From thence her name and worship were diffused through the other islands and states of Hellas; though the Cretans pretended that she was born at Amnisos in the Knossian territory, and was a daughter of Hera. The Athenians, who erected a temple to Eileithyia appeared to favour both traditions, since of the two statues which were found in her fane the more ancient was said to have been brought from Delos by Erisicthon, while the second, dedicated by Phædra, came from Crete. Among the Athenians, alone, as an indication of the national modesty, the wooden images of this mysterious divinity were significantly veiled to the toes.[[329]]
The simple delicacy of remoter ages required women to be attended, while becoming mothers, by individuals of their own sex. But the contrary practice, now general among civilised nations, prevailed early at Athens, where the study of medicine, in which the accoucheur’s[[330]] art is included, was prohibited to women and slaves. The consequences bear stronger testimony to the refined taste and truly feminine feelings of the Athenian ladies than a thousand panegyrics. Numbers, rather than submit to the immodest injunctions of fashion, declined all aid, and perished in their harems: observing which, and moved strongly by the desire to preserve the lives of her noble-minded countrywomen, a female citizen named Agnodice, disguised as a man, acquired a competent knowledge of the theory and practice of physic in the medical school of Herophilos; she then confided her secret to the women who universally determined to avail themselves of her services, and in consequence her practice became so extensive that the jealousy of the other practitioners was violently excited. In revenge, therefore, as she still maintained her disguise, they preferred an accusation against her in the court of Areiopagos as a general seducer. To clear herself Agnodice made known her sex, upon which the envious Æsculapians prosecuted her under the provisions of the old law. In behalf of their benefactress the principal gentlewomen appeared in court, and mingling the highest testimony in favour of Agnodice with many bitter reproaches, they not only obtained her acquittal, but the repeal of the obnoxious law, and permission for any free woman to become an accoucheuse.[[331]]
Mention is made by ancient writers of several rude and hardy tribes, whose women, like those of Hindùstân[Hindùstân] at the present day, stood in very little need of the midwife’s aid. Thus Varro,[[332]] speaking of the rough shepherdesses of Italy, observes that among the countrywomen of Illyria, bringing forth children was regarded as a slight matter; for that, stepping aside from their work in the fields, they would return presently with an infant in their arms, having first bathed it in some fountain or running stream, appearing rather to have found, than given birth to, a child. Nor are the manners of these uncultivated people at all altered in modern times, as appears from an anecdote related to Pietro Vittore,[[333]] by Francesco Sardonati, professor of Latin at Ragusa, who said that he saw a woman go out empty-handed to a forest for wood, and return shortly afterwards with a bundle on her head and a new-born infant in her arms. At Athens, however, where the women were peculiarly tender and delicate, the young mother remained within doors full six weeks,[[334]] when the festival of the fortieth day was celebrated, after which she went forth, as our ladies do to be churched, to offer up sacrifices and return thanks in the temple of Artemis or some other divinity.
New-born infants, when designed to be reared, were at Athens and in the rest of Greece bathed in cold water: at Sparta in wine, with the view of producing convulsions and death should the child be feeble, whereas, were its constitution strong and vigorous, it would thus they imagined, “acquire a greater degree of firmness, and get a temper in proportion, as Potter[[335]] expresses it, like steel in the quenching.” Swaddling-bands[[336]] also, in use throughout the rest of Greece, were banished from Sparta, which led the way therefore to that improved system of infant management advocated by Rousseau, Lacépède and others,[[337]] and now generally adopted in this country, though but partially in France. The ceremonies and customs of the Greeks were a kind of symbolical language, many times containing important meaning, and always perhaps indicative of the character and familiar feelings of the race. Much stress was laid on the thing wherein the infant was placed upon its entrance into the world. This, among the Athenians, consisted of a wrapper adorned with an embroidered figure of the Gorgon’s head, the device represented on the shield of Athena, tutelar divinity of the state. From the beginning every citizen seemed thus to be placed under the immediate shelter of that goddess’s ægis which should be extended over him in peace and in war. In other parts of Greece the child’s first bed, and too frequently his last, was a shield.[[338]] In accordance with this custom we find Alcmena cradling her twin boys Heracles and Iphicles in Amphytrion’s buckler; and the same practice prevailed, as might have been expected, at Sparta, where war constituted to men the sole object of life.[[339]] Elsewhere other symbols spoke to the future sense rather than the present of the new citizen. In agricultural countries the military symbol was replaced by a winnowing van, not unfrequently of gold or other costly materials;[[340]] though it may be doubted whether the word so rendered meant not rather a cradle in the form of that rustic implement.
