With this was connected the unnatural and monstrous custom of exposing poor, sickly, and deformed children to a cruel death, or in many cases to a life of slavery and infamy-a custom expressly approved, for the public interest, even by a Plato, an Aristotle, and a Seneca! "Monstrous offspring," says the great Stoic philosopher, "we destroy; children too, if born feeble and ill-formed, we drown. It is not wrath, but reason, thus to separate the useless from the healthy." "The exposition of children"--to quote once more from Gibbon--"was the prevailing and stubborn vice of antiquity: it was sometimes prescribed, often permitted, almost always practised with impunity by the nations who never entertained the Roman ideas of paternal power; and the dramatic poets, who appeal to the human heart, represent with indifference a popular custom which was palliated by the motives of economy and compassion .... The Roman Empire was stained with the blood of infants, till such murders were included, by Valentinian and his colleagues, in the letter and spirit of the Cornelian law. The lessons of jurisprudence and Christianity had been insufficient to eradicate this inhuman practice, till their gentle influence was fortified by the terrors of capital punishment." [639] 39
[632] Koinonia ton eleutheron.
[633] Their name hetairai was an Attic euphonism for pornai. In the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth more than a thousand hetaerae were employed as hierodulae and were the ruin of foreigners (Strabo, VIII. 6, 20). Korinthia kore was a synonym for hetaera, and expressive of the acme of voluptuousness. A full account of these hetaerae and of the whole domestic life of the ancient Greeks may be found in Becker's Charicles, translated by Metcalf, third ed. London, 1866. Becker says (p. 242), that in the period of the greatest refinement of classical Greece, "sensuality, if not the mother, was at all events the nurse of the Greek perception of the beautiful." Plato himself, even in his ideal state, despaired of restricting his citizens to the lawful intercourse of marriage.
[634] Aspasia bewitched Pericles by her beauty and genius; and Socrates acknowledged his deep obligation to the instructions of a courtesan named Diotima.
[635] Lecky (II. 311) derives this unnatural vice of Greece from the influence of the public games, which accustomed men to the contemplation of absolute nudity, and awoke unnatural passions. See the thirteenth book of Athenaeus, Grote on the Symposium of Plato, and the full account in Döllinger's Heidenthum und Judenthum, 1857, p. 684 sqq. He says: "Bei den Griechen tritt das Laster der Paederastie mit allen symptomen einer grossen nationalen Krankheit, gleichsam eines ethischen Miasma auf; es zeigt. sich als ein Gefühl, das stärker and heftiger wirkte, als die Weiberliebe bei andern Völkern, massloser, leidenschaftlicher in seinem Ausbrüchen war ... In der ganzen Literatur der vorchristlichen Periode ist kaum ein Schriftsteller zu finden, der sich entschieden dagegen erklärt hätte. Vielmehr war die ganze Gesellschaft davon angesteckt, und man athmete das Miama, so zu sagen, mit der Luft ein." Even Socrates and Plato gave this morbid vice the sanction of their great authority, if not in practice, at least in theory. Comp. Xenophon's Mem. VIII. 2, Plato's Charmides, and his descriptions of Eros, and Döllinger, l.c. p. 686 sq. Zeno, the founder of the austere sect of Stoics, was praised for the moderation with which he practiced this vice.
[636] Chapter XLIV., where he discusses at length the Roman code of laws.
[637] Lecky, II. 321.
[638] Gibbon (ch. XLIV.) confirms the statement by several examples, to which more might be added. Maecenas, "qui uxores millies duxit" (Seneca, Ep. 114) was as notorious for his levity in forming and dissolving the nuptial tie, as famous for his patronage of literature and art. Martial (Epigr. VI. 7), though in evident poetical exaggeration, speaks of ten husbands in one month. Juvenal (Satir. VI. 229) exposes a matron, who in five years submitted to the embraces of eight husbands. Jerome (Ad Gerontiam) "saw at Rome a triumphant husband bury his twenty-first wife, who had interred twenty-two of his less sturdy predecessors." These are extreme cases, and hardly furnish a sufficient basis for a general judgment of the state of society in Rome, much less in the provinces. We should not forget the noble and faithful Roman women even in the days of imperial corruption, as Mallonia, who preferred suicide to the embraces of Tiberius; Helvia, the mother of Seneca, and Paulina his wife, who opened her vein to accompany him to the grave; the elder Arria who, when her husband Paetus was condemned to death under Claudius (42), and hesitated to commit suicide, plunged the dagger in her breast, and, drawing it out, said to him with her dying breath: "My Paetus, it does not pain" (Paete, non dolet); and her worthy daughter, Caecinia Arria, the wife of Thrasea, who was condemned to death (66), and her granddaughter Fannia, who accompanied her husband Helvidius Priscus twice into banishment, and suffered a third for his sake after his execution (93). See Pliny, Epist. III.16; Tacitus, Ann. XVI. 30-34; Friedlaender, I. 459 sqq. . Nor should we overlook the monumental evidences of conjugal devotion and happiness in numerous Roman epitaphs. See Friedlaender, I. 463. Yet sexual immorality reached perhaps its lowest depths in imperial Rome, far lower than in the worst periods of the dark ages, or in England under Charles II., or in France under Louis XIV. and XV. And it is also certain, as Lecky says (II. 326), "that frightful excesses of unnatural passion, of which the most corrupt of modern courts present no parallel, were perpetrated with but little concealment on the Palatine." Prenuptial unchastity of men was all but universal among the Romans, according to Cicero's testimony. Even Epictetus, the severest among the Stoic moralists, enjoins only moderation, not entire abstinence, from this form of vice. Lampridius relates of Alexander Severus, who otherwise legislated against vice, that he provided his unmarried provincial governors with a concubine as a part of their outfit, because "they could not exist without one" (quod sine concubinis esse non possent)."
[639] Ch. XLIV. See a good chapter on the exposure of children in Brace, Gesta Christi, p. 72-83.