Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World 147246480X, 9781472464804, 0367880814, 9780367880811

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Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World
 147246480X, 9781472464804, 0367880814, 9780367880811

Table of contents :
List of figures viii
List of contributors x
Notes on abbreviations xiv
1. A new paradigm for the social history of childhood and children in Antiquity / Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto 1
2. Experience, agency, and the children in the past: the case of Roman childhood / Ville Vuolanto 11
Part I. Setting the scene: experiences and environments 25
3. Children and the urban environment: agency in Pompeii / Ray Laurence 27
4. Little tunics for little people: the problems of visualising the wardrobe of the Roman child / Mary Harlow 43
5. Touching children in Roman Antiquity: the sentimental discourse and the family / Christian Laes 60
6. Being a niece or nephew: children’s social environment in Roman Oxyrhynchos / April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto 79
Part II. What did the Roman children actually do? 97
7. Leisure as a site of child socialisation, agency and resistance in the Roman empire / Jerry Toner 99
8. Roman girls and boys at play: realities and representations / Fanny Dolansky 116
9. The writing on the wall: age, agency, and material culture in Roman Campania / Katherine V. Huntley 137
10. Why Roman pupils lacked a long vacation / Konrad Vössing 155
11. Becoming a Roman student / W. Martin Bloomer 166
Part III. Religious practices and sacred spaces 177
12. Roman children as religious agents: the cognitive foundations of cult / Jacob L. Mackey 179
13. Jewish childhood in the Roman Galilee: Sabbath in Tiberias (c. 300 CE) / Hagith Sivan 198
14. Resistance and agency in the everyday life of Late Antique children (third–eighth century CE) / Béatrice Caseau 217
15. Children in monastic families in Egypt at the end of Antiquity / Maria Chiara Giorda 232
16. Everyday lives of children in ninth-century Byzantine monasteries / Oana Maria Cojocaru 247
Part IV. A cruel world: accidents, disability and death 265
17. Children’s accidents in the Roman empire: the medical eye on 500 years of mishaps in injured children / Lutz Alexander Graumann 267
18. Listening for the voices of two disabled girls in early Christian literature / Anna Rebecca Solevåg 287
19. Children and the experience of death in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine world / Cornelia Horn 300
Epilogue
20. How close can we get to ancient childhood? Methodological achievements and new advances / Reidar Aasgaard 318
Bibliography 332
Index 383

Citation preview

Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World

Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World explores what it meant to be a child in the Roman world – what children’s concerns, interests, and beliefs were – 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. Christian Laes is an associate professor of ancient history and Latin at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and an adjunct professor in ancient history at the history department of the University of Tampere, Finland. He has studied the social and cultural history of Rome and Late Antiquity, paying particular attention to the human life course: childhood; youth; family; slavery; old age; sexuality; and disabilities. His monographs and over 70 contributions have been published by international publishers and journals. Ville Vuolanto is research fellow at IFIKK, University of Oslo, Norway, and adjunct professor in general history at the University of Tampere, Finland. He has published a number of articles on the history of the family and childhood in the Roman and early medieval periods, and is now writing a monograph on children in Oxyrhynchos (with April Pudsey). His latest book Children and Asceticism in Late Antiquity: Continuity, Family Dynamics and the Rise of Christianity was published in 2015.

Children and Everyday Life in the Roman and Late Antique World Edited by Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto; individual chapters, the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Laes, Christian, editor of compilation. | Vuolanto, Ville, editor of compilation. Title: Children and everyday life in the Roman and late antique world / edited by Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto. Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016019195| ISBN 9781472464804 (hardback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781315568942 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Children--Rome--History. | Children--Rome--Social life and customs. | Children--Rome--Social conditions. | Rome--Social life and customs. | Rome--Social conditions. Classification: LCC DG91 .C47 2016 | DDC 305.230937--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019195 ISBN: 978-1-4724-6480-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-56894-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by HWA Text and Data Management, London

Contents

List of figures List of contributors Notes on abbreviations 1 A new paradigm for the social history of childhood and children in Antiquity

viii x xiv 1

C hristian L aes and V ille V uolanto

2 Experience, agency, and the children in the past: the case of Roman childhood

11

V ille V uolanto

Part I

Setting the scene: experiences and environments

25

3 Children and the urban environment: agency in Pompeii

27

R ay L aurence

4 Little tunics for little people: the problems of visualising the wardrobe of the Roman child

43

M ary H arlow

5 Touching children in Roman Antiquity: the sentimental discourse and the family

60

C hristian L aes

6 Being a niece or nephew: children’s social environment in Roman Oxyrhynchos A pril P udsey and V ille V uolanto

79

vi Contents Part II

What did the Roman children actually do?

97

7 Leisure as a site of child socialisation, agency and resistance in the Roman empire

99

J erry T oner

8 Roman girls and boys at play: realities and representations

116

Fanny D olansky

9 The writing on the wall: age, agency, and material culture in Roman Campania

137

K atherine V. H untley

10 Why Roman pupils lacked a long vacation

155

K onrad V ö ssing

11 Becoming a Roman student

166

W. M artin B loomer

Part III

Religious practices and sacred spaces

177

12 Roman children as religious agents: the cognitive foundations of cult

179

J acob L . M ackey

13 Jewish childhood in the Roman Galilee: Sabbath in Tiberias (c. 300 ce) 198 H agith S ivan

14 Resistance and agency in the everyday life of Late Antique children (third–eighth century ce) 217 B é atrice C aseau

15 Children in monastic families in Egypt at the end of Antiquity 232 M aria C hiara G iorda

16 Everyday lives of children in ninth-century Byzantine monasteries 247 O ana M aria C ojocaru

Contents  vii Part IV

A cruel world: accidents, disability and death

265

17 Children’s accidents in the Roman empire: the medical eye on 500 years of mishaps in injured children

267

L ut z A lexander G raumann

18 Listening for the voices of two disabled girls in early Christian literature

287

A nna R ebecca S olev å g

19 Children and the experience of death in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine world

300

C ornelia H orn

Epilogue 20 How close can we get to ancient childhood? Methodological achievements and new advances

318

R eidar A asgaard

Bibliography Index

332 383

Figures

3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 5.1 5.2 7.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 8.7 8.8 8.9 9.1

The house of the Cei, Pompeii 29 Altar of the temple of the Genius of Augustus, Pompeii 32 Crossroad, with shrine and waterfountain in close proximity, Pompeii 34 Sale of bronze vessels in the Forum of Pompeii 37 a) South side frieze of the Ara Pacis; b) detail of the north side frieze of the Ara Pacis 45 Trajan’s column, scene XCI 46 Children playing with nuts. Marble panel from a Roman sarcophagus, third century ce 48 Grave stele for Flavia Augustina and her two children 48 Tunic of a child (‘Kind 1’) from Antinoopolis 51 Altar of Passiena Gemella 62 Cornelius Statius sarcophagus, c. 150 ce, probably from Ostia Antica 65 Sarcophagus of Lucius Aemilius Daphnus 104 Two of Niobe’s daughters play at knucklebones 117 Second-century ce sarcophagus showing boys at play with nuts and girls with balls 120 Late Roman or Coptic rider standing between two horses 121 Late third-century ce sarcophagus depicting girls on the left and boys in the center and right playing games with nuts 125 Second-century ce marble sculpture of a young girl playing knucklebones 126 First-century ce marble tombstone for Avita 127 Mid-first-century bce to late first-century ce funerary relief from Orolaunum (Arlon) showing boys with a dog 127 Second-century bce (?) fragmentary marble sculpture of a boy biting the limb of his now missing opponent during a game of knucklebones 128 Cippus of Primulus, a slave, with a dog, and a toy wheel 130 Early human figures from the outer wall of the Termopolio dell’Asellina 141

List of figures  ix 9.2a 9.2b 9.2c 9.2d 9.3 9.4 12.1 14.1

A ladder cross oval graffito from the Casa del Menandro, Pompeii A comparative image: ladder crossed oval drawing by a young child Graffito from the Theater Corridor, the Casa dell’Efebo, Pompeii A comparative image: ladder crossed squares drawing by a young child from Indonesia A marble relief from Pompeii shows a workshop for metal housewares A graffito, possibly of a pig from the summer triclinium of the Casa di Trebio Valens Mosaic (third century ce) depicting a sacred choir or schola cantorum from the temple of Diana Tifatina Game boards, Aphrodisias, Temple-Church precinct

142 142 142 143 146 150 190 221

Contributors

Reidar Aasgaard is professor of history of ideas at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, Norway. He has published widely on family and childhood in early Christianity/Late Antiquity, apocryphal infancy gospels, the New Testament, and Augustine, and also translated early Christian texts from Greek and Latin into Norwegian. He is director of the project ‘Tiny Voices from the Past: New Perspectives on Childhood in Early Europe’ (2013–2016, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the University of Oslo). W. Martin Bloomeris professor of classics at the University of Notre Dame, USA. He specializes in Latin literature, ancient rhetoric, and ancient education. His books include Valerius Maximus and the Rhetoric of the New Nobility (1993), Latinity and Literary Society at Rome (1997), The Contest of Language (2005), The School of Rome (2011), and the Companion to Ancient Education (2015). Oana Maria Cojocaruis a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo, Norway, working within the broader project ‘Tiny Voices from the Past: New Perspectives on Childhood in Early Europe’, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and the University of Oslo. Her thesis, Between Ideal and Ordinary: Literary Representations of Children and Childhood in Byzantine Hagiographies of the Ninth through the Eleventh Centuries is to be defended in 2016. Béatrice Caseauis professor of Byzantine history at the University of ParisSorbonne, France and director of the research center LABEX RESMED (Religions and Society in the Mediterranean). She has published seven books on the Middle Ages, Byzantine food culture (2015), family networks (2012) and questions of inheritance (2014), religious history, especially pilgrimages (2006) and eucharistic practices (2009) and prepares a book on Byzantine childhood. Fanny Dolanskyis associate professor of classics at Brock University (St Catharines, Canada) where she teaches Latin and Roman history. Her research primarily concerns the Roman family, children, and childhood. She has published articles and chapters on several Roman domestic rituals and

List of contributors   xi festivals, education, and children’s toys, and has studies of Ovid’s Fasti and Roman domestic healthcare forthcoming. Maria Chiara Giordais researcher at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, after having obtained the national academic qualification of associate professor. She is adjunct member in CéSor, Centre d’études en sciences sociales du religieux, EHESS, CNRS – Paris. Among her latest publications are Monasteri, luoghi di identità (2015)  and   ‘Familles du «monde», familles monastiques. Une économie du capital dans l’Égypte chrétienne (Ve-VIe siècles)’,  in  Archives des Sciences Sociales de Religions (2015). Lutz Alexander Graumann is a paediatric surgeon at the University Hospital of Marburg, Germany and has published on the case-stories of the Hippocratic Corpus, on medical interpretation of Roman prodigies, and on ancient hermaphrodites. He is currently focusing on ancient children’s activities with medical implications. Mary Harlowis a senior lecturer in ancient history in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, UK. Her main research interests are in Roman dress and in age and ageing. She has published most recently Greek and Roman Dress, An Interdisciplinary Anthology (co-edited with Marie-Louise Nosch, 2014) and has just completed the writing and editing for the Berg Cultural History of Dress and Fashion, vol. 1: Antiquity (2016). Other published works include Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome. A Life Course Approach (co-written with Ray Laurence, 2002). Cornelia Hornis a senior research associate at the Institute for Christian Oriental Research (ICOR) at CUA, Washington, DC, USA and a Heisenberg Fellow at the Freie Universität, Berlin. Her research focuses on the spread and interactions of religious traditions, practices, and ideas in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, primarily within the Mediterranean world, the Near East, and the Caucasus. Katherine V. Huntleyis assistant professor at the Department of History, Boise State University, USA. Her research interests include Roman archaeology and social history; the history of the Roman Republic and the archaeology of preRoman and Roman Italy; everyday life in the Roman world; graffiti; Pompeii and Herculaneum; religion in the Greco-Roman world; and the anthropological theory of religion. Christian Laesis associate professor of ancient history and Latin at the University of Antwerp, Belgium and an adjunct professor in ancient history at the University of Tampere, Finland. He has studied the social and cultural history of Rome and Late Antiquity, paying particular attention to the human life course: childhood; youth; family; slavery; old age; sexuality; and disabilities. His monographs

xii  List of contributors and over 70 contributions have been published by international publishers and journals. Ray Laurenceis professor of Roman history and archaeology at the University of Kent (the UK’s European University). Over the last two decades, he has sought to develop the study of space and movement in Roman Italy and has published extensively on the subject. Publications include the two editions of Roman Pompeii: Space and Society (1994, 2007), The Roads of Roman Italy: Mobility and Cultural Change (1999), Rome, Ostia, Pompeii: Movement and Space (2011), The City in the Roman West (2011), and Written Space in the Latin West (2013). His work based in archaeology, history, and classics is characterised by a cross-disciplinary aspect that causes it to be accessible to architects, landscape historians, geographers, and urbanists. Jacob L. Mackeyis assistant professor of classics, Queens College (CUNY), USA, and is completing his first book manuscript, Cult and Cognition in Republican Rome: From Intuitions to Institutions, and gathering material for his second book, tentatively titled Ad Incunabula: Roman Perceptions of Early Cognitive Development. April Pudseyis lecturer in ancient history at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, where she teaches Roman and Egyptian history. She has co-edited a volume on  Demography and the Graeco-Roman World. New Insights and Approaches  (with Claire Holleran, 2011) and published items on children, family, demography, and wet-nursing in Roman Egypt. She is currently writing a monograph on children in Oxyrhynchos (with Ville Vuolanto) and editing a volume on ancient housing (with Jen Baird). Hagith Sivanis professor of history at the University of Kansas, USA. Her research has ranged from the Hebrew Bible to late Roman princesses and from poets-turned-politicians to the Jewish diaspora of Late Antiquity.  She is currently engaged in a book project on Jewish childhood in the Roman world. Anna Rebecca Solevågis associate professor at VID Specialized University in Norway. Her publications include Birthing Salvation. Gender and Class in Early Christian Childbearing Discourse (2013) and Bodies, Borders, Believers. Ancient Texts and Present Conversations, edited with Anne Hege Grung and Marianne Bjelland Kartzow (2015). Jerry Toner  is fellow and director of studies in classics at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK. His research focuses on looking at history ‘from below’ and his books include Leisure and Ancient Rome (1995) and Popular Culture in Ancient Rome (2009). He is currently completing research on various aspects of the Roman non-elite, ranging from their intellectual life to the forms of their social relations.