In another custom, long on these occasions observed, we discern traces of that serpent-worship which at different epochs diffused itself so widely over the world. Among opulent and noble families at Athens new-born children were laid on golden amulets in the form of dragons by which they were supposed to commemorate Athena’s delivery of Erichthonios to the care of two guardians of that description.[[341]]
But under certain circumstances, instead of the joy and gladness by which the noble and the great are greeted on their entrance into the world, the birth of a child was, as in Thrace,[[342]] an event fraught with sorrow and misery. It announced in fact the approach of an enemy, of one who, if he survived, must snatch from them a portion of what already would scarcely sustain life. Together with the announcement of his birth, therefore, came the awful consciousness that war must be made on him—that he must in short be cast forth, a scape-goat for the sins of society, not for his own—that his parents who should have cherished him, whose best solace he should have been, must steel their hearts and close fast their ears against the voice of nature, and become his executioners. The poor-laws of Greece, or rather their substitutes for poor-laws, were exceedingly imperfect, and foundling hospitals had not been introduced. They got rid of their surplus population, as many nations still do, by murder; for infanticide, under various forms, has more or less prevailed in all civilised countries, if the term civilised can properly be applied to nations among whom crimes so demoralising are habitually perpetrated. No doubt the sullen reluctance of a father to imbrue his hands in the blood of his child produced daily many a heart-rending scene; no doubt the sting of want must have been keenly felt before the habit of slaughter was confirmed;—but the fashion once set, children were thrown into an earthen pot and exposed in mountainous and desert places to perish of cold, or fall a prey to carnivorous birds[[343]] or wolves, as coolly as they are murdered by their young and frail mothers in our own Christian land.
Under all circumstances, however, the parents thus criminal are objects of pity. Misery is blind, and crime is blind. But what shall we say to those priests of humanity, those sacred and reverend interpreters of nature,—the philosophers who come forward to sanction and justify the practice? It would be criminal to disguise the fact, that both Plato and Aristotle, the great representatives of the wisdom of the Pagan world,[[344]] conceived infanticide, under certain circumstances, to be allowable. Near, therefore, as the former stood to the truths of Christianity, there was still a cloud between him and them. What he saw, he saw through a glass darkly. Christ had not then stamped the seal of divinity upon human nature, had not shed abroad that light by which alone we discover the true features of crime, no less than the true features of holiness. Philosophy is beautiful; but with the beauty of one involuntarily polluted. Religion alone, breathing of heaven, radiant with light, reflected on its whole form from the face of God, is lovely altogether without spot or blemish. The Greeks wanting this guide went astray. They looked at the question of population as coarse utilitarians,—all but the gross, unintellectual Thebans, who, relying on the vast fertility of their soil, or led by some better instinct, on this point soared high above their cultivated neighbours, an example of how the foolish things of this world, even in the unregenerate state of nature, may sometimes confound the wise. Among the Tyrrhenians,[[345]] likewise, a people of Pelasgian origin, infanticide was unknown, probably because among them it was accounted no disgrace to be the parents of illegitimate offspring; indeed the sense of shame could not, in any case, be very keen among a people whose female slaves served naked at table, and where even the ladies appeared at public entertainments in the same state, drinking bumpers and joining freely in the conversation of the men.
