His delicate body met
With yellow and empurpled rays
From many a violet:
And hence his mother bade him claim
For ever this undying name.”
Generally, it would appear, illegitimate children were exposed in the neighbourhood of the Gymnasium, in the Cynosarges, because, as suggested by Suidas, Heracles, who was himself a bastard, had a temple there.
On the subject of infanticide the Thebans,[[363]] as I have said, entertained juster sentiments than the rest of their countrymen. By their institutions it was made a capital crime; but because severe laws would not furnish the indigent with the means of supporting the children they were forbidden to kill, they by another enactment provided for their maintenance. If a poor man found himself unable to support an addition to his family, he was commanded to bear his children immediately from the birth, wrapped in swaddling-clothes, to the magistrates, who disposed of them for a small sum to wealthy people in want of children or servants: for, according to the Theban laws, they who undertook the charge of foundlings, if they may be so called, were entitled to their services in return for their nursing and education.
Connected with infanticide is another subject equally important, but of very difficult treatment; that is practices to destroy the infant before the birth.[[364]] In modern nations all such offences are theoretically visited with very severe punishment by the law, and public opinion so strongly condemns them that no one solicitous of upholding a respectable character in society will dare to be their apologist. It was otherwise in antiquity. The greatest dread of a superabundant population was in many states felt, and led to customs and acts of a very nefarious nature; for some classes of which, if not for all, writers of highest eminence are found to plead. Thus Pliny,[[365]] commonly a great declaimer in behalf of virtue, admits that some artificial limit should be put to female productiveness; and Aristotle, despite his far nobler and more generous ethics, had on this point no loftier views. The regulations also of the Cretan Minos—but let them remain in the obscurity which encompasses his entire code.
Among the Romans several modern writers appear to suppose the existence of more humane feelings, for which it would certainly have been difficult to account. An ancient law attributed to Romulus has misled them. By this it was enacted that no male child should be exposed; and that of daughters the first should be permitted to live, while the others having been brought up till they were three years old, might then if judged expedient be destroyed.[[366]] The legislator, it is argued, knew human nature too well to fear that parents who had preserved their children three years would after that take away their lives. But infants exceedingly mutilated or deformed might be killed at once, having first been shown to five neighbours, and these neighbours, like the overseers of murder at Lacedæmon, were probably lax in interpreting the law, which, acknowledging the principle, would easily tolerate variations in the practice.[[367]] Be this, however, as it may, child-murder and child dropping were in imperial times of ordinary occurrence at Rome. There was in the Herb-market a pillar called the “Milky column,”[[368]] whither foundlings were brought to be suckled by public nurses, or to be fed with milk—for the passage in Festus may be both ways interpreted, and their numbers would seem to have been considerable. The Christian writers constantly object the practice of infanticide to the Romans. “You cast forth your sons,” says Tertullian,[[369]] “to be picked up and nourished by the first woman that passes.” And the poor, as Ambrose remarks, would desert and expose their little ones, and if caught deny them to be theirs.[[370]] Others adopted more decisive measures, and instead of exposing strangled them.[[371]] Probably, moreover, it was the atrocious device of legislators to get rid of their superabundant population that gave rise to the rite of child-sacrificing known to have prevailed among the Phœnicians, who passed their children through fire to Moloch; and among their descendants the Carthaginians,[[372]] who offered up infants to their gods, as at the present day our own idolatrous subjects in the East cast forth their first-born infants on islands at the mouth of the Ganges, to be devoured by the alligators. In China Christianity has performed for infancy the same humane duty as in ancient Rome, as many of the converts made by the Jesuits consisted of foundlings whom they had picked up when cast forth by their parents to perish in the streets.