Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

The People 93
his chances of survival still further, his father took the added precaution
of nailing his ankles together, from which in later time he
received the name Oedipus or “Swollen Foot.”
In Sparta, the abandonment of handicapped and sickly infants
was required by law. Plutarch informs us that the father of a newborn
child had to present his offspring for inspection before the
council of Spartan elders. If it was strong and lusty, the council
ordered him to raise it, but if it was not, the father was ordered to
expose it at the foot of Mount Taygetos “in the belief that the life
which nature had not provided with health and strength was of no
use either to itself or to the state” (Life of Lykourgos 16.1–2).
Girls were almost certainly abandoned more frequently than
boys, partly because their usefulness in the home was more limited
than that of boys and partly because they had to be provided with
a substantial dowry to attract a suitable husband and therefore represented
a drain on the family’s finances. For this reason, families
with more than two daughters were probably somewhat rare. In a
lost drama, Poseidippos, a comic writer of the third century b.c.e. ,
puts the following observation into the mouth of one of his characters:
“If you have a son you bring him up, even if you’re poor, but
if you have a daughter, you abandon her, even if you’re rich.” The
same preference for a son is poignantly revealed in a letter written
on a papyrus from Hellenistic Egypt. The writer, a soldier who
was billeted in Alexandria, informs his pregnant wife that if she
gives birth to a boy she should raise him, but if to a girl she should
expose her. Evidently the mother’s feelings were regarded as irrelevant.
The lower value placed on girls is also strikingly illustrated
by Herodotos’s comment about the Spartan king Kleomenes, who,
he says, “died childless, leaving only one daughter, Gorgo, behind”
(5.48). Other groups that were at risk of being exposed included the
deformed and those who were the product of rape or incest.
Some estimates put the level of female exposure in Athens as
high as 10 percent. However, almost everything that we know
about the practice derives from literary sources. It is certain, too,
that some exposed infants would have survived, as indicated in the
contract with the wet nurse Didyma, quoted above. Infertility was
a serious problem in the Greek world, and many childless couples
would have been only too happy to act as the foster parents of an
unwanted child. This was the experience of the infant Oedipus,
who, having aroused the pity of the servant entrusted with the task
of exposing him, grew up believing that he was the offspring of the
king and queen of Corinth, his adoptive parents. Evidently the fact