THE RACE PROBLEM OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 373 

A curious circumstance shows how common childlessness was 
among the upper classes. This was the competition for inheritances, 
which the moralists satirized and thundered against in vain. It was 
not only a literary commonplace but a very real evil. The philo- 
sopher Seneca writes to a mother who had lost her only son that 
in these times childlessness contributes to the importance of a person 
rather than deprives him of it. Even the legislation was put in 
action against the annoyance °. 
Much more important are the legal means used to raise the 
birth-rate. The first emperor, Augustus, in spite of an embittered 
resistance, enacted the famous laws which enforced every Roman of 
noble birth between 25 and 60 years to be married, or at least 
engaged‘. The irony of fate willed that both the consuls who 
“gave the law their names were unmarried. Parents of three and more 
children had valuable prerogatives, especially in regard to the higher 
offices in the state. Unmarried persons were deprived of the privi- 
lege of visiting the circus and the theatres and could not receive 
legacies, childless legatees were deprived of half their inheritance. 
These means were more drastic than any that have been imagined in 
our times, but they were of no avail. 
The, decline of the birth-rate begins in the upper classes, and 
Ausustus had perhaps thought that if it could be checked there the 
example would influence the lower classes. But he also tried to 
support poor families with a flourishing crowd of children. He used 
to present them with 1,000 sesterces for every child. An inscription 
of the small town of Atina in Latium recounts that a certain Basıra 
has given to the town a fund of 400,000 sesterces in order that the 
children of the inhabitants may receive corn for their food and at 
the age of puberty a sum of 1,000 sesterces each to set them up in 
life. This is the first example of the means by which the emperors 
later on tried to raise the birth-rate of the people in Italy. In reality 
it is liberating the parents from the cost of feeding the children and 
transferring this to public funds. The emperors Nerva and TRAJAN 
in particular carried out this scheme on a large scale, and patriotic 
private persons helped them with great gifts. Prixy the younger, for 
example, gave half a million sesterces to his native town of Comum 
for this purpose. The later emperors of the second century vigorously 
carried out the work and created a staff of supervising officers *. It 
must be acknowledged that those in authority recognized the evil and 
did their utmost to check it. In proportion to the finances of the 
