FATHERHOOD was elemental to the ancient Mediterranean peoples. To the Romans, paternal piety, judgment and self-sacrifice were the ground upon which civilization was formed. This famous 16th century painting by Federico Barrocci of Virgil’s Aeneas fleeing a burning Troy with his father, Anchises, on his back and his son and wife at his side depicts a mental outlook that was deeply familiar to the Roman nobility. The idea of father’s being so indifferent to his lineage that he would hand over his sperm to a technician in a lab, and just walk away, would have been not just technologically foreign to Romans, but barbaric and spiritually alien. Virgil would have considered us primitives.

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