List of contributors   xiii Konrad Vössing  is professor for ancient history at the University of Bonn, Germany. He has been a member of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften since 2012. His field of research includes the cultural history of Antiquity (notably schools and education, banquets and eating culture, dress and habitus), the representation of the ruler, the imperial cult, the Roman North Africa, and the history of the Germanic peoples in Late Antiquity, especially the Vandals. Ville Vuolantois research fellow at IFIKK, University of Oslo, Norway and adjunct professor in general history at the University of Tampere, Finland. He has published a number of articles on the history of the family and childhood in the Roman and early medieval periods, and is now writing a monograph on children in Oxyrhynchos (with April Pudsey). His latest book Children and Asceticism in Late Antiquity: Continuity, Family Dynamics and the Rise of Christianity was published in 2015.

Abbreviations

Works of Latin and Greek literary authors have been abbreviated by the Latin title. For the sake of clarity, we have sometimes expanded the abbreviations given in Oxford Latin Dictionary (OLD), Lewis & Short Latin Dictionary (LS), and Liddle-Scott-Jones Greek Lexicon (LSJ). As for late ancient, patristic, and Byzantine sources, even classicists and ancient historians sometimes struggle to find the passage involved. For those works which are more difficult to trace down, we either included the reference (volume and page number) to the Patrologia Graeca (PG) / Patrologia Latina (PL) / Patrologia Orientalis (PO) / Sources Chrétiennes (SC) / Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium (CSCO) / Acta Sanctorum (AASS) / Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents (BMFD), or the full reference to a useful edition (or translation with commentary) is offered. For abbreviations for the books of the Bible and for ancient Jewish and Christian literature, see http://www.viceregency.com/Abbrev.htm. For the Jewish tractates, see also Strack and Stemberger 1996 or G. Stemberger, Einleitung in Talmud und Midrasch, 9th rev. ed. Beck: München 2011. In the bibliography all titles of journals and works are written out in full. The abbreviations of epigraphical and papyrological sources are in line with the standard lists named here, in which the reader will find all bibliographical data of the editions used: Greek inscriptions according to Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Consolidated index for volumes XXXVI – XLV (1986–1995) (ed. J.H.M. Strubbe, J. C. Gieben: Amsterdam 1999) pp. 677–88 and the subsequent volumes of SEG. Latin inscriptions according to L’Année Épigraphique (2004) (Presses Universitaires de France: Paris 2007) pp. 699–705 and the Epigraphische Datenbank Frankfurt (EDCS), in www.manfredclauss.de. Papyri according to John F. Oates, Roger S. Bagnall, Sarah J. Clackson, Alexandra A. O’Brien, Joshua D. Sosin, Terry G. Wilfong and Klaas A. Worp, Checklist of editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets, in http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/papyrus/texts/clist.html, June 2011.

1 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

2  Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto 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,

Childhood and children in Antiquity   3 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

4  Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto 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.

Childhood and children in Antiquity   5 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 bear in mind from the outset that we are not limiting ourselves to the ancient theories of ‘the Ages of Man’ (usually with seven-year periods), nor to the legal thresholds that conventionally posit the end of childhood at the age of 12 (girls) or 14 (boys) – or, more loosely, at the onset of puberty. In Roman law, full economic independence was achieved only at the age of 25, or, in special circumstances, 20. And one may question the significance of legal regulations for persons who scarcely entered into contact with Roman law, and for whom age was never as certain as it is in the present-day Western world, with its identity cards and birth certificates. The famous ancient divisions of the human life span, which were often quite sophisticated, point to ancient predilections for numerology and schematisation rather than to the everyday reality of concrete individuals.22 In general, when we look at everyday life, the age in years was less relevant than the individually and locally changing notions of majority. In Rome, for example, boys’ adulthood began in principle with the ceremony of the taking of the toga virilis. The age for this depended on individual circumstances (family situation and traditions, the onset of puberty), with considerable variation between 13 and 18 years of age.23 In Roman Egypt, in turn, the epikrisis, when elite boys entered the gymnasium and became subjects to taxation, took place when they were 13 or 14. For girls, the definite end of childhood was marriage and giving birth (or taking an

6  Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto ascetic vow). Although the legal majority and marriageable age for girls was 12, the actual age of puberty, consequent betrothal and eventual marriage seem to have been more important factors for social majority, which could take place from the early to late teens (depending on social status).24 Leaving childhood behind was a long process with different stages that depended greatly on gender, status and geographical and cultural contexts. This means that no fixed ages can be given here. In a volume that discusses the everyday lives of children and aims to include concepts like experience and agency, the methodological and conceptual starting points need extra consideration. This is why the volume begins with a chapter by Ville Vuolanto discussing the meaning and meaningfulness of the concepts of agency and experience for the study of ancient history: What is actually being studied when we claim to study the agency and experience of children? The chapter presents two quite different examples of Roman childhood narratives to exemplify the challenges scholars of Antiquity meet in tracing the voices of children; one is an autobiographical anecdote from hagiography, the other a letter sent by a boy in his (early?) teens. The chapter questions how much we can actually study children’s cultures, and how far we are necessarily limited to studying the boundary conditions and environments of children’s agency. The theme of the environments for children’s everyday life is taken up in the next chapters, which set the scene for the experience of childhood. Ray Laurence takes as his starting point the ‘moving body’25 of children: How would children’s height affect their experience of a cityscape (here Pompeii)? Laurence demonstrates that the most obvious and ‘simple’ questions about how children managed to find their way around in a provincial town have hardly been asked, let alone answered. His reconstruction allows us to move around as a child in this particular environment, although his evidence is hard-core archaeological material, not an a priori belief in the possibility of empathically ‘feeling’ children’s condition. The physical environment of children is the subject for the fourth chapter too: here, Mary Harlow discusses clothing from the children’s point of view. What kind of clothes did children wear? Harlow distances herself from Philippe Ariès’ often-repeated thesis that the absence of specific children’s clothing implies the absence of the recognition of childhood as a specific phase of life. On the contrary, if we try to put ourselves in Roman children’s shoes, their clothes can tell us something about their experience and the world around them. We move even nearer to children’s bodies in the chapter by Christian Laes, who studies the theme of touch from the angle of breastfeeding, hugging and kissing the children. Ancient families had rather strict boundaries about who was allowed to touch whom and under which conditions. Undoubtedly, such rules shaped the way children experienced the world around them and how they valued the people in proximity to them. This section of the volume is rounded off by a chapter on children’s social environments by April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto, who take a look at the middle status people of Graeco-Roman Egypt and investigate children’s relationships with their aunts and uncles in the city of Oxyrhynchus. The next five chapters ask what children actually did – how they used their time and what their activities were. First, Jerry Toner offers an overview of the

Childhood and children in Antiquity   7 leisure time of children, with plays, games and communal activities, discussing the possible effect the changes in popular culture, thanks to the rise of Christianity, may have entailed for childhood experience. Toys, plays and games were crucial to the socialisation of children. Fanny Dolansky shows how they shaped the identity of children of a certain age, gender and status and how different expectations with regard to childhood shaped their culture. Her analysis is strongly focused on agency. Aptly making use of anthropological comparisons, she shows that children do not always use toys the way adults expect them to. This is a world apart from Giovanni Pascoli, in whom the discovery of young Crypereia Tryphaena and her doll prompted reflections on eternal childhood. Katharine Huntley’s chapter on children’s graffiti on the walls (private and public) goes deeper to the heart of children’s agency and their culture in the context of Roman urban culture. Recent research based on archaeological and palaeographical evidence has made it possible to identify certain graffiti as the work of children. Huntley explores the potential of this research to ask why children created graffiti and which places they preferred. The two other papers of this section deal with less leisurely but equally vital activities of young people. Konrad Vössing’s contribution states that contrary to an often expressed opinion based on a superficial reading of some texts, a longer summer vacation did not exist for pupils at Roman schools. He thereby provides us a new framework for Roman children’s experiences at school. Martin Bloomer concentrates on more specific experiences based on Roman schoolboys’ ‘bitter memories’ and their experience of violence, showing the significance of resistance as a locus for agency in Roman schooling. Naturally, schooling as such was a privilege for a minority of children in the Roman world. However, since the theme of child work has lately received more interest than other themes related to childhood experience, it has not been given a separate treatment in the present volume; this topic is discussed in some of the chapters (especially in Vuolanto, Dolansky and Graumann).26 The following chapters deal with children in the context of religious spaces and practices. In Chapter 12, Jacob Mackey examines children’s participation and experience in connection with the ‘lived religion’ in the traditional Roman religious milieu. Mackey takes an explicitly universalist and essentialist stance, claiming that certain reactions towards religion can be found in children throughout the ages. But again, this stance is not based on any a priori sentiment, but on recent research by experimental psychologists and historians of religion – and on Roman evidence. Hagith Sivan gives us a day in the life perspective on Jewish childhood experience by letting us follow a boy in the Palestinian town of Tiberias in the course of a Sabbath day. Chapter 14, by Béatrice Caseau, returns to the theme of resistance: how children’s own culture would be seen in the ‘childish’ responses to church attendance, and to fasting. The chapter also brings in the theme of food and its importance for Roman childhood history. A more special group, but much better documented than most others, were the children who lived in monasteries. Mariachiara Giorda discusses children who ended up in Egyptian monasteries, and their life conditions and tasks there, while Oana Cojocaru’s chapter gives us two stories tracing the experiences of everyday life in ninth-century Byzantine

8  Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto monasteries. Both Sivan and Cojocaru explore the possibilities of using fictional characters (recalling the genre of ‘faction’), which bring children to life by means of plausible and well-informed life stories. Yet, these stories are far from being romantic or dramatic, since each fact of the narration is carefully documented. The last chapters of the volume return to the theme of the body, but now from the perspective of the darker sides of childhood. As a medical doctor, Lutz Graumann is well placed to look at the evidence of children’s accidents in the Roman world and show the huge variety of activities children were involved with in their everyday lives, while also giving us a glimpse of the experiences of injured children. The theme of physical marginalisation continues with Chapter 18, by Rebecca Solevåg, who presents a close reading of two early Christian stories about disabled girls, that is, children who are marginal in a multiple way. What kind of ‘tiny’ voices can be heard here? Solevåg, like Laes earlier, also brings in the theme of sexuality and children.27 Fittingly, the last chapter in this section deals with death: Cornelia Horn includes in her discussion sources beyond the traditional geographical boundaries of the Roman world, as she analyses both experiences of children’s death and, as far as possible, children’s own experiences of death in a world in which illness and death were an everyday phenomenon. The book ends with a chapter by Reidar Aasgaard, in which he discusses the challenges, problems and potential of the study of ancient childhood, and especially of children’s agency and experiences. He asks to what extent and in what ways has the volume let us hear the ‘tiny voices’ of the children. What kind of new steps can scholarship take and what methodologies should it follow in the future?

