2025-05-22
8 分钟The Economist. Hi, John Priddo here.
I host Checks and Balance, our weekly US politics podcast.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
You're about to hear an article from the latest edition of The Economist.
I hope you enjoy it.
Our forefathers had some odd ideas about fatherhood.
In ancient Athens, a baby was not legally a person until its father said it was.
At a ceremony called the Amphidromia,
the patriarch would hold up the newborn for inspection and either welcome it into his household or abandon it on a hillside to face near certain death.
Typical reasons
for rejecting an infant included deformity or the mere fact that it was a girl.
All this may sound horrible today, but some of it had a harsh underlying logic.
For most of history a man had no reliable way to tell whether he was the biological father of a child,
and in a world where nearly everyone was poor,
most were reluctant to risk wasting bread on another man's offspring.
Many therefore asserted oppressive control over female fertility,
forbidding their wives and daughters to mingle with other men,
and in the Athenian case claiming the right to kill any child they did not wish to acknowledge.
Men have long shaped the law to their advantage.
Fully a third of the rules in the four-thousand-year-old code of Hammurabi,