Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

negations of the family 409
clearly very low in practical impact and very high in ideological content.
From the emotional point of view, exposure was a central issue round
which far too many sins and far too much wretchedness gravitated. It
turned parents into putative infanticides (often enough the infant’s fate was
death). It laid bare the macabre power of uncontrolled sexuality, of both
free citizens and slaves, within and outside marriage. It disclosed the avidity
of those who exploited the theoretically charitable act of taking in a child
as a means of gaining ownership over a human being. Finally, it projected
on to the whole of society the shame and contamination of incestuous
contact, which could occur anywhere: in brothels as in lawful marriages, in
the beds of concubines and adulterers alike. All things considered, the
actual survival and subsequent fate of the exposed children were just one
aspect of the problem, perhaps not even the most important.
In the abstract, exposure was a serious crime with associations closely
resembling those of infanticide. But in the vast majority of cases the
offence had compelling material causes that constituted objective conditioning.
Raising these issues questioned the whole problem of responsibility:
is it better to allow a child to die of hunger or to expose him in the
hope that others might take him in? To differentiate the law by introducing
a typology of motivations – i.e. distinguishing abandonment caused
by indigence from that caused by pettier or less constrictive reasons –
would have had the dual effect of undermining the moral principle that
the law aimed to uphold and of disrupting the very foundations of the
juridical system. Once exposure had entered the province of the law, the
only option was to repress it without distinction. The material constrictions,
however, doomed the laws to failure; and failure, in turn, provoked
even stricter prohibitions and severer punishments. In this way, the law
ended up by carrying out, almost exclusively, the functions of a moral
imperative.
The laws on exposure can be considered together with those on the sale
of infants and the locatio of children of working age. The latter was strictly
speaking locatio operarum, though the laws, in view of the overall context of
relationships of dependence, sometimes represented it and classified it as
a sale. 65 The legislation thus responded to a need constantly referred to in
late antique legislation: that of preserving the family nucleus. In other
words, in situations of long-term economic difficulty the break-up of the
family could be prevented by the temporary cession of a child. The relinquished
child, who would then be housed in the domus of a proprietor
sufficiently rich to be able to rent labour, would surely be no worse off than
before. The possibility of a subsequent return to the nuclear family could
also have a dissuasive effect on exposure.
65 Humbert (1983).
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