Childhood in Ancient Athens

Iconography and Social History

Lesley A. Beaumont

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136486692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Altertum

Childhood in Ancient Athens offers an in-depth study of children during the heyday of the Athenian city state, thereby illuminating a significant social group largely ignored by most ancient and modern authors alike. It concentrates not only on the child's own experience, but also examines the perceptions of children and childhood by Athenian society: these perceptions variously exhibit both similarities and stark contrasts with those of our own 21st century Western society. The study covers the juvenile life course from birth and infancy through early and later childhood, and treats these life stages according to the topics of nurture, play, education, work, cult and ritual, and death.

In view of the scant ancient Greek literary evidence pertaining to childhood, Beaumont focuses on the more copious ancient visual representations of children in Athenian pot painting, sculpture, and terracotta modelling. Notably, this is the first full-length monograph in English to address the iconography of childhood in ancient Athens, and it breaks important new ground by rigorously analysing and evaluating classical art to reconstruct childhood's social history. With over 120 illustrations, the book provides a rich visual, as well as narrative, resource for the history of childhood in classical antiquity.

Part I

INTRODUCTION, DEFINITIONS AND METHODOLOGY

1

FRAMING THE CONTEXT

Like a child, this book has been developing for many years. Its life began in the doctoral research I undertook at University College London, which resulted in the writing of a thesis, ‘Studies on the Iconography of Divine and Heroic Children in Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painting of the Fifth Century BC’ (1992).¹ While my original intention as a postgraduate student had been to treat representations of mortal, as well as superhuman, childhood, the subject proved too large for the purposes of a PhD thesis. Since the surviving ancient Greek literary sources provide far more information about the experiences and exploits of divine and heroic children than they do about the lives of mortal offspring, and since we are therefore more readily equipped to ‘read’, or decode, the images of mythological children preserved in the material record, I decided to limit my doctoral research to an analysis of the numerous superhuman children depicted on Athenian red figure pottery. Now, however, two decades later I am revisiting my original aim to examine the representation of mortal children and childhood in ancient Athenian art. Happily, in those intervening years important developments have taken place, not only in the culture-specific study of ancient Greek children, but also in terms of an emerging theoretical approach to the archaeology of childhood, and in the diachronic and cross-cultural study of the wider history of childhood. As a result, this book on the iconography and social history of Athenian children constitutes a far better-informed and richer offering than I could have contributed to scholarship had its gestation period been a shorter one. In view of this claim, it seems appropriate and desirable to begin this volume with a review of work already undertaken on the archaeology and history of ancient Greek children and childhood, and to contextualise the current undertaking in the still emerging wider discipline of ancient childhood studies, both historical and archaeological.

1.1 Scholarship on ancient Greek children and childhood

In the second half of the nineteenth and the opening years of the twentieth century, a handful of books and journal articles, mostly written in German, French and English, explored the subject of children and childhood in ancient Greece: though aspects studied varied widely, a particular interest was expressed in childhood education and the depiction of children in art.² Subsequently, between the First and Second World Wars, interest continued to grow in the study of ancient Greek childhood based on the evidence of both ancient art and literature,³ with the exploration of toys and games on one hand and the practice of infant exposure on the other now also coming to the forefront.⁴ Also by now the influence of Arnold Van Gennep’s seminal work, Les Rites de Passage, first published in 1909, was beginning to filter its way into scholarship on the Classical world. Thanks to Van Gennep the cross-cultural human experience, and culture-specific ritual marking, of the movement from one life stage to the next received scholarly recognition: this understanding had particular implications for the study of childhood and youth and its major transitional stages such as birth, puberty and marriage. In terms of Classical scholarship, adolescence was now accordingly identified as a subject worthy of investigation, and in 1939 H. Jeanmaire published Couroi et Courètes: essai sur l’éducation spartiate et sur les rites d’adolescence dans l’antiquité hellénique. Scholars such as A. Brenot and P. Roussel also ventured to explore aspects of the Athenian ephebeia, which certainly by the fourth century BC, if not earlier, had been established as a transitional period of military training for male youths.⁵

