Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World

Christian Laes, Ville Vuolanto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317175506
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World explores what it meant to be a child in the Roman world - what were children's concerns, interests and beliefs - and whether we can find traces of children's own cultures. By combining different theoretical approaches and source materials, the contributors explore the environments in which children lived, their experience of everyday life, and what the limits were for their agency. The volume brings together scholars of archaeology and material culture, classicists, ancient historians, theologians, and scholars of early Christianity and Judaism, all of whom have long been involved in the study of the social and cultural history of children.

The topics discussed include children's living environments; clothing; childhood care; social relations; leisure and play; health and disability; upbringing and schooling; and children's experiences of death. While the main focus of the volume is on Late Antiquity its coverage begins with the early Roman Empire, and extends to the early ninth century CE. The result is the first book-length scrutiny of the agency and experience of pre-modern children.

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A new paradigm for the social history of childhood and children in Antiquity

Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto

Hearing the tiny voices – Nil novi sub sole?

His early years were in a way quite close to the ancient childhood experience. Giovanni Pascoli was born in 1855, in a village which was then called San Mauro di Romagna. He was the fourth child of a family of ten children, two of whom died in infancy. At the age of 12, he lost his father. In the next three years, his mother, one sister and one brother would follow. The oldest brother took over the role of parent for the family of six young people who had to survive in difficult financial and emotional conditions. But in 1876, the dire typhus disease struck him. Giovanni would survive only thanks to the financial help of an uncle, who now acted as a tutor for the family.

Pascoli’s childhood and youth experience undoubtedly influenced his Italian and Latin poetry, which made him one of the most famous writers of his time.¹ In his Il fanciullino (1897), he considers children and childhood as eternal symbols of the unspoiled naturalness of the human condition. Throughout the ages, childhood has been an ontological category of human existence, and this makes it perfectly possible to be in contact with children from the past. When the sarcophagus of a Roman girl named Crepereia Tryphaena was found with her jewels and toys at Prati di Castello in 1889, it inspired Pascoli to write a Latin poem invoking her condition of lost youth.² Nowhere in Latin poetry are the tiny voices of children better and more touchingly heard than in Pascoli’s Poemata Christiana.³ Witness his Thallusa (1911), in which we hear a wet-nurse lamenting the loss of her own baby, whom she had never held in her arms – the concerns of the master’s child prevailed. Pomponia Graecina (1909) evokes the loss of a playmate of childhood, who turns out to have died for his Christian faith. A group of playful children are evoked in Centurio (1901), in which the military commander narrates the hours he spent near Jesus’ cross. In the Paedagogium (1903), we encounter teenagers playing, quarrelling, fighting and committing themselves to each other in a touching friendship.

Pascoli’s view on Roman children can well be characterised as utterly romantic, nostalgic and Christian.⁴ But this approach certainly did not do him any harm during his lifetime and even nowadays. Although he is scarcely noticed outside Italy, he still is one of the country’s most celebrated writers. In 2012, the centenary of his death was officially celebrated. Alitalia named an airbus after him, his head is on the Italian two euro coin, and the village where he was born was renamed San Mauro Pascoli.

The dream (or illusion) of coming as close as possible to the ancient Romans’ childhood experience is certainly not recent. In the wake of the spectacular discoveries during the Pompeii excavations, more than one nineteenth-century writer produced so-called faction – a mixture of fiction and facts – in an attempt to have the victims of Vesuvius’ eruption speak for themselves.⁵ This is precisely what a contemporary of Pascoli, the Polish Nobel Prize winner Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916), was aiming at in his novel Quo Vadis?. Faction appeared in the wonderful volume by Alex Butterworth and Ray Laurence on Pompeii;⁶ it turned up now and then in journals of classical scholarship,⁷ and the most recent volume of the Roman Family conferences contains two chapters of ‘historically informed imagined scenarios’: the story of a day in the life of a slave child in fifth-century Constantinople, and the gruesome tale of early Christian enslaved families.⁸ A contributor to this volume, Jerry Toner has even dared to put himself in the shoes of a Roman slaveholder. The result is a fictitious handbook of slave management, an eye opener for anyone wanting to take a closer look at the Roman upper class mentality.⁹

