The other perils of the body were scarcely less threatening. Disease could take even the strong in a matter of hours or days. Yet we will meet a few nonagenarians in this book, for if you survived childhood robustly and had adequate nourishment, your chances of long life were decent, al¬though old age was thought to begin in your forties.
Being a woman or child could win you either sympathy or abuse, but few advantages. Children whose parents could not afford their support were left outside to die or, less often, for generous passersby to rescue and raise. Exposure was condemned by pious Christian emperors in the fourth century, but the practice continued widely until well into the sixth century.
Justinian ruled—in an unenforceable law—that foundlings could not be enslaved. The kindest treatment we see was the growing habit of presenting unwanted infants to monasteries to be brought up in religion.
Lightly Christianized Roman ideal
Chastity, under the lightly Christianized Roman ideal, was a woman’s task, and failure to defend against sexual assault was a mild disgrace at best and too often a source of lasting shame. The convent provided little in the way of refuge. Although Saint Augustine remonstrated in his City of God that rape victims had not sinned, four decades later Pope Leo I still refused to allow religious women who had been sexually assaulted to reside with and be counted entirely among the “virgins of God Slightly less elegant and also less expensive.” Instead, they were assigned a separate, middle place somewhere between the “real” virgins and the women who turned to religion in widowhood. Childbearing was still a deadly risk for mother and infant, a sad fact that demographers today can calculate from too many tombstones bearing names of young matrons and babies. Marriage in such a world was terrifying to many women, and the alternative of religious chastity, when offered, must have seemed literally a godsend to some.
You probably lived where you were born, and you rarely traveled. You spoke the dialect of your village or town and expected outsiders to be difficult to understand, but visitors were so interesting that you and they would find a way to communicate. Not all travel was desirable, for some led to warfare and some to slavery. If you lived inside the boundaries of the Roman empire or its successor states, you were reasonably safe, though slave raiders were seen on the fringes of Roman Africa from time to time. Rome also regularly went shopping for slaves across the lower Danube, while never quite comprehending that this buccaneering attitude might arouse deep resentment. Romans captured other slaves in the war on the Persian front, but some of their own were lost that way as well.