In the post-Second World War decades of the fifties, sixties and seventies, the corpus of scholarship on ancient Greek children and childhood continued to expand, and witnessed some important trends and developments. Interest in toys and games, in, the child-to-adult transition, and also in the Athenian ephebeia, persisted,⁶ and in 1969 A. Brelich followed up on the earlier work of H. Jeanmaire with his publication of Paides e Parthenoi, which investigated the question of initiation rituals in the lives of Greek children and youths. Enquiry into ancient Greek education now, furthermore, witnessed a resurgence, with the work of H.I. Marrou and F.A.G. Beck grounded firmly in the primary literary and archaeological sources and constituting important appraisals of the subject that still carry currency to this day.⁷ It is significant to note that Beck specifically included in his discussions of the 1970s the question of the education of girls,⁸ an indication that contemporary feminist approaches were making sure inroads into the heretofore largely androcentric agendas of research on the Classical world. Indeed, groundbreaking work in Classical scholarship, such as S.B. Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (1975), was now fixing attention firmly on the ancient female, and while such studies largely concerned themselves with the adult woman, this nevertheless had important flow-on effects for the study of ancient childhood via an interest in the woman as mother and in the preparation of girls for marriage, wifehood, and the bearing and raising of their own children. Also contributing to a growing awareness of children as a fundamental element in the ancient social matrix was research into the Classical family: among such work, which was in part catalysed by the rapidly changing social landscape of the post-Second World War decades, of particular importance and influence was W.K. Lacey’s 1968 publication of The Family in Classical Greece. At the same time, the post-war years witnessed an increasing interest in the intersection of child life and religious cult, not least in the growing scholarship on the Anthesteria festival and the representation of young children on Attic red figure choes.⁹ With the excavation of the sanctuary of Artemis at Brauron between 1948 and 1963,¹⁰ emerging scholarly interest in the juvenile female and in the cultic life of children met head-on to spawn a line of scholarly investigation which continues to this day, namely the role of girls in Greek religion. Also significant here was the metamorphosis occurring in the study of Greek religion which, under the influence of anthropological theory and parallel, was now analysing religious thought and practice as an instrument of socialisation, which applied not least to the socialisation of the young and their ultimate incorporation into adult society: C. Calame’s 1977 publication of Les Choeurs de jeunes filles en Grèce archaique constituted an early expression of this interest. Alongside the influence of contemporary feminist and sociological trends which were now shaping scholarship on the ancient world and making the discipline receptive to consideration of issues related to children, the more sexually liberated era of the 1970s witnessed a further turning point in the study of ancient Greek childhood and youth when K.J. Dover published his book Greek Homosexuality (1978), in which he presented a candid analysis of the practice and perception of the paederastic relationship in ancient Athens.

In 1981, M. Karras and J. Wieshöfer compiled Kindheit und Jugend in der Antike: Eine Bibliographie, an indication that work on childhood in antiquity had developed sufficiently to become an identifiable scholarly corpus. Nevertheless, it is only since 1980 that a critical mass of scholarship has come to be produced specifically on children and childhood in ancient Greece. Following Dover’s pioneering work, a good many more articles and books have, since the 1980s, explored the phenomenon of Greek paederasty.¹¹ Greek education, and issues surrounding adolescent transition, have remained popular subjects of investigation,¹² and enquiry into the question of infant exposure has seen a resurgence.¹³ The role of the child in Greek cult and the use of religion as a means for the socialisation of children and young people has also continued to be explored, particularly in relation to the female child.¹⁴

In 1990 the publication by M. Golden of his important monograph Children and Childhood in Classical Athens heralded a significant advance in the study of ancient Greek childhood via the focusing of serious attention on the child in anglophone Classical scholarship: indeed, as Golden notes in his preface, this was the first full-length book written in the English language to discuss childhood in ancient Athens.¹⁵ Basing his work primarily on ancient literary texts, Golden treated first the characteristics of children and childhood as perceived by Athenian society, before devoting most of his discussion to an examination of the child’s place in the household and community and the child’s relationships with those around him. In the same year R. Garland published The Greek Way of Life: From Conception to Old Age. While this was not a book written specifically on the subject of ancient childhood, Garland’s life-course approach to his topic meant that three of his six chapters were devoted to ‘Childbirth’, ‘The Growing Child’ and ‘Coming of Age’, thus drawing further attention to the sub-adult population of Classical antiquity. Like Golden, Garland marshalled the evidence of mainly ancient literary sources, though he adopted a somewhat more catholic approach than Golden by incorporating a wider sample of archaeological evidence.

