Childhood, Class and Kin in the Roman World

Suzanne Dixon, Suzanne Dixon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134563180
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

It can be difficult to hear the voices of Roman children, women and slaves, given that most surviving texts of the period are by elite adult men. This volume redresses the balance.
An international collection of expert contributors go beyond the usual canon of literary texts, and assess a vast range of evidence - inscriptions, burial data, domestic architecture, sculpture and the law, as well as Christian and dream-interpretation literature. Topics covered include:
* child exposure and abandonment
* children in imperial propaganda
* reconstructing lower-class families
* gender, burial and status
* epitaphs and funerary monuments
* adoption and late parenthood.
The result is an up-to-date survey of some of the most exciting avenues currently being explored in Roman social history.

1
THE ‘OTHER’ ROMANS AND THEIR FAMILY VALUES

Suzanne Dixon

Women and children last?

This collection of articles is a contribution to ongoing scholarly debates about Roman social history. We hope that it will also appeal to intelligent lay readers without talking down to them or compromising professional standards of caution and precision.

Domestic topics are now firmly on the historical agenda, and their general appeal is not in doubt. Family, marriage and childhood are universal features of human society, and the public appetite for tabloid, documentary and pop-sociology treatments suggests that all such features are perennially of interest. Academe should be able to cater to that interest. It has something special to offer – popular treatments, in emphasising moral decline from an idyllic past and the sameness of ‘human nature’, often distort the great dynamism of social institutions. To say that something – the family, for instance – is universal does not mean that it is uniform. Or static. Childhood and the family have been variously interpreted at different times and in different places. If we are prepared to learn from them, experts can put this variability into perspective and enable us better to assess the prospect of change in our own societies.

In the ancient world, childhood, class and kin interacted with each other as they do in the modern. For good or ill, class still pervades many aspects of life today. Its impact on modern childhood has been amply demonstrated by the BBC TV series 7Up, which has struck a chord worldwide. Many governments, treating the notional egalitarianism of some twentieth-century societies as an amusing historical aberration, are trying to urge us all into a ‘global’ era in which we once more take for granted the economic extremes and social

divisions of earlier epochs. In this book we explore some of the ways in which class – and status – affected ideas and realities of kinship and childhood in the highly stratified Roman world.

There should be no need to justify to any of our potential audiences the inclusion of Roman children, slaves, the free lower classes, élites and families all in the same volume. But we are all profoundly influenced by labelling, and the reality is that long-standing academic distinctions between public and private, however inappropriate to classical antiquity, continue to dominate our stock classification of topics and therefore to divide our audiences. Academe has now generally moved on from older notions of what constitutes history, one consequence being that Roman political history has long since faded (relatively speaking) into the scholarly background; yet both publishers’ catalogues and lay readers continue to equate ‘history’ with personalities, warfare and politics, which means that anything else becomes a marked category requiring an explanatory epithet – art history, social history, legal history, economic history. The process is not, of course, logical or consistent. The Struggle of the Orders, Gracchan land and debt reforms, slave revolts and Augustus’ ‘pro-family’ legislation were always incorporated in the traditional Boys’ Own Annual narrative of Roman history that otherwise blithely excluded the servile and lower classes, women and children.

Even within academe, ‘history of the family’ is seen as the proper repository for matters concerning women and children, while Roman class and status are assumed to be about adult men. Ramsay MacMullen explicitly excluded family and marriage from his 1974 book Roman Social Relations, although it was designed to fill in many of the existing gaps; to treat rural and provincial areas, and those social groups whose perspective had been neglected in most historical works on the Roman Empire. The last half-century has seen an explosion of publications on slavery, the free lower classes, life-stages (especially childhood), women and gender relations in the Roman world. But it has not united potential audiences. Perhaps people are discouraged by the long trips they would have to make to different parts of a university library to find books on these apparently discrete topics. Yet (to state the obvious) slaves and free people alike could be male or female, children or adults, all with parents, children and siblings of their own. Roman family studies originated with ‘prosopographical’ reconstructions of senatorial careers and marriages. As products of ‘mixed’ marriages between slave and free parents, children named in epitaphs can furnish historians with a key to the implications of status categories (Weaver 1986).

