Infanticide and child abandonment were common practices in the ancient world. The reasons for abandonment were many while infanticide was a convenient way to eliminate deformed or maimed children. In some cases, children were sold to pay family debts. Those societies that worshiped Baal or the many Baal variations – such as Kronos in Carthage, engaged in the sacrifice of children. It was the Romans, however, that established a series of laws regarding abandonment.
Ancient Abandonment and Infanticide in the Near East and Mediterranean World
Pre-Roman societies regularly practiced infanticide. In Sparta, the community leaders, called Ephors, inspected newborns for defects. Unwanted females and males with obvious defects were flung into a ravine. The Egyptians also practiced infanticide, leaving the unwanted newborn at the village dump.
Abandoned children were often taken by childless couples or speculators that raised such children as slaves, profiting from their sale. Some of these children ended up as prostitutes. John Boswell (recently deceased) of Yale University identifies several admonitions made by early Christian Church Fathers against abandonment because at some future time fathers might use prostitutes that might have been their children! This was the sin of incest.
Abandonment of Children in Ancient Rome
Roman society held the family as the fundamental core that defined the community. Whether a newborn was part of that family depended solely on the father of the family or the paterfamilias. Any child born under his roof, slave or free, was either “raised” (referring to the paterfamilias holding up the child) or exposed. Exposed infants were left outside the house while malformed children were drowned.
Exposed children were often taken by other Romans. During the early years of the Republic, when farming characterized Roman society, childless farm parents “took” exposed children to help with the work. In no situation, however, did Roman law allow free born infants to be converted to slaves. According to Boswell, “the free born natal status was irrevocable.”
Infanticide involving exposed slave children was legal and common. The same can be said of selling exposed slave children, as slaves. Rigid rules, however, forbade Romans from selling non-slave children while exposed free born children brought up in other households could be reclaimed at any time by the paterfamilias provided the child’s upkeep was paid for.
Caring for the Abandoned Children Begun by the Early Christian Church
Exposed infants often included orphans and this posed a separate problem. One of the earliest tasks of the early Christian Church as seen in the Acts of the Apostles was the community care for “widows and orphans.” But Christians were not alone in this practice.
Historian Lionel Casson notes how the emperor Nerva set up special funds to care for a certain number of boys and girls. Casson also refers to individual or private charities in the empire that dispensed money for the care of exposed children that had no families.
All of this changed with the first Christian emperor, Constantine. In 329, Constantine issued an edict that eliminated all previous protections of free born infants whether slave or free. No longer was natal status irrevocable. For the first time, free born children could be converted to slave status.
Why Children were Abandoned in Early Centuries
Historians like Boswell note that Constantine’s edict may have been an extension of the reforms of Diocletian, pragmatic given the economic condition of the empire. Casson states that Constantine’s edict allowed children to be sold to “slave nurseries.”
Abandonment was a normal practice in the post-Roman world and throughout the Middle Ages. Children were abandoned in times of famine and given to God, i.e., monasteries and religious orders (oblation). The heightened sense of the profane enabled parents to disclaim demon children switched at birth (changelings).
Sources:
- John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: the Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (Pantheon Books, 1988)
- Lionel Casson, Everyday Life in Ancient Rome (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)
- Paul Veyne, “The Roman Empire,” A History of Private Life From Pagan Rome to Byzantium Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, Gen. Eds. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987)
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