Demography and the Exposure of Girls at Athens

Abstract

IT IS NOW GENERALLY AGREED THAT Athenians of the classical period did not raise all their children.' Exposure-the nearest equivalent of the Greek words2_must often, perhaps even frequently, have been the fate of deformed children or the children of unwed mothers. But two passages in Plato's Theaetetus (149a-151c, 160e-161a), where Socrates compares an idea to a newborn baby and proposes to inspect it to decide whether it should be rejected, show that healthy children ostensibly born within marriage could be exposed as well. It is less clear that girls were regularly exposed, or exposed more often than boys. The subject is important for two reasons. First, it has a place in the debate on the position of women at Athens. We need not believe that fathers (or mothers) who exposed newborn daughters were motivated by actual hostility, conscious or even unconscious, towards them. But a tendency to expose daughters more readily than sons implies that it was more important to raise boys than girls, and that men were valued more highly than women. To quote a standard textbook of demography: Wherever infanticide is practised, female infanticide is the rule ... supplemented by the elimination of defective and unhealthy offspring and those undesirable by reason of some magical (e.g., multiple births) or social (e.g., illegitimacy) factor. Infanticide is thus associated with the higher valuation of males.' Secondly, it raises broad methodological issues. Our literary evidence is inconclusive. According to a passage in the third-century comic poet Poseidippus, Everyone raises a son even if he is poor, but exposes (EKTi.r9lL) a daughter even if he is rich (11E. = Stob. Flor. 77.7). But there are indications in other authors that girl babies were as welcome as boys.4

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