In this volume, we explore what it meant to be a child in the Roman world: what children were occupied with, interested in, believed in – and whether we can find traces of ‘children’s culture’. Roman society was a society of young people: about a third of the population was under the age of 15.¹⁰ For ordinary people without pension systems, living directly from agriculture and thus dependent on physical labour, children meant welfare, especially for their old age. Above all, children perpetuated the memory of the ancestors and stood for the continuity of the family wealth, name and honour – both for local communities and for the Empire itself.¹¹ By studying the experience of childhood, we hope to come closer to an answer to a question that is often raised: ‘What was the ancient world like’? The ubiquity and importance of children must have had a strong impact on the everyday culture of the Roman world.

When we do so, however, we differ from Pascoli and his predecessors in more than one way. Several decades of research on Roman childhood have focused our attention on methodological issues – and many chapters will explicitly raise methodological questions. Also, well known source material will be approached with a fresh look and new research questions asked. Finally, this volume will be innovative through its use of new sources and material which have never been approached with these specific questions in mind.

Half a century of studies on Roman childhood

During the last two decades, a new phase of the study of the history of childhood in the Roman and early medieval world has been developing quickly. The field has been able to leave behind the thematic framework set by the discussions over Philippe Ariès and his followers in the 1960s and 1970s. Their heritage was twofold: first, they viewed childhood as a culturally conditioned and thus historically changing concept; and second, they looked for development and progress in the field of the history of childhood. This led scholars to concentrate on specific questions: How did the parent–child relationship change in the past? Did ancient and medieval people perceive childhood as a separate phase of life, or not? The resulting scholarship concentrated on cultural views on childhood, which was perceived as one undivided reality. The unintended result was that most research looked at views of childhood rather than at children themselves.Or to put it boldly: nobody has yet questioned whether Roman children loved their parents.¹²

Things started to change from the second half of the 1980s onwards. Demography of the ancient world and women’s studies made significant progress. And these new branches intersected with studies of the Roman family that were strongly oriented to social history from the late 1980s onwards. Children became one of the focal points in the study of Roman family relations and dynamics.¹³ At the same time, the study of Roman education and, especially, of families in Roman law became closely integrated with the more culturally and socially oriented research into children.¹⁴ Beryl Rawson’s Children and Childhood in Roman Italy (2003) marked an end point of this phase of scholarship, synthetizing much the earlier research and pointing out the importance of studying the living environments and experiencs of children.

Besides this, scholars of early Christianity have long been interested in childhood in the New Testament narratives; in particular, the metaphorical use of family and child imagery has been the subject of much research.¹⁵ Considerable research with an orientation to social history has been carried out lately into the question of the possible influence of the rise of Christianity on attitudes towards children and on their actual lives. This research tradition was competently summed up by Cornelia Horn and John W. Martens in 2009.¹⁶

All these trends have gradually opened up studies of Roman childhood to wider questions linked with the developments of modern childhood studies, which concentrate on identifying the children’s agency and their own culture. Topics such as children’s play, orphans, slave children, nursing and child labour have aroused increasing interest. Similarly, the range of source material has expanded to include material culture, archaeology, iconography, papyri, letters and sermons of ecclesiastical writers, hagiographical sources and legal texts.¹⁷ Nevertheless, the interdisciplinarity has been rather selective. The material culture and visual representations of children and childhood have often been treated as separate fields. Archaeological material has been used to study childhood mortality and diseases, while some work has also been undertaken on toys, especially dolls and items like feeding bottles.¹⁸ But the results of these studies have rarely been integrated into other research on children and families in Antiquity.

