Supposititious children

Supposititious children are fraudulent offspring. These arose when an heir was required and so a suitable baby might be procured and passed off as genuine. This practice seemed to be a common occurrence in Ancient Rome was used to claim birthright status to a Roman father's wealth and prestige, as rules were instituted to ensure that the children claimed by the wife were the legitimate children of the husband, or ex-husband, in some cases

This was a common concern in the classical period as there were dealers in supposititious children who would provide them for a fee. Laws were passed to counter this and those found to be illegitimate might be sold into slavery.

While Roman wives could own property of their own via the dowry system or inheritance, women had no legal standing to participate in public or political life. The upper class of Roman citizen was the patrician, and the right to participate in the Roman republic at the highest level was passed down from father to son, making paternity in the upper classes a state matter. Because of this, wealthy Roman families often employed a number of midwives to ensure that no sleight-of-hand occurred during the birthing period, and for a set period of time immediately after the woman gave birth. Because a Roman woman could file for a divorce after the edict of Julian and a man could do so much earlier, a divorced woman or a widow had to announce her pregnancy and allow observers if she was to claim the child as an heir of her previous husband.

Supposititious children were a concern in Western Society for thousands of years, being different than illegitimate children, as illegitimate children were designated by their paternity, as supposititious children were never the offspring of the father. This is because these societies were almost uniformly patrilineal societies, and the blood link to the father had to be established in order for the child to lay claim to the inheritance, or at the very least, the paternity could not be in doubt. This fear led to the coining of the term cuckold, borrowing the name of a bird notorious for tricking other birds into raising its chicks as their own.

Supposititious children appear in myths and legends across many Western countries. In some medieval European countries, fairies were believed to sometimes swap out human children with fairy children so that the human parents unsuspectingly raise the fairy child as their own. In these legends, there must be a legitimate child present for the fairies to work their tricks on the human parents. These legends played upon the fear medieval men had concerning raising offspring that may not be their own. This was particularly a problem among the upper classes, as older men would marry younger women more frequently in the upper classes.

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