10 Conception, Birth and Infancy in 



couple, we shall ignore the topic of philtres and love charms in 

 this discussion. 



The actual fecundity of married women in Italy in our time is 

 sure to impress a tourist if he happens to come from a land and 

 from a social class in which the family stock commonly produces 

 but a single flower. In Italy one may see so many children 

 gathered around still youngish parents that one wonders whether 

 they may not have arrived not as singlets but in veritable clusters. 

 To speak in the terminology of the old Romans, we seem to be 

 viewing not a mere familia but an entire gens. Pitifully often the 

 poor of the community appear to possess little else but a horde 

 of children. It is probable that in ancient Rome babies came to 

 the young mother in quick succession, and that in the ignorance 

 of hygiene which characterized the age, infant mortality reached 

 a high rate even in normal times when neither famine nor pesti- 

 lence was afflicting the city. Insanitary conditions fostered any 

 endemic disease, and malnutrition lowered the resistance of the 

 young. We can assume, I believe, that ignorance of a proper diet, 

 superstitious practices and medical quackery destined much of the 

 annual increase in Roman families to a premature end. 



While the diffusion of scientific knowledge in Italy has reduced 

 in recent years the chance of finding the beliefs and practices of 

 Roman times surviving there in the fields of procreation, ob- 

 stetrics, and pediatrics, there are yet some legacies discoverable. 

 For example, a classicist will learn with interest that a test of 

 conception to which Catullus refers in a well-known passage of 

 one of his poems is still employed. On the morning after the 

 wedding the interested inquisitor encircles the woman's neck with 

 a cord to see whether its measurement has increased since the day 

 before: a greater circumference is a sign that she has conceived. 20 

 It is curious that one of the ancient tests of virginity, the burning 

 of jet, gargates, also served to determine whether a slave on sale 

 was subject to epilepsy and so no bargain, and whether a person 

 who had fallen to the ground was in an epileptic fit or was merely 

 the victim of somebody's magic spell. In the thirteenth cen- 

 tury the test to ascertain the condition of a woman was not the 

 fumigation, but a drink of water in which the jet was immersed. 

 It acted as an immediate diuretic, we are told, if she were a maiden. 

 We suspect, however, that she had to be a believer in the criterion 



