We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2014
Believe me, good folks, this is not so inconsiderable a thing as many of you may think it;—you have all, I dare say, heard of the animal spirits, as how they are transfused from father to son &c. &c—and a great deal to that purpose:—Well, you may take my word, that nine parts in ten of a man's sense or his nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in this world depend upon their motions and activity, and the different tracts and trains you put them into, so that when they are once set a-going, whether right or wrong, ‘tis not a half-penny matter,—away they go cluttering like hey-go-mad; and by treading the same steps over and over again, they presently make a road of it, as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which, when they are once used to, the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.
Claims about the physical substances and the reproductive processes of human bodies underwrite presuppositions about familial identities and roles in many cultures. The claim, for example, that the male is the true parent and the female a mere receptacle becomes part of a brief for justified matricide in Aeschylus' Eumenides (657-673). Roman declaimers often take up the question of whether blood is thicker than water. A would-be adoptive father finds his attempt to adopt a young man criticised as a symptom of the disease of luxury (Sen. Con. 2.1), while a foster father finds his argument for retaining his adolescent foster sons rebutted by the birth father's claim that his biological ties are more significant—even though the birth father has not seen the children since he exposed them shortly after birth (Sen. Con. 9.3). Depending on the observer, the birth of twins may be viewed as a source of family pride, as evidence of the mother's adultery, or as an abomination.
1. Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759), Vol. 1Google Scholar, Ch. 1. The Latin text of the Major Declamations (abbreviated DM) is quoted from Håkanson, L., Declamationes XIX maiores Quintiliano falso ascriptae (Stuttgart 1982);Google Scholar of the Minor Declamations (abbreviated DMin.), from Shackleton Bailey, D.R., [Quintilian]: The Lesser Declamations (Cambridge MA 2006Google Scholar). All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. My sincerest thanks to Neil Coffee, Craig Gibson, Heather Gruber, Loren Lybarger, Craig Pinkerton, Yi-Ting Wang, and Anthony Boyle and the Ramus anonymous readers for many helpful comments and suggestions.
2. Pride: e.g., Tac. Ann. 2.84; adultery: see Mencacci, F., I fratelli amici: la rappresentazione dei gemelli nella cultura romana (Venezia 1996), 10–46Google Scholar. For discussion of twins viewed as abominations in turn-of-the-century Nigeria, see Bastian, M.L., ‘“The Demon Superstition”: Abominable Twins and Mission Culture in Onitsha History’, Ethnology 40 (2001), 13–27CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
3. Yanagisako, S.J. and Delaney, C.L., Naturalizing Power: Essays in Feminist Cultural Analysis (New York 1995Google Scholar).
4. Laqueur, T.W., Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge MA 1990), 88Google Scholar.
5. For discussion of the deployment of medical claims about the body in order to naturalise the Roman gender hierarchy, see Flemming, R., Medicine and the Making of Roman Women: Gender, Nature and Authority from Celsus to Galen (Oxford 2000), 1–28Google Scholar.
6. Bloomer, W.M., ‘Roman Declamation: The Elder Seneca and Quintilian’, in Dominik, W.J. and Hall, J. (eds.), A Companion to Roman Rhetoric (Maiden MA 2007), 297–306CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 304.
7. See most recently: Gunderson, E., Declamation, Paternity and Roman Identity: Authority and the Rhetorical Self (Cambridge 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Vesley, M.E., ‘Father-Son Relations in Roman Declamation’, AHB 17 (2003), 158–80Google Scholar; Raccanelli, R., ‘Parenti e amici a confronto: per un sistema degli affetti nelle declamazioni latine (Ps. Quint, decl. mai. 9 e 16; decl. tnin. 321)’, BStudLat 20 (2000), 106–33Google Scholar; Sussman, L.A., ‘Sons and Fathers in the Major Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian’, Rhetorica 13 (1995), 179–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8. For discussion of disowning in Roman declamation, see most recently Fantham, E., ‘Disowning and Dysfunction in the Declamatory Family’, MD 53 (2004), 65–82Google Scholar; of stepmothers, see Watson, P.A., Ancient Stepmothers: Myth, Misogyny and Reality (Leiden 1995Google Scholar). For discussion of adoption and fosterage in Roman declamation, see my article ‘Adoptees and Exposed Children in Roman Declamation: Commodification, Luxury, and the Threat of Violence’, forthcoming in Classical Philology (2010Google ScholarPubMed).
