The Child in Human Progress

by George Henry Payne

Suppressed in part by the constitution of Caracalla as to the privileges of paternity to the claim upon the caduca, and by Constantine as to the penalties for celibacy, these laws were not completely and textually abrogated until Justinian. They were the beginning, however, of the new movement; out of the degeneration and degradation of the waning days of the Republic there had come at least this forward step, though the patricians complained that these provisions gave rise to despised informers and opportunities for tyrannical misuse of power.

The child now had some other than a future use; it had an immediate value. Occasionally, in times past, strangers had picked up children exposed by their parents and had reared them as slaves, or maimed and blinded them for the profession of begging. Augustus set aside a reward of two thousand sesterces (about $40.00) for the person who would rear an orphan. This was the seed of a growing humanity, the first intimation of an inclination to treat children with kindness, though it contrasts with Augustus’s own personal conduct when his anger was aroused. Both his daughter and granddaughter were so profligate that he banished them; when his granddaughter Julia was delivered of a child after sentence, he ordered that the child be “neither owned as a relative nor brought up.”[344]

From the death of Augustus, 14 A. D., to the reign of Nerva, 96 A. D., the violent sway of the army and the tragic fate of successive emperors cloud the history of Roman law and progress.

The Emperor Claudius distinguished himself by ordering that Claudia, a child by his first wife, “who was in truth the daughter of his freedman Boter, be thrown naked at her mother’s door.”[345]

There were no successors to the great jurists of the type of Capito and Labeo, whose opinions in Augustan days were accepted by even the emperor himself. With the coming of Nerva there was a great change in the attitude toward children. Despite a short reign of two years and a reputation for a weak will, it was to his initiative that the State owed the movement to put an end to the practice of abandoning infants, by having the government subsidize poor parents.

Apparently there was no other way of stopping this ruinous custom in a degenerate day. It was useless to appeal to the rich to rear families, and the poor who were still producing children were becoming poorer. One of Nerva’s noteworthy acts to alleviate conditions was the founding of colonies, and it was in accordance with the same general plan that, a few months before he died, he ordered that assistance should be given parents who found themselves without the means of bringing up their offspring.

This order was issued in the year 97, and so successful was the experiment under his successor, who accepted and enlarged the plan, that in the year 100, five thousand children were receiving aid from the State. Much credit is given to Trajan for following up the ideas of Nerva, but it was to Nerva that Rome owed Trajan, one of the most humane of her emperors.

Another evidence of the humanity of Nerva was the fact that he prohibited the making of eunuchs, a practice that had met with the disfavour of the Emperor Domitian years before, and a practice that led the Pope Clement XIV., to decree, centuries later, that no more castrats should sing in churches. And these things he did when the extravagance of his predecessors had made it necessary for him to sell the imperial furniture and jewels in order to replenish the treasury. One of his coins shows him seated in the curule chair, dispensing charity to a boy and girl, the mother standing near, with the legend “Tutela Italia.”

One need only to read the gentle replies of the Emperor Trajan to the younger Pliny, to see that, in that reign at least, there was a great change and that the conception of duty in the modern sense was creeping into a military world. Pliny himself, in a letter to Cannius, describes how he settled five hundred thousand sesterces (about $20,000) on the city of Como for the maintenance of children, “who were born of good families”—an act as traceable to the growing protective tendency as to Pliny’s patriotism and love of glory.