Acknowledgements On behalf of all the contributors we thank Reidar Aasgaard who has commented on the chapters, and in many ways given support in the different phases of the project. The contributions of the non-native English speakers were proofread by Brian McNeil. The financial contributions of the Research Council of Norway, and of the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Arts and Ideas (IFIKK), University of Oslo, have been crucial to the publication of this book.

Notes 1 The bibliography and scholarly literature on Pascoli as a writer in Italian and Latin are extensive. There even exists a yearly Rivista Pascoliana edited by the Accademia Pascoliana. For a first introduction, see Hartmann 1920; Pascoli 1961; Bragantini 1973; Mahoney 2010. Laes 2014c explicitly makes the link with the aim of writing the history of childhood from the child’s point of view, as this appears in other literary writers and scholars. 2 See Pascoli 2009 for edition and commentary. 3 See Pascoli 1984 for edition and commentary. 4 Laes 2014c. 5 Moormann 2003 gives many examples of this.

Childhood and children in Antiquity   9 6 Butterworth and Laurence 2005. See also Hopkins 1999 for a more experimental example, with a postmodern twist. 7 See the special issue 72:2 of the year 2000 of the Dutch journal Hermeneus. Tijdschrift voor antieke cultuur. It contains 16 fictional stories by leading classicists and ancient historians. Each story has its origin in literary, epigraphical, papyrological or archaeological sources. See also Marciniak 2016 for a survey of the reception of Classical Antiquity in the literature for youngsters throughout the world. More often than not, such literary stories refer to images of ancient childhood and youth. 8 Aasgaard 2015; Brooten 2015. See Sivan and Cojocaru in this volume for two other examples of historically informed life stories. 9 Toner 2014. 10 Parkin 2010: 105–7. 11 Vuolanto 2015a: 28–44. 12 For Ariès, deMause and Stone, and the reactions classicists and historians of Antiquity, see Harlow, Laurence and Vuolanto 2007: 5–6; Vuolanto 2014. 13 Rawson 1986a, 1991; Saller 1986, 1994; Dixon 1988, 1992; Bradley 1991. 14 Dixon 1988, 1992, Education: Vössing 1997, 2003; Cribiore 2001; 2007; Law: McGinn 2013; Evans Grubbs 2011; Gardner 1998. 15 For the older research, see Aasgaard 2006, esp. 30–6, with now especially Betsworth 2015; MacDonald 2014; Murphy 2013; Horn and Martens 2009. Metaphors: Moxnes 1997; Buell 1999; Hellerman 2001; Aasgaard 2004; Gerber 2005; Strawn 2008; Vuolanto 2015a: 69–88. 16 See first Wood 1994; Bakke 2005 and Bunge 2008; now Horn and Martens 2009 and Horn and Phenix 2009. 17 For the recent studies, see papers in Laes, Mustakallio and Vuolanto 2015; Evans Grubbs and Parkin 2013, with Horn and Martens 2009; Horn and Phenix 2009; Hübner and Ratzan 2009; Papaconstantinou and Talbot 2009, with Laes 2011a; Hennessy 2008; Rawson 2003a. For the earlier research, see Aasgaard 2006; Harlow, Lawrence and Vuolanto 2007, with Vuolanto 2014. Children´s agency was already addressed in Golden 1990, a landmark study on children in classical Athens. For this subject, see now also Sommer and Sommer 2015. 18 See now papers in Carroll and Graham 2014, with esp. Harlow 2013; Hermary and Dubois 2012; Dolansky 2012; Bourbou and Garvie-Lok 2009; Pitarakis 2009; Crawford and Shepherd 2007; Dasen 2004. 19 See Rawson 2003a: 153–7, 269–80; Horn and Martens 2009: 161–212, 268–71; 292–300; Laes 2011a; Harlow 2013; McWilliam 2013; Vuolanto 2013a; MacDonald 2014; Brooten 2015; Aasgaard 2015; Pudsey 2015. See also Dolansky 2012; KatajalaPeltomaa and Vuolanto 2011; Huntley 2010; Harders 2010; Prescendi 2010; Aasgaard 2009a and b; with Pudsey forthcoming. 20 See Vuolanto in this volume. 21 For further discussion of a longue durée perspective on the everyday lives of children across the conventional borderline between ancient and medieval worlds, see KatajalaPeltomaa and Vuolanto 2011: 79–85 and 93. For earlier volumes with this approach, see Mustakallio, Hanska, Sainio and Vuolanto 2005 and Mustakallio and Laes 2011. 22 Ages of man and coming of age: Parkin 2010; Laes 2011a: 85–98. Legal background: Gaius, Inst. 1.196; Institutiones Iustiniani 1.22 pr.; Codex Iustinianus 5.60.3; Ulpian 11.28 (in Fontes Iuris Romani Anteiustiniani (FIRA) II, 276), with Gardner 1998: 146–8. For general discussions of the end of childhood, with both legal and social facets, see Laes 2011a: 278–81; Laes and Strubbe 2014: 23–39. 23 Harlow and Laurence 2002: 13–19, 56–60, 67; Rawson 2003a: 142–4; Laes 2011a: 278–80; Laes and Strubbe 2014: 55–9; McWilliam 2013: 271–2. 24 Epikrisis: Montserrat 1996: 36–9; Laes and Strubbe 2014: 55–9. Ages at first marriage: Vuolanto 2015a: 95–101 with further notes.

10  Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto 25 This is one of the newer approaches in the modern sociology of childhood: see Brembeck 2013. 26 Laes 2015; Vuolanto 2015c; Laes 2011a, 148–221; Laes 2008; with Bradley 1991, 103–24. 27 As in the case of children and work, some significant contributions on sexuality and children have recently appeared. Accordingly, it was decided not to include a separate chapter on sex and children here. See esp. Brooten 2015; Martens 2009 and 2015; Laes 2011a: 222–77 with Laes 2010a and b.

2 Experience, agency, and the children in the past The case of Roman childhood Ville Vuolanto

The concepts of experience and agency have become central to the study of children by social scientists in modern childhood studies. Since these concepts have also started to appear in the writings of historians of childhood, it is necessary to reflect on their meaningfulness for the study of ancient children. What is actually being studied when we claim to study the agency and experience of children? The aim of the first part of the present chapter is to give an overview of the research into children’s experience and agency, and of the methodological problems in the study of Roman childhood in the context of modern childhood studies. The rest of the chapter deals with the usefulness of the concepts of ‘agency’ and ‘experience’ in studying the history of ancient childhood, with the help of two very different kinds of examples. The first is drawn from the autobiographical narrative of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, from the mid-fifth century ce Roman Syria, which represents a common situation in writing ancient childhood history: a text written by an older man, in which childhood is only one more tool for arguing his point in ongoing discussions on authority. The other example is a second- or thirdcentury papyrus letter by Theon to his homonymous father, a very rare example of a text written by a child, probably in his early teens.

Modern childhood studies and the Roman childhood In modern family studies, one is able to recognize, very roughly, three different phases in relation to the study of childhood and children. In the first phase, children were understood to be worthy of study as objects of adult interest, especially in the contexts of education and legal status. Childhood was looked at as a fixed and separate period in a human life course, both preparatory and anticipatory as such – this approach dominated the scattered studies on children until the 1960s. Here, the influence of Philip Ariès and the idea of the historical embeddedness of childhood was essential: childhood is (also) socially constructed. However, one may claim that modern childhood studies really began only with the next phase of research, through the development of the idea of childhood socialization. The continuity of a community depends not only on its biological and economic survival but also on the transmission of its cultural and social norms and customs while learning processes of inheriting norms, behaviour, and ideologies provide the individuals

12  Ville Vuolanto with the skills and ways of acting that are necessary for participation in their own society. This idea of a double process of socialisation was already central in the work of George Herbert Mead in the 1920s, but it was only after the Second World War, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s, that the study of childhood socialization became the way of studying childhood in the field of social studies.1 From the late 1980s onwards, this way of approaching children in childhood studies has been much criticized on the grounds that there is a danger of seeing children solely as passive objects of various socializing forces. Socialization would be too easily understood as principally a process through which a child becomes a non-child, a member of the adult world. Thus, in recent studies on modern childhood, the stress has shifted from childhood socialization to a third phase of studies, with its starting point in agency-based theories. The claim is that children have an active role in their growing and learning processes, transforming and renewing the cultural heritage they were born into.2 It must, however, be noted, that the concept of socialization as such does require us to subscribe to a deterministic view of childhood which would deny the possible agency of children.3 Four basic assumptions underlying this new wave in childhood studies in the social sciences can be identified.4 First, childhood and ‘child’ should be approached as socially constructed and culturally conditioned notions. The necessary stress on the constructive elements of childhood makes it important to historicize childhood – even for the social scientists. Second, age, and thus also childhood, should be seen as a variable of social analysis just like class, health, gender, or ethnicity. Childhood, when it starts and when it ends, and the cultural connotations and practices relevant to childhood, are defined differently in different historical periods, in different cultural spheres, and by different social groups. Third, therefore, childhood, children’s social relationships and children’s culture are worthy of study in their own right – not because children will one day become adults. In all, fourth, children should be seen as active in constructing and experiencing their own lives. As the brief historiographical survey in the introduction to this volume shows, this new paradigm of childhood studies has had scant influence on writing about ancient, or more specifically Roman, children and childhood. Attention has seldom been paid to children’s agency and everyday life or to Roman children’s experiences. Modern studies of ancient childhood began as the history of education. The roots of this approach go back to the nineteenth century and to the establishing of national educational systems and the need to find old examples and new viewpoints. However, such studies up to now have concentrated mainly on normative aspects, on how children (ideally) would be brought up, rarely exploring the history of everyday life and mentalities, and they still form a somewhat differentiated field of study.5 On the other hand, most of the other studies on ancient childhood have been preoccupied with discussions of le sentiment de l’enfance and parental love, in response to the claims of Philippe Ariès and, later, especially of Lloyd deMause. Although studies from the 1980s onward, drawing on women’s history and demography, have widened the field of study and raised new questions and themes, the discussions initiated by Ariès still provided the framework for research, which has focused on showing that even if childhood is culturally conditioned and a

Experience, agency, and the children   13 potentially changing category, the history of families cannot be written as a long story of unloving and frigid family relations, which gradually evolved into caring and loving parenthood during the modern era.6 It is obvious that these questions and themes took parents and their perspective on children and childhood, not children themselves, as their starting point.

Methodological challenges to the ancient historians Why has the shift from the adult perspective to children’s own experience been so difficult to achieve? It can be claimed that ancient historians lack the necessary sources: the genuine motives and experiences of children cannot be found. There are no interviews or diaries to use, and direct signs about agency, such as a variety of toys or children’s own writings and drawings, are rarely if ever available. Since even the voice of the common people is barely audible, how can we hear the voice of children? Nevertheless, the questions and viewpoints derived from the modern approaches can be useful: concepts such as socialization, agency, experience and children’s culture direct the gaze of the historian to other kinds of social processes and questions than were previously studied. How did children use their time? What did they do, and with whom did they interact? One could also study parent–child relations from the point of view of the children – for example, one may wonder, why nobody has dared to ask if Roman children had the courage to invest emotionally in their parents, given that they saw so many of their peers become orphans?7 The change in perspective is all the more needed, since at present not only ancient historians but scholars of the past cultures more generally seem to speak somewhat intuitively and unreflectively about childhood and children’s history. This can be overcome only by carefully defining the words, concepts and approaches taken. The basic requirement is that normative statements should not be confused with depictions of everyday attitudes or with social history. As Paula Fass stresses in the introduction to a recent volume, family affection and experience should not be confused with expressions of family affection and experience. The emotional expressions that are regarded as legitimate change over the course of history. Besides this, we are often at the mercy of differing intellectual traditions if we are not aware of them: a Roman scholar, a scholar of early Christianity, a medieval scholar, or a sociologist, all reflect on the past from their own perspectives. A multidisciplinary discussion, presentation, or volume does not guarantee an interdisciplinary view of the subject.8 It is, however, much more difficult to evade a tendency to think about childhood in the terms of our own experience – which we understand as the natural order of things. In particular, there is a danger in defining ‘child’ through modern ideas about the development child, thereby universalizing ideas about the age of children. What are we to think about the Roman elite marriages, or the marriages of the Byzantine, Renaissance or Muslim elites, involving girls between the ages of twelve and fourteen (like Shakespeare’s Juliet)? What would have been the difference between abusive child labour and everyday child work in the households? Thus, for example, instead of taking an a priori definition of a child as being of one particular age, it

14  Ville Vuolanto would be more fruitful to see how children or ‘childish behaviour’ was defined in the contemporary contexts, and who is already considered to be a grown-up – and why. To sum up, when we study children – not merely adult views about childhood – we should view childhood as a performative phase of life. A focus on the physical and psychological immaturity and development, which are based on a shared human biology, does not suffice to define ‘a child’ (although this biological and ‘bodily’ base for childhood would inevitably play its part in these definitions)9: children become children by their own repeated acts and social interaction, the exact nature of which depends not only on biology and individual characteristics but also on social conventions and cultural contexts. This idea of performative childhood focuses research on the activities of the children and their ways of adapting to certain culturally and socially conditioned environments. From this viewpoint, childhood socialization cannot be understood as the set of activities through which children are taught to function in their society. The emphasis would lie rather on extra-educational impulses, and on the children’s own initiative.10 At any given time at least a third of the population consisted of children, who shared in a children’s culture. This means that the potential influence of childhood experiences on an individual cannot be underestimated.11 Moreover, viewing childhood as a preparation period for taking part in the adult culture is by no means the same as viewing it as a period of participating in children’s own culture, which is worthy of study on its own merits. Children, as individuals, certainly do change and the way they are looked at is constantly shifting – but the point of comparison does not need to be adulthood, nor does research need to restrict itself to the processes through which children grow up towards adulthood.

