FEMALE CHILDREN NOT DESIRABLE AMONG GREEKS—PRECAUTIONS
FOR SAVING EXPOSED CHILDREN—ORNAMENTS AS A MEANS OF
IDENTIFICATION—ADOPTION UNDER STRANGE CIRCUMSTANCES.
The Greeks who exposed their children hoped, as a rule, they might
possibly be saved by others and precautions were frequently taken to
this end. The gruesome task of doing away with the infant was generally
entrusted to a slave or to a midwife, who were willing, apparently, to
undertake many services.[304] The time usually chosen was early in the
day, inasmuch as the child would perish if it passed the entire night
without attracting attention.
The lexicographers and the scholiasts of the time speak of children
being left in deserted places. In the “golden days,” they were placed
where they could be seen. There is evidence that the most frequented
places were the most popular—the hippodromes, the entrances to the
temples, and the sacred grottoes, where they would be most in evidence.
A watch was kept on the place or it was revisited, in order to be sure
of the fate of the infant.
Care was usually taken to wrap the child up carefully. When Laymonde,
the shepherd, discovered Daphnis, the child was being suckled by a
goat. “Struck with natural astonishment, he advances closer to the spot
and discovers a lusty and handsome male child with far richer swathing
clothes than suited its fortune in being thus exposed; for its little
mantle was of fine purple, and fastened by a golden clasp; and it had a
little sword with a hilt of ivory.”[305]
The jests of Aristophanes show that more often children were exposed
in large copper pots with two handles, called _kutrai_ (κυτρἀι). The
Athenians had been in the habit of making sacrifices to some of their
divinities in these _kutrai_, and it is likely that when children were
first abandoned, they were placed in these receptacles that they might
invoke the protection of the immortals. Recent excavations at Gezer and
Tell Ta’Andkk show children were sacrificed in a similar way.
[Illustration: BLIND BOYS AT DRILL IN “THE LIGHTHOUSE,” NEW YORK CITY]
Various objects were placed with the child when it was so exposed.
Creusa, the daughter of Erectheus, King of Athens, when she exposed
Ion, the son whom she had secretly borne to Apollo, “observant of the
customs of her great progenitors,” in addition to leaving with him what
ornaments she had, also added:
A branch of olive then I wreathed around thee,
Plucked from that tree which from Minerva’s rock
First sprung; if it be there it still retains
Its verdure; for the foliage of that olive,
Fresh in immortal beauty, never fades.[306]
This, and the sacred bandelettes, were always the symbols of
inviolability.
This final act of maternal affection, characteristic of both the human
and the barbaric side of Greek parents, became, in time, a widespread
custom. When the child was exposed, there was generally placed
alongside of it a small basket or collection of trinkets. The royal
daughter of Erechtheus attached to the neck of her son many precious
ornaments, including a serpent of massive gold. The shepherd Laymonde
found on Daphnis a clasp of gold and a small ivory sword. Among the
very poor, hand-made collars, shoulder straps, with various trinkets of
little worth, were used to mark the infant.
In all this, dramatists saw but a means to establish the identity
of the hero and heroine and an assistance to the _dénouement_. The
ceremony, with its pathos and its strangeness, was, to tragic as well
as to comic writers, but a means to end the fifth act. The pity of it
all never seems to have occurred to the Greek mind.
It was rare that the father or the child-mother who renounced the
infant had any real desire to find it when better days came. The real
wish was that the child might be taken up by some stranger before death
came and the trinkets were an inducement to befriend the child.
If, on the other hand, the child should die, the feeling was that these
ornaments would assure for it a happy life on the other side of the
Styx.
For this reason the favoured objects of mothers were amulets; and,
as in the case of the serpent placed around the neck of Ion, Creusa
hoped to invoke the aid of Minerva, who had guarded her ancestor,
Erichthonius, with two dragons; the object being to watch over the
child’s existence. These gewgaws were supposed to give the infant
exposed all the rights of a suppliant.
As to how far these ceremonies of supplication were successful, as to
how far they commended the unfortunate infant to the public, is a grave
question. From the religious and literary myths one might imagine that
the greater number of the infants were saved. We read of Hephaistus,
nourished by the Sintians or by Thetis; of Atalanta by a bear; of Zeus
and Dionysos, nursed by the nymphs; the shepherds found and received
Telephus, Amphion, and Œdipus; Ion, by a priestess, and Sirus, by a
beggar.
Greek artists frequently show a Satyr holding in his arms a newly-born
that he had found on the road.
Poets of the new comedy delight to represent their heroes, or, more
frequently, their heroines, as people who had gone through the trial
of exposure and were raised by either courtesans, shepherds, or
innkeepers. It is in this way that Menander, among others, shows us
Silenium growing up in the house of Melænis to whom she has been given
by the evil woman who picked her up[307]; Casina treated as a daughter
by the brave Cleostrata.[308]
Longus, in this way, brings Daphnis and Chloë into the cabin of a
goatherd.
But these examples prove little about the actual conditions, only going
to show the facility of the writers of the time, and Glotz suggests
that these scenes flattered the Athenians, who liked to think of
themselves as a philanthropic people.
Apparently, the first impulse when a child was found was to ignore it,
for the attitude of Athenian society was probably well expressed by
Longus when he said:
“Those who seek paternity are many.”
