I get constant attempts to salvage something, some desperate crumb of Western moral decency or innovation, that can be credited to Christianity. They always end up mythical, or too trivial to impress. As I explain in No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West (and the many articles linked to from there), every single thing you might have heard the Christians gave us, they didn’t. Everything was invented by pagans before them. That includes science, education, democracy, charity, and morality. Upon hearing this, desperation kicks in. Christians cannot bear the possibility that Western values don’t come from the Bible (in fact most are shat upon in the Bible, or astonishingly neglected altogether). So they try really hard to find something. Something.

“Aha! Christians invented polyphonic music!” No. They did not. Even insofar as we define “polyphonic” so hyper-minutely as to make this claim true, the claim is then thoroughly unimpressive. Rather like claiming Christians invented plastic guitar picks. “So much better than bone!” In fact multiple instruments producing a harmony of sounds each playing their own sequence predates Christianity and isn’t uniquely Western. We have artwork from Rome depicting small orchestras (including the organ, which was playable by two hands simultaneously, and thus not monophonic; likewise the harp); Roman and Greek art depicts various combinations of horns, strings, and percussion (even multiple different wind, string, and percussion instruments playing together). So, no. Sorry. “But what about some more hyper-specific musical thing only Christians did, like contrapuntal music?” Every culture has some unique musical thing they do. That doesn’t make Christianity special. Nor, obviously, is there anything in the Bible or Christian ideology that is responsible for that innovation anyway.

You might think this is pretty pathetic. When they are scraping the bottom of the “the Bible gave us orchestras” barrel, they’ve kind of conceded the point already. They already lost the hospitals argument. Everything we mean by a hospital today was invented by the pagan Romans. Yes, they limited who had access to them; but so did the medieval Christians: most Christian healthcare was of the hospice variety. Just like most pagan healthcare. There is no functional difference between a Temple to Asclepius (or Serapis or any of a dozen other gods of healing) and any hospice property of a Church—just another temple to yet another god. The ancients even subsidized the poor’s access to scientific healthcare, with public salaries for physicians and means-adjusted fees. But at least trying to steal the pagans’ glory over hospitals makes more sense than trying to rob them of their musical innovations.

A different tack is to claim some form of moral superiority, like “Christians got rid of gladiatorial contests,” but since they replaced those with horrific and abundant public executions, sorry, that’s a wash.

And so on.

So I was not surprised to be posed with yet another desperate attempt at this kind of argument: “What about orphans!?” The claim is usually that Christians invented orphanages; and that, therefore, before that, unwanted kids were just left to starve. I knew the actual score on exposure of infants (more on that shortly), but I actually hadn’t run into the question of “orphans” before. Sure, after a dozen of these kinds of arguments, I was skeptical. But hey, you know, maybe? Since checking things like this is literally what my PhD trained me for, I deep-dived the subject to find out.

The Problem with Orphanages

It is true that Christians invented the orphanage. But this is not something to be proud of. The resort to (much less need of) orphanages actually represents a failure-mode of the social system, not a value addition—even apart from the fact that, as we well know, orphanages tended to become horror houses of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse, or even workhouses little different from the actual slave shops that preceded them. The worst thing you can do with unwanted children is stuff them into hives tended by unchecked overseers. But to understand this, you have to understand what preceded the concept—and what modern society is trying to get back to, now recognizing that orphanages have always been the worst idea, not a good one.

First, babies.

Set aside the question of abortion. Yes, surgical abortion, even chemical birth control, existed in antiquity, and pagans waffled a lot on whether to legalize it, but Christians outlawing it was not a boon but a net bane to society, as we well know (it was also contrary to the Bible).

So let’s stick with babies. Contrary to lore, the ancients did not just chuck unwanted infants into the wilderness to starve. While “exposure” as this was called was legal until Christians got sterner about it (though even then Christians waffled a lot on whether or how severely to even enforce such laws), it wasn’t that commonly practiced in fact, and was always morally condemned. Indeed, almost all the pagan texts we have telling us about the practice are attacking or criticizing it, not endorsing it (or else are excluding it from being justified: see, for example, Three Representative Examples of Roman Attitudes Toward Infanticide). It was no different under Medieval Christianity, where plenty of babies surely got abandoned or smothered, for want of food or means to raise them, all while moral authorities went on condemning this from the pulpit, and futilely trying to police it with paltry legal resources or even will. What a society’s morality was does not always describe that society’s behavior. And that disconnect was no doubt the same before as after Christianity took the reigns.