In the modern world to take the life of an infant is a capital offence, yet we see with how little fear or ceremony the law is set at nought. It will, therefore, readily be supposed that in those countries of antiquity where neither law nor public opinion opposed the practice, but in some cases winked at, in others enjoined it, the number of child-murders must have been enormous. Sparta very naturally took the lead in this guilty course.[[346]] Here it was not permitted to private individuals to make away with their offspring stealthily, and with those marks of shame and compunction inseparable from individual guilt. The state monopolized the right to Herodise, and by sharing the criminality among great numbers appeared to silence the objections of conscience. Fathers were compelled by law to bring their new-born infants to certain officers, old, grave men,[[347]] who held their sittings in the Lesche of their tribe, and after due deliberation determined on the claim of each child to live or die. By what rules they decided, rude and ignorant of physiology as they were, it would now be impossible positively to affirm. Little skill no doubt had they in detecting the latent seeds of robustness and physical energy, still less those of splendid mental endowments lurking in the crimson countenance of helpless infancy. They who might have proved the wise and good of their generation no doubt often went instead of the mere animal. However, giving orders that the strong and apparently healthy should be nursed, the weakly and delicate, often the noblest men, and the bravest soldiers, as witness Lucius Sulla, were condemned to be cast like so many puppy dogs into the Apothetæ, a deep cavern at the foot of Mount Taygetos. This den of death relieved the Spartans from the necessity of erecting workhouses or enacting poor-laws. The surplus population went into that pit.
To a certain extent, and in a mitigated form, the same practice prevailed at Athens. Here, however, it was more a matter of custom than of law, and in this respect differed materially[[348]] from the practice of Sparta, that it was left entirely to the father to determine the fate of his children. Accordingly, the more cold-blooded had recourse to murder, while the less atrocious exposed them in jars in desert places to perish, or in the thronged and crowded quarters of the city in the hope that they might excite in others that compassion, which he, their father, denied them.[[349]] And humane individuals were often found who, like our Squire Allworthy, would sympathise with these deserted creatures.[[350]] Numerous examples occur in the comic poets. In these cases poverty was no doubt the motive, particularly when boys were exposed; but even wealthy persons, reasoning like the Rajpoots of northern India, would prefer exposing their daughters, to the care and expense of educating them to an uncertain destiny. On these occasions the child was dressed and swaddled more or less carefully, placed in a large earthen vessel called a chytra,[[351]]—the same in which soup was made, and which ought, therefore, to have awakened humane associations,—and laid at the mouth of some cave without the walls, or in such situations as I have above described. To this custom allusion is made in the anecdote of a foundling, who amusing himself by rolling a chytra before him with his foot, “What! exclaimed some one desirous of reminding him of his origin, have you the impiety to kick your mother in the belly?”[[352]]
Sometimes when the object was rather to escape shame than to shun the expense of education, rings, jewels, or other valuable tokens were suspended about the child, or put along with it into the chytra.[[353]] And in the comic writers these usually assist in bringing about a discovery. If they fell into the hands of the poor the costly marks of noble birth, always held in honour by the ignorant and needy, would perhaps tempt them to preserve and cherish the off-cast, as in the case of Shakespeare’s Perdita, or in the event of death, would defray the expenses of their funerals. Sometimes superstition operated on their minds, urging them into a mock show of sharing their possessions with the little wretches they abandoned.[[354]] Thus Sostrata, wife of Chremes, in the Self-tormentor delivered along with her little daughter to the person who was to expose it, a ring from her own finger to be left with the child, that should it die it might not be wholly deprived of all share of their property. Such also is the behaviour of Creusa in Euripides; for Hermes, whom the poet introduces unfolding the argument of the drama, relates that when the young princess laid her new-born son to perish in the cavern, where he had been conceived, she took off her costly ornaments and with them decked her devoted boy.[[355]]