The case of Theodoret of Cyrrhus: grapes, and the nearness of the ascetics In what follows, my aim is to clarify by means of a very short and simple example the methodological problems and promises involved in studying agency and experience of (late) Roman childhood. The text consists of only two sentences taken from the biographies of the Syrian ascetics in the Religious History by Theodoret of Cyrrhus, from the 440s ce – but the actual event described had taken place some forty years earlier: Often, when he [i.e. Peter the Galatian] had asked me to sit on his knee, he gave me grapes and bread. Indeed, my mother, who had experienced his spiritual grace, sent me once a week to reap the harvest of his blessing.12 In the middle of his discourse on the life and deeds of a local ascetic, Peter the Galatian, who lived in the mountains near Antioch, Theodoret writes himself into the narrative. First, Peter explains why Theodoret, who is still a boy or a young man, cannot become his disciple, ‘as his parents love him too much’ to let him devote himself to the ascetic lifestyle away from his family. Theodoret wanted to attach himself with the ascetics and explain why he himself did not become one of them. This was done by referring to one of the most generally accepted ancient

Experience, agency, and the children   15 virtues, the dutiful and affectionate relationship between a parent and a child. He was so dear to his parents, that he, as a dutiful and obedient son, could not (yet!) act against his parents – but he allows his readers to think that later, when his parents had died, he could follow his calling. However, after this introduction of the setting and his filial duties, he gives details of his relationship with the ascetics, and here with Peter. Theodoret starts ‘from the beginning’ – with his first writing about his initial encounters with the ascetic figures as a child, and gives a brief account of his experiences. Although we cannot know for sure if this idyllic recollection represents any actual events, the scene with its homely nearness is a perfect example of how a child would end up with a positive view of a certain lifestyle and values. In analysing the narrated incident and its rhetorical strategies, one must be aware of the genre in question: autobiographical writings employ elaborate discourses with a variety of narrative strategies for self-promotion. It was influenced by three interlinked aims which would have taken precedence over any truth claims or unmasking of the self: the ancient autobiography was preoccupied with the preservation of memory, with portraying oneself as an exemplary figure, and with justifying some quite precise deeds or thought systems. Moreover, ancient autobiography was not preoccupied with any ‘development’ of character, but about the depiction of the life as a perfected whole and as revealing the unchangeable ‘real character’ of an individual. In Roman autobiographical writings, there is a continuum of anecdotes from consisting of possibly first-hand experience to the invented exemplary stories using the author himself and his family members as the protagonists.13 Thus, these texts require a reading which pays attention to themes and ideas the writers themselves had taken for granted, and which often serve only as a background for their actual argumentation, which is directed towards other ends. Although we may question the exact relationship between these stories and the actual living conditions of the specific children they are supposed to refer to, they must necessarily depict a childhood which has relevance to the intended audience. It would, however, be pointless to make any specific psychohistorical analyses, for example, on the basis of Augustine’s depiction of his childhood: but his text could be a reliable source for seeing what kinds of forces an adult late-antique elite male saw at play during childhood. But how are we to study the experience of childhood? What do we actually mean by this concept? If everything done by any person is categorized by ‘agency’, the category becomes vacuous and devoid of analytical importance (although this would not prevent its being used for rhetorical purposes, to give the impression that the scholar is informed about the recent trends in social sciences).14 We need an analytical definition, to see if the concept of agency indeed helps us to study the past and to discern what it means to postulate the ‘agency’ of a person?

Experience experienced and narrated The word ‘experience’ refers to two rather different sets of ideas: knowledge or lessons gained from past events (e.g. when we say that someone is ‘an experienced

16  Ville Vuolanto person’), or consciousness or awareness of something, by sensing, feeling or thought. This is experience as subjective feeling (for instance, referring to something as ‘a great experience’). Second, one must be careful to keep separate the individual experience and, on the other hand, the meanings given to this experience. A simple example: what we have experienced as children is a past thing – but if we talk about it, it is transformed into an experience reflected upon and brought to the present. Thus, experience is a changing thing, reconstructed in our daily lives. Experience that can be studied is always something which is already told, spoken about, and thus constructed.15 These two points lead to a third point: individual, reflected, even shared experience versus a common experience (which may also be called a generational experience – such as asking ‘what was it like to be at school in the 1980s?’). If we confuse these approaches, there is a danger of essentialism: as if there were ‘a childhood’ that is, a more or less universal and shared ‘one certain’ childhood to be experienced.16 Let us return to Theodoret. He claims to have experienced a certain repetitive event in his early life before he was a teenager. We have no way of ascertaining this – we have only his own words. Moreover, he does not even reflect further upon his experience – no emotions are referred to, and we learn nothing of the significance of these visits. On the other hand, we know that Theodoret consciously presented himself both as a son of a pious mother and as a spiritual son of the holy ascetics, trying to construct himself as a person of special authority against this double background (to back up his claim to a pure tradition) for the mid-fifth-century theological struggles.17 Where is the experience here? Let us assume that we can indeed trust him: how can we try to reconstruct something like the experience of childhood on the basis of individual, anecdotal evidence? And, what does ‘experience’ means for us? Would reality be something that just ‘happens’ to an individual with direct experience (and a cognitive scientist may ask whether a direct experience would even be possible); or would it rather be something that people, in any case, construct by giving their own meanings to their ‘experiences’ in social and cultural contexts and contacts? If we opt for the latter view, as we think we should,18 what is important must not be what has been told, but the fact that it has been told, and it is told in a certain, culturally sanctioned way. In other words, we should ask why this kind of anecdote was recorded in the first place: why the ancient texts mention those incidents which we categorize as referring to a certain experience. As Aldous Huxley claims: ‘Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him’. After all, it is an interpretation of experience that needs an explanation.19

Defining agency Agency can denote human freedom in the sense of ‘free will’ (against the view that human actions are predetermined by structures). This, naturally, poses the basic philosophical problem in all the human sciences: how much are people bound by their environment, that is, by history and society, and how much they can shape by their own action these very same constraints? Agency in the course of a life has sometimes been defined as a capacity to act meaningfully and to exert influence on

Experience, agency, and the children   17 one’s life within personal constraints in a given temporally-constructed situation.20 The idea of autonomous action has aroused criticism, especially because this position is individualistic. Rather than stressing individual competence and strategic planning in agency, which would reserve real agency to narrower and more privileged groups of people (also of children), it would be more fruitful to take ‘social modes’ of agency as our point of departure: agency, here understood as a capacity to act purposively and make a difference, takes place on social networks and in structures of power; it is always ‘in-between and interstitial’, as David Oswell points out.21 It has also been argued that a sense, or an appreciation, of this kind of effect, should itself be understood as agency. Thus, agency would include the individual sense of control and achievement, the experience that it is possible to have an influence on one’s life and on the future, and often an element of planning. This sense of making an impact on the world would be dangerously weakened if a person were left without any positive feedback. This means that social support is an important element of agency. The sense of being an agent is strongly dependent on the dimensions of futurity and hope.22 According to the useful categorisation by Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische, the practice of agency is determined by past patterns of action, or, more generally, by the presence of past experiences (sense/feeling, remembrance, anticipation), and communicative interaction (socialization), which together constitute one’s identity. Second, future ‘projective experience’ and emotions are present: hopes, fears, desires; and third, there is the practical evaluation of the present situation. Agency is ‘always agency towards something’, a means of entering into a relationship with surrounding persons, places, meanings, and events.23 There are inevitably great differences between children in the forms which agency would take in particular different historical contexts, because of personal characteristics, family environment, dominant social structures, and prevalent age, status, health and gender roles.24 A child who has agency is an interactive child, with a sense of having influence, and of being able to make a difference. To be an agent is to be able to take the initiative, to be creative – but this creativeness does not need to be spectacular since it takes place in everyday life: agency is not present only when acting in contrast to social expectations, but also in the reproduction of social norms.25 To analyse children’s agency need not to mean finding ‘great deeds’ or heroism in the lives of children.26 In general, however, agency denotes the possibility of change. The problem for a historian is, of course, that behaviour seemingly totally in line with social expectations can still represent agency, since we cannot observe the processes of decision-making and the ‘sense of social action’ that may be involved. What, then, is the relationship between experience and agency? The theoretical framework adopted by social interactionism is useful here. As Herbert Blumer stresses, we must recognize that the activity of human beings consists of meeting a flow of situations in which they have to act and that their action is built on the basis of what they note, how they assess and interpret what they note, and what kind of projected lines of action they map out.27

18  Ville Vuolanto Thus, agency involves interpretation of and reflection on the reality of the environment one is exposed to, even if it is not an immediate reaction to it. When studying agency, we must identify the meanings people give to their environment and to people and phenomena they interact with – studying agency is, from this perspective, the study of narrated experience. Since these meanings are individual, contextual and localized, ‘people may be living side by side yet be living in different worlds’.28 However, the interpretation process itself, and its meaningfulness for an individual are necessarily informed by social interaction in general. Thus, agency is built on individual experiences as interpreted in social contexts. The perspective of agency presents individuals at the crossroads of the external pressures and their own – culturally conditioned – intentions and choices: to have agency means that an individual has a sense of having the means to influence the course of one’s own life (and thus the world) within the opportunities and constraints provided by history and social circumstances. However, social and cultural factors not only play a role in limiting the boundaries of action and ‘accepted’ behaviour for achieving goals; they also affect these goals – and provide a field for the acting itself. Moreover, the actual goals – the towardsaspect of agency – may be of low visibility both for the actors themselves and for the scholar, and even the actors’ explanations of their goals should not be taken for granted a priori.

Theodoret the boy and Theodoret the story-teller When we come to the case related by Theodoret, we have very little information about the situation of the protagonist, the boy Theodoret. However, even if he is sent to see the ascetic by his mother, he is there on his own; his mother trusts him to actually go where his mother urges him and to find the way by himself in due time (at least before night-fall). He is to receive the blessing of the hermit – he achieves this, and he is also given grapes and bread.29 This may not be extremely innovative, but he is certainly in control of many aspects of his own quest, and interacts with his surroundings and with the other people mentioned (his mother, the ascetic). But even if the story as such is intended to convey a certain emotional message for the readers, he does not refer to any emotions, nor does he comment on any practical issues involved in getting to see the ascetic. Historians need to accept the limits of their knowledge. We cannot know how an individual experienced a situation and what motivations and intentions he or she had. Accordingly, the historian should pay attention to ‘the composition and decomposition of the interpretative dispositions that inevitably frame historical agency’.30 If the question is not what an agent’s degree of liberty is, but what conditions have allowed ‘a given social context to generate a particular modality of practice or course of action’,31 actions as expressions of their social contexts can be used to reconstruct that context. Here, we are dealing not only with a certain ‘modality of practice’, but also with a culturally shared discourse, which tended to emphasize and combine childhood, individual choosing, the mother’s influence, and the accumulation of authority.32

Experience, agency, and the children   19 For the ancient historian, the precious information is that Theodoret’s aim of presenting himself as an inheritor of the ascetic monks leads him to refer to his own childhood, giving us an anecdote of homely intimacy, as he sits on the lap of a father figure.33 His contemporaries must have found this recognizable, referring to an expectation of a shared experience, and certain modes of agency that needed no further explanation for his intended audience. Otherwise, it would have been futile to try to use this kind of story to promote a message of intimate links with ascetic Christianity. We thus reach the paradoxical conclusion that, as a discursive act, the story by Theodoret may tell us more about the possible limits of childhood agency, the experience of nearness, the shaping of identity, and the transfer of the tradition in a certain historical context, than if we (by some miraculous way) could know how he, as an individual, actually managed to pay these visits and how he experienced and actually remembered them in the early fifth century. A speculative story, with a point on what plausibly could have been the case, might be more useful than a historically ‘accurate’ anecdote, even for a social historian.34 The contextualization of the stories related to everyday life of the children would be one way of collecting information on children’s history – even if these were told by middle-aged men decades later, propagating their own ideas and ideals. We are left with the bare bones of agency and an outsider’s view of experience: what kinds of circumstances the protagonists of our historical study encountered and experienced. In most cases, therefore, it seems futile to try to reconstruct any actual agency or experiences of the historical subjects. Instead, we might be able to reconstruct the world which was to be experienced. Moreover, as Mary Jo Maynes points out, narratives of childhood of this kind can be very telling, not as direct evidence of the experience of children, ‘but rather as sources of insights into the impact and meanings of childhood, and of childhood as a phase of the construction of agency and subjectivity’.35 It is from his childhood that Theodoret seeks to draw the arguments for his (public) identity as an ascetical and unwavering orthodox bishop.