But more importantly, that’s not where most orphans came from.

A third of all babies—and mounting up to 60% of all children before their second year (and 80% by the age of 15)—died naturally. Christians made no impact on this statistic. Only modern scientific medicine and socialist civil engineering ever changed it. For the rest, wherever they had the means and political will, pagans instituted charities to keep up the income of the poor so they could raise children. The famed Imperial Alimenta was not the only one. For example, William Byrnes (“Ancient Roman Munificence: The Development of the Practice and Law of Charity,” Rutgers Law Review 57.3 (2004-2005), pp. 1043–1110) discusses a second-century inscription praising Menodora Megakleous, from a town in what is now Turkey. As a priestess of Augustus, she donated over her lifetime “300,000 drachmas to aid orphans and children,” the equivalent of between twenty-four and fifty-eight million American dollars today (if we match dollars to minimum wages across regimes). This entails many more private charitable ventures of like direction will have existed, as only the minutest fraction of records like this will have survived. Yet we have many other examples (Lewis & Reinhold, Roman Civilization, vol. 2, pp. 255–59).

Over half of all kids died anyway. But given that the average life expectancy for parents was around 48, it wasn’t uncommon for kids of all ages to suddenly find themselves without a parent. This was especially the case for war orphans, whose fathers were killed on the battlefield (and whose mothers were lost to other causes), or parents slain in whatever looting operation. This may have been the most common category of orphan across ancient society. Next after that would be kids orphaned by famine, plague, fire, flood, or other disaster. And then all the kids orphaned by Acts of God upon their parents far more common and pernicious: the ordinary ailments and accidents of life now dubbed “dying of natural causes” (or by crime or misadventure, wherever any blame may be).

Needless to say, most actual orphans, being older than infants, were placed with families (as often also were infants—the ancient wetnurse trade existed in part for this reason, although for other reasons as well). Orphans could thus be fostered or even legally adopted. Already, ancient households often operated on an extended family model, so entire families, not just a specific mother and father, cared for kids, making orphans in the sense of “unhoused children” even harder to come by. The redundancies of ancient society thus buffered many losses. But even when this didn’t exist as a safety net, in many societies (from Athens to Rome) there were actual magistrates charged with the duty of placing abandoned children with families. For example, we have inscriptions attesting to the office of orphanistai (and other like terms)—plural, indicating several magistrates, per city, tasked with seeing to the welfare of orphans—as far away as Hellenistic Crimea across the Black Sea (see Vladimir Stolba, “Two Hellenistic Defixiones from West Crimea,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 56 (2016), pp. 263–92). Roman law assigned the same role to various magistrates, such as praetors and their deputies (and by the time of Marcus Aurelius, a specific magistracy was created for the purpose: the praetor tutelarius). This was, basically, the primary ancient solution for orphans: give them a family. Which was a far better outcome than being imprisoned in an inhuman workhouse or abuse-farm called an orphanage.

Indeed in some places, like Athens, war orphans were also given a pension by the state; and Roman-era alimenta, which applied to all children (or those covered by a private endowment, such as the children of a particular town), may have operated similarly, with orphans receiving their per-child pension directly, or through foster parents as a profiting proxy. This was certainly the case in pagan Crete (see Anna Strataridaki, “Orphans at Cretan Syssitia,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 49.3 (2009), pp. 335–42). Similar arrangements no doubt existed in other cities and cultures; we just can’t tell because most records are lost, particularly as discussed marginalized groups. But since any parents could expect eighty percent of their own kids to die of natural causes—and kids were a vital resource in rural and even urban economies (an asset rather than a liability)—many families would be eager to receive fosters even without a proxied pension. “Hey, you just lost your kid to cholera; here’s a replacement” made orphancy, essentially, a self-solving problem.

Something similar could happen in the rarer and more specific case of exposed infants—truly abandoned babies, where there was no family to take them, or you had to hide them for fear of laws against illicit sex, always punishing the woman and rarely the man (an example of false-moral laws causing real-moral problems). In these cases it was more or less an open secret where to leave such infants—for slavers to reave them. This was the ancient world’s secondary solution. Hence the fate of abandoned infants was probably far more often slavery than death, being raised by slave families for future training and sale.

