Abandonment and Adoption

Regarding abandonment and adoption in the Byzantine Em-formulate the key issues with two simple questions Did the people of East Rome abandon as many babies as their pre-Christian ancestors had And, second, were devout Christians willing to adopt the exposed infants they happened to find Answering these two questions would provide valuable information not only about the society of the Byzantine Empire but also about the efficacy of Christianity in reshaping deep-rooted customs and instilling respect for human life in its most helpless form. In sum, answering these two questions would help us gage how much success the Byzantine Church and Byzantine state achieved in their effort to create the New Jerusalem. 

Unfortunately, sufficient evidence has not survived to enable modern historians of Byzantium to answer either of these questions precisely. Historians of the ancient world have to date failed to establish exactly how often infant abandonment occurred in pre-Christian Greco-Roman society, or what happened to most of these babies. Scholars have been debating for decades how often and for what reasons Greeks and Romans exposed their infant children. Was it a widespread phenomenon practiced by all classes to limit family size Was it only a desperate strategy of the poor to avoid starvation Or was it a method to restrict the number of females a family had to support Historians have so far failed to answer any of these questions definitively, although they 

At some time in the one hundred years before the reign of Constantine (306-337), a Greek apparently from the Isle of Lesbos wrote a popular prose novel entitled Daphnis and Chloe. The plot of this pastoral romance revolved around abandonment and adoption. 

Two years later, their neighbor, the shepherd Dryas, followed one of his female sheep into a nearby cave, which served as a shrine to the Nymphs. Here Dryas found the sheep nursing a newborn girl, also abandoned with valuable tokens. After some initial hesitation, Dryas also took the baby home. He and his wife adopted her and gave her the name Chloe. When she reached sufficient age, she took over Dryas s shepherding duties.  

How much of Daphnis and Chloe was literary invention and how much reflected reality Some ancient historians have rejected as evidence of widespread abandonment both this pastoral romance and the plots of several earlier Greek and Roman new comedies but for a literary work such as Daphnis and Chloe to have had any impact, at the least readers would have had to accept the plausibility of infant exposiue for the reasons stated by both fathers. That the babies were nursed by animals, were soon found by humans, were subsequently adopted by caring peasant families, and eventually were reunited with their true parents of high status required divine intervention, but the initial abandonment represented a harsh fact of contemporary reahty. 

---