Almost invariably, moreover, research has not centred on children themselves, as agents in their own right. Rather, scholars have asked how children would fit in to the ‘adult’ society and public life. Issues such as the living environment of children, or relations between children and grandparents, or between siblings, have rarely been addressed. Moreover, even studies of the socialisation of children have been interested primarily in formal education, with children seen more as passive recipients than as personally active. Socialisation in everyday life, in the daily interaction of family members, has received only limited attention. There is also a striking lack of studies of family strategies and children’s roles in family dynamics in the ancient and early medieval periods. Indeed, the whole issue of the agency of children and the experience of childhood has been marginal, and the attempt has seldom been made to take the children’s perspective explicitly and ask what children actually did in their everyday life, how they experienced their physical and social environments, and what children’s culture was like. These topics are, of course, touched upon in Rawson’s and Horn and Martens’s volumes, and, more recently, Christian Laes and Margaret MacDonald have addressed the issue of childhood socialisation and experience in their monographs, especially in connection with the topics of education, violence, child work and sexuality. But even in the most recent collections of studies of ancient childhood, The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (2013) and Children and Family in Late Antiquity. Life, Death and Interaction (2015), only a handful of chapters cover these issues.¹⁹

The initiative for this volume comes from the project ‘Tiny Voices From the Past: New Perspectives on Childhood in Early Europe’, based at the University of Oslo, History of Ideas (IFIKK). The project, financed by the Norwegian Research Council and the University of Oslo (2013–2016), and led by Professor Reidar Aasgaard, studies the lives of children and attitudes to childhood in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, at a formative stage of European culture. The project covers the period from the fifth century BCE to the twelfth century CE, with an emphasis on the period from the first to the eight century. A workshop organised by the project, Children and Everyday Life in the Roman World took place in Oslo between 21– 23 May, 2014, where the first drafts of most of the chapters included here were presented. The companion volume to the present book, Centuries of Childhood: Perceptions of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (now in preparation), deals with the history of conceptions of and attitudes towards childhood in the Western world from Plato to the High Middle Ages.

Being a child: a specific approach

Our aim in this volume is to let children’s ‘tiny voices’ be heard. We have brought together scholars of archaeology and material culture, classicists, ancient historians, theologians and scholars of early Christianity, all previously involved in the study of the social and cultural history of children and families.

It must be admitted that the voices of ancient and medieval children are barely audible, and the attempt to study everyday life from their perspective encounters obvious challenges. But although the direct application of agency-based theories is difficult, the questions and viewpoints of these theories are readily applicable to the study of this early period.²⁰ Our aim is to apply theories and concepts used also in modern childhood studies, in order to unravel something of the richness of everyday childhood culture and to study the history of children themselves. Their living environment, both material and interpersonal, is the forefront in the individual chapters, and this is the first book-length scrutiny of the agency and experience of pre-modern children.

The articles deal with local children in the Roman world, including the early medieval and early Byzantine contexts. Thus, while the main focus of the volume is on Late Antiquity, we begin with the early Roman Empire and extend our scrutiny to the early ninth century CE. There are two interconnected reasons for extending Late Antiquity beyond the conventional borders of Antiquity, even longer than Peter Brown has proposed. First, we want to emphasise that while the everyday life of children is undoubtedly culturally conditioned, this seems to have been an arena of relatively slow changes, linked to changes in mentalities and in patterns of behaviour, since many of the basic social and economic structures on the family level (especially below the elites) remained much the same during Roman, Byzantine and Early Medieval times. There is also a practical reason for choosing this period. Many rewarding, but little used, sources are available for this period, especially from the Eastern Mediterranean, for the study of children’s agency.²¹

All the contributors endeavour to combine different kinds of materials and methodologies drawn from sociology, anthropology, modern childhood studies and cultural studies. If this aim is to be achieved, we need to read the old sources in a new, fresh way, and to include ‘new’ material for our studies: this volume will be innovative by making use of sources and material which have never been approached with these specific questions in mind. It is only in this way that we can sketch a framework for the experiences and everyday lives of children in this historical period, and identify the limits of our own knowledge.

In approaching the world of children, it is important to define the central concepts. First of all: Who is a child? When does a child cease to be a child? We must ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Notes on abbreviations
• 1 A new paradigm for the social history of childhood and children in Antiquity
• 2 Experience, agency, and the children in the past: the case of Roman childhood
• PART I Setting the scene: experiences and environments
• PART II What did the Roman children actually do?
• PART III Religious practices and sacred spaces
• PART IV A cruel world: accidents, disability and death
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index