ALUMNUS. — In the Greco-Roman world, it was permissible to rid oneself of newborns, even freeborn ones, who were exposed either in places where refuse was thrown or in special places, as at Rome at the foot of a column called Lactaria, near the temple of Pietas in the Forum Holitorium. Whoever took in the exposed children could raise them as slaves: expositi in nullo nu-
mero sunt, servi fiunt: hoc legum latori visum est (Seneca, Controv., 5, 33); among the servile class they were designated as a.
The Christian Apologists soon raised their voices against the sad consequences of this state of affairs: Giustino (I Apol., 27: PG 6, 369), Minucio Felice (Octavius, 31: PL 3, 350), Tertulliano (Ad nationes, I, 15: PL 1, 651), Clemente Alessandrino (Paedagog., 3, 3: PG 8, 585), Lattanzio (Divin. Instit., VI, 20: PL 6, 709). One should recall the Shepherd of Hermas, which begins with the sentence: “He who had reared me sold me to a certain Rhode who lived in Rome.”
The exposed children were often given names recalling 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, in the words of Paolo Allard, the work of the Holy Childhood actually began from the earliest centuries (Les esclaves chrétiens, p. 368, Italian version, p. 375).
Christians undertook to gather abandoned children, exposed to the elements and to illness. The oldest Christian cemeteries of Rome provide twofold evidence: the great number of small tombs, not explained solely by the higher rate of infant mortality, and a series of inscriptions commemorating the a. or the Φρεσθό. In a single gallery (E. Diehl, Inscr. christ. lat., II, Berlin 1925, pp. 142–43) of the cemetery of Panfilo, out of 111 tombs, 83 are for children, and of these only 5 bear an inscription.
Perhaps this work gave rise to the accusation that Christians, at their assemblies, ate the palpitating 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). S. Agostino attests that consecrated virgins gathered exposed children and brought them to baptism (Epist. 98: PL 33, 362). A Constantinian law of a. 315, extended to Africa in 331, sought, through distributions of food and clothing, to reduce exposure; then the Councils of Vaison in 422 and Arles in 452 intervened, until Giustiniano in 529 established that exposed children, 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.