The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World

Paula Fass, Paula S. Fass

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135121693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World provides an important overview of the main themes surrounding the history of childhood in the West from antiquity to the present day. By broadly incorporating the research in the field of Childhood Studies, the book explores the major advances that have taken place in the past few decades in this crucial field.

Part I

CHILDHOOD IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, THE MIDDLE AGES, AND EARLY MODERN EUROPE

1

IMAGES OF CHILDHOOD IN CLASSICAL ANTIQUITY

Keith Bradley

Introduction

Augustine’s spiritual autobiography, Confessions, composed at the turn of the fifth century AD, is a document of special significance to the social historian of antiquity because it contains specific recollections of its author’s childhood. Recording the history of his relationship with God in middle age, the Bishop of Hippo begins at the beginning, from the moment of his birth, and gives an account of his childhood years full of notable details. Infancy has to be re-imagined through later observations of the very young; but Augustine knew that he had been fed at the breast, by both mother and wet nurses, and that before he could speak, imitating and memorizing sounds made by his attendants, he had first learned to express himself by tears and smiles and gestures. He knew, too, of his fits of pique towards those who had cared for him, and the bursts of jealousy towards other infants who had nursed with him. His sensitivity to the early moments of life is strong.¹

Memory is keener once Augustine recalls the boyhood years of schooling, with teachers of elementary literacy and numeracy, and masters of literature and rhetoric. All were remembered for the ceaseless beatings they had given, against which prayers, and parents, were unavailing. Unruly and resistant to study, Augustine preferred to play with other boys, hated Greek but took to Latin more readily, and was attracted by a pagan mythology whose vanity he did not yet understand. He duly learned the great passages of Virgil by heart – the wooden horse, the fall of Troy, the shade of Creusa – and thrilled to the story of Dido and Aeneas. He also learned how to declaim, avoiding solecisms and mispronunciations (no aitches dropped), and excelled in his studies, with commendations and rewards offsetting the punishments. Yet as an adolescent, he engaged in more wayward behavior: petty thievery in the household, pursuit of vulgar entertainments, and roistering with companions, the culmination of which was a night-time raid on a nearby orchard and the theft of some pears from a pear-tree. Worse still were his frequent indulgences of rampant sexual desire: it was a matter of braggadocio to claim, and exaggerate, carnal conquests.

Augustine was born in the North African city of Thagaste in the middle of the fourth century AD into a landed family. His parents Patricius and Monica were not of the first order of wealth, but they were slave-owners and had nurses and childminders, both male and female, to care for him through infancy and boyhood. There was also money for his schooling, first at Thagaste and then, when he was fifteen or so, in Madauros and later still at Carthage, when he was about seventeen. His parents were ambitious for him, and he received the type of education available only to the privileged, opening up the prospect of a life of civic leadership. (Comprehensive public schooling was unknown in antiquity.) Patricius, a pagan for most of his life, died when Augustine was studying in Carthage; Monica, a devout Christian much younger than her husband, was a woman of great influence. She looked carefully to Augustine’s spiritual well-being, and, surprisingly, advised him in adolescence on his sexual comportment, a matter that might have been thought a father’s responsibility.²

My purpose in this chapter is to explore some of the principal characteristics of childhood in the societies of ancient Greece and Rome, broadly defined and as I understand them; but I have begun with Augustine in the late classical world for several reasons. Augustine’s account illustrates clearly how childhood was thought of in antiquity as a distinguishable phase of life that was divisible into stages – infancy, boyhood, and adolescence – and it communicates the idea that through its course, what at first was a completely formless entity, as though a piece of earth, was to be gradually shaped and molded into an adult fit to function in civic society in ways determined by those responsible for a child’s upbringing. Childhood is conceptualized in purely passive terms. The account also gives evidence of the truism that it is through the eyes of adults that children in the classical world can usually be seen, which means that there are limits to what can be said about them. Any hope of understanding childhood from the vantage point of children themselves, and any possibility of uncovering a capacity children may have had to shape their own lives actively, is by definition foreclosed. It is rare, moreover, to find even personal reminiscences of childhood: Augustine’s account is exceptional in this respect. For the most part, children in antiquity are known only from adults who left records of others.

Augustine’s account also draws attention to the factors that must guide discussion. The experience of childhood in Greco-Roman antiquity is unlikely to have been the same for all children. An enormous expanse of time is involved, a millennium and more, a vast range of territory, and often great disparities in social standing among the children and their families at issue, whose societies were arranged in steep hierarchies quite alien to modern liberal democracies, including those in which vestiges of class structure still remain. All, crucially, were slave-owning societies, and although Augustine was as aware as anyone of the fundamental divide between free and slave, it was not important to him to speak in any detail of slaves’ experiences; and in this his evidence is typical of most of the evidence that remains from antiquity. Its bias is towards the prosperous and successful, which makes it difficult ever to comprehend society in the round. A tendency to imagine that life was less harsh for the majority than I believe it to have been can result. Nevertheless, time, place, status, economic resources, gender, cultural specificity, religious identity – these are the criteria that must control any assessment. Whether a history of childhood in Greco-Roman antiquity is possible is a question to which I will return. Attention falls meantime on a collage of images, predominantly from the Roman Imperial Age with retrospective glances at earlier periods as appropriate. Augustine can be kept in mind as a guide throughout.

