Musings from the UK

As you may know if you follow my tweets, I’m still in the UK staying with my husband’s family. Last night on a history show we were watching, there was a reference to a Roman archaeological dig at the site of a suspected brothel;

Romans ‘killed babies at brothel’

Dozens of unwanted babies born during Roman times were murdered and buried on the site of a Roman brothel in Buckinghamshire, archaeologists suspect.

An extensive study of a mass burial at a Roman villa in the Thames Valley suggests that the 97 children all died at 40 weeks gestation, or very soon after birth.

The archaeologists believe that locals may have been killing and burying unwanted babies on the site in Hambleden, Buckinghamshire.

While it seems incredibly brutal to us that newborns would be killed as a form of ‘birth control’, historians claim early Romans believed that babies didn’t receive a soul until they were nearly a year old (a child attempting to speak was a sign that his soul had entered his body) and killing them was widely considered no more evil than slaughtering an animal. (Yes, some of the British history I’ve had over the last week or so has been pretty ick!)

But it did get me to thinking…with the near constant breakthroughs in the areas of understanding how animals think, act and feel, are our future selves going to look back at our time on earth and think it similarly ugly? Will everything we feel we know about animals now turn out to be a vast underestimation of their capacity to value their life, and that we are as a society are just unenlightened about their understanding and awareness?

If we equate ‘consciousness’ to some cognitive stage, then its very easy to see why Romans thought it ok to swiftly end the life of a newborn child through an opiate overdose (or worse). Yet few today would defend infanticide. Could our assumptions that animals don’t have ‘souls’ or their lives value, because our culture says they don’t, turn out to be an equally misinformed position?

While it’s unfair to use current knowledge and societal framework to condemn those in history who simply didn’t know better, imagine for one moment what it means if we’re living today, in a similar ignorant absolution. Are we the barbarians of tomorrow?