The real reason why the Romans were obsessed with having children

A child was a treasure for a wealthy family, and the Roman's knew this. They didn't have a lot of options for taking care of their children, and children were expensive to raise. So why would a wealthy Roman couple have a child when they didn't have to? Why would they go through the trouble of raising a child when they could just buy a slave instead? The answer to this is a lot more interesting than we would expect, and it has to do with the ancient Roman law.<br><br>The Roman law said that any children that a man had naturally were considered to be his. But if a man bought a child from another family and adopted it as his own, then the child would be owned by that family. The Roman's called this "natural children" and "adopted children". Natural children would receive a portion of the man's inheritance when he died. Adopted children would receive a portion of the estate of their owner, not the man who adopted them.<br><br>This raises a big problem. The Romans had no way of knowing if a child that was being sold to them was actually their natural child or not. If a child was adopted into a family, the family could tell the child to do certain things that would prove to them whether the child was their natural child or not. If the child could do it, then he was their natural child. If he couldn't, then he was adopted. For example, let's say that a father told his child to play the lyre. The child starts playing the lyre, and then he starts to play it poorly. He hits the strings with a mallet, he plucks them with his fingers, and he uses his teeth to get different sounds. The father tells him to stop, and he says that the child is adopted.<br><br>Now that you have a better understanding of the Roman law, let's go into how the Roman's were obsessed with having children. You see, they wanted their children to be able to do things like the man in the example above. They wanted their children to be able to play the lyre, to sing, to dance, and so on. They wanted their children to be able to do all the things that a child should do, and they wanted them to be able to do them well. They wanted their children to be able to do things like the Roman soldiers, like the Roman gladiators, and so on.<br><br>They wanted their children to be able to do things that would make them proud of them. They wanted their children to be able to do things that would make them happy. They wanted their children to be able to do things that would make them feel good. But they didn't want their children to be able to do things like the Roman slaves. They didn't want their children to be able to do things that would make them look stupid, or foolish, or weak. They didn't want their children to be able to do things that would make them look like they were inferior to their owner. They didn't want their children to be able to do things that would make them look like they were slaves.