Pound Pup Legacy

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While pregnancy and childbirth represent events of great magnitude in the lives of all humans of all periods of history, they were of seminal importance to the Roman Imperial family.  The birth and survival of a suitable heir to the throne was vital.  In fact, one of the great weaknesses of the ancient Roman political system was the lack of clear guidelines for choosing a successor to the emperor in the absence of a designated heir to the throne.  It comes as no surprise that an event of such primary importance as the birth of an heir was commemorated by Roman coinage.

The absence of an heir often meant years of civil war, political assassination and turbulent times.  This is well illustrated by the four years of civil war which followed the death of Commodus by assassination the last night of December, 192 AD.  Only by making the false claim that he was the son of Marcus Aurelius did Septimius Severus at last mollify his opposition, ending the unrest and establishing the relative stability of the period of Severan rule.

Furthermore, up until only the last century, pregnancy and childbirth were fraught with difficulty.  Pregnancy carried a high risk of death or serious illness for both mother and child.  The Hippocratic Corpus contains seven books of physician’s case notes.  Of the dozens of women in its pages afflicted with illness during pregnancy or shortly after delivery, only a few survived their illnesses.^[1] Maternal and neonatal mortality plagued even those who could afford the highest quality medical care at the time.  Caesar's daughter Julia died in childbirth. The younger Pliny reports that both daughters of one of his friends, Helvidius, died during labor.^[2]  The Athenian philanthropist, Herodes Atticus, was grief-stricken when his first child, a baby boy, died shortly after birth.^[3]  The anxiety and grief of the aristocratic elite was surely felt also among the lower classes.  Even at the dawn of the twenty first century, the maternal death rate in some developing countries remains substantially above 10%, with infant mortality rates exceeding 50%.

Not only was maternal and neonatal mortality high in ancient Rome, but so was the rate of death in childhood.  Although by the standards of the ancient world, Roman sanitation and farming practices were the state of the art at the time, they were woefully inadequate by modern standards. The populace was at the mercy of both endemic diarrheal and febrile illnesses as well as number of epidemic pestilences that periodically swept through the Empire.  To give but one example, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, a series of plagues were brought to the Empire by veterans of Lucius’ eastern armies as they returned from campaigns against the Parthians.  The particular cause of the epidemics is unclear, but they raged throughout the Empire, especially the east, for the next twenty years.  The army and city dwellers were disproportionately affected, suggesting overcrowding was a factor, with direct person to person or respiratory means of transmission.  In Rome, it is estimated that as many as 2,000 people died per day at the peak of the epidemic.^[4]  Malnutrition from the ever-present threat of famine was a constant state of affairs for all but the wealthiest individuals.  Unfortunately adding to the misery inflicted by the natural processes of starvation and disease was intentionally inflicted trauma and violence as a result of warfare, slavery and abuse.  No one was spared the high pediatric death rate.  Of the fifteen children born by Faustina Junior to her husband, the emperor Marcus Aurelius, only six survived to adulthood.  This is despite the highest quality medical care available in the known world at the time:  the renowned Galen was their physician.^[5]  Studies of neonatal mortality in ancient Rome estimates that 28^[6]-32^[7]% of Roman babies who were born alive died by their first birthday.

What was labor and delivery like for the Roman parturient?  In the absence of any hospitals, all women delivered at home--either their own or that of a trusted relative or friend.  Those women in the Greco­Roman world who could afford to pay for it received their maternity care from midwives who employed traditional methods and medications of folk medicine.  With no anesthetics, effective analgesics or means of augmenting or inducing labor, it would have been a painful and protracted experience.  Although these folk remedies probably did little to make childbirth safer (and some practices may have been harmful), it does seem clear by analogy to the traditional midwifery techniques employed by midwives in developing countries today that their efforts to give emotional support to the patient must have had a positive effect.

There is very little in the historical record to reach any firm conclusions about the characteristics of those who practiced midwifery. They were uniformly women.  In the Hellenized East, they may have had a higher status than their counterparts in the Roman West.  Although some women of free birth went into midwifery as a profession, the bulk of them were probably of servile origin or the daughters of women of the lower classes.  A few of these “low born” women became obstetricians of some note.  For the wealthy elite, maternity care was potentially much better.  The corpus of medical literature certainly shows that some physicians and midwives employed enlightened techniques that at the very least were unlikely to harm either the mother or the baby.^[8]  One might suppose that the rates of maternal and infant mortality in the Greco-Roman world varied with the socio­economic class of the family and with the family's choice between traditional folk medicine and professional obstetrical care, but there is little objective data to support this conclusion.  Medical care was largely ineffectual, and whether for rich or poor, the rates of death were high for mother and child.

In response to the high infancy and childhood mortality rate, a variety of religious rituals developed to protect the pregnant mother and her offspring during labor and delivery and in the years to follow.  The aid of quite literally dozens of deities, major and minor, could be invoked.^[9] It is quite likely that the typical parturient and her midwife prayed for assistance from one or more of these goddesses.

The process of expansion of the Roman Empire necessitated a ready and increasing supply of soldiers and labor--a difficult feat given the high rate of death in childhood and its “two steps forward and one step back” effect. Given the high rate of infant and childhood death, it has been calculated that to even maintain a stable population in ancient Rome required a birth rate of over five children per mother, live-born.^[10] It was thus in the best interest of the Roman state to encourage fertility among its families.  One way to do this was through the creation of official deities and celebrations of fertility, the other was to advertise fertility on its coinage.  This paper will focus on that coinage.  A handful of reverse types relating to pregnancy and fertility grace the coins of the Roman empire.  These reverse types include Fecunditas, Juno Sospita, Juno Lucina, Venus Genetrix, Laetitia, the Dei Genitales, and a few miscellaneous types.  Uberitas refers to the personification of agricultural fertility, not to human childbirth, and will not be discussed here.