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By Barbara McAllister
Word of the Day: Genuine
Genuine means “true” or “authentic,” from the Latin root “gignere,” to give birth, beget or produce, referring to members of the same family or clan. The same root is found in “generate,” “genus” (a group of living things), “gentle” and “progeny” (descendants or offspring).
In ancient Rome, progeny were deemed genuine by the ancient custom of tollere liberum (from tollere, to raise, liberus, child), a tradition in which a man lifted a newly born infant in the air as a symbolic display of the child’s acceptance as a legitimate member of the household.
Historians wrote of Romans who commonly abandoned or exposed unwanted children to the elements and used infanticide as an accepted early method of population control before reliable contraception. It sounds harsh in today’s world, but ancient Romans did not consider children human until they could walk and talk. It’s a theme that is widespread in ancient myths: Oedipus and Paris were exposed in the mountains; Perseus was put in a box and thrown into the sea along with his mother; Romulus and Remus, the twin boys credited with the founding of Rome, were left in the wilds to die but were saved by a wolf before being taken in by a shepherd and his wife.
Modern scholars debate whether this ritual was more fiction than fact, although they acknowledge that infanticide was known to have been commonly used. There is written evidence to suggest there was a ceremony by which the father raised up the newborn child to acknowledge it as “genuine,” but no evidence to suggest this was any more than a ceremonial gesture and it did not actually confer any legal or paternal rights.
