Benjamin Porteous (Harvard University)
(Content Warning: This paper contains detailed discussion of infanticide and infant death)
In the popular imaginary, no two historical civilizations are associated with the disposal of unwanted infants more vividly than Graeco-Roman antiquity and Late-Imperial China (1368-1911). Trivia websites delight in discussing Sparta’s brutal standards for infant “fitness,” while the flood of literature about China written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has made bound feet, the queue, and female infanticide defining characteristics of the era in the mind of many Westerners. As regards both Graeco-Roman antiquity and China, a change in attitudes towards infanticide and the abandonment of children has been presented as closely tied to the rise/introduction of Christianity (Bakke 2005; Grubbs 2014, 99; on China, King 2014, 77-178). While recent Western scholarship has substantially complicated our picture of ancient demographics and early childhood, and demonstrated the love and care Graeco-Roman parents had for their children (Sneed 2021; Carroll 2018), sources attesting to a moral discourse condemning the killing or exposure of infants are remarkably few: with several possible exceptions, all writing from Western Antiquity explicitly condemning infanticide is of Christian or Jewish origin (Boswell 1988, 53-94). In the case of China, however, scholarship has shown exactly the opposite. China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had a flourishing indigenous moral discourse that operated completely independently of Christian influence, dedicated to condemning infanticide and exploring its social and ethical resonances (King 2014).
Adopting an intellectual and cultural historical perspective, I ask which factors might lie behind China’s development of a flourishing moral discourse completely independent of Christianity, while Greece and Rome did not. I advance my inquiry through close comparative reading of moral and polemical texts from imperial Rome and early-modern China. Because of the diffuseness of writing on infanticide from Western Antiquity, I examine a group of Latin and Greek texts representing a diversity of intellectual traditions, all well-known to scholars of Graeco-Roman infanticide/abandonment: Seneca the Elder’s Controversiae 10.4, Philo’s Special Laws III.20, Seneca the Younger’s De Ira I.15.2, and Tertullian’s Apology IX. 1-8. In counterpoint to these I place a Chinese tract, likely of eighteenth-century origin, attested in a printing from 1800 (Sun 1800). Entitled Jie ninü shuo 戒溺女說 (An Essay Urging an End to the Custom of Drowning Baby Girls), it addresses the question of female infanticide—a significant problem in a society with strong patrilocal marriage structures--but also infanticide more broadly. I interrogate the Jie ninü shuo’s multi-layered moral logic. At the same time as it threatens karmic retribution from the supernatural world, it invites the reader to ponder the infants’ experience in a lengthy and gruesome passage describing the process of drowning and, most unsettlingly, the social repercussions of the killer’s actions. Infanticide is part of a social and moral web: the reader’s mother was somebody’s daughter who could have been drowned. The comparison of well-known texts from Western Antiquity with a little-known Classical Chinese document allows a revealing look at the presentation of infanticide in moral discourse, and the ways in which practical ethical arguments are structured.