A rare case: letter of Theon, the angry boy The case depicted above is a representative example of the challenges involved in finding children’s experience and agency from the late Roman sources, but the case with which I end my discussion is quite exceptional in the context of Roman history. It is a papyrus letter by a Roman Egyptian boy presumably in his early teens, written in his own hand to his father. As far as I am aware, only two other children’s letters from Antiquity have been preserved.36 Theon to his father Theon greetings. It was so nice of you not to take me with you to the city. If you refuse to take me with you to Alexandria I won’t write you a letter or speak to you or wish you good health. So, if you go to Alexandria I won’t take your hand or greet you ever again. If you refuse to take me, this is what will happen. And my mother said to Archelaos, ‘He’s upsetting me, take him away!’ It was so nice of you, sending me these great

20  Ville Vuolanto presents, just rubbish.37 They put me off the track on the 12th, the day when you sailed. Well then, send for me, I beg you. If you don’t, I won’t eat, I won’t drink; there! I pray for your health. Tybi 18th. Deliver to Theon from Theonas his son.38 We have here a boy whose father does not want to take him to the big world, to the second biggest city of the Roman empire, Alexandria. The father has left home without informing him to take the boat from the city of Oxyrhynchus further down the Nile. The text combines nicely two different rhetorical strategies: first, the adulttone, with recourse to irony with ‘so nice of you’ and a present of beans. Second, there is the childish-tone, with blackmailing: he won’t speak, greet or eat if his hopes are not fulfilled. Moreover, he is able to refer to the words of his mother, thus backing up his claim that he is indeed very disappointed and actively trying to influence the decision-making in the family – most probably, he had pestered his mother to write a letter to his father. The translation cannot do full justice to the textual characteristics of the original letter: the editors39 remark that it is ‘[w]ritten in a rude uncial hand, and its grammar and spelling leave a good deal to be desired’. Still, we have here a child who certainly is privileged compared to most of his peers: he has access to education and he comes from a wealthy family.40 His father is doing business in Alexandria for a longer period, he himself has access to papyrus to write on – and he took full advantage of his situation. Naturally, to write a letter may have been the idea of Archelaos (perhaps an older relative, or even a teacher) but the wording shows that the ideas presented were the boy’s own. The intervention of an adult may be discerned in the formulae of address and conclusion, or else what we see here are the well-embedded cultural conventions. In particular, the shifting tone at the end of the letter is amusing and shows that ‘I pray for your health’ is there because (and only because) one should end letters with this expression. It is also of interest that at the beginning of the letter he uses his real name, Theon – but when adding the address, he shifted to use his pet name, Theonas.41 We have here an example of multi-layered agency by a child: Theon wants to experience Alexandria, he pesters his mother, he writes a letter; he is also proclaiming his agency by greeting or not greeting his father, and – though perhaps not so convincingly – by eating or not eating. Certainly, he presents himself as a subject in his own life. Nevertheless, this is a rhetorical exercise, since he tells what he chooses to about his experiences: he works hard to convince his father of his deep disappointment at the family decision. The interplay of social conventions and his immediate concerns are made visible in an exceptional manner: he is socialized with regard to his ‘family culture’ rather than with the requirements of the wider cultural discourses. There is little sign of the kind of filial piety which ideally should permeate all interaction between children and their parents. The milieu in which his action takes place is convincingly depicted: a household with his mother and some other people; with freedom to act and to express his opinions and experiences. Perhaps the most interesting point in our

Experience, agency, and the children   21 present context is that he seems to think this actually could help. Theon is not an oppressed or frightened child. He is not afraid of losing the emotional support of his nearest and dearest even if he is himself angry and acting irritatingly. This is an isolated text, and, as noted, nearly unique. No firm conclusions about the ‘usual’ experiences of childhood or prevalent patterns of family dynamics can be drawn from this kind of anecdotal evidence: it is his own world Theon is experiencing. But it shows what was possible within certain limits, at least in some contexts and in some families.

Conclusions In our quest for children’s everyday life and experiences in Roman Antiquity we are mostly limited to stories told by the adults, reflecting childhood agency, experience and culture. We can seldom claim with certainty to hear the voices of ‘real’ children in ancient texts since they have been appropriated to such an extent by adult authors.42 And when these voices can be heard, the information we gain is often quite anecdotal. When historians talk about ‘experience’ and ‘agency’, what they in fact often mean is the frame in which the actual historical experiences (about which we have no information) took place, or the outward ‘acts’ which the historians take as representing the actual choices made by the individuals as more or less free ‘agents’. It may seem that a child who has agency is a special case of having a childhood experience, but this is true only in a superficial sense. Thus, while it is self-evident that having an experience does not require any outward actions taking place (such as moving your body or speaking), experiencing nevertheless needs processing and interpretation, that is, something that has an effect on the person in question. The world around us is not existing, but happening to us – as far as we are aware of it. A historian cannot know which features of the individuals’ environment are in fact actively experienced, and would, therefore, be reflected in their agency. These experiences are rarely reported (even in more modern times, let alone in Antiquity), they are always processed and narrated, and are thus subject to more or less conscious hindsight, or even to exploitation. The studies presented in this volume may tell us more about the boundary conditions of childhood agency than about the worlds that children actually experienced. They depict the potential of the human networks with which children of the Roman world could interact, and the cultural and material environment they moved in during their childhood. But, this will give us a glimpse of a mode of thought and action that is arguably characteristic of a particular combination of gender, age, social group, stage of family life course, culture/ethnicity/ geographical area, and time: What was the capacity of Roman children (both individually and collectively) ‘in making the difference’, and what kinds of conditions limited them?43 By emphasizing the perspectives of childhood experience and children’s agency – what children do, in what circumstances, and with whom – the research may emphasize children’s active, intentional, and goal-seeking character. If we add to this perspective the study of the material contexts of childhood, the significance of both

22  Ville Vuolanto the children’s environment and their own biological boundary conditions, the focus of research would shift from the history of childhood towards the history of children, that is, towards a better understanding of children’s culture and their everyday life.

Acknowledgements I am indebted to many acute and constructive comments in the History of Ideas Research Seminar in 2014 and in the Breakfast Club workshop in 2015 in Oslo, and to Jari Aro (Tampere) and Christian Laes (Antwerp/Tampere) for their suggestions and encouragement.

Notes 1 Oswell 2013: 9–12, 37–43; Honig 2009; see also Ryan 2008: 563–4, who also points out that already John Locke’s ideas fit well into the theories of the developmental socialization of children (p. 569). 2 Honig 2009: 65–9; Alanen 1992: 80–90; James and James 2004: 23–7. 3 See Katajala-Peltomaa and Vuolanto 2011: 83–4; Ryan 2008: 563–4, 574. 4 On what follows, see James and Prout 1997: esp. 7–10, with Ryan 2008: 555–6 and James and James 2004: 23–7, 37–40. Ryan 2008: esp. 561, 564–6 criticizes those who call this way of doing childhood studies a new ‘paradigm’, showing that several important studies of children’s agency were published earlier. 5 On this, see Vössing 2003. 6 See Introduction, this volume, pp. 2–3, with further bibliography. 7 On this, see also Horn in this volume, p. 313–314. 8 Fass 2013: 4 – with a sad example in the same volume: King 2013, writing on Early Christian and Jewish views on childhood, claims that ‘the machinery of child slaughter’ powered the ‘infanticidal’ Greco-Roman world, which ignored, exploited, and discarded children – all of which gradually began to change by the rise of Christianity. However, in the same volume, Bradley 2013 argues that there was no great changes in the lives of children or in the attitudes towards them in Christianity, and that children were ‘never marginal beings’. For an analysis of research into misconceptions and prejudices about child abandonment and infanticide on the advent of Christianity in Late Antiquity, see Vuolanto 2011. 9 See e.g. Oswell 2013: 18–20. 10 The idea of performative childhood is derived from Butler 1990 and Laz 1998. 11 Cf. a slip in Fass 2013: ‘childhood, as it had developed and changed over time in West, has not only affected the experience of almost one half of the population …’! 12 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 9.4 (Canivet and Leroy-Molinghen 1979: 414): Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Religious History 9.4 (Canivet and Leroy-Molinghen 1979: 414): ‘Πολλάκις δέ με τοῖς γόνασιν έπικαθίσας σταϕυλῇ με κὰι ἄρτῳ διεθρέψε· πεῖραν γάρ αὐτοῦ τῆς πνευματικῆς χάριτος ἡ μήτηρ δεξαμένη ἅπαξ με τῆς ἑβδομάδος ἑκάστης τρυγᾶν ἐυλογίαν ἐκείνην τὴν ἐκέλευε.’ For the social and cultural contexts and an analysis of the Theodoret’s self-narrative, see Vuolanto 2012. 13 For the autobiographical character of this story, and further studies on autobiographical writing in Antiquity, see Vuolanto 2013b. More generally on hagiographic texts as essentially fictionalized literature, see Clark 1999: 16–21. 14 Critics have also alleged that the focus on children’s agency and their ‘authentic voices’ echoes the ‘modern romanticism of personhood’, that is, it lays too much stress on individualism. See Ryan 2008: esp. 567–8, Oswell 2013: 15, 264–6. 15 See esp. Scott 1991: 793.

Experience, agency, and the children   23 16 Scott 1991: 791–3. 17 For religious authority and Theodoret’s self-construction as a living saint, see Vuolanto 2012. 18 See also Cabrera 2001: 91. 19 Huxley 1932: 5; Scott 1991: 797. 20 Hitlin and Elder 2006: 38 with Calhoun 2002 sv. ‘agency’. See Oswell 2013: esp. 7, 35, 280, who urges that we should leave behind the agency/structures dichotomy in studying children’s agency. 21 Valentine 2011; Oswell 2013: 271. This theorisation is strongly influenced by Anthony Giddens and the theory of structuration, highlighting the impossibility of separating structure and agency, and in attributing even to the smallest social actions a possible role in intervening (and thus reproducing or changing) social systems and processes – although without Giddens’ stress on rationalization and ‘competent members of the society’. See Valentine 2011: 350–51 and Oswell 2013: 46–9 with Giddens 1984: 14–24. 22 Oswell 2013: 263–71; Hitlin and Elder 2006: 39–43; Hitlin and Elder 2007: 182–4 with further references. On agency and hope, see Feldman 2013 with further references to empirical psychological research. 23 Emirbayer and Mische 1998: 969–73, 994 and 1011. On agency and the construction of individual identity, see also Hitlin and Elder 2007: 179–81, 184, who point out that agency is exercised when the individual is performing her or his identity, while simultaneously modifying it in social interaction. 24 See also Valentine 2011 on sociological differences and contexts. 25 Oswell 2013: 6–7, 17; Valentine 2011: 355. See also Hitlin and Elder 2007: 181. 26 See also Maynes 2008: 115–18. She seems to hold that writing about agency would somehow imply this kind of viewpoint – as if studying the agency of the marginalized and voiceless were an oxymoron. See also Ryan 2008: 567–8 and Valentine 2011: esp. 354–5. 27 Blumer 1969: 16. 28 Blumer 1969: 11. 29 It is possible to see here an allegory of Eucharist with bread, wine from the grapes, and a blessing. 30 Smith 2001: 141; See also Scott 1991. 31 Cabrera 2001: 97. 32 Vuolanto 2015b. 33 It must be noted here that Theodoret chooses to attach himself especially to his biological mother – he refers as little as possible to his father. Thus, in his narrative, the nearness to the (male) ascetics takes the place of nearness to father – it was, after all, also due to the prayers of the ‘ascetic fathers’ that he was himself born, as he claims (see Vuolanto 2012). Theodoret’s father is like Joseph, and his mother like Mary – or, alternatively, like a Mother Church – for him. On family metaphors in fourth and fifth century Christianity, see Vuolanto 2015a: 69–80. 34 See also De Brigard 2013: 155, a psychologist and philosopher, who concludes that memory is an ‘integral part of a larger system which that supports not only thinking of what was the case and what potentially could be the case, but also what could have been the case’ (quote from his summary) – thus, in remembering the experiences, it would be more important to be able to formulate possible future events, than to record actual past ones. 35 Maynes 2008: 119. See also Scott 1991: 782. 36 Another is SB III 6262 (Third century, of unknown provenance. For the text, see Aasgaard in this volume, p. 327, with further discussion in Cribiore 2001: 112). Here, too, an angry boy is writing a letter to his father. Thonis goes to school away from home, and he complains that the father hardly ever writes to him, and does not pay visits to his son ‘to find out whether the teacher pays attention’ to the boy or not. At the

