Delphi Complete Works of Pliny the Elder

by Pliny the Elder

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  CHAP. 4. (5.)

  THE GENERATION OF MAN; UNUSUAL DURATION OF PREGNANCY; INSTANCES OF IT FROM SEVEN TO TWELVE MONTHS.

  In other animals the period of gestation and of birth is fixed and definite, while man, on the other hand, is born at all seasons of the year, and without any certain period of gestation; for one child is born at the seventh month, another at the eighth, and so on, even to the beginning of the tenth and eleventh. Those children which are born before the seventh month are never known to survive; unless, indeed, they hap- pen to have been conceived the day before or the day after the full moon, or at the change of the moon. In Egypt it is not an uncommon thing for children to be born at the eighth month; and in Italy, too, children that are born at this period live just as long as others, notwithstanding the opinions of the ancients to the contrary. There are great variations in this respect, which occur in numerous ways. Vestilia, for instance, who was the wife of C. Herdicius, and was afterwards married, first, to Pomponius, and then to Orfitus, very eminent citizens, after having brought forth four children, always at the seventh month, had Suillius Rufus at the eleventh month, and then Corbulo at the seventh, both of whom became consuls; after which, at the eighth month, she had Cæsonia, who became the wife of the Emperor Caius. As for children who are born at the eighth month, the greatest difficulty with them is to get them over the first forty days. Pregnant women, on the other hand, are in the greatest danger during the fourth and the eighth month, and abortions during these periods are fatal. Masurius informs us, that L. Papirius, the prætor. on one occasion, when the next but one in succession was urging his suit at law, decided against him, in favour of the heir, although his mother declared that her period of gestation had lasted thirteen months — upon the ground that it did not appear that there was any fixed and definite period of gestation.

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  CHAP. 5. (6.)

  INDICATIONS OF THE SEX OF THE CHILD DURING THE PREGNANCY OF THE MOTHER.

  On the tenth day after conception, pains are felt in the head, vertigo, and dimness of the sight; these signs, together with loathing of food and rising of the stomach, indicate the formation of the future human being. If it is a male that is conceived, the colour of the pregnant woman is more healthy, and the birth less painful: the child moves in the womb upon the fortieth day. In the conception of a child of the other sex, all the symptoms are totally different: the mother experiences an almost insupportable weight, there is a slight swelling of the legs and the groin, and the first movement of the child is not felt until the ninetieth day. But, whatever the sex of the child, the mother is sensible of the greatest languor at the time when the hair of the fœtus first begins to grow, and at the full moon; at which latter time it is that children newly born are exposed to the greatest danger. In addition to this, the mode of walking, and indeed everything that can be mentioned, is of consequence in the case of a woman who is pregnant. Thus, for instance, women who have used too much salted meat will bring forth children without nails: parturition, too, is more difficult, if they do not hold their breath. It is fatal, too, to yawn during labour; and abortion ensues, if the female should happen to sneeze just after the sexual congress. (7.) It is a subject for pity, and even for a feeling of shame, when one reflects that the origin of the most vain of all animated beings is thus frail: so much so, indeed, that very often the smell even of a lamp just extinguished is a cause of abortion. From such beginnings as these springs the tyrant, from such the murderous dispositions of men. Thou man, who placest thy confidence in the strength of thy body, thou, who dost embrace the gifts of Fortune, and look upon thyself, not only as her fosterling, but even as her own born child, thou, whose mind is ever thirsting for blood, thou who, puffed up with some success or other, dost think thyself a god — by how trifling a thing might thy life have been cut short! Even this very day, something still less even may have the same effect, the puncture, for instance, of the tiny sting of the serpent; or even, as befell the poet Anacreon, the swallowing of the stone of a raisin, or of a single hair in a draught of milk, by which the prætor and senator, Fabius, was choked, and so met his death. He only, in fact, will be able to form a just estimate of the value of life, who will always bear in mind the extreme frailty of its tenure.

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  CHAP. 6. (8.)

  MONSTROUS BIRTHS.

  It is contrary to nature for children to come into the world with the feet first, for which reason such children are called Agrippæ, meaning that they are born with difficulty. In this manner, M. Agrippa is said to have been born; the only instance, almost, of good fortune, out of the number of all those who have come into the world under these circumstances. And yet, even he may be considered to have paid the penalty of the unfavourable omen produced by the unnatural mode of his birth, in the unfortunate weakness of his legs, the misfortunes of his youth, a life spent in the very midst of arms and slaughter, and ever exposed to the approaches of death; in his children, too, who have all proved a very curse to the earth, and more especially, the two Agrippinas, who were the mothers respectively of Caius and of Domitius Nero, so many firebrands hurled among the human race. In addition to all this, we may add the shortness of his life, he being cut off in his fifty-first year, the distress which he experienced from the adulteries of his wife, and the grievous tyranny to which he was subjected by his father-in-law. Agrippina, too, the mother of Nero, who was lately Emperor, and who proved himself, throughout the whole of his reign, the enemy of the human race, has left it recorded in writing, that he was born with his feet first. It is in the due order of nature that man should enter the world with the head first, and be carried to the tomb in a contrary fashion.

