Post-natal Rituals: Viability and Paternal Potestas
Birth happened when the embryo, as the active agent, began to require a different form of nourishment and made its way out, thereby causing the birth pangs the mother suffered.[306] Birth took place in the home and was a “women’s thing” - with a midwife in charge and several other women, relatives and neighbours, present.
The father was not present, but it remains an open question whether male doctors attended even if this hardly was standard procedure.[307] In relation to Roman practices, Beryl Rawson mentions that in situations where there might be legal dispute about the status of the child, the law stipulated who should be present to make sure that there could be no mistake and no attempt at cheating.[308]A baby, who was born breathing and capable of survival, still had to have life conferred by the father or, in the Roman context, the pater familias. He may have been absent at the birth itself, but being born into life was an extended process where the paternal power reasserted itself. Only the father had the right to determine whether the newborn was to be counted as his and accepted into his family and household, the infrastructure of survival. He might choose not to accept a child if he suspected that the baby was not begotten by him; he might have another reason or no reason at all. If this happened the newborn baby was exposed. Exposure was not considered to be infanticide. It was a late abortion with the added advantage that the infant could first be viewed. However, the relative number of children who were exposed is much discussed, and Beryl Rawson claims that that according to Roman law, a child born in wedlock was considered legitimate and a husband had to initiate specific procedures to contest paternity.[309]
Most exposed children seem to have been clothed to help them survive, and there seem to have been particular places for foundlings.
People expected that abandoned infants would be picked up and enslaved in various trades. Exposure thus served to supply various slave trades, including brothels, with labour, and one thinks that survival was most likely where and when the demand for slaves was high. This caused legal writers to be concerned about the status confusion of free-born children exposed by parents and reared as slaves or alumni, since exposure did not terminate patria potestas; it rendered it quiescent. Roman fathers could therefore reclaim children at a later stage without compensation to those who had fostered them.[310]As soon as the father had accepted an infant into the protection of the family and it had been given a name, it was considered to be a horrific act to kill or abandon it.[311] The acceptance into the father’s house happened stepwise. In both Greece and Rome is it extremely difficult, probably impossible to determine with any certainty the distinctiveness of the different occasions as well as the precise procedures of each event.[312] The confusion concerns when the rite took place, how and by whom it was performed, and how it related to the naming of the child. Since the brevity of this contribution does not allow me to walk through this maze, I will only mention that in ancient Greece there was a ceremony or rite called amphidromia whereby the infant was admitted to the domestic cult of the hearth. This happened shortly after birth when the newborn baby was carried in a run round the hearth of the house. Membership in the household or family preceded the individual identification by a specific name, which followed some time later on the seventh or tenth day. Apparently, the name giving was a formal and public event, but the actual role of the father at the ceremonies is not clear. However, if he did not himself take an active part such as performing the amphidromia it still depended on his consent and authority.
The Romans practiced a similar stepwise ritual process that, even if it was different in many regards, seems to have served much of the same purposes.
Apart from a prayer to the helping goddesses, there were strictly speaking no formal ritual practices at the delivery itself, whereas devices of magic protections against evil powers probably were abundant. The midwife would receive the baby into her hands and lay it on the ground.[313] Once the baby had been safely delivered, the midwife made a sign to indicate the sex of the child, and the birth was announced to the father and his pater familias. While the newborn was still attached to the mother the midwife would examine the child - accompanied by good or bad omens. If the midwife considered the newborn not fit to rear, it was deemed to be stillborn. If she affirmed viability, the father had still to lift the baby ceremonially from the ground as a sign of recognition (infantem tollere). Legal and literary sources refer to the tollere liberos as an act of the pater familias. Even if it came to have an extended meaning of “raising children,” the act of lifting or taking up seems to be at its root.[314] If the father or his pater familias rejected the baby, it was not lifted but exposed and dead to the family. The paterfamilias had the ius vitae necisque, and the decision as to whether a child should be raised or exposed may have been its primary site of practice.A Roman citizen did not have a child, he took a child. A consequence of this was that the family name mattered more than blood relationship. Frequent adoptions attest to this, and the Roman practice of adoption even of adults is therefore not surprising. It may well be right that the act of lift- ing/raising up the child in Rome did not necessarily indicated an avowal of paternity but, rather, represented willingness to rear and support the child, defining paternity less in biological and more in legal terms.
If the father decided that the child be lifted and raised, mother and child were both bathed. The next ritual step was dies lustricus or nominalia, a festive ceremony of purification and name-giving that took place sometime during the first week after birth, most often on the eighth day.
On this occasion the infant assumed the bulla, a protective pendant amulet.[315] [316] The name of a child was extremely significant as it conferred identity, and in legal terms the infant existed only when it had been given a name. In both Greece and Rome names indicated family membership and children were identified by an individual name and a patronymic. Also girls were given names from those in the patriline, often from a generation back. It is more difficult to identify women’s names, and Sarah Pomeroy indicates that “it is precisely the lack of explicit identity in her natal family that permits a bride to leave it and join another.”[317] A daughter was a potential deserter; a bride remained a stranger.Within the limits of this article, I have chosen not to discuss pre- rabbinic Jewish practices beyond mentioning that Carol Exum discusses how circumcision, virility, and reproduction correlate in view of patriarchy’s fear of women’s reproductive power, its need to suppress it, and its equally strong desire to appropriate it. She understands circumcision as a ritual for separating the male child from the impurity of the mother. In referring to Howard Eilberg Schwartz, she claims that circumcision becomes “a rite that marks the passage from the impurity of being born by a woman to the purity of life in a community of men.” [318] Circumcision and sacrifice have overlapping functions in that they create and demonstrate patrilineal kinship ties.
C.