28 Quintilian speaks in a tone of apology, if not justification, of the exposition of the children of destitute parents (_Decl._ cccvi.), and even Plutarch speaks of it without censure. (_De Amor. Prolis._) There are several curious illustrations in Latin literature of the different feelings of fathers and mothers on this matter. Terence (_Heauton._ Act. iii. Scene 5) represents Chremes as having, as a matter of course, charged his pregnant wife to have her child killed provided it was a girl. The mother, overcome by pity, shrank from doing so, and secretly gave it to an old woman to expose it, in hopes that it might be preserved. Chremes, on hearing what had been done, reproached his wife for her womanly pity, and told her she had been not only disobedient but irrational, for she was only consigning her daughter to the life of a prostitute. In Apuleius (_Metam._ lib. x.) we have a similar picture of a father starting for a journey, leaving his wife in childbirth, and giving her his parting command to kill her child if it should be a girl, which she could not bring herself to do. The girl was brought up secretly. In the case of weak or deformed infants infanticide seems to have been habitual. “Portentosos fœtus extinguimus, liberos quoque, si debiles monstrosique editi sunt, mergimus. Non ira, sed ratio est, a sanis inutilia secernere.”—Seneca, _De Ira_, i. 15. Terence has introduced a picture of the exposition of an infant into his _Andria_, Act. iv. Scene 5. See, too, Suet. _August._ lxv. According to Suetonius (_Calig._ v.), on the death of Germanicus, women exposed their new-born children in sign of grief. Ovid had dwelt with much feeling on the barbarity of these practices. It is a very curious fact, which has been noticed by Warburton, that Chremes, whose sentiments about infants we have just seen, is the very personage into whose mouth Terence has put the famous sentiment, “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.” 29 That these were the usual fates of exposed infants is noticed by several writers. Some, too, both Pagan and Christian (Quintilian, _Decl._ cccvi.; Lactantius, Div. Inst. vi. 20, &c.), speak of the liability to incestuous marriages resulting from frequent exposition. In the Greek poets there are several allusions to rich childless men adopting foundlings, and Juvenal says it was common for Roman wives to palm off foundlings on their husbands for their sons. (_Sat._ vi. 603.) There is an extremely horrible declamation in Seneca the Rhetorician (_Controvers._ lib. v. 33) about exposed children who were said to have been maimed and mutilated, either to prevent their recognition by their parents, or that they might gain money as beggars for their masters.