Slavery and infanticide among prostitutes in the Roman Empire circa 150AD

[penitentmoomin]

I've had an idea for a story that I almost wish I hadn't! The germ of the story was the discoveries of Roman-era mass graves of babies in Ashkelon, Israel, and in Hambleden, England, and other places.

The situation of these graves near bathouses and the evidence that the babies were actively killed rather than exposed, and were, unusually for

Comments

[sollersuk]

You need to check out John Boswell, particularly "The Kindness of Strangers" (about child abandonment) as his books should answer all your questions - the answers are too complex for me to easily go into them here.

[orange_fell]

"Firm conclusions" are not something we expect a lot of in the field of ancient history, especially when it comes down to individual motivations for behavior. If the scholars researching these bones were going around saying, "This site was DEFINITELY a brothel and these infants were killed for XYZ reasons," they would need to have serious evidence to back that up, so instead they say things like "Why were they doing this at this site? It doesn't make sense. This site was exceptionally wealthy - they could have kept babies - so it wasn't because of the poverty. There were no natural illnesses that would affect just the little ones, the newborns. There is no logical reason we can think of, except maybe it was a brothel." (Jill Eyers, hereI'm going to look for any recent scholarly work I can find on this (it's not my main area), but overall, especially addressing Question 1, I think you have a lot of leeway on your character's potential behavior. Keep in mind that when the Daily Mail says things like the prostitutes were "forced" to

[sollersuk]

I'll be looking too, though I suspect it'll be in my notes from a course in Human Skeletal Remains in Archaeology. I seem to recall finds of fairish quantities of babies' remains from rural sites because raising a child was not acost effective use of an agricultural slave's time. Urban households were a different matter, and a slave born and brought up in a household was thought more highly of than one who had been bought.

[marycatelli]

The odd thing about that theory is that exposed children were frequently taken up exactly to be raised as prostitutes. It was a routine Christian retort to pagan churches of sexual immorality that YOU pagans expose your children and then frequently brothels.

(It was also a routine Christian retort to charges of child sacrifice that it was not they who killed their own children by exposing them, which reflects that they had no actual figures.)

[sollersuk]

It was worse than that: what set John Boswell off was learning that Christians were told not to go to brothels because of the risk of accidental incest with a sister or daughter abandoned by their family.

Actual killing, as well as abandonment, continued: fishermen in the Tiber in the Middle Ages complained to the Pope that the large number of dead babies in the river were breaking their nets.

[penitentmoomin]

Thank you to everyone who responded. I shall certainly read "The Kindness of Strangers" - though I doubt it will be an easy read.

If anyone does have any further thoughts, or happens to see a relevant article in a journal or online, please remember this post!