“Look,” he exclaims, “on the blind wandering about the streets leaning on their sticks, and on those with crushed feet, and still again look on those with broken limbs. This one is without arms, that one has had his shoulders pulled down out of shape in order that his grotesqueries may excite laughter. Let us view the entire miserable family shivering, trembling, blind, mutilated, perishing from hunger—in fact, already half dead. Let us go to the origin of all these ills—a laboratory for the manufacture of human wrecks—a cavern filled with the limbs torn from living children—each has a different profession, a different mutilation has given each a different occupation.”
The conclusion is that inasmuch as the exposed children are slaves, being the property of those who rear them, they have no cause for complaint against the State.
“What wrong has been done to the Republic?” asks Gallio in reply to Severus. “On the contrary, have not these children been done a service inasmuch as their parents had cast them out?”
“Many individuals,” adds F. Claudius, “rid themselves of misformed children defective in some part of their body or because the children are born under evil auspices. Someone else picks them up out of commiseration and, in order to defray the expenses of bringing the child up, cuts off one of its limbs. Today, when they are demanding charity, that life that they owe to the pity of one, they are sustaining at the expense and through the pity of all.”
CHAPTER XVII
PROGRESS UNDER THE ANTONINES—FAUSTINA’S EFFORTS TO SAVE FEMALE CHILDREN—CHRISTIAN SENTIMENT GROWS—PLEA OF LACTANTIUS—ITS EFFECTS—CONSTANTINE.
FROM the strictly legal side the most interesting event of Hadrian’s reign is the fact that the opinions of the jurists, when they were unanimous, were now recognized as written law.[354] The constitutions or proclamations of law of the emperors, although none were ascribed to an earlier date, had probably been issued for a century previously, but now what is called the “Perpetual Edict” is finally arranged and authorized, and law proceeds from an intellectual and philosophic source, instead of from an imperial head.
In empowering Salvius Julianus, one of the four greatest lawyers Rome ever produced, to frame an edict, and by a senatus consultum embody this edict in the statute law of Rome, the entire law of the Empire underwent a change in spirit. What had hitherto been done by Augustus, by Nerva, by Trajan, and by Hadrian himself, had furnished only the value of example or of an immediate law passed for the benefit of some particular condition. A succeeding emperor was at liberty to imitate or pass similar laws, or ignore the acts of his predecessors as he might choose. As we shall see, he usually ignored the noble examples of those who had gone before.