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  CHAP. 7. (9.)

  OF THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN CUT OUT OF THE WOMB.

  Those children, whose birth has cost the mother her life, are evidently born under more favourable auspices; for such was the case with the first Scipio Africanus; the first, too, of the Cæsars was so named, from his having been removed by an incision in his mother’s womb. For a similar reason, too, the Cæsones were called by that name. Manilius, also, who entered Carthage with his army, was born in a similar manner.

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  CHAP. 8. (10.)

  WHO WERE CALLED VOPISCI.

  A child used to be called Vopiscus, who, when twins had been conceived, had been retained in the womb and born alive, the other having perished by abortion. There are, too, some very remarkable instances of this kind, although they are singularly rare and uncommon.

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  CHAP. 9. (11.)

  THE CONCEPTION AND GENERATION OF MAN.

  Few animals, except the female of the human species, receive the male when pregnant. In only one or two species, and no more, does superfœtation ever take place. Cases are to be found stated in the journals of physicians, and of others who have paid particular attention to the subject, in which twelve embryos have been removed at a single abortion. When, however, but a very short time has intervened between two conceptions, the embryos both of them proceed to maturity; as was seen to be the case with Hercules and his brother Iphicles. This was the case also with the woman who brought forth two children at a birth, one of whom bore a resemblance to her husband, and the other to her paramour. So too, with a female slave in Proconnesus, who was delivered of two children at one birth, one of whom bore a strong resemblance to her master, and the other to her master’s steward, with both of whom she had had connection on the same day; with another woman who was delivered of two children at a birth, the one after the usual period of gestation, the other an em- bryo only five months old: and again, with another female, who, having been delivered of one child at the end of seven months, in due course, two months afterwards, brought forth twins.

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  CHAP. 10.

  STRIKING INSTANCES OF R
ESEMBLANCE.

  It is universally known that well-formed parents often produce defective children; and on the other hand, defective parents children who are well formed, or else imperfect in the same part of the body as the parents. It is a well-known fact also, that marks, moles, and even scars, are reproduced in members of the same family in successive generations. The mark which the Daci make on their arms for the purpose of denoting their origin, is known to last even to the fourth generation.

  (12.) We have heard it stated that three members of the family of the Lepidi have been born, though not in an uninterrupted succession, with one of the eyes covered with a membrane. We observe, too, that some children strongly resemble their grandfather, and that of twins one child is like the father, while the other resembles the mother; and have known cases where a child that was born a year after another, resembled him as exactly as though they had been twins. Some women have children like themselves, some like their husband, while others again bear children who resemble neither the one nor the other. In some cases the female children resemble the father, and the males the mother. The case of Nicæus, the celebrated wrestler of Byzantium, is a well-known and un- doubted instance. His mother was the produce of an act of adultery, committed with a male of Æthiopia; and although she herself differed in no way from the ordinary complexion of other females, he was born with all the swarthy complexion of his Æthiopian grandfather.

  These strong features of resemblance proceed, no doubt, from the imagination of the parents, over which we may reasonably believe that many casual circumstances have a very powerful influence; such, for instance, as the action of the eyes, the ears, or the memory, or impressions received at the moment of conception. A thought even, momentarily passing through the mind of either of the parents, may be supposed to produce a resemblance to one of them separately, or else to the two combined. Hence it is that the varieties are much more numerous in the appearance of man than in that of other animals; seeing that, in the former, the rapidity of the ideas, the quickness of the perception, and the varied powers of the intellect, tend to impress upon the features peculiar and diversified marks; while in the case of the other animals, the mind is immovable, and just the same in each and all individuals of the same species. A man named Artemon, one of the common people, bore so strong a resemblance to Antiochus, the king of Syria, that his queen Laodice, after her husband Antiochus was slain, acted the farce of getting this man to recommend her as the successor to the crown. Vibius, a member of the plebeian order, and Publieius as well, a freedman who had formerly been a slave, so strongly resembled Pompeius Magnus in appearance as to be scarcely distinguishable from him; they both had that ingenuous countenance of his, and that fine forehead, which so strongly bespoke his noble descent. It was a similar degree of resemblance to this, that caused the surname of his cook, Menogenes, to be given to the father of Pompeius Magnus, he having already obtained that of Strabo, on account of the cast in his eye, a defect which he had contracted through imitating a similar one in his slave. Scipio, too, had the name of Serapion given him, after the vile slave of a pig-jobber: and after him, another Scipio of the same family was surnamed Salvitto, after a mime of that name. In the same way, too, Spinther and Pamphilus, who were respectively actors of only second and third rate parts, gave their names to Lentulus and Metellus, who were at that time colleagues in the consulship; so that, by a very curious but disagreeable coincidence, the likenesses of the two consuls were to be seen at the same moment on the stage.

