Chrem. Many a time a man cannot be such as he would be[333] if circumstances do not admit of it. Time has now so brought it about, that I should be glad of a daughter; formerly I wished for nothing less.
There is no evidence that the Romans as a people at any time approved of the sale of children, and while the suggestion is made by Gibbon that early in the days of the kings impoverishing conditions occasionally made it necessary to dispose of members of the family, from the time of the adoption of the Twelve Tables as the codified law of Rome there is not a single indication that the power of the father over grown-up children was used otherwise than sparingly, and with a view to strengthening the stern and military character of the Roman idea of family. The main use of the provision for the sale of children, in time of prosperity at least, was to put the boy out to business, this being in general more a form that took the place of what was later apprenticeship and, still later, the labour contract. As late as Constantine this was permitted, even of new-born children, but only in cases of extreme need (propter nimiam paupertatem),[334] and then when it seemed the only way to prevent their parents from murdering them.
CHAPTER XV
HUMANITARIAN MEASURES OF AUGUSTUS—LIFE IN THE IMPERIAL CITY—FIRST ATTEMPTS OF THE STATE TO CHECK INFANTICIDE—TRAJAN AND THE VELEIA LOAN—STOIC SPIRIT IN PLINY’S CHARITY.
ASTONISHING depravity marked the last days of the Republic, to the point where it was even said that annual divorces were as much the fashion in Rome as voluntary celibacy.[335] Seneca says there were women who reckoned their years by their husbands. In the severe, early period of the Republic, celibacy was considered censurable and even guilty,[336] whereas later it was not only condoned but wittily approved, to judge by the quips of the dramatist, Plautus, whose cynical references to marriage and the burden of a wife read not unlike our own scoffing and immoral dramatists of the eighteenth century.[337]
Civil wars and proscriptions had left great voids in Roman families; more prolific foreigners, freedmen, and slaves began to dominate the noisy city now beginning to earn her title of Mistress of the World. The visitor to Pompeii today, noting the large and heavy paving blocks, the narrow sidewalks, the deep ruts made in these solid streets by the heavy wagons, the open shops, the indecent signs, sees Rome in miniature. All this cosmopolitan disorder marked the greater town that had not twenty thousand inhabitants but a million; the noise and the congestion increased out of all proportion to its size because of the character of its dwellers, for Rome had a large foreign population. As in modern New York or London, it was in the foreign quarters that were found the discomforts, the loud misunderstandings, and the noisy, tragic fights for small things.
The stranger arriving in Rome had hardly entered its gates when he was being jostled and shoved. The narrow streets were filled with pedlars calling their wares of all kinds, from matches (sulphurata), in exchange for broken glass where money was scarce, to a dish of boiled peas for an as, or fine smoking sausages for those who had more money. Idlers filled the streets at all hours, but especially at the lunch hour (the sixth) when business ceased and those who patronized the cafés (tabernæ) were hurrying to get to their accustomed tables.[338]
