On Affection for Offspring (4)

Carry the discussion back to primitive mankind, to those whose women were the first to bear, and whose men were the first to see a child born; they had neither any law which bade them rear their children, nor any expectation of gratitude or of receiving the wages of maintenance lent to their children when they were young. [*] Nay, I should rather be inclined to affirm that these mothers were hostile and malicious toward their children, since great dangers and travail had come to them from child-birth:

As when a sharp pang pierces a woman in labour,

A pang which the Eileithyiae of child-bed send,

The daughters of Hera, who bring the bitter pangs -

these lines, women tell us, were written, not by Homer,[*] but by an Homerid[*] after child-birth or while she was still in the throes of it and had the pain of travail, alike bitter and sharp, actually present in her entrails. But even then the affection for offspring implanted by Nature would bend and lead the mother: still hot and suffering and shaken with her pangs, she did not neglect or avoid her child, but turned to it and smiled at it and took it up and kissed it, though she reaped nothing sweet or profitable therefrom, but received it with pain and suffering, and with tatters of swaddling-clothes

Thus warming and caressing it, both night And day she passes in alternate toil. [*]

For what pay or advantage were these services performed by those ancient parents? Nor is there any for those of our day, since their expectations are uncertain and far off. He that plants a vineyard in the vernal equinox gathers the grapes in the autumnal; he that sows wheat when the Pleiades set reaps it when they rise; cattle and horses and birds bring forth young at once ready for use; but as for man, his rearing is full of trouble, his growth is slow, his attainment of excellence is far distant and most fathers die before it comes. Neocles did not live to see the Salamis of Themistocles nor Miltiades the Eurymedon of Cimon; nor did Xanthippus ever hear Pericles harangue the people, nor did Ariston hear Plato expound philosophy; nor did the fathers of Euripides and Sophocles come to know their sons’ victories; they but heard them lisping and learning to speak and witnessed their revellings and drinking-bouts and love-affairs, as they indulged in such follies as young men commit; so that of all Evenus[*] wrote the only line that is praised or remembered is

For fathers a child is always fear or pain.

Yet none the less fathers do not cease rearing children and, most of all, those who least need them. For it is ridiculous if anyone thinks that the rich sacrifice and rejoice when sons are born to them because they will have someone to support them and bury them-unless, by Heaven, it is for lack of heirs that they bring up children, since it is impossible to find or happen upon anyone willing to accept another’s property!

Not sand or dust or feathers of birds of varied note

Could heap up so great a number[*]

as is the number of those seeking inheritances.[*]

The sire of fifty daughters,[*] Danaüs;

but if he had been childless, he would have had more heirs, and heirs unlike his own. For sons feel no gratitude, nor, for the sake of inheriting, do they pay court or show honour, knowing that they receive the inheritance as their due. But you hear the words of strangers clustering around the childless man, like those famous verses of the comic poet,[*]

O Demos, judge one case, then to your bath; Gorge, guzzle, stuff, and take three obols’ pay.

And the remark of Euripides,[*]

Money it is that finds out friends for men

And holds the greatest power among mankind,

is not a simple and general truth, but applies to the childless: it is these whom rich men feast, whom great men court, for these alone do advocates plead gratis.

A rich man with an unknown heir’s a power.[*]

Many, at any rate, who had many friends and much honour, the birth of one child has made friendless and powerless. Therefore not even toward the acquisition of power is there any aid to be derived from children, but the whole force of Nature exists no less in man than in beasts.[*]