6 Conception, Birth and Infancy in 



rather small upper class in the community, and have used their 

 talent for social and ethical analysis and for satirical description 

 and censure with but slight regard for the fairness and breadth 

 of view that modern principles of historical criticism require. The 

 specialist may point out that the dissolute conditions in Roman 

 society which the poet Ovid has vividly depicted — himself a rec- 

 ognized master in the arts of seduction and, we suspect, an active 

 and successful practitioner in that field — do not hold true for 

 earlier ages, nor even for all ranks of society in his own day. A 

 scholar may furthermore emphasize the fact that Roman satirists 

 and moralists like Horace, Persius, Juvenal, Martial, and Seneca, 

 often say in a piquant fashion and with an exaggeration which 

 may be born of indignation but is too often largely a product of 

 rhetoric, things which we must weigh with a scrupulous care. 

 But the influence of the classical scholar and teacher cannot reach 

 very far in an age which can scarcely keep up with its own mod- 

 ernity. The findings of dispassionate investigators of Roman 

 family life have little effect upon those adepts in popular sen- 

 sationalism, whether novelists, painters, play-wrights, or pulpi- 

 teers, who have been responsible for the ideas which the ordinary 

 layman cherishes concerning Roman character and conduct. It 

 is spectacular and sometimes salacious movies founded upon 

 Quo Vadis, The Last Days of Pompeii and the like that provide 

 the mental pictures of our contemporaries, and the less knowledge 

 any informed spectator takes to them the less will be his irritation 

 at their falsities both in spirit and in fact. 



It is only too apparent that in all that concerns the sexual and 

 family life of antiquity our purveyors of excitement have catered 

 to the popular love of intrigue, scandal, and lubricity. In what 

 I shall have to say about conception, pregnancy, birth, and baby- 

 hood among the Romans in correlation with information from 

 modern Italian life, which is often curiously parallel, I am at- 

 tempting to set forth thoughts and procedures of people living at 

 two widely separate periods in Italian history which I think may 

 interest the general reader as well as the student. If some of the 

 facts, especially some in the field of folkmedicine with which this 

 work will have much to do, seem incomprehensibly strange or even 

 sensational, they will owe nothing of their quality to the writer's 

 fancy or diction. I write soberly and must often present a rather 