24  Ville Vuolanto

37

38 39 40

41 42 43

end of the letter, Thonis sends his greetings to his family members and friends, even to teachers back home, wishing his father good health (as was the custom in letters). As a postscript he adds ‘Remember my pigeons’. The boy here seems to be somewhat older than Theon here in P.Oxy. I 119. The third case is a fourth century bce lead table found in the Athenian Agora (Agora inv. IL 1702). It is sent by a boy, Lesis, to his mother and a man called Xenocles, asking them to save him from perishing, as he is working presently in a foundry under a wicked master. Also here the boy seems to be somewhat older. See Jordan 2000 for an edition and discussion. The word is arakia, which literary means chickling beans (lathyrus sativus). However, here it would be more up to the point to understand this as denoting more generally ’weed’, with a general meaning of ’refuse’, or ’rubbish’, as Jaakko Frösen pointed to me in a private discussion. P.Oxy. I 119 (second–third century ce), translation modified after Peter Parsons. Bernard P. Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt. Naturally, for the age of the writer we have only conjectural evidence: a person not married, living at home, clearly not working or studying outside the household, upsetting his mother, having a person (not a parent) with a power of ‘taking him away’ from the mother, able to write, but writing bad Greek, using emotional and even conflicting arguments and threats. All would be consistent with a person in his (very) early teens. It has to be noted that we do not know if this letter was ever sent. This, naturally, has no bearing on the analysis of Theon’s experiences as they are expressed in the text. See Clark 1999: 31 on writing history of women in early Christianity: ‘we cannot with certainty claim to hear the voices of “real” women in early Christian texts, so appropriated have they been by male authors’. See also the plea by Oswell 2013: 280 for scholars of childhood to study these questions.

Part I

Setting the scene Experiences and environments

3 Children and the urban environment Agency in Pompeii Ray Laurence

Introduction Work on Pompeii has sought to map key aspects of public space with a view to understanding the local variation across the excavated city. As most will know, two-thirds of the 66 hectares of the site has been excavated. The neighbourhoods have been approached with a focus on: where activities occurred – for example – the worship of the gods at street shrines, the collection of water from public fountains, and the presence or absence of bakeries, bars and other commercial outlets. Within this view of the city at a local level, much of the focus has been upon an adult–adult interaction with little discussion of how children might have utilised the public spaces of the city, or at what age might their access to public space and its urban amenities have been enabled. Work to date, by Katherine Huntley on the drawing of stick-figures by children and by Renata Garraffoni and Ray Laurence on the writing of ABCDs, has demonstrated that we can identify children learning and playing in public space.1 The key aspect of determining the presence of the child has been undertaken in these studies with reference to developmental psychology/anthropology and with reference to the height off the ground of children at different ages. This is a key concept for the investigation of the child in the Roman city that may provide the means to accessing the differential between the adult’s city and the child’s city. This chapter reviews where we might measure the access of children by age/height to key features of the Roman city and to define how that access changed according to their age/height.2 To begin with, we need to be well-aware that human height and human growth vary, both today and between today and the past of Pompeii prior to 79 ce. Thus, average height today is that of the very tallest Pompeian; whereas the lowest percentiles of modern European growth charts are at the average for the first century ce. Most parents, today, have an understanding of the reach of their children as they grow up, and often consciously or sub-consciously relate height to competency or agency of a child. For example, sharp knives tend to be moved to a position only reached by adults, where they are perceived as outof-reach of a young child (climbing or moving furniture to increase reach needs to be recognised as a possibility). This is not to suggest that parents in Pompeii may have followed the same procedure, however, what I wish to suggest is that

28  Ray Laurence within the material culture of Pompeii – we have access to the haptic or sensory experience of the past, and an age-related variable to that experience was the height of the child. Most obviously, a child’s gaze was from a quite different position to that of adults, but we should add also the experience of touch at a lower level than that of adults. The modern world has become aware of the role of touch in the learning of children.3 Houses, today, bear evidence of the touch of children through handprints and marks on walls at the height of their hands.4 It is perhaps, also, worth contemplating the role of heat and cold in relation to the child’s body in Antiquity. A matter that was fully conceptualised for Antiquity in medical thought as physically different.5 It has to be admitted that the modern world measures height and weight (occasionally head size as well) to conceptualise a normative pattern of human growth. The ancients had normative patterns of development in the medical literature and a numerical system of normalisation of childhood in relation to both development and to numerical danger points to health, such as the age of seven.6 Age rather than gender was the dominant structure for the medicalisation of children prior to puberty.7 In this period of childhood, the materiality of the city played a role in the creation of gender distinctions alongside the creation of citizens or the reproduction of cultural norms over generations.8 A key factor for the reproduction of gender was clothing that at its most formal would have adjusted or restricted the movement of a child.9 Today, we associate rapid movement with the actions of children, whereas the Romans consciously saw a person in a hurry as a slave.10 Thus, part of socialisation or becoming more adult was a slowing of bodily movement in public space – an obvious exception to this being exercise in the palaestra or at the baths, when clothes were not worn. Perhaps, the most formal wear was associated with religious ritual, in which children were not bystanders and these could have been occasions at which gender was learnt.11 The view of these events associated with temples and the Forum may have been obscured, or potentially children could have been lifted up by parents to gain a better view or a panorama across the heads of a crowd of adults.12 The child, due to height or position, would only have been able to see what was occurring, but these views set out the limits or norms of participation, according to gender and/or status, which were learnt for an adult future.13 Importantly, we need to recognise this aspect of memory from childhood – alongside other recognised aspects of ‘the society of memory’ found in Roman cities, such as ancestors and the creation of ancestors through tomb construction or even the new visual imagery associated with emperor Augustus or early Christianity.14

Redefining neighbourhoods in Pompeii with reference to children Earlier work on neighbourhoods in Pompeii tended to focus on the definition of Pompeii’s neighbourhoods in terms of the formal organisation of the vici known from inscriptions and electoral notices.15 This inevitably caused the focus of discussion to be upon the adult male citizen voter and provided the starting point

Children and the urban environment  29

Figure 3.1  The house of the Cei, Pompeii, seen from the fauces showing puteal in the atrium (centre foreground) (photo: Ray Laurence)

for the discussion of public space in Pompeii in the 1990s, just as the salutatio and the paterfamilias were the starting points for the discussion of private space. As a consequence, Pompeian spatial studies can be seen to have a gender and age bias to the adult male.16 Thus, the child is generally excluded from the literature – a perusal of the indices of books on Pompeii point to an exclusion of children from the ‘proper study’ of Pompeii.17 However, houses can be approached from the perspective of the child and the role of children may inform some of the spatial practices associated with these structures. The puteal found in the atria of a number of houses provide a telling example of the development of spatial practice (Figure 3.1). These show clear signs of wear from rope-pulled buckets or similar devices for gaining access to water from the cistern.18 The puteal prevents the possibility of a child or adult falling into the cistern or domestic animals falling in or polluting the supply of water, but also is at a height that would have facilitated use by both adults and children. The heights recorded tend to range from 0.4 to 0.6 metres.19 The simplicity of the design needs to be observed though and not simply taken for granted. The compromise between accessibility and safety is intriguing and illustrates an interesting designed resolution of the problem. The barrier that is created is not particularly tall but needs to be tall enough to be noticed and to prevent the possibility of tripping over it, or a toddler falling into it. Hence, we have evidence for the fact that the Pompeians considered a concept of child safety that informed the design of domestic interior spaces. Even where the evidence points to children clearly having agency, it is often denied. For example, Pompeii’s most famous child Numerius Popidius

30  Ray Laurence Celsinus, who it is stated clearly in the inscription over the gateway leading into the precinct of the temple of Isis restored the temple with his own money and was co-opted onto the ordo of decuriones (town council) at the age of six is explained with reference to his father attempting to launch him into politics.20 The name in the inscription like all names of the freeborn in epigraphy includes a reference to the name of Numerius’ father. The question of how the young boy of six walked through the streets of Pompeii on his way to meetings of the decuriones is never discussed, for most scholars the explanation is much easier if it is recognised that the father was doing this for his son. It should be pointed out that this is not the only child from Pompeii, who was a decurion. The recent excavation of a tomb adjacent to a villa of the Lucretii Valentes included two stelai commemorating an eight-year-old and a 13-year-old, who were adlected to the decurions.21 Importantly, alongside these stelai was another; a two-yearold who was not a decurion. This might suggest that this family produced children who walked amongst the decurions from the age of eight. These boys, buried on a rural estate, would have been seen in the city and we should note here that they were already in a position to have power over others from an early age.22 To place children into the neighbourhoods of Pompeii, we need to begin with an understanding of the nature of Pompeian spatial structures, once outside the front door of a house.23 Within the vicinity of the doorway or just a few crossroads away, a local neighbourhood shrine could be found and at roughly the same distance, but not necessarily in the same location, a public water fountain could be found. The streets themselves varied in terms of width with those leading from the gates of the city, generally, having a far greater width than those that did not. These were streets that had the most shops along their sides. There were other streets that would have been conspicuous for an absence of wheeled traffic. It is possible for an adult to walk from one end of Pompeii to the other in less than 20 minutes. This observation is important and allows us to suggest that all parts of the city were easily accessible to all the healthy and able-bodied people. Once you could walk unaided, you could traverse the city – but children would also have needed a sense of direction and knowledge of how to return to their home. The exploration of space by children tended to occur in what is today termed: middle childhood – the ages running from seven to early teenage years. Such forms of exploration have become curtailed in the twentyfirst century by fears associated with modern traffic and a fear of strangers. Both of these can be effectively removed from the study of Pompeii, it was a city of fewer than 20,000 inhabitants with slow moving traffic, and though there were strangers in the city – there is no evidence of the fear of strangers that modern parents project onto the urban environment in the large metropolis that anticipates the child as victim and ensures that children have limited scope for urban journeys undertaken alone or with other children.24 Our concerns in this chapter are with the range a child might travel from home.25 Ultimately, the aim of this research is to engage with observations in urban discourse that there are spatially distinct stages to knowing the city:

Children and the urban environment  31 a. preparatory stage: of preliminary adjustment of self (e.g. immigrant getting to know a place); b. play: involving development of socio-spatial networks through place based social interaction; c. the game: a stage by which a person has developed a consistency of thoughts and behaviour that is maintained in spite of an extended spatial context.26 Over the period of seven to 14 years in a Pompeian childhood, we would expect the range in space and understanding of the city to increase.27 This would suggest that the city has a personal geography that is age-specific and may expand through experience (organised by the body and the mind) that also may through a time–space life path interiorise and internalise social relations.28 It is important to recognise that the relationship of experience of space, always via the body, has to embrace the concept that a child’s body is in a state of change over time.29 This may be all too obvious but seems to be an omission when discussing the engagement of children and space. Their gaze or ability to gaze at elements of the city changes as they become taller. Their mobility is also an area of change due to the development of co-ordination. Thus, to incorporate the child into urban studies of Pompeii, we need to incorporate a conception of continuing redefinition of the body and gaze.

Redefining the child in the neighbourhood: the child’s body and material practice Children have, forever, been shorter in height than adults – it is the visual distinction of the child–adult division. The view of the city seen by a child thus is quite different from that of an adult. Spaces designed today for the exclusive use of adults are quite different to those designed for the dominance of children – for example, a school. The feature of size, for example, that of chairs in schools today reflects the usage of the chair by an adult or a child. Such an obvious example underlines the relationship between the material and the usage of the material according to the age of the individual. This need not be a feature exclusive to the world of the schoolroom, but should be extended to the wider urban environment. As children become older their height increases, thus a child at one age might have a quite different experience of an object or part of the urban environment than a child who is four years older. This differentiation by height, that should also be a proxy for sight and reach of the hands as well, will form the basis of the analysis set out in the core section of this chapter. It is possible to define the average growth pattern of children in Pompeii by taking the adult height outcomes based on skeletal evidence, and model the expected growth pattern that would produce average Pompeian adults at 1.64m for males and 1.54m for females. In terms of the modern twenty-first century growth charts, these heights are low and place average Pompeians in what would be the first five centiles.30 The seven years between a Roman six-year-old and a young-adult changing into his toga virilis could be summarised as a difference between a 106 cm tall child and a 145 cm tall youth with just another 11 cm to grow to a full adult height of 166 cm.

