AIA Lecture
I attended the lecture on dead Greek babies by Maria A. Liston. Now, despite sounding like an incredibly riveting way to spend an evening based on that description, it was actually pretty interesting.
The real title for the lecture was “Short Lives and Forgotten Deaths... Infant Skeletons from the Baby Well in the Athenian Agora.” It was very eye-opening for me because unless I didn’t ever consciously think about it - you don’t recognize that infanticide was fairly common back then until someone shows you. 50% of babies born alive (i.e. not stillborn or dead immediately after birth) didn’t reach puberty. The babies were obviously thrown into the well because of the masses of bones found about 13-20 meters down the well. Other artifacts such as 2nd century BCE pottery, bronze trash, a baby feeder bottle, and dog bones were found along with the infant bones. It’s theorized that the infants and these other artifacts were thrown into the well as sacrifices and not as super-intentional infanticide. The male-to-female ratio of infant bones discovered was actually very close to a clean 50/50 split, so there was no bias as to which sex was preferred for sacrificing. A full term for children in utero was about 43 weeks - some were found to have been born at about 26 weeks which is wayyyyyy premature; they were most likely D.O.A. So was it infanticide or was the well just a dumpster for these λίγο κουτσούβελα? Well (pun intended), some children were found to have had Battered Child Syndrome and, like the name suggests, it’s basically child abuse. That part suggests infanticide. Now, other things could’ve played a part in their deaths, too: the belief that breastmilk was bad for the children so they fed them other mixtures which in turn killed them, disease, and a plethora of other possibilities. Some babies were killed before amphidromia which was the 5th, 7th, or 10th day after birth ceremony.
So were the Greeks ruthless child murderers or makeshift morgue creators? We don’t know, and we may never know for sure, but as we learned in Classic Civ this semester, that’s okay! Don’t try this at home, kids.
