they became the property of anyone who cared to pick them up. They were collected at night by people who looked after them in order to sell them as slaves or to stock the brothels of Rome. (3) Ancient civilization was merciless to the sickly or deformed child. Seneca writes: ‘We slaughter a fierce ox; we strangle a mad dog; we plunge the knife into sickly cattle lest they taint the herd; children who are born weakly and deformed we drown.’ Children who were weak or imperfectly formed had little hope