Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

408 14. the family in the late roman world
duced to the harsher and more marginal sectors of slave exploitation; some
were subsequently resold. The laws on these issues provide valuable evidence
clarifying the general orientations of legislation and moral teaching
on the family.
Evidence from the Severan period suggests that infant exposure had
already, for quite some time, been provoking censure and unease in the pagan
community (or at least among the classes that voiced their opinions in our
documents). 61 But it was only with the Christian emperors that any attempt
was made to discourage and, subsequently, stamp out the phenomenon.
Alongside certain flimsy attempts at prevention in situations of emergency
(in the form of aid to needy families), there were also some more realistic
measures, which tried to limit the scourge of exposure by authorizing the
cession of children while at the same time not excluding the possibility of
recovery. This was an option already provided for in traditional Roman law,
but few can have availed themselves of it. It was not so much a practical
proposition as a valuable psychological opening that alleviated the trauma of
separation. At the same time, it acted as a moral palliative in what was clearly
the thorniest aspect of the law on exposure: the fact that, in contrast with
one of the basic principles of Roman law, an individual of free birth could
be reduced to slavery by the wishes of another person.
The flexibility of this approach, however, was soon superseded by the
opposite tendency, and the laws not only withheld the possibility of recovery
but even made infant exposure punishable by death if the parents were
free citizens. The results of these measures were, we suspect, negligible. A
wide parallel documentation attests how deeply rooted and widespread the
phenomenon was, for it thrived well into the Middle Ages in the west and
into the Byzantine period in the east, even surviving in the recent history
of industrial urbanism. 62
The failure of strict legislation is indirectly confirmed by a subsequent
law passed by Justinian: it guaranteed all exposed children the condition of
freedom and denied those who received them the power to enslave them
or to reduce them to any other form of dependence, or even to place them
in a relationship of patronage. Justinian explained that the measure
intended to make a clear moral distinction between the desire for illicit
profit and a mere act of compassion. At the same time, those abandoning
a child were to be denied the right to recover him with the object of enslaving
him. 63 If actually enforced, this law would surely have provoked a considerable
increase in the death rate of the exposed. But it is fruitless to pose
problems of this kind, or even to try to relate the individual laws to specific
demographic or economic situations. 64 In such cases the legislation was
61 Harris (1994). 62 Boswell (1989). 63 CJ viii.51.3 (529); see also Nov. 153 (541).
64 For example, Bianchi Fossati Vanzetti (1983) 223.
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