“An obviously deformed child….”

by Kristina Chew, PhD on November 12th, 2006

I teach about the ancient Greeks and Romans and one law from the Twelve Tables—the first written code of law among the Romans (449 B.C.)—and this law from Table IV has been on my mind:

Cito necatus insignis ad deformitatem puer esto.
An obviously deformed child must be put to death.

The words for “child” is puer; the word for “obviously deformed” is insignis ad deformitatem: insignis means “conspicuous” or “manifest”; deformitas means “ugliness,” “disfigurement,” “blemish.”

Puer is a big more vague: Its basic meaning is “boy” or “child,” and this leads me to wonder, how old of a child who was “conspicuously disfigured or blemished” was to be “put to death”?

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mcewen
Nov 12, 2006 at 12:18 pm

And how ‘conspicuous?’ picky, picky, picky!
Kristina Chew, PhD
Nov 12, 2006 at 1:00 pm

Insignis has somewhat the meaning of “marked” and “standing out.”
Autism Vox » A Lot of Knowledge Is Not a Bad Thing: Prenatal Testing and Diagnosis
Mar 7, 2007 at 1:43 pm

[…] As a teacher of college students, I think it is imperative that no knowledge, no facts, no information, be withheld from them. I teach about ancient Roman society, which produced Virgil, whose poetry with its evocation of “the tears of human things” (sunt lacrimae rerum, Aeneid 1.462) has sustained me. I teach about Roman society, in which most of the laws and legal rights applied only to the members of the senatorial or patrician class; in which untold numbers of slaves lived lives that were (in the words of a later philosopher), “nasty, brutish, short, and solitary”; in which a paterfamilias—the head of a Roman household—had the right, according to the ancient Twelve Tables, to put to death a deformed child. And I think this same sense that it is better to know, to get all the facts out on the table, and then to think and judge and discern, is why I think it better not to shy away from a diagnosis, or even prenatal genetic testing. […]