32  Ray Laurence Table 3.1  Average height of Pompeian child aged 6 to 14 Age 6

106 cm tall

Age 7

111 cm tall

Age 8

117 cm tall

Age 9

121 cm tall

Age 10

126 cm tall

Age 11

130 cm tall

Age 12

134 cm tall

Age 13

139 cm tall

Age 14

145 cm tall

This basic raw data that relates average height to chronological age allows us to begin to comprehend how a child at a certain age saw the city from eyes a few centimetres below the average adult height of 166 cm (for males) or 154 cm (for females). Thus, if looking at the sacrifice scene in the temple of the Genius of Augustus (Figure 3.2) with a height of 130 cm (the average height for 11-year-olds), few children under the age of 10 could see down onto the surface of the altar or view objects placed on the altar.31 However, their hands would have been considerably

Figure 3.2  Altar of the temple of the Genius of Augustus, Pompeii (photo: Ray Laurence)

Children and the urban environment  33 closer to the marble of the altar than the hands of an adult. This would provide them with the tactile experience of touching the incised surfaces that included the famous sacrificial scene and featured both adults and a child attendant. The same would have been true of inscribed statue bases in the Forum itself, where hands and eyes were closer to the letter forms of the inscriptions and further away from the statues of men and horses that towered over both children and adults.32 The statue base of Lucius Decidianus Rufus was 1.36 m in height (CIL X 788); whereas others such as those of Gaius Cuspius Pansa reached a height of only 1.08 m (CIL X 790).33 The child from the age of six was at a height of which, the lettering of the inscription on these statue bases would have been lower than the level of their eyes. This might have been the position in which children learnt to read inscribed letters, something that remained with them in adulthood, even if they could not read a document or cursive script.34 As a child’s age increased, the distance between the letters and their eyes also increased culminating in the adult view from a position at the height of the feet or lower legs of the statue. Thus, as though the statue was standing on a rostra, whilst these statues would have been overlooked by those set up on the triumphal arches of the Forum in Pompeii.35 The view of the child is one of looking up at the faces of adults and looking further up to the statues that were placed in the Forum, whilst in proximity to the letters of the inscription – a combination that informs them as a viewer.36 They could also look at a different world at their own height of other children, the lower parts of the bodies of adults, and a material world that featured figural scenes on altars and the letters of inscriptions that were seen by adults from above were in close proximity to their hand and may have been objects that were learnt through touch as well as sight.37 The child’s world of touch was not that of adults whose hands did not reach down to the height of inscriptions when standing. Thus, the possibilities of touch could be seen to have been a feature of this form of material culture in the Forum and an aspect of learning to read the carved letters of inscriptions. A key feature of the child, seen in visual representations is the fact that they are touching or holding either the clothes of adult males or hands of adult females.38 Every doorway to every house in Pompeii was not far from a local altar (of the Lares), a public waterfountain, bars and shops, whilst within the house itself – an altar of the Lares frequently protected its inhabitants from danger (Figure 3.3). The question is how far can we see that these prominent features of Pompeii’s urban environment have been part of a child’s world as much as part of an adult world? Also, did age make a difference to how the urban environment was utilised? The scaling of the growth of children set out above allows us to examine the most prominent material features of neighbourhoods and begin to see whether they could have been utilised by children, who are shorter than adults. This would seem to be a fundamental first step to understanding agency and childhood in Antiquity.39 The adult version of Pompeii often connects the use of bars with drinking, gambling and prostitution.40 The reasoning comes from our literary and legal sources written by the elite with a modern bias that the use of a bar is an adult thing – symbolised in many countries by the height of the counter on which drinks are served. If we look at Pompeian bars, as Paula Lock has done, from a point

34  Ray Laurence

Figure 3.3  Crossroad, with shrine and waterfountain in close proximity, Pompeii (photo: Ray Laurence)

of view of design, we discover that the height of bars in all cases is below 1.12 m and on average these bars are found to be at a much lower height of 0.79 m.41 Thus, the height of the bar would suggest that these ubiquitous structures found across Pompeii were not spaces that were designed to exclude children. It would seem likely with a large population of children in Pompeii, that these bars were part of their urban experience and we need to create the means to understand the bar as a place not just for adults, but also for children and potentially these were places at which children learnt or understood the social conventions of alcohol.42 Close to many bars were water-fountains located in the street. These have a very similar height to that of the bars with a median of about 0.8 m and with the tallest at over one metre. This would cause the public water-supply to be accessible to children over the age of six and the fountains were constructed to prevent potential pollution from animals and also to ensure that careless children did not get wet for no reason. There is visual evidence from Pompeii of sleepy water carriers, who can be identified as young boys. Thus, children were not designed out of these public spaces of the city and the bars and water-fountains catered for their needs with access gained by those over the age of six. This implies that children had access to clean water and were able to collect water themselves, just as they could go to a bar and obtain food and drink. Not far from any bar in Pompeii, you can normally find an altar set up close to a crossroad or street intersection. These vary in height from a low 0.43 to 1.3 m with only one over 1.15 m and a median height of 0.89 m.43 Thus, in the majority of cases children had access to the surface of the altar in terms of touch, but need not have access to the surface of the top of the altar in terms of sight (bearing in mind

Children and the urban environment  35 that eyes are placed below the top of the head in terms of height). The surface of the front of the altar, in Pompeii, at least, was not decorated – but examples from Rome show both epigraphy and imagery that would provide a tactile world to be explored. The height of an altar or a thing might be said to have been designed to prevent the touching that is often associated with the child. An interesting feature of the altars from Rome is that they developed a sculptural form that was most readily accessed by children (i.e. persons of a lower height) than by adults, who would need to bend or kneel down to examine the detail.44 The importance of this imagery should not be underestimated in the creation of identity. Early haptic experiences of these sculptural images, reinforced with a concept that the Lares Augusti protected people may have inserted an understanding of, what we today associate with the imagery of Augustan Rome into the minds of all who grew up near such a local altar.45 Thus, it is not just the ability to see the objects placed on an altar that was experienced by children, but also the smell, the touch and the ability to hear sounds associated with ritual. In combination, this experience of the local shrines of the city inserted a body of knowledge into the heads of children from a young age. The inclusion of the image of the Genius of Augustus on some of these altars would have effectively placed that image in close proximity to those most impressionable, and – at least in Rome – could also gain a tactile experience of touching the sculpted stone – effectively touching the emperor’s image and, perhaps, also in the mind gaining an experience of the emperor. The learning of images, for children, did not distinguish new from old, and new imagery may have had a greater didactic value for children. Hence, when viewing the imagery associated with the reign of Augustus – we may suggest that a child aged seven might experience the new altars set up in the vici to the Lares Augusti and that experience would stay with them (or be continually reinforced through usage) by age 12 at the first sight of the completed Forum of Augustus in 2 bce. The combination of stories from the Aeneid (with lines found in Pompeii as graffiti) with Augustan imagery provided children with a powerful socio-cultural matrix for the formation of a Roman identity in Pompeii Interestingly, the crossroad shrines (located in the streets of Pompeii) are somewhat lower in height than the household Lararia with all but three well-over one metre in height, and ranging even to two metres in height.46 The median height of household altars, at 1.33 m, causes children under the age of 12 to have had a limited view of the objects placed on/in the shrine. The images of the deities in these household shrines cast a gaze down on children, whereas they were looked at from a greater height by adults. Certainly, the objects were positioned out of the reach of younger children and provided a site in which to place the images of gods. It should be noted here that the atrium was a space associated with things of considerable height accentuated by columns, but also including doorways that were on average some three metres in height that were often closed.47 We may speculate over the use of doors to keep children in rooms and to curtail their ability to wander both around the house and out of the house. The height of the Lararia reflects both the control of access of younger children – i.e. its prevention, providing an opportunity to develop a conception of the sacred that they would

36  Ray Laurence have to grow up to gain access to, whilst the use of the figurines located in the Lararia was restricted and reserved for older children and adults. The lower altars are almost miniatures, often found in more private rooms, away from the access of the public.48 The wooden Lararium found at Herculaneum had two parts to it – an upper shrine with deities (Hercules and Venus), and a lower cupboard with vessels for rituals, the upper part stood at 0.94 metres off the ground.49 This would suggest all had access to the vessels but not to the deities. Thus, there is no reason to suppose that children could not have been involved in the use of ritual vessels, but what they were prevented from doing, due to height, was to utilise the deities or to have been in a position to touch the deities. We might also contemplate that these shrines were to be viewed by adults from closer to eye level. Thus, the rituals associated with the day on which a toga virilis was first worn may also be a point at which a child had grown to the height or higher than the height necessary to look straight into their household Lararium.50 Moreover, the linkage between the Lares and not just watching, but cultivating the household may make a tangible linkage between the physical growth in terms of height of children and the wellbeing of the household as a whole.51 The frieze from the atrium of the Praedia Julia Felix that ran around the room above the level of the doors has been recently reinterpreted as a series of scenes representing a mercatus (market) being held in the Forum of Pompeii.52 Its position causes the view of the figures to be distant and looked up to, unlike the publication of the frieze in books. Thus, the position of the viewer is not dissimilar to the viewer of the frieze of the Ara Pacis that also included children.53 The frieze was drawn in the eighteenth century on excavation and these drawings, alongside photographs taken more recently, provide evidence for how children would appear in public, their gestures and their activities.54 Most of the activities involve forms of commerce and trade. Fragment 9 shows the sale of bronze vessels and features children in two roles. The first is seated but hard at work with a hammer, whereas the second is holding the toga of a customer and carrying a small basket (see Figure 3.4). The latter may remind us of the children on the Ara Pacis, who hold the hands of female adults, but the clothing of male adults.55 In addition, there is at the left of this scene, a person shorter than the adults around him selling bread. Fragment 10 shows another scene of sale, of textiles to two seated women – behind whom is standing a female older child, whose body language is created to be erect and stationary without interacting with the other adult figures. The distancing, here, may be due to the age of this person or perhaps their status as a slave attendant to either the female customers or the seller. Fragment 15 includes scenes of the sale of metal items and of shoes, to the left we can see a naked baby sat on the lap of the customer – presumably carried to the Forum enfolded in the woman’s garments.56 To the right, an older male can be seen actively purchasing or discussing the metal goods. The female adult rests a hand on his shoulder that delineates the child’s dependency through touch, just as the younger child in Fragment 9 was holding the clothing of a male adult. A clear indicator of dependency for children was the physical contact between themselves and adults; whereas adults have no contact with each other. Fragment 11 shows a female seller,

Children and the urban environment  37

Figure 3.4  Sale of bronze vessels in the Forum of Pompeii. Frieze from the atrium of the Praedia Julia Felix (detail). Photo: Wikimedia Commons

who is upright and almost stationary with a tray of goods and also further baskets of goods at her feet. Her location at the north end of the Forum is indicated by the presence of the triumphal arch that flanks the Capitolium and we can suggest that she is strategically placed to sell to people moving into the Forum.57 Another architectural feature of this fragmentary frieze are the columns to the rear of any scene. As we have seen above, columns were a prime location for graffiti and need to call our attention to them as a key feature of Roman public space. Fragments 4 and 13 provide some guidance to their use by children of different ages. Fragment 4 shows two female and male figures draped around a column, whilst a togate figure looks on. In contrast, a naked toddler can be seen in Fragment 13 interacting with a female adult. The famous school-teaching scene, Fragment 12, also features people leaning on columns and watching the lesson from within the colonnade and we see on the far left beyond the scene of whipping a person writing on a column.58 The structure of the frieze with action both in front of the colonnade and further action within the colonnade itself illustrates a key spatial feature. Those in the colonnade are not conducting business, but might be said to be at play – whether gazing at each other or at the action in the foreground, these people could be seen to be partially hidden – revealing a key quality of the presence of columns in the ancient city, the columns created segmented spaces that were partially obscured. Thus, they were also facilitating contact between male and female older children. A notable feature of Fragment 14 of the frieze from the atrium of the Praedia Julia Felix is the scene representing adults and a child reading a notice set out across three equestrian statue bases.59 The notice is suspended from the top of the statue bases, thus, we might suggest it was suspended at a height of over a metre and, taking a scale from the adults would suggest a height of about 1.3 m. In this representation, the adults look down on the notice – in closer proximity to it than they would be an inscription on the statue base, whereas the shorter child (?) has an eye level at the lowest part of the notice. This rather ephemeral evidence for the

38  Ray Laurence public display of a notice illustrates the distinction between permanent writing and the temporary notice. The latter is placed so that it could be read by adults and older children at a greater height than the inscriptions on the statue bases.

