SOS. She gave it to me to keep for her, whilst she went to bathe. At first I paid no attention to it; but after I looked at it, I at once recognized it, and came running to you. CHREM. What do you suspect now, or have you discovered, relative to her? SOS. I don’t know; unless you enquire of herself whence she got it, if that can possibly be discovered. CHREM. Is this woman living to whom you delivered the child? SOS. I don’t know. CHREM. What account did she bring you at the time? SOS. That she had done as I had ordered her. CHREM. Tell me what is the woman’s name, that she may be inquired after. SOS. Philtere. CHREM. Sostrata follow me this way indoors. SOS. How much beyond my hopes has this matter turned out! How dreadfully afraid I was, Chremes, that you would now be of feelings as unrelenting as formerly you were on exposing the child. CHREM. Many a time a man cannot be such as he would be[333] if circumstances do not admit of it. Time has now so brought it about, that I should be glad of a daughter; formerly I wished for nothing less. There is no evidence that the Romans as a people at any time approved of the sale of children, and while the suggestion is made by Gibbon that early in the days of the kings impoverishing conditions occasionally made it necessary to dispose of members of the family, from the time of the adoption of the Twelve Tables as the codified law of Rome there is not a single indication that the power of the father over grown-up children was used otherwise than sparingly, and with a view to strengthening the stern and military character of the Roman idea of family. The main use of the provision for the sale of children, in time of prosperity at least, was to put the boy out to business, this being in general more a form that took the place of what was later apprenticeship and, still later, the labour contract. As late as Constantine this was permitted, even of new-born children, but only in cases of extreme need (_propter nimiam paupertatem_),[334] and then when it seemed the only way to prevent their parents from murdering them. CHAPTER XV HUMANITARIAN MEASURES OF AUGUSTUS—LIFE IN THE IMPERIAL CITY—FIRST ATTEMPTS OF THE STATE TO CHECK INFANTICIDE—TRAJAN AND THE VELEIA LOAN—STOIC SPIRIT IN PLINY’S CHARITY. Astonishing depravity marked the last days of the Republic, to the point where it was even said that annual divorces were as much the fashion in Rome as voluntary celibacy.[335] Seneca says there were women who reckoned their years by their husbands. In the severe, early period of the Republic, celibacy was considered censurable and even guilty,[336] whereas later it was not only condoned but wittily approved, to judge by the quips of the dramatist, Plautus, whose cynical references to marriage and the burden of a wife read not unlike our own scoffing and immoral dramatists of the eighteenth century.[337]