Ancient Rome and Modern Italy 7 



depressing picture of humanity in even this century of Christian 

 culture. Unequal treatment of topics will, of course, be inevitable 

 because of disparities in the amount of data available for drawing 

 our comparisons. 



While research reveals an astonishing amount of parallelism 

 between superstitious ideas and practices of the Romans and those 

 found among Italians of recent times, we must always bear in mind 

 that the latter are treasured for the most part by the less intelligent 

 and least educated members of any community. Moreover, it is 

 never safe to generalize from the instances that I have found and 

 to conclude that the same superstition is current in all parts of 

 the country, because it is reported from several widely separated 

 regions. We simply lack the data, and until there are many 

 more folklorists at work in Italy than there have yet been or are 

 at all likely to be, we cannot have even a near approach to a 

 comprehensive account. What chiefly interests us is to find any 

 survivals at all of thoroughly pagan and irrational beliefs and 

 practices after the lapse of so many centuries and in an age that 

 has enjoyed the advantages of scientific scholarship and of the 

 wide dissemination of its teaching. Let us begin with the baby's 

 beginning, or to speak more accurately, with efforts to prevent his 

 coming into being at all. 



Although, for one reason or another, information about con- 

 traceptives and abortives excited interest among the Romans, as 

 appears from the attention that Pliny the Elder gives them in his 

 Historia Naturalis as well as from a few references in other au- 

 thors, 1 yet we cannot stress too strongly the fact that Romans 

 married primarily in order to produce children who should per- 

 petuate the family and perform the religious rites which were 

 thought to be essential for the happiness of both the living and the 

 dead, and who should fulfil civic and military duties in default 

 of which the nation could not endure. Laws penalized even with 

 exile those who committed abortion. 2 Of course, for reasons that 

 cannot be set forth here, there was plenty of licentious living at 

 Rome, and increasingly so as the Republican period drew to a 

 close, but during many centuries the family occupied a position 

 of respect, and its purity enjoyed a rating of importance that 

 Greek and much Oriental life of the time does not match. We 

 think of this when we note how in Roman Catholic Italy the 