While the representation of children in Greek art was not a new subject, the 1980s saw the beginning of revitalised interest in the topic. In 1983 O. Hirsch-Dyczek and C. Vorster collected and analysed, respectively, images of children on Attic funerary stelai and in free-standing sculpture.¹⁶ Hard on their heels in 1984, H. Rühfel published two important volumes on children in Greek art: one a survey of the image of the child from the Greek Bronze Age to the Hellenistic period, and the other a closer analysis of the iconography of child life found mainly on Attic figured pottery.¹⁷ Subsequently, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, work also got under way on the question of the representation of childhood age in ancient Greek art, a critical aspect of iconographical study heretofore ignored: this subject will form part of a wider discussion and evaluation in the chapter that follows this introduction, but suffice it for now to say that C. Sourvinou-Inwood’s Studies in Girls’ Transitions: Aspects of the Arkteia and Age Representation in Attic Iconography (Athens, Kardamitsa, 1988), C. Clairmont’s ‘Age groups on tombstones and family relationships’ in his introductory volume of Classical Attic Tombstones (Kilchberg, Akanthus, 1993) and my own article ‘Constructing a methodology for the interpretation of childhood age in Classical Athenian iconography’ in the Archaeological Review from Cambridge 13.2 (1994) all drew attention to the methodological difficulties inherent in analysing and seeking to interpret the evidence of ancient art for past children and childhoods. A new and important addition to the corpus of work on the iconography of childhood is C. Hennessy’s 2008 publication Images of Children in Byzantium.¹⁸ In recent years the image of the ancient Greek child has also been treated as the subject of a major exhibition entitled ‘Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the Classical Past’: this exhibition travelled to a number of US museums during 2003 and 2004, and reached a wider international audience via the publication of an exhibition catalogue which also incorporated a number of scholarly essays addressing aspects of childhood in Greek antiquity.¹⁹ The exhibition also spawned a dedicated conference on ‘Constructions of Childhood in the Ancient World’, and a further conference session at the XVIth International Congress of Classical Archaeology, both since published.²⁰

While this exhibition of 2003 and the publications and conferences with which it was associated have markedly raised both public and scholarly anglophone awareness of ancient childhood as a subject worthy of attention and discussion, it should be noted that a number of museum exhibitions, conference gatherings and resulting publications, which turned the spotlight on the child in antiquity, had appeared already from 1991 onwards in Germany, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands. Two of these concentrated on ancient toys and games,²¹ two on birth and infancy,²² and another on an overview of childhood and youth in antiquity.²³ This flurry of activity in the study of ancient childhood was mirrored, and was at least in part catalysed, by work on the family in antiquity: the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a number of important publications on the Greek family, and most recently in 2010 Wiley-Blackwell published A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds.²⁴ Issues surrounding the family, motherhood, fatherhood, children and the relationship between parents and their offspring are all topics of concern to our own contemporary Western society, and scholarship on the ancient family and related subjects is flourishing as never before.²⁵ The use, furthermore, not only of iconography, which I have already mentioned, but also of funerary archaeology, as tools we can employ to uncover past children and childhoods is now beginning to come into its own in Classical scholarship, alongside the longer-established tradition of sifting the ancient literary sources for relevant references: excavated mortuary evidence related to children which had previously been regarded as not worthy of attention, is now being revisited with new theoretical and methodological approaches and techniques and is providing us with new perspectives on childhoods long since lived.²⁶ I will return to this point in the final section of this chapter.

1.2 The emergence of the ‘history of childhood’

In order to position the current undertaking not only within the context of scholarship on the Classical world, but also within the wider framework of the development of theoretical and methodological approaches to the diachronic and cross-cultural study of childhood in the past, we must now turn to a consideration of the relatively recent emergence of the scholarly sub-discipline of the ‘History of Childhood’.

In 1960 Philippe Ariès published L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, a tome which was translated into English two ...