  On the other hand again, L. Plancus, the orator, bestowed his surname on the actor Rubrius: the player, Burbuleius, again, gave his name to the elder Curio, and the player, Menogenes, to Messala, the censor. There was a certain fisherman, too, a native of Sicily, who bore a strong resemblance to the proconsul, Sura, not only in his features, but in the mode even of opening his mouth, and the spasmodic contraction of his tongue, and his hurried and indistinct utterance when speaking. Cassius Severus, the celebrated orator, had it thrown in his teeth how strongly he resembled Armentarius, the gladiator. Toranius, a slave-dealer, sold to Antony, while he was one of the Triumvirs, two boys of remarkable beauty, as being twins, so strong was their resemblance; whereas, in reality, one of them was born in Asia, and the other beyond the Alps. The fraud, however, having been soon afterwards discovered through the difference in the language of the youths, Antony, who was greatly exasperated, violently upbraided the dealer, and, among other things, complained that he had fixed the price at so high a sum as two hundred thousand sesterces. The crafty slave-merchant, however, made answer that that was the very reason for his having set so high a price upon them; for, as he said, there would have been nothing particularly striking in the resemblance of the boys, if they had been born of the same mother, whereas, children found to be so exactly like each other, though natives of different countries, ought to be deemed above all price; an answer which produced such a reasonable feeling of surprise and admiration in the mind of the proscriber, that he who was but just before frantic under the injury he had received, was led to set a higher value on no part whatever of all the property in his possession.

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  CHAP. 11. (13.)

  WHAT MEN ARE SUITED FOR GENERATION. INSTANCES OF VERY NUMEROUS OFFSPRING.

  There exists a kind of peculiar antipathy between the bodies of certain persons, which, though barren with respect to each other, are not so when united to others; such, for instance, was the case with Augustus and Livia. Certain individuals, again, both men and women, produce only females, others males; and, still more frequently, children of the two sexes alternately; the mother of the Gracchi, for instance, who had twelve children, and Agrippina, the mother of Germanicus, who had nine. Some women, again, are barren in their youth, while to others it is given to bring forth once only during their lives. Some women never go to their full time, or if, by dint of great care and the aid of medicine, they do give birth to a living child, it is mostly a girl. Among other instances of rare occurrence, is the case of Augustus, now deified, who, in the year in which he departed this life, witnessed the birth of M. Silanus, the grandson of his granddaughter: having obtained the government of Asia, after his consulship, he was poisoned by Nero, on his accession to the throne.

  Q. Metellus Macedonicus, leaving six children, left eleven grandsons also, with daughters-in-law and sons-in-law, twenty-seven individuals in all, who addressed him by the name and title of father. In the records of the times of the Emperor Augustus, now deified, we find it stated that, in his twelfth consulship, Lucius Sylla being his colleague, on the third day before the ides of April, C. Crispinus Hilarus, a man of a respectable family of the plebeian order, living at Fæsulæ, came to the Capitol, to offer sacrifice, attended by eight children (of whom two were daughters), twenty-eight grandsons, nineteen great-grandsons, and eight granddaughters, who all followed him in a lengthened train.

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  CHAP. 12. (14.)

  AT WHAT AGE GENERATION CEASES.

  Women cease to bear children at their fiftieth year, and, with the greater part of them, the monthly discharge ceases at the age of forty. But with respect to the male sex, it is a well-known fact, that King Masinissa, when he was past his eighty-sixth year, had a son born to him, whom he named Metimanus, and that Cato the Censor, after he had completed his eightieth year, had a son by the daughter of his client, Salonius: a circumstance from which, while the descendants of his other sons were surnamed Liciniani, those of this son were called Saloniani, of whom Cato of Utica was one. It is equally well known, too, that L. Volusius Saturninus, who lately died while prefect of the city, had a son when he was past his seventy-second year, by Cornelia, a member of the family of the Scipios, Volusius Saturninus, who was afterwards consul. Among the lower classes of the people, we not uncommonly meet with men who become the fathers of children after the age of seventy-five.

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  CHAP. 13. (15.)


  REMARKABLE CIRCUMSTANCES CONNECTED WITH THE MENSTRUAL DISCHARGE.

  Among the whole range of animated beings, the human fe- male is the only one that has the monthly discharge, and in whose womb are found what we term “moles.” These moles consist of a shapeless mass of flesh, devoid of all life, and capable of resisting either the edge or the point of the knife; they are movable in the body, and obstruct the menstrual discharge; sometimes, too, they are productive of fatal consequences to the woman, in the same manner as a real fœtus; while, at other times, they remain in the body until old age; in some cases, again, they are discharged, in consequence of an increased action of the bowels. Something of a very similar nature is produced in the body of the male, which is called a “schirrus;” this was the case with Oppius Capito, a man of prætorian rank.

  It would indeed be a difficult matter to find anything which is productive of more marvellous effects than the menstrual discharge. On the approach of a woman in this state, must will become sour, seeds which are touched by her become sterile, grafts wither away, garden plants are parched up, and the fruit will fall from the tree beneath which she sits. Her very look, even, will dim the brightness of mirrors, blunt the edge of steel, and take away the polish from ivory. A swarm of bees, if looked upon by her, will die immediately; brass and iron will instantly become rusty, and emit an offensive odour; while dogs which may have tasted of the matter so discharged are seized with madness, and their bite is venomous and incurable.