Ancient Rome and Infanticide

This terracotta statue from Ancient Rome of a breastfeeding mother with four swaddled infants gets at the challenges of raising babies when resources were scarce and infant mortality high. Scholars have been debating the extent to which ordinary people practiced infanticide, but it was undertaken without criminal prosecution in the Ancient Roman world. After all, the foundational myth of Rome involves the abandonment of the twins Romulus and Remus, who were found and raised by a she-wolf. One line of questioning involves whether female infants were more likely than males to be set out to the elements to die, or be “exposed.” Isocrates the Greek wrote in the third century BCE: “Everyone, even if he is poor, rears a son/ But exposes a daughter, even if he is rich. . . ” By the time Rome had conquered much of the Mediterranean basin in the first century, Dionysius of Halicarnassus records a “Law of Romulus” which says Roman citizens must rear all their male children but only need keep the first-born daughter — And we do have a record of a Roman soldier writing to his wife to tell her that she should keep her baby if it is a boy, but otherwise get rid of it. Perhaps contradicting this idea that female infants were more disposable is an archaeological find from about 1,800 years ago in Roman Britain at a cite called Yewden Villa. There, through the relatively recent technique of ancient DNA analysis, scientists were able to discover a number of infants all of the same age, implying (so argue the authors of the study) infanticide. Although the sampling is miniscule, the gender ratio did not skew towards more female infanticide – of the 33 infants, only 12 DNA samples took, and of those seven were female and five male. Despite the small numbers, we can recognize that our textual evidence is even more paltry. The debate continues, but I find it fascinating that new scientific techniques are brining more and more elements of the social history of ancient people to life.