“And why?” asks the orator, “because the one sold him as soon as he was born, while the other, when she might have obtained a better for the same price, bought Midias.”
Ion,[315] when he meets his father for the first time and learns that he had been exposed, congratulates himself on having escaped slavery, indicating that in all probability the majority of children saved after they had been exposed by their parents were saved by the professional slave dealers. The general view, however, was that children were cheap, Xenophon,[316] declaring that “good slaves when they had children generally become still better disposed, but bad ones increase their power to do mischief.”
Only in two instances as far as we know did the law of the Greeks reach out to protect the child against the destroying whim of the parent. According to Ælian[317] the Thebans were not allowed to expose their children or leave them in a wilderness under the pain of death. If the father were extremely poor, the child, whether male or female, had to be brought to the magistrate in its swaddling clothes, and there delivered to some person who would agree to bring up the child and when it was grown up, take it into service and have the benefit of its labour in return for its education.
As to the other instance of the law protecting the child it has been truly said that all that Lycurgus did was to insist that all “fit” children should be raised.
“If,” says Plutarch,[318] “they (the Spartans) found it puny and ill-shaped, they ordered it to be taken to what was called the Apothetæ, a sort of chasm under Taygetus, as thinking it neither for the good of the child itself, nor for the public interest, that it should be brought up, if it did not from the very outset, appear made to be healthy and vigorous.”
And this was the most “protecting” move of the ancient Greeks.
CHAPTER XIV
FIRST RECOGNITION OF RIGHTS OF CHILDREN—LAWS OF ROMULUS AND OF NUMA POMPILIUS—THE TWELVE TABLES—ATTITUDE OF PARENTS SHOWN IN TERENCE—PATRIA POTESTAS SPARINGLY USED.