ALUMNUS. — In the Greco-Roman world it was permissible to dispose of newborn infants, even freeborn ones, who were exposed either in places where refuse was thrown or in special spots, such as at Rome at the foot of a column called the Lactaria, near the Temple of Piety in the Forum Olitorium. Those who gathered up the exposed children could raise them as slaves: expositi in nullo numero sunt, servi fiunt: hoc legum latori visum est (Seneca, Controv., 5, 33); among the ranks of servitude they took the name of alumni.
Alumnus — Cubicle known as that of Sabina, with a sepulchral inscription of the alumna Sabina, recalling her condition as an alumna, who wished to be buried super patronum — Rome, cemetery of S. Agnese on the Via Nomentana.
Against the sad consequences of this state of affairs the voice of the Christian Apologists soon arose: Justin (I Apol., 27: PG 6, 369), Minucius Felix (Octavius, 31: PL 3, 350), Tertullian (Ad nationes, I, 15: PL 1, 651), Clement of Alexandria (Paedagog., 3, 3: PG 8, 585), Lactantius (Divin. Instit., VI, 20: PL 6, 709). One may recall the Shepherd of Hermas, which begins with the phrase: “He who had nourished me sold me to a certain woman named Rhoda who lived in Rome.”
Such exposed children were often given names recalling the places where they had been found: Stercorius, Proiectus, Kōrēpōw, etc. The adoptive father of an alumnus was called nutritor, papas or patronus.
But with Christianity, in the words of Paul Allard, the work of the Holy Infancy in reality began in the earliest centuries (Les esclaves chrétiens, p. 368, Italian trans., p. 375).
Christians took it upon themselves to gather abandoned children, exposed to the elements and to disease. The earliest Christian cemeteries of Rome provide a twofold testimony: the great number of small graves, not justified by higher infant mortality alone, and a series of inscriptions that recall the alumni or the pērētōr, in a single gallery (E. Diehl, Inscr. christ. lat., II, Berlin 1925, pp. 142-43) of the cemetery of Pamphilus, where out of 111 graves, 83 are for children and of these only five bear epitaphs.
Perhaps this work gave rise to the accusation that Christians in their assemblies ate the still-beating flesh of a child (G. Waltzing, Le crime rituel reproché aux chrétiens du IIe siècle, in Bulletin de la classe des lettres de l'Académie royale de Belgique, 1925, pp. 205-39). St. Augustine attests that consecrated virgins gathered up exposed children and brought them to baptism (Epist. 98: PL 33, 362). A Constantinian law of the year 315, extended to Africa in 331, sought, through food and clothing allowances, to reduce the practice of exposure; later the Councils of Vaison in 422 and of Arles in 452 intervened, until Justinian in 529 decreed that exposed children, whatever their origin, could not be slaves or coloni, but were free (Cod. Iust., VIII, 52, 3, 4). In a now-lost Christian inscription read in S. Prassede, the deceased commends himself to the martyrs, declaring himself their alumnus.