Demography and Dowries: Perspectives on Female Infanticide in Classical Greece

Abstract

IN TWO RECENT PUBLICATIONS, Sarah Pomeroy, who has justly won praise for her pioneering work on women in antiquity, has reiterated her views that selective female infanticide was practiced in Greece and that the need to provide a dowry was an important cause.l These views were first expressed in her groundbreaking Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves and have been repeated in several subsequent publications.2 Of the variety of arguments that she has advanced in support of selective female infanticide, most have been challenged, but the burden of providing a dowry is one major reason often given and never questioned.3 The purpose of this essay is to review some demographic realities in ancient Greece that militate against infanticide in general and daughters in particular and to examine the dowry in an effort to uncover any evidence that might suggest that it was a factor in decisions to expose daughters. Greek families tended to be small. But family size was not determined by parental choice; it was the result of high rates of infant and child mortality. Until the discovery of the germ theory of disease at the end of the nineteenth century and the advent of modern medicine, child mortality rates everywhere were extremely high.4 In early modern Europe, for example, where good records of births and deaths were kept, it generally took two live births to produce one adult; in other words, every other child died.5 There is no reason to believe that the mortality rate was any different in ancient Greece. Ancient authors allude to the high mortality rate of children and young people. Demosthenes (57.28), for example, provides a glimpse of this reality when Euxitheos states that his father had four cacti6; (usually translated as sons, but who could have been daughters), born of the same mother as himself, who died and were buried in the ancestral tomb. According to Solon, Tellos was the happiest man in the world because he had children who were KacXoi zT Kayacoi and because he saw them all produce offspring who survived ao4 cE'6 arcaat TeKva Ky8cvilLPeva Kcai T7avTa vrxpaPCicvavTa (Hdt. 1.30.4; cf. Plut. Sol.

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