In fact, the author of _Daphnis and Chloë_ says that when Daphnis was
first seen by the shepherd being suckled by a goat, “Laymonde (the
shepherd) resolved to leave it to its fate, and to carry off only
the tokens; but feeling afterward ashamed at the reflection, that in
doing so he should be inferior in humanity, even to a goat, he waited
for the approach of night and then carried home the infant with the
tokens.”[309]
Old Megacles, the father of Chloë, in the same story seeks to excuse
himself for having exposed his daughter, by a number of bad reasons:
he did not have the means, it was a moment of weakness, he hoped that
the nymphs would take pity on the child: and then, there were so
many people who did not have children, etc. The most interesting of
his reasons, however, is the statement that he had spent his fortune
equipping theatrical choruses!
As a rule, when adoption did take place it was not for the benefit of
the child. In many instances, those who wished to adopt a son waited
and adopted a grown-up one so as not to have the trouble and expense of
educating him.
As set forth in the plays, it was apparently not infrequent that
a courtesan sought to attach a lover, or a wife a husband who was
slipping away from her, by adopting a child and passing it off as her
own. It was to this subterfuge that Silenium, in the _Cistellaria_ of
Plautus, owes her life. Speaking of the incident, the Procuress in the
play, says:
“But once upon a time, that girl (Silenium) who has gone hence in
tears, from a lane I carried her off a little child exposed.... I made
a present of her to my friend, this courtesan, who had made mention of
it to me that somewhere I must find for her a boy or a girl, just born,
that she herself might pass it off as her own.
“As soon as ever the opportunity befell me I immediately granted her
request in that which she had asked me. After she had received this
female child from me, she at once was brought to bed of the same female
child which she had received from me.... She said that her lover was a
foreigner.”[310]
It is hardly likely, however, that many courtesans in real life were
willing to be so encumbered, and perhaps, as Demosthenes says, this
was only the sort of thing one “sees in tragedies,” like the fatal and
convenient malady described by Heine as a sort of “fifth act sickness.”
That the substitution of foundlings and exposed children was frequent
in Greece is evident, however, from the many plays bearing this name.
Cratinus the younger was the author of a piece called _The Substituted
Child_ [ὑποβολιμάιος], and the title was also used by Menander.
Athenæus quotes from a play by Alexis entitled _The Suppositious
Child_[311] and from one by Epinicus called the _Suppositious
Damsels_ [ὑποβολλομενᾶι] and from[312] another by Crobylus called the
_Pseudo-Suppositious Child_ (_Falsus suppositus_).[313]
In the Thesmophoriazusæ, Aristophanes depicts the father of Euripides,
Mnesilochus, as making a tactless defence of his son-in-law at the
festival of Thesmophoria by abusing the very women he would placate.
“And I know another woman,” he says “who for ten days said she was in
labour, till she purchased a little child while her husband went about
purchasing drugs for a quick delivery. But the child an old woman
brought in a pot with its mouth stopped with honeycomb that it might
not squall. Then, when she that carried it nodded, the wife immediately
cried out: ‘Go away, husband, go away, for methinks that I shall be
immediately delivered.’ For the child kicked against the bottom of the
pot. And he ran off delighted, while she drew out the stoppage from the
bottle and it cried out. And then the abominable old woman who brought
the child, runs smiling to the husband, and says: ‘A lion has been born
to you, a lion; your very image, in all other respects whatever, and
its nose is like yours, being crooked like an acorn cup.’”[314]
That there was a class of people who looked on children in the light of
good or bad bargains we must assume from the certainly serious words
of Demosthenes in his oration against Midias. In his attack on his
physical assailant, Demosthenes says that the real mother of Midias was
a wise woman because she got rid of him as soon as he was born, whereas
the woman who adopted him was a foolish woman because she made a bad
bargain.
“And why?” asks the orator, “because the one sold him as soon as he was
born, while the other, when she might have obtained a better for the
same price, bought Midias.”
Ion,[315] when he meets his father for the first time and learns that
he had been exposed, congratulates himself on having escaped slavery,
indicating that in all probability the majority of children saved after
they had been exposed by their parents were saved by the professional
slave dealers. The general view, however, was that children were cheap,
Xenophon,[316] declaring that “good slaves when they had children
generally become still better disposed, but bad ones increase their
power to do mischief.”
Only in two instances as far as we know did the law of the Greeks reach
out to protect the child against the destroying whim of the parent.
According to Ælian[317] the Thebans were not allowed to expose their
children or leave them in a wilderness under the pain of death. If the
father were extremely poor, the child, whether male or female, had
to be brought to the magistrate in its swaddling clothes, and there
delivered to some person who would agree to bring up the child and
when it was grown up, take it into service and have the benefit of its
labour in return for its education.
As to the other instance of the law protecting the child it has been
truly said that all that Lycurgus did was to insist that all “fit”
children should be raised.
“If,” says Plutarch,[318] “they (the Spartans) found it puny and
ill-shaped, they ordered it to be taken to what was called the
Apothetæ, a sort of chasm under Taygetus, as thinking it neither for
the good of the child itself, nor for the public interest, that it
should be brought up, if it did not from the very outset, appear made
to be healthy and vigorous.”
And this was the most “protecting” move of the ancient Greeks.