Conclusion – The materiality of agency in childhood Agency tends to be discussed with reference to individuals and has been associated with a shift from a descriptive analysis based on societies to one that is focussed on the individual within archaeology.60 However, within other disciplines, agency can belong to not just individuals, but also social powers and institutions.61 Often these include social workers and public institutions today, elements simply absent from Pompeii, yet we should still consider where else agency might have rested in Pompeii. The discussion in this chapter has focussed on a dialogue between the growth of children and the physical environment of the Forum, bars, water-fountains, local shrines, and household shrines identified a changing relationship as the child, quite literally, grew up. Their interaction with all these elements would have been cyclical based on daily routines, such as water-collection, and cyclical events held in the Forum and at local shrines. This caused them to interact with not just the urban environment of the everyday, but also with a city’s lieux de memoire of past activities.62 The latter causes the physical urban environment to have a form of agency that was not static or simply present, but subject to change. Examples of these changes include the connection of the aqueduct or the construction of a crossroad shrine. The physical features of Pompeii, in particular, altars and statues, represented in material form the institutions of the state in terms of religion and power. Thus, these were primary locations for developing a conception of wider identity that linked the child in Pompeii to Rome and to the power of the emperor. As with any discussion of agency, social context is critical. The child of a slave would have lacked the same autonomy that might have been associated with a freeborn child. However, recent research in neuro-science has shown that social context affects physical brain development, and also recognises that unlike speech, reading is the result of the activation of a complex network linking sound and shape of letters to be decoded.63 The implications for the study of Pompeii are that the instruction of children in their ABC was a necessity for literacy. The fact that this took place at the crossroad in literary sources would suggest a convergence of the child’s schooling with the location of water-fountains and crossroad shrines.64 Similarly, schooling also took place in the Large Palaestra with its toilets and swimming pool pointing to the convergence of urban amenity and education that underpinned adult identities. Taking a functionalist stance, we might see such locations as simply being the main facilties for children – education, drinking water, and so on. However, these were locations of interaction between children and their environment, which would have affected their development – water was not simply for the function of drinking, but, as we see today, has a potential for play.

Children and the urban environment  39 The raising of access to water to a height beyond the reach of the youngest children regulated access to wetness and reflects a view of the competency of young children, or their ability to disrupt the smooth operation of an older adult world based around functionalism. The height of any element of the urban environment at Pompeii can be seen to regulate children under a certain age, through a denial of access to it. As we have seen, in Pompeii, children over seven had access to most features regulated by height; but their access increased as children grew taller and gained through repetition greater experience of using water-fountains, bars, altars, and the Forum. This is not to say that younger children were denied access to these features of the urban environment, but, instead, to suggest that adults or older children were needed to facilitate or regulate their access. Just as the opening or closing of doors to rooms and houses could have limited the range of roaming by children. This returns us to the three key concepts associated with the learning of urbanism and suggests a means to comprehend these in the context of Pompeii: 65 a. preparatory stage: that we may associate with children under seven years of age, in which their access and understanding of urbanism was dependent on adults or older children; b. play: that we can associate with middle childhood, in which access is enabled through social interaction often at the crossroad, or in the Forum, and with school in the public spaces of the city;66 c. the game: that can be understood to have been full independent interaction with the public realm of the city, even if that person was not fully independent legally. Not every person in Pompeii reached the third stage, some may simply have not developed the knowledge of urbanism due to their social environment of slavery or of child labour. Whether a child could reach the third stage without any form of literacy would require a much longer discussion, but a preliminary position might be one that emphasised the role of writing (in the form of graffiti) in the first two of the three stages above. Informed by this knowledge of children’s interaction with the urban environment, we may consider how a six-year-old acted as a decurion, rather than simply as being a child, aided by his father, in a state of becoming an adult.67 Indeed, given that we have knowledge of three children who were decurions in Pompeii (tightly dated to the second half of the first century ce), with two known from the same family tomb next to their villa, perhaps, we should no longer see children as decurions as an uncommon phenomenon,68 and we need to incorporate the powerful child into our understanding of historical phenomena of the Roman city and into wider Roman historical discourse.69 These children lived out of the city, perhaps, but when in town – they would have been seen alongside the adult members of the ordo of decurions.

40  Ray Laurence

Notes 1 Oscan alphabets from Pompeii: Crawford 2011: Pompei no. 74–83. No. 81 in the Casa di M. Obellio Firmo, Reg. IX, 14, 2+4 is 1.17m above the ground. Huntley 2010; Garraffoni and Laurence 2013; see also Huntley in this volume. 2 Pufall and Unsworth 2004 for discussion of a need to understand agency of children. See also Vuolanto in this volume. 3 Stevens 2013. 4 Tuan 2005. 5 Dasen 2011: 293–4 on the physiology of infants; also Baker 2010. 6 On medical thinking on age and childhood see Harlow and Laurence 2008. For discussion of stages of life, see Harlow and Laurence 2002 and, more recently, Parkin 2010 and 2011. 7 Flemming 2013. 8 For the reproduction of culture and citizenship, see Laurence, Esmonde-Cleary and Sears 2011, especially 4–6. Compare how school texts from the Roman world taught norms of adulthood: Bloomer 1997. 9 Harlow 2013. 10 Corbeill 2004: 117. 11 Vuolanto 2010 for overview; Hemelrijk 2006, 2007, 2009, 2013; Flemming 2007; and Rives 2013 for specific studies. On movement and walking: O’Sullivan 2011 and papers in Laurence and Newsome 2011. 12 Children being carried to meet the emperor Trajan are a feature of the friezes on the Arch at Benevento, see Currie 1996. 13 For limits of participation of women in Pompeii, Laurence 2007a. The term “limits of participation” comes from van Bremen 1996. 14 Flower 2002; consider the discussion of Eumachia’s image by D’Ambra 2012 as a mode of memory creation. See also D’ Ambra 2002 and 2012. 15 Key texts are: CIL IV 60, 128, 470, 480, 783, 7667, 7676, 7706, 7747. Laurence 2007b: 40–5 for an overview of approaches. For discussion of politics and vici, see Mouritsen 1990, and 1988: 67–8. An alternative reading is given by Castrén 1975: 80–2, and 275–6; or Jongman 1988: 304–6. 16 Both Wallace-Hadrill 1994 and Laurence 1994 have this basis from which to work forward. Both books can be seen to have limitations in their focus, compare Savunen 1997 and Laurence 2007a for a focus on women in space. For children in houses, see discussion by Allison 2004: 164–6. 17 It is worth examining the overview volume edited by Dobbins and Foss 2007, there are chapters on women and slaves, but no chapter on childhood – children are referred to in the index, but only fleetingly. Education might be considered a proper subject for discussion and García y García 2005 provides an overview. 18 Jansen 2007: 259. 19 Puteal heights are found in the following houses to vary between 40 and 60 cm, following examples suffice: House of the Cei: 45 cm – Michel 1990: 22; House of the Nozze d’Argento: 40.5 cm – Erhardt 2004: 41; House of the Caccia d’Antica: 60 cm – Allison and Sear 2002: 18; and House of the Fabbro: c. 55 cm – Ling 1997: 375. 20 CIL X 846. This inscription is linked by others to that of his father within the precinct, see recent examples: Beard 2010: 307; Jongman 2007: 511; Zanker 1988a: 126–7. Interestingly, 100 years earlier, Mau 1899: 164–5 linked the child’s inscription to others within the precinct to suggest the agency behind the rebuild rested with both his parents – CIL X 848 lists his mother (?) his father (?) and uncle (?) – for description of the finds and their recording in the years 1765–66, see D’Alessio 2009: 72–6. 21 De Spagnolis Conticello 1993–4 for context of the excavation of a tomb adjacent to a rural villa = AE 1994 no. 398 aged 8 AE 1994 no. 395 – the family produced a flamen and games giver of equestrian status. Also CIL 10.1036 Marcus Alleius Libella died

Children and the urban environment  41

22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

42 43

aged 17 – a decurion. For listing of epigraphic references to young decurions see Laes 2004b, but note decurions of Pompeii lack epigraphic visibility – as Mouritsen 2005 demonstrates – note also this single excavation of a rural tomb complex substantially increased the number of inscriptions of under-age decurions at Pompeii. Laurence 2007b: 167–81 on the learning of urbanism in childhood. Laurence 2007b: 39–61 and 102–33 provides the detail to fill out the picture set out here with illustrations; Van Nes 2011 draws together these results and applies a more sophisticated understanding of space syntax to the issues. The overall pattern though is not greatly different. For discussion: James and James 2004: 2. There are many studies of children and space – Elwood and Elwood 2012 engages with the topic of agency at the centre of this book. For the body and space in childhood see Teather 1999: 1–26. Wilson 1980. Jones and Cunningham 1999. Pile 1996: 46; Thrift 1983. On the body and space, see Lefebvre 2014. See for example, http://www.rcpch.ac.uk/system/files/protected/page/NEW%20 Boys%202-18yrs%20%284TH%20JAN%202013%29.pdf. For introductory discussion of skeletal heights in Pompeii and Herculaneum and health: Laurence 2005. We should not get too bound up with the knowledge that our own children would have been giants by 10 years at the height of the average 14-year-old in Pompeii. What is more important for this paper is to identify how height and growth of a child to certain height caused that child to have a view of some features of urban life for the first time. Figures from Benedetti, Gaiani and Remondino 2010. Pliny the Elder, NH 34.17 clarifies the link between reading inscriptions and collective memory in the Forum. Indeed, inscribed letters created a different mode of reading (Petronius, Sat. 58.7 sed lapidarias litteras scio) often informed by associated imagery, see Susini 1989; Corbier 2013 (= translation of Corbier 2006, chapter 1). For measurements of height, see Kockel 2005. Horsfall 1991: 62–3 comments: this is precisely how he learnt to read as a child; compare reading of CAVE CANEM at Petronius, Sat. 29.1, discussed further by Corbier 1991: 107–9, and 115. Müller 2011 for triumphal arches in the Forum. Koortbojian 1996: 219 on how image and inscriptions could be read by those unable to read documents. Millar 1994: 85–117 on use of touch and vision. For examples see Laurence 2000 on the Ara Pacis and Figure 3.4 (p. 37) on the images from the atrium of the Praedia Julia Felix. Compare Oswell 2013: 37–61. For example. Wallace-Hadrill 1995, but the question remains, how were these values and the texture of Pompeii learnt? Compare discussion of D’Arms 1995, who suggests historians need to address the question of how children learnt to drink alcohol in Roman culture. A question that 20 years on from publication, to my knowledge, remains unanswered. D’Arms suggested drinking would occur for males after the toga virilis in their teens. Variation in height is from 0.55–1.12 metres. I am indebted to Paula Lock (PhD student at the University of Kent) for providing the data and also for the conversation about design and height that inspired this paper. See discussion in MacMahon 2005: 76–9 on comparative height of counters Pompeian and modern and Monteix 2010: 92–7 for additional discussion. Estimates of the number of children vary, but we should expect 40–50 percent of the population to be under 18. Van Andringa 2000 for evidence of each altar published with its height.

42  Ray Laurence 44 For images of the altars, see Lott 2004. 45 Creighton 2000: 87–101 argues that the child hostages of barbarian kings learnt the visual language of Augustan Rome that was reproduced on coins struck in mints on their return to their kingdoms later in life. What was true of foreign children should also apply to Roman children – Augustan imagery was learnt, Zanker 1988b was crucial to the development of this hypothesis. 46 Fröhlich 1991 for measurements of height; see also Boyce 1937. 47 Lauritsen 2013. 48 Bodel 2008. 49 Mols 1999: 58–62 with figures 137–47; Maiuri 1958: 252–55. 50 Harlow and Laurence 2002: 67. Harmon 1978 for dedication of the bulla to the Lares, especially Propertius 4.1.131-2; Persius 5.30–31. 51 Foss 1997: 196–7 on Plautus, Aulularia 1–8 usage of the verb colere. See also Orr 1978: 1563–9. 52 Olivito 2013 is the most recent and most extensive study to link the fragments of the frieze to the structures in the Forum, and it includes illustrations of all fragments alongside eighteenth century engravings (37–83). See Newsome 2013 on writing and space. 53 Laurence 2000 for children and the life course as depicted on the Ara Pacis. 54 Olivito 2013: 249–63 for discussion of the position of the frieze and alternative reconstructions. Le Pitture Antiche d’Ercolano e Contorni Incise con Qualche Spiegazione, Naples 1762 contains the earliest drawings of these scenes: Fragment 4 = Tav XLIII, p.227; Fragment 9 = Tav XLII, p.221; Fragment 10 = Tav XLI, p.213; Fragment 11 = Tav XLIII, p.227; Fragment 12 = Tav XLIII, p.227; Fragment 13 = Tav XLI, fig. p.213; Fragment 14 = Tav. XLIII, p. 227; Fragment 15 =Tav XLII, p.221. Mau 1899