Book 3
16
BOTH physicians and philosophers of distinction have investigated the duration of the period of gestation in man. The general opinion, now accepted as correct, is that after the womb of a woman has conceived the seed, the child is born rarely in the seventh month, never in the eighth, often in the ninth, more often in the tenth in number; and that the end of the tenth month, not its beginning, is the extreme limit of human gestation. And this we find the ancient poet Plautus saying in his comedy the Cistellaria, in these words: 162. And then the girl whom he did violate Brought forth a daughter when ten months had sped. That same thing is stated by Menander also, a still older poet and exceedingly well informed as to current opinion; I quote his words on that subject from the play called Plocium or The Necklace: Fr. 413, Kock. The woman is ten months with child . . . But although our countryman Caecilius wrote a play with the same name and of the same plot, and borrowed extensively from Menander, yet in naming the months of delivery he did not omit the eighth, which Menander had passed by. These are the lines from Caecilius: 164, Ribbeck3. And may a child in the tenth month be born?— By Pollux! in the ninth, and seventh, and eighth. Marcus Varro leads us to believe that Caecilius did not make this statement thoughtlessly or differ without reason from Menander and from the opinions of many men. For in the fourteenth book of his Divine Antiquities he has left the statement on record that parturition sometimes takes place in the eighth month. Fr. 12, Agahd. In this book he also says that sometimes a child may be born even in the eleventh month, and he cites Aristotle Hist. Anim. vii. 4. as authority for his statement in regard both to the eighth and the eleventh month. Now, the reason for this disagreement as to the eighth month may be found in Hippocrates' work entitled Peri\ Trofh=s, or On Nurture, from which these words are taken ii. p. 23, Kühn; vol. 1, p. 356, xlii, L.C.L. The text is not the same as that of Gellius, but the meaning is practically the same. Eighth-month's children exist and do not exist. This statement, so obscure, abrupt, and apparently contradictory, is thus explained by the physician Sabinus, who wrote a very helpful commentary on Hippocrates: They exist, since they appear to live after the miscarriage; but they do not exist, since they die afterwards; they exist and do not exist therefore, since they live for the moment in appearance, but not in reality.