Formation

The stages of childhood that Augustine distinguished were widely recognized by Greeks and Romans. They were sometimes further subdivided, with childhood and adolescence split into earlier and later portions, but infancy lasted until approximately age five, boyhood until eleven or twelve, and adolescence until seventeen or eighteen. Terminology sometimes varied: the philosopher Seneca (first century AD) would sometimes use “puberty” for “adolescence.”³ But standardized ages, including ages of majority, were not the norm.

The idea that the child was in essence a malleable being also had a long history. It was the premise on which Plato based his educational regimen 800 years before Augustine, and it is the assumption that underlies the Platonist philosopher Celsus’s complaint that children in his day (second century AD) were the victims of Christian proselytes.⁴ It is especially evident in three works from the late first century AD. They concern elite children only, and mainly boys – Greco-Roman societies were patriarchal in character; this has to be accepted for what it is – and may be taken to represent ideals of upbringing and education among upper-class families in the Roman Imperial Age, both in the Latin west and the Greek east. Their common perspective confirms that ideals changed little over time.

Quintilian’s Oratorical Institute is a comprehensive educational treatise that prescribes the curriculum to be followed by the upper-class Roman boy from infancy until he emerges as an orator well-trained in moral sensibility and academically equipped to participate in civic affairs: in the phrase of the elder Cato, “a good man skilled in speaking.”⁵ Following a tradition illustrated again by Plato, Quintilian was concerned with the formation of character as much as of the mind, with ideals of deference, obedience, and modesty uppermost in his thinking. The treatise is a testament to Quintilian’s experience as an instructor of rhetoric at Rome, which included service as tutor to the grand-nephews of the Emperor Domitian. He was an astute observer of children and of their behavior. The second work is an anonymous document called On the Education of Children, which has survived among the moral essays of Plutarch (first century AD). While much shorter, its aim likewise is to give instruction on how the well-to-do boy is to be turned into a civic leader through literary and rhetorical learning and the inculcation of moral excellence. The acquisition of what Greeks called paideia and Romans doctrina was considered the key to all success in life.

Both works assume that the primary obligation for supervising the boy’s upbringing falls on his father. Any concept of joint parental responsibility is minimal. All household decisions are those of the male head (in Latin, the paterfamilias; in Greek, the kyrios). They also assume that the child will be born into a household community where servile dependants, female nurses, and male chaperons (pedagogues) carry out the practical tasks of child-care and provide instruction in the first years. The servants are to be carefully selected, with several nurses needed in case of illness or death. Quintilian indicates that once the boy is out of the nursery he should proceed to the schools of public teachers, that of the teacher of literature (grammaticus) at the age of seven or so, and that of the rhetor at puberty, when about fourteen.⁶ For both authors, however, the child is an inherently impressionable being – this is the key point – who is to be constantly shaped to a desired end with appropriate incentives towards, and rewards for, good behavior. He is also to be punished if recalcitrant or lazy, although both authors object to corporal punishment, which they regard as demeaning and suitable only for slaves.⁷ In contrast, despite his own childhood experiences, which were probably far more representative, Augustine thought when he wrote the City of God that corporal punishment was not only uncontroversial but also ordained by Scripture.⁸ Special attention must be given to safeguarding the boy from male sexual predators. To the Greek author, male courtship of a boy of a traditional Greek kind is permissible if the intent, as in Athens and Sparta, is the pursuit of virtue, but not, as he suggests it was in other Greek city-states, for erotic purposes alone.⁹ To Quintilian, obsessed with fears of effeminacy, male attentiveness is never acceptable. The Roman orator must be a real man.¹⁰

For the earliest stages of life, details accrue from the third item, the Gynecology of Soranus, a book on women’s medical issues by a Greek doctor who practiced in Rome. The details are all again predicated on the assumption that strictly regulated formation of the infant, now girls as well as boys, is necessary. Here too the nurse is a significant figure. She is again to be carefully chosen because a connection is made between the quality of the care given to the nursling and the child’s well-being. It was thought for example that a nurse who drank made her nursling ill.¹¹ Her duties are elaborately itemized – feeding, bathing, massaging, and swaddling the child – suggesting that she spent a great amount of time each day with her charge, and that her influence was consequently great. In due course, she was to help the infant to learn to sit up and walk, and, through play and storytelling, become the child’s first teacher. It was best, therefore, even in Rome, for the nurse to be a Greek woman.¹² In a highly speech-conscious world, the way the child began to say words was not a trifling matter. The Emperor Hadrian was reproached for betraying his Spanish origins with a provincial accent.¹³

The ethic that prevails in these works is one of conservative conformism, and unless within controlled limits, no allowance is made for fostering individuality or independence of mind. This is especially true of Quintilian, whose educational curriculum is based on a canon of great Greek and Latin books, beginning with the Iliad and Odyssey, which must never change. The writings are prescriptive, but they must reflect something of the reality of elite children’s lives in the Roman Imperial Age. Boys and girls could expect to be surrounded from their earliest moments by a cluster of adults who looked to their material needs and nurtured their development, with parents and servants skilled, ideally, in providing child-care, who together formed a household community in which children first began to learn. In time boys could expect formal schooling, as fathers engaged teachers for them, and sometimes they traveled to major cities such as Milan or Rome for the purpose, as circumstances required or warranted.¹⁴ A regimen of literary learning and speech-making was then the norm, with much of the pupils’ time devoted to memorizing and reciting passages from great books; and as they exploited what they had learned in rhetorical performance, they gradua...