Suppositious Child (Falsus suppositus).[313]
In the Thesmophoriazusæ, Aristophanes depicts the father of Euripides, Mnesilochus, as making a tactless defence of his son-in-law at the festival of Thesmophoria by abusing the very women he would placate.
“And I know another woman,” he says “who for ten days said she was in labour, till she purchased a little child while her husband went about purchasing drugs for a quick delivery. But the child an old woman brought in a pot with its mouth stopped with honeycomb that it might not squall. Then, when she that carried it nodded, the wife immediately cried out: ‘Go away, husband, go away, for methinks that I shall be immediately delivered.’ For the child kicked against the bottom of the pot. And he ran off delighted, while she drew out the stoppage from the bottle and it cried out. And then the abominable old woman who brought the child, runs smiling to the husband, and says: ‘A lion has been born to you, a lion; your very image, in all other respects whatever, and its nose is like yours, being crooked like an acorn cup.’”[314]
That there was a class of people who looked on children in the light of good or bad bargains we must assume from the certainly serious words of Demosthenes in his oration against Midias. In his attack on his physical assailant, Demosthenes says that the real mother of Midias was a wise woman because she got rid of him as soon as he was born, whereas the woman who adopted him was a foolish woman because she made a bad bargain.