ALUMNUS. - In the Greco-Roman world it was permitted to get rid of newborn infants, even free ones, who were exposed either in the places where refuse was thrown or in special places, as at Rome at the foot of a column called Lactaria, near the temple of Piety in the Forum Holitorium. Whoever picked up the exposed infants could raise them as slaves: expositi in nullo numero sunt, servi fiunt: hoc legum latori visum est (Seneca, Controv., 5, 33); in the ranks of servitude they took the name of a.
Against the sad consequences of such a state of affairs the voice of the Christian Apologists rose up very early: 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 should remember the Shepherd of Hermas, which begins with the phrase: "He who had brought me up sold me to a certain Rhoda, who was living in Rome."
Often such exposed infants were given names that recalled the places where they had been found: Stercorius, Proiectus, Κόπρον, etc. The adoptive father of an a. was called nutritor, papas or patronus.
But with Christianity, according to an expression of Paul Allard, the work of the Holy Childhood in reality began from the first centuries (Les esclaves chrétiens, p. 368, Italian trans., p. 375).
Christians occupied themselves with gathering abandoned children, exposed to the elements and to diseases. The most ancient Christian cemeteries of Rome offer a twofold documentation: the great quantity of small tombs, not justified by the greater infant mortality alone, and a series of inscriptions that recall the a. or the Φρεσθό. In a single gallery (E. Diehl, Inscr. christ. lat., II, Berlin 1925, pp. 142-43) of the cemetery of Pamphilus, out of 111 tombs, 83 are for children and of these only 5 have an epitaph.
Perhaps this work gave rise to the accusation against the Christians that at their gatherings they ate the palpitating flesh of an infant (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 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, by means of distributions of food and clothing, to reduce exposure; then the Councils of Vaison of 422 and of Arles of 452 intervened, until Justinian in 529 established that exposed infants, whatever their origin, could be neither slaves nor coloni, but free (Cod. Iust., VIII, 52, 3, 4). In a Christian inscription read in S. Prassede, now lost, the deceased commends himself to the martyrs, declaring himself their a.
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Enrico Josi