The sources historians use can also become territorial dividers, separating epigraphers (who specialise in inscriptions) from legal historians reliant on the selective Christian compilations of earlier Roman law, such as Justinian's Digest. The fact that the historians of classical antiquity themselves wrote about Gracchan land reforms and Augustan legislation promoting marriage and parenthood explains the inclusion of such matters in the traditional curriculum. Indeed, the training of ancient historians continues to privilege such texts. But confining oneself to any given source or genre both limits and skews the reader's perspective on the ‘evidence’. Each type of source has its own problems of interpretation and, at best, throws light on only a minute part of any topic. Examining ideologies of gender, or determining whether Romans had a concept of childhood, for example, soon sends the text-based historian to art. In this volume we see repeatedly how the evidence of different sources tells different stories. Janette McWilliam (Chapter 5) contrasts literary statements about mourning the deaths of babies with the evidence of epitaphs; Paul Weaver (Chapter 6) contrasts the rules of the law on which slaves could be freed and how status transmitted to children with those revealed by sepulchral inscriptions.

Both topic- and source-based divisions are wholly artificial, no more than a convenient device for scholars wanting to focus on areas of their own expertise and for cataloguers subject to practical constraints. They should not be allowed to harden into ways of thinking that blind us to obvious connections and questions that might widen our understanding of the Roman world. The reader perusing the Contents page of this book should bear in mind the arbitrariness of the editorial decision to consign to ‘Kin’ rather than to ‘Class’ a mother–daughter sculptural group expressing the aspirations of prosperous freed slaves (Michele George, Chapter 11).

The conventional divisions are not just habit. Experts have a healthy respect for genuine problems. There are plenty of traps for the unwary. Combining topics and sources is a complex business. There is, in the last analysis, no substitute for thorough training in reading ancient sources in the original language, then using linguistic and analytic expertise to assess their value as evidence. The Roman social historian needs not only a traditional classical training but also an informed and critical understanding of social institutions and issues.

The fact that a historian – even a historian with the necessary (if insufficient) technical skills in reading Latin and Greek – may have children and a family does not automatically make him or her an expert on family matters, particularly in a foreign culture. The traditional practice of compiling references on a given topic is an important starting-point, a potential database, but it is indecent to expose such collections in public in their raw, or nude, state. They should not appear in print until they have been dressed with appropriate critical analysis. There can be no excuse for treating epitaphs from the ancient world as simple sources per se for Roman demography or residential groupings, or for presenting as self-explanatory evidence references to (what is only possibly) the same institution from the Italian stage of the early second century BCE and from Christian papyri from Roman Egypt five centuries later. A word-search is not finished scholarship. The authors in this volume go well beyond such preliminaries, analysing the impact of social institutions with the help of sophisticated source criticism which allows for the bias, genre-emphasis and exclusions of the evidence examined. But we are not wholly pessimistic and over-cautious. Some chapters offer innovative ideas about how far we might press the sometimes terse or enigmatic yield of inscriptions or buildings. Others explore literary works in a novel way, to throw light on the incidental testimony and assumptions of dreams, for example, or on changing ideas about the proper age for parenting and the suitability of sex in old age.

Most of the contributors to this volume were trained in an empiricist tradition of attention to detail. Over the years, they have learnt to address larger questions, to approach more types of evidence and to rethink their approaches to familiar sources. The perceived tension between the ‘big picture’ approach and scholarly caution never quite disappears. As with the eternal compromise between accuracy and fluency in translation, each scholar weighs up the competing requirements and makes a subjective decision. In the last analysis, judgements about the success of individual efforts will vary and controversy will continue (Martin 1996). Novelty will inevitably draw criticism, often tinged with territorial defensiveness. Non-classicists – even those of the stature of Foucault or Goody – collect broadsides when they include classical Greco-Roman culture in broad histories of European kinship, marriage and sexualities, but brilliant ‘outsiders’ can often shake up our ideas to good effect, sometimes opening up whole new areas of scholarship.

It is possible to combine scrupulous care and brilliance, to cross-pollinate disciplines by moving judiciously between genres, regions and historical periods, without oversimplifying the issues or ‘dumbing down’. The proof lies in landmark studies, some of them bearing directly on the topics of this book: Hopkins’ monumental 1978 treatment of slavery and the transformation of the Roman economy; Saller and Shaw's groundbreaking 1984 computer simulations of Roman demography based on epitaphs; Evans Grubbs’ 1995 analysis of the impact (or non-impact) of Christian doctrine on inherited Roman law and on social expectations of marriage. We all benefit when the broad sweep is well done.