9. For discussion of declamation’s emphasis on aequitas over ius, see Bloomer, W.M., ‘Schooling in Persona: Imagination and Subordination in Roman Education’, ClAnt 16 (1997), 57–78Google Scholar, and Winterbottom, M., ‘Schoolroom and Courtroom’, in Vickers, B. (ed.), Rhetoric Revalued: Papers from the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (Binghamton 1982), 59–70Google Scholar. For discussion of contrasts between Roman and declamatory law, see Bonner, S.F., Roman Declamation in the Late Republic and Early Empire (Berkeley 1949), 84–132Google Scholar, and Lanfranchi, F., Il diritto nei retori Romani: contributo alla storia dello sviluppo del diritto (Milan 1938Google Scholar).
10. For discussion of declamation as ‘cultural mythmaking’, see Beard, M., ‘Looking (Harder) for Roman Myth: Dumézil, Declamation and the Problems of Definition’, in Graf, F. (ed.), Mythos in mythenloser Gesellschaft: das Paradigma Roms (Stuttgart 1993), 44–64Google Scholar. For the genre’s affinities with Greek and Roman prose fictions, see van Mal-Maeder, D., La fiction des déclamations (Leiden 2007), 115–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11. For previous studies of this declamation, see Stramaglia, A., I gemelli malati: un caso di vivisezione (Declamazioni maggiori, 8) (Cassino 1999Google Scholar); Mencacci (n.2 above), 79–82; Ferngren, G.B., ‘Roman Lay Attitudes towards Medical Experimentation,’ BHM 59 (1985), 495–505Google Scholar, and ‘A Roman Declamation on Vivisection’, Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 4 (1982), 272–90Google Scholar.
12. For examples of declamations where the husband’s violence against his children leads to a wife employing the actio malae tractationis, see [Quint.] DM 18, 19 and Sen. Con. 3.7. For other uses of the complaint, see Sen. Con. 1.2.22, 4.6, 5.3; Quint. Inst. 4.2.30, 7.4.11, 29; [Quint] DM 10, [Quint] DMin. 363, and Calp. Flacc. Decl. 51. For discussion, see Breij, B., ‘Pseudo-Quintilian’s Major Declamations 18 and 19: Two controversiae figuratae’, Rhetorica 24 (2006), 79–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gunderson (n.7 above), 191–226; Stramaglia (n.ll above), 105–07; Bonner (n.9 above), 94f.; Lanfranchi (n.9 above), 235–39.
13. For attendance by the lay public at physicians’ demonstrations, see e.g. Plu. Mor. 71A. For medicine as part of general education, see e.g. Arist. Pol. 1281b38–1282a22, Gel. NA 18.10, and Apul. Apol. 48–52. For discussion, see Flemming (n.5 above), 57–63; Ferngren (n.ll above ‘Vivisection’), 278f.; Nutton, V., ‘Murders and Miracles: Lay Attitudes to Medicine in Antiquity’, in Porter, R. (ed.), Patients and Practitioners: Lay Perceptions of Medicine in Pre-Industrial Society (Cambridge 1985), 23–53Google Scholar, at 31–33.
14. von Staden, H., ‘Anatomy as Rhetoric: Galen on Dissection and Persuasion’, JHM 50 (1995), 47–66Google ScholarPubMed.
15. Nutton (n.13 above), 32. Plutarch’s suggestion not to show off medical learning at a friend’s sickbed (Mor. 129D) implies the breadth of general medical knowledge expected of the upper-class layman; see Bowersock, G.W., Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire (Oxford 2002 [1969]), 66–69Google Scholar.