That was morally barbaric—just as much as pre-modern war’s propensity for putting civilian populations to the sword in the first place, or punishing women for having sex, or torture, and all the other horrors Christians continued without any shame—like, ahem, slavery. But it is difficult to measure how workhouse orphanages were an improvement (or even monasteries, church schools, or any other place orphans could get stuffed into). Just because you didn’t get assigned the label “slave” did not mean your fate was going to be measurably different. Medieval serfdom, or indeed even monkery, was slavery in all but name anyway; and wage-slavery was hardly much better. All children were put to work. Many were used as servants. And sexual abuse in orphanages (or abandonment to prostitution once finishing tenure) was also as much a danger as any slave faced (we know even today how vulnerable children could get treated in Christian institutions). Sex slavery was, after all, replaced by Christians with illicit sex “wage slavery,” rather than the sexual labor market being treated with the same humanitarian respect as any other. But even orphans who made it into some other occupation, like housemaid, were effectively free for the abusing as well. So, what improved?

It’s also not true, despite often being claimed, that there was any great disparity between the numbers of adult women and men in antiquity, a claim often made to bolster the conclusion that female infants were being killed in vast numbers. The actual data do not support this, particularly but not only when accounting for the slave market. There just isn’t reliable evidence to support any great disparity, and what little there was could easily have been for more pathetic reasons: boys would be fed and treated better growing up, resulting in more girls dying in childhood from such “natural” causes as disease, while teenaged girls would get disproportionately killed by childbirth (the most common acceptable age of marriage and thus first legitimate pregnancy was between the ages of 14 to 16—a fact Christians did not change—and maternal mortality rates before modern medicine were high). Sexism kills. And that hasn’t really changed much. Particularly in backwards countries more similar to pre-modern eras.

But on top of all that, orphanages were rare anyway. Most Christian care for orphans simply replicated the ancient pagan model. And where there were orphanages, we can imagine that at first—until they became overwhelmed and turned into workhouses to get the destitute out of sight—they might have been kept as show-pieces, a form of conspicuous consumption demonstrating the capitalist tycoons of the region were so very magnanimous that the poor shouldn’t be complaining about their low wages, desperate conditions, and abusive treatment. Much like Christian claims of charity today: materially insignificant relative to the actual need, and thus essentially just empty virtue signaling; like the way Hamas runs the occasional charity to pretend it’s not evil.

And finally: there were few child labor laws in antiquity (or, for that matter, the Christian Middle Ages). Orphans often just…took care of themselves. Regardless of whether they were orphaned or not, until shockingly recently, in all Christian eras, “virtually all urban children worked in some capacity as soon as they were physically able,” which meant about 7 or 8 years old; and in the case of orphans, if their deceased parents left anything to them (that wasn’t stolen by predatory guardians), they earned a keep from that as well (David Nicholas, “Child and Adolescent Labour in the Late Medieval City,” The English Historical Review 110.439 (November 1995), pp. 1103-1131; see also Mary Lewis, “Work and the Adolescent in Medieval England ad 900–1550: The Osteological Evidence,” Medieval Archaeology 60.1 (2016), pp. 138-171).

The ancient evidence matches the same observation. For example, one of the jobs of ancient orphanistai was assigning guardians to manage the estates orphans inherited; and work was always available to anyone who could do it, regardless of age. Indeed teens, in both eras, could support themselves as apprentices to any master of a trade. And all the same was the case, ancient and Medieval, for rural children.

Conclusion

We can criticize almost every aspect of these societies in respect to the fate of orphans within them. But one thing we can’t do is claim any functional difference between these societies. The ways Christian societies dealt with orphans were, at best, functionally identical to how pagan societies did, and at worst, worse, owing to the fact that hoarding them into orphanages, a uniquely Christian idea, is never an improvement in the fate of orphans, but really a failure to do right by them. The closest match we can find in antiquity would be the slavery workhouses that most truly-abandoned infants would get sorted into. And there isn’t any good evidence to conclude that was all that much worse. And regardless, the evidence of a charitable and even government concern for the welfare of orphans long predates Christianity. It was already a staple of pagan morality and law.

If you want to read up on the corresponding history of orphans, these are the best starting points:

Another source I learned of after composing this article, which addresses the abuse problem regarding orphans raised in monasteries with some frankness and evidence, is Caroline Schroeder’s Children and Family in Late Antique Egyptian Monasticism (Cambridge University Press, 2022).

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