The specialist scholars who drew on their current researches to contribute to this volume were not expected to cover all three areas, childhood, class and kin, but they have shown a readiness to transcend their designated categories. They were asked to consider common questions of reading, representation and perspective and, in particular, to open up their own specific observations to more general concepts of life-stage, status and kinship. Their approaches vary: legal positivism, comparative sociology, active reading and thick description all feature. Issues of exclusion, skewing and representation have emerged naturally from attempts to compare and combine diverse types of source. From the expert reconstruction of specifics, the authors all contribute to the ‘big picture’ not only of Roman social mores but of wider issues of kinship, class and the life-stages.

Roman childhood, class and kin in context

Status, age, kinship and gender are prime organising principles of any known society. Our title begs the vexed question of the value of ‘class’ as a key to Roman society, since ties of patronage sometimes linked the different social strata, and inherited rank (though requiring renewal in each generation) could outweigh wealth. Legal status categories, dividing free and slave, provincial and Roman, were not necessarily reflected in wealth and prestige ratings.

Our book has its own exclusions and emphases. Most of us concentrate on Roman Italy and the first two centuries of the common era or CE, which largely coincide with the early Roman imperial period, but some contributors, notably in Chapters 4, 10 and 14, compare pre-Christian and Christian approaches. In the first section, ‘Childhood’, we see how children were represented in state propaganda, in dreams, in the law and on urban tombstones. For both emperors and dream-interpreters children served as symbols, expressing political and personal hopes for the future. But the historian can make use of such sources for more than their intended purpose: the public sculpture examined by Beryl Rawson in Chapter 2 and the dream manual of Artemidorus analysed by Keith Bradley in Chapter 3 also yield incidental information as to what constituted childhood in Roman (adult) eyes and on the typical pursuits of children in antiquity. Mireille Corbier (Chapter 4) reviews a range of sources to explore Roman attitudes to babies and to the incorporation of children into society in both Italy and Egypt. She argues that, although the two are often combined by scholars, we need to distinguish between child ‘exposure’, the subject of legal rules, and child ‘abandonment’, a practice treated by literary sources which reveal rather different social norms. Pace Boswell (1988), she points to significant differences – and some interesting similarities – between the abandonment of children in antiquity and its equivalents in later western Europe, where Christian precepts held sway.

It is not only archaeologists who use mortuary commemorations for an insight into attitudes to different social groups. Like childhood and gender, death is a physical given which gains its social meaning from cultural elaboration. Corbier points out that the Roman child who had not formally been raised up by the paterfamilias could be discarded as a non-person who had not acquired a full social personality. Birth into a group is only the beginning or potential of a person's admission to that group. In many cultures, the commemoration of dead children is distinguished by special rules. They may not be commemorated at all. Some moderns have read the practice of exposure as an index of a low valuation on infant life in classical antiquity, but Romans of the Italian peninsula were relatively attentive to the memorials of their child dead, particularly in towns. Janette McWilliam (Chapter 5) explores the possible connections between social status, urban location and the commemorations of those who died as children. She finds interesting differences in the approaches of town élites and groups such as freed slaves as to where and how they present the loss of their child dead to the community about them. We are reminded that funerary rituals are for the living as well as for the dead, and that children can represent many things (hopes for future security or social advancement, an assertion of continuing high status) above and beyond their own individual characteristics.

In the second section, ‘Class and Status’, Paul Weaver (Chapter 6) and Suzanne Dixon (Chapter 7) consider how we might reconstruct lower-class families, slave and free, from their memorials, most of them just brief inscriptions. Names are an important guide to status in Roman sources. The names of freeborn Roman citizens were distinctive, consisting for men of three parts, for women of one (later two). When featured on an inscription, such names frequently included what experts call ‘filiation’, that is, the formula ‘son/ daughter’ (filius/filia) followed by the father's first name or prae-nomen, for example Marci, ‘of Marcus’. Slaves’ names could also furnish further information by giving the owner's praenomen (‘slave of Marcus’), and freed slaves, libertini, would typically take the ‘gentile’ name of their citizen owner or patron, retain their own name and include a reference to the owner or (‘patron’, patrona, patronus). Wherever possible in this volume, Latin terms have been explained and quotations given in English. Because of the importance...