16. Aulus Gellius, for example, relates a conversation in the villa of Herodes Atticus, in which a medicus demonstrated his loquendi imperitia (NA 18.10.5) by confusing veins and arteries and was accordingly reproved by the philosophus Calvenus Taurus. For discussion of issues of contemporary significance in declamation, see Migliario, E., ‘Luoghi retorici e realtà sociale nell’opera di Seneca il Vecchio’, Athenaeum 67 (1989), 525–49Google Scholar.
17. See Ferngren (n.ll above ‘Vivisection’), 280–83; Stramaglia (n.ll above), 4–9. Håkanson (n.l above) compares Cels. proem. 27–44 (app. crit. ad [Quint.] DM 8.17). The Empirics’ opposition to vivisection stemmed from a larger aversion to enquiry into the hidden causes of disease. The cures described in DM 8.17, according to Ferngren (283), ‘are recognizably Methodist both in treating the whole body and in employing contraria contrariis’. For further discussion, see Nutton, V., Ancient Medicine (London 2004), 187–201Google ScholarPubMed.
18. The termini for the date of the Major Declamations are (post quern) the era of Quintilian, to whom they were falsely atttributed, and (ante quern) their citation by Jerome. For arguments placing them in the second half of the second century, see Stramaglia (n.ll above), 24f., and Sussman, L.A., The Major Declamations Ascribed to Quintilian: A Translation (Frankfurt am Main 1987), ixGoogle Scholar.
19. Though too late to save his children, the advocate instructs the father cede nunc tota potestate matri (‘draw back now from your full [paternall authority for the mother’s sake’, DM 8.7).
20. For discussion of the pervasiveness of the monogenetic paradigm in ancient Greco-Roman culture, see Harlow, M., ‘In the Name of the Father: Procreation, Paternity and Patriarchy’, in Foxhall, L. and Salmon, J. (eds.), Thinking Men: Masculinity and its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition (New York 1998), 155–69Google Scholar. For broader reflections on its impact on the discipline of anthropology, see Delaney, C., ‘The Meaning of Paternity and the Virgin Birth Debate’, Man 21 (1986), 494–513CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21. See e.g. Hp. Nat. puer. 14–16, Arist. GA 739b20–741a3, and Plin. Nat. 7.66. For discussion, see Beagon, M., The Elder Pliny on the Human Animal: Natural History, Book 7 (Oxford 2005), 236fGoogle Scholar.; Vons, J., L’image de lafemme dans I’æuvre de Pline l’Ancien (Bruxelles 2000), 163–80;Google ScholarDean-Jones, L.A., Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford 1994), 200–09Google Scholar; Lonie, I.M., The Hippocratic Treatises ‘On Generation’, ‘On the Nature of the Child’, ‘Diseases IV’: A Commentary (Berlin 1981), 168–76Google Scholar. For the reception of these claims in non-medical contexts, see e.g. M. Ant. Med. 5.4 
(‘falling upon that source from which my father collected his seed and my mother her blood and my wetnurse her milk’).
22. A similar elision of the mother’s role occurs in the pseudo-Plutarchan De Liberis Educandis. See the recent discussion by Bloomer, W.M., ‘The Technology of Child Production: Eugenics and Eulogies in the de liberis educandis’, Arethusa 39 (2006), 71–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 86–90.
23. First-century writers also discussed external factors that affected fetal development. Soranus (Gyn. 1.39) focused on the attendant circumstances at the moment of conception and throughout the period of gestation. Unlike other biological or medical writers, the Elder Pliny would have these ‘maternal’ impressions be shared equally by mother and father (Nat. 7.52–53). For discussion of Pliny, see Beagon (n.21 above), 213–15; for discussion of the lengthy tradition of maternal impressions, see Reeve, M.D., ‘Conceptions’, PCPS 31 (1989), 81–112Google Scholar.
24. See Mencacci, F., ‘Sanguis/cruor: designazioni linguistiche e classificazione antropologica del sangue nella cultura romana’, MD 17 (1986), 25–91Google Scholar, at 50–59; Guastella, G., ‘La rete del sangue: simbologia delle relazioni e modelli dell’identità nella cultura romana’, MD 15 (1985), 49–123Google Scholar, at 76–97.
25. Ulp. Dig. 38.8.4: consanguinitatis, itemque adgnationis iura a patre oriuntur (‘the rights of shared blood, as well as the rights of adgnatio, derive from the father’). See also Gaius Inst. 3.10.
26. Ulp. Dig. 3.2.11.1; see Beltrami, L., Il sangue degli antenati: stirpe, adulterio e figli senza padre nella cultura romana (Bari 1998), 52fGoogle Scholar. Cf. also Cic. Clu. 35 and Plu. Num. 12.
27. See Beltrami (n.26 above), 41–56.
28. Paul. Dig. 1.7.23: adoptio enim non ius sanguinis, sed ius adgnationis adfert (‘for adoption does not bring the right of blood, but the right of adgnatio’). See Guastella (n.24 above), 85f.
29. For discussion of Seneca’s editorial strategies, see Fairweather, J., Seneca the Elder (Cambridge 1981), 27–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30. Dean-Jones (n.21 above), 185f.
31. For discussion of earlier references to female semen, see e.g. Hp. Genit. 6–8, Alcmaeon ap. Censorinus 6.4 (DK 24 A14), and Democritus ap. Arist. GA 764a6–11 (DK 55 A143). For discussion, see P. De Lacy, Galen: On Semen (Berlin 1992), 215f.; Blayney, J., ‘Theories of Conception in the Ancient Roman World’, in Rawson, B. (ed.), The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives (Ithaca 1986), 230–36;Google Scholar Lonie (n.21 above), 124–39.
32. See also the catalogue of functions of the female semen at Gal. UP 4.188–90 Kähn.
33. Tr. De Lacy (n.31 above), 87.
34. Tr. De Lacy (n.31 above), 103.
35. Blayney (n.31 above), 234.
36. For example, various writers refer to Julia’s marriage to Pompey as pignora iunctilsanguinis (‘the pledges of joined blood’, Luc. BC 1.111f.), communis sanguis uinculo (‘the bond of common blood’, V. Max. 4.6.4). For other examples, see e.g. Lucan’s description of Marcia’s multiple marriages: sanguine matrislpermixtura domos (‘about to commingle [two] houses with a mother’s blood’, Luc. BC 2.332f.) and Statius’ description of Polynices’ marriage to Argia, which makes him a closer relative of Jupiter: propiorque fluat de sanguine iunctolluppiter (‘May Jupiter flow more closely from your joined blood’, Stat. Theb. 2.436f).
37. See Guastella (n.24 above), 76–84.
38. See Mencacci, F., ‘Il sangue del gladiatore: Commodo e la doppia identità’, in Vattioni, F. (ed.), Sangue e antropologia nella teologia medievale (Roma 1991), 657–82Google Scholar.
39. Dean-Jones (n.21 above), 178.
40. King, H., Hippocrates’ Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London 1998), 32;Google Scholar see Hp. Genit. 5, Nat. Puer. 13, and Arist. HA 582bl0–12, 583a35-b3.
41. See Thomas, Y., ‘Le “ventre”: corpus maternel, droit paternel’, Le Genre Humain 14 (1986), 211–36Google Scholar.
42. Cf. Tryph. Dig. 48.19.39. See Thomas (n.41 above), 225f.
43. See also Tac. Dial. 28–29. In opposition to decadent Roman women, Tacitus’ virtuous German women breastfeed their own children (Ger. 20.1). For discussion, see K.R. Bradley, ‘Wet-Nursing at Rome: A Study in Social Relations’, in Rawson (n.31 above), 201–29.
44. Sor. Gyn. 2.44.1–2. See Flemming (n.5 above), 239f.
45. E.g., X. Oec. 7.24, Arist. EN 1161b26–27, Sen. Prov. 2.5, etc.
46. See Sen. Helv. 16.3, Juv. 6.592–99; Dixon, S., The Roman Mother (Norman 1988), 93–95Google Scholar.
47. [Quint.] DM 6.10: si adeo non genuit filium sed effudit, et Mo infelici partu ingratum uteri pondus exposuit (‘if she did not give birth to her child but poured him out, and exposed this unwelcome weight of her womb through this unlucky birth’).
48. Cf. Aristotle ap. D.L. 5.20.
49. See Richlin, A., ‘Pliny’s Brassiere: Roman Medicine and the Female Body’, in McClure, L.K. (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World (Oxford 2002), 225–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Flemming (n.5 above), 161–72; Vons (n.21 above), 116–25.
50. See Nutton (n.13 above). The doctor who administers poison at Lib. Prog. 7.3.16 is accused of 
, ‘using the appearance of art as a screen for his evil deed’. See Ratzan, R.M. and Ferngren, G.B., ‘A Greek Progymnasma on the Physician-Poisoner’, JHM 48 (1993), 157–70.Google ScholarPubMed
51. Eggs: Sen. Apoc. 11.5. Bees: Cic. Luc. 54. Drops of liquid: Plaut. Men. 1089f. See Mencacci (n.2 above), 108–25.
52. ‘Uguaglianza e inseparabilità restano per sempre la cifra più autentica dei gemelli romani’ (Mencacci [n. 2 above], 193). See Plu. Mor. 478D and Mencacci (n.2 above), 68–74.
53. Nigidius test. 17 Swoboda = Aug. CD 5.3. See Dasen, V., Jumeaux, jumelles dans l’antiquité Grecque et Romaine (Kilchberg 2005), 270fGoogle Scholar.; Stramaglia (n.11 above), 116–20; Rordorf, W., ‘Saint Augustin et la tradition philosophique antifataliste: a propos de de civ. dei 5,1–11’, VChr 28 (1974), 190–202Google Scholar.
54. [Quint.] DM 8.15: quid ais, pater? ita tecum quisquam sic audet agere de duobus <s>eruis? … non ferrem, si separare expositurus auderes, si contentus esses educaturus alterutrum (‘What are you saying, father? Does anybody dare to discuss your two sons with you as if they were two slaves?… I wouldn’t put up with it, if you dared to separate them in exposing them, if you were satisfied just to rear one’).
55. See Mencacci (n.2 above), 10–46. Nor are such beliefs limited to the Roman world, to polytheistic cultures, or to antiquity. Bastian (n.2 above) examines the widespread murder of twins up until the 1930s among the Igbo of Nigeria, the result of beliefs that human beings, in contrast to animals, give birth only to one child at a time and that multiple births are therefore ‘abominations’, signs of divine anger. Masquelier, A., ‘Powers, Problems, and Paradoxes of Twinship in Niger’, Ethnology 40 (2001), 45–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, examines the followers of Izala, a Islamic reformist movement in contemporary Niger, who argue that twins must be the product of adultery and have advocated the killing of twins as a result.
56. An aggrieved father of twin girls, one of whom hanged herself after being raped, similarly protests hoc grauius est, iudices, perdere alteram e geminis (‘this is worse, judges, to lose one of a pair of twins’, [Quint.] DMin. 270.27). See Stramaglia (n.l 1 above), 136f.
