Monday, October 04, 2004
Paternity
In the days before blood and DNA tests for paternity, a child who obviously resembled his father was prized:
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- Hesiod, Works and Days 235 (when justice flourishes): Women bear children resembling their fathers.
- Theophrastus, Characters 5 (The Complaisant Man, tr. R.C. Jebb): Then, when he is asked to dinner, he will request the host to send for the children; and will say of them, as they come in, that they are as like their father as figs.
- Catullus 61.221-225: May he look like his father Manlius and be easily recognized by all who don't know him and prove with his face his mother's virtue (sit suo similis patri / Manlio et facile insciis / noscitetur ab omnibus / et pudicitiam suae / matris indicet ore).
- Horace, Odes 4.5.23: Mothers who have just given birth are praised for children resembling [their fathers] (laudantur simili prole puerperae).
- Dio Cassius 56.3 (supposedly from a speech delivered by the Emperor Augustus, tr. Ian Scott-Kilvert): Is it not a joy to acknowledge a child who possesses the qualities of both parents, to tend and educate a being who is both the physical and spiritual image of yourself, so that, as it grows up, another self is created?
- Martial 6.27.3-4: You have a daughter who is marked with paternal resemblance of face, witness of her mother's virtue (est tibi, quae patria signatur imagine vultus, / testis maternae nata pudicitiae).
- G. Kaibel, Epigrammata Graeca 243b (an inscription from Pergamum, 2nd century A.D.), line 5: You bore me children, all resembling me.
- Buecheler and Lommatzsch, Carmina Latina Epigraphica 387, lines 9-10 (restoration conjectural): I have three sons, resembling their father, born from one wife (nam patri similes uno de coniuge nati / tres sunt).
- Aeschines, Against Ctesiphon 111 (quoting an Amphictyonic oath): And may their wives not bear children resembling the fathers, but freaks.
- Theocritus 17.43-44 (tr. C.S. Calverley): She that loves not bears sons, but all unlike / Their father: for her heart was otherwhere.
- Martial 6.39 describes in great detail the seven "children" of husband Cinna and wife Marulla, none of whom looks like the supposed father.
- Lucilius, Greek Anthology 11.215 (tr. W.R. Paton): Eutychus the painter was the father of twenty sons, but never got a likeness even among his children.
