An inescapable tenet of the Roman society was the supreme power of the pater familias, including the power of life and death over his children. Where infants were concerned, a father could exercise this power through exposure or infanticide. It is agreed among most scholars that each of these practices was widespread although it is impossible to know to what extent social practice followed legal right . Furthermore, ancient authors disagreed on the practices. The Jewish writers Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus each opposed to exposure and infanticide, and the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus notes that Jews tended to raise all their young (Hist 5.5). In general, the power a father exercised over his children by virtue of patria potestas was accepted as an absolute legal right and remained relatively unchallenged until the Christian era, when emperors began legislating to restrict both exposure and infanticide. These laws culminated with unconditional ban on infanticide issued by the Western emperor Valentinian I (364-375) in 374 (JC 8.52.2).

In this thesis, I shall look at the hitherto negelected Christian concerns with terminating "the power of life and death ("vitae et necis potestas) against the Christian morality. Several previous scholars have noted in passing that the prohibition of exposure and infanticide was consistent with the Christian empire's increasing restriction on the exercise of patria potestas. At the same time, Christian writers condemned exposure and infanticide as a way of restricting illicit sex[. But as yet no one has elucidated how the Christian writers tended to emphasize the accountability of the mother (as well as the father) in this matter, thereby placing much more responsibility on the mother than had been accorded to her under classical Roman law. This accountability of the mother applied both to the well-being of the infant and also to the procreative act itself. Hence, such notable church fathers as St. Basil of Caesarea and St. Ambrose stressed the mother's responsibility for her children, and each severely criticized mothers who chose to abandon their young. St. Augustine even went so far as to propose that a wife send her husband to a prostitute if he wished to engage in non-procreative acts, thereby suggesting that some of the responsibility for moral, procreative sex lay with the mother. What these changes in patristic literature marked, then, was not only a changing attitudes toward sexuality, but also a new position on women at odds with that in classical Roman law. This thesis will trace the development of this attitude toward mothers and sexuality in the early Christian writers, and explain how this change in attitude influenced social legislation of Late Antiquity,. The changes of the laws restricting the rights of a father over the lives of his children, in turn, were part of the wider story of how Roman legal precepts were accommodated to the ethical and moral concerns of a Christian society.