57. Gaius Inst. 3.212. See Dasen (n.53 above), 262.
58. Space does not permit a full discussion of this important aspect of the declamation. Throughout DM 8, the advocate repeatedly condemns the doctor’s ignorance; failure to comprehend the causes of the twins’ disease prompted his fatal investigation (DM 8.3, 8.4, 8.12, etc.). Though the author of DM 8 may have originally performed the case for the other side as well, neither the father nor the doctor are granted an opportunity to justify their decisions in the extant Major Declamations. Sen. Con. 4.5 and Luc. Abd. provide examples of how a declamatory doctor justifies his practice—in these examples, the decision to withhold treatment from a stepmother, a much easier case to justify in both logical and affective terms than the knowing commission of the medical murder of a young man. See Wöhrle, G., ‘Die medizinische Theorie in Lukians Abdicatus (lib. 54)’, MHJ 25 (1990), 104–14Google Scholar. [Quint.] DMin. 268 shows how a medicus defends his art against the other arts of rhetoric and philosophy in a declamatory context. See discussion in Buffa Giolito, M.F., ‘Contendunt orator, medicus, philosophus: retorica giuridica/giudiziaria in Ps. Quintiliano, decl. min. 268’, Euphrosyne 30 (2002), 89–100Google Scholar. Roman rhetorical texts frequently compare aspects of oratory and medicine (e.g., Cic. De Orat. 2.186, Quint. Inst. 1.10.6, etc.); see full discussion in Mastrorosa, I., ‘Medicina e retorica nell’ Institutio oratorio di Quintiliano’, Sileno 22 (1996), 229–80Google Scholar.
59. See Flemming (n.5 above), 1–28; Laqueur (n.4 above), 52–62.
60. See van Mal-Maeder (n.10 above), 105.
61. See Schneider, D.M., American Kinship: A Cultural Account (Chicago 1980 [1968]Google Scholar).
62. See Carsten, J., After Kinship (Cambridge 2004Google Scholar), and ‘Substantivism, Antisubstantivism, and Anti-antisubstantivism’, in Franklin, S. and McKinnon, S. (eds.), Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies (Durham NC 2001), 29–53Google Scholar; Strathern, M., After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge 1992Google Scholar); Schneider, D.M., A Critique of the Study of Kinship (Ann Arbor 1984CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
63. In Malaysia, see Carsten (n.62 above Kinship), 126–31; on New Guinea, see Meigs, A.S., Food, Sex, and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion (New Brunswick NJ 1984Google Scholar).
64. For example, E. Haimes relates the peregrinations of the ‘Limbo Twins’, twin girls commissioned by an Italian man and his Portuguese wife, produced from the sperm of an American donor and the egg of a British donor, implanted in a British surrogate mother, then subsequently rejected by the commissioning parents and adopted by an American lesbian couple. The competing claims of various parties temporarily left the twins in legal ‘Limbo’. As Haimes observes, to claim that the biogenetic substances donated by the anonymous donors were the girls’ only ‘real’ grounds for constructing their kin relationships would clearly be absurd (‘Embodied Spaces, Social Places and Bourdieu: Locating and Dislocating the Child in Family Relationships’, Body and Society 9 [2003], 11–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar). See also Ragoné, H., ‘Chasing the Blood Tie: Surrogate Mothers, Adoptive Mothers and Fathers’, American Ethnologist 23 (1996), 352–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
65. According to C. Hayden, the gestating mother’s partner can alternately be viewed as a ‘non-mother’, her contribution viewed on biological grounds as inferior with respect to the gestating mother’s, or as a full and equal participant in family life. Both mothers may attach varying cultural meanings to the sperm donor, ranging from exclusionary anonymity to involvement in family life: ‘Insemination is perceived to give lesbian parents space to negotiate the degree to which a donor’s sperm is imbued with (or disabused of) distinctive features of identity…. Thus genetic substance itself can become the referent for relatedness (as when the same anonymous donor is used so that the children will be related); a donor may be chosen on the basis of features that he shares with the ‘nonbiological’ mother, thereby implying a biogenetic connection between her and the child; or the donor, by virtue of his biogenetic connection to the child, can be incorporated into the family configuration’ (‘Gender, Genetics, and Generation: Reformulating Biology in Lesbian Kinship’, Cultural Anthropology 10 [1995], 41–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 53). See also Weston, K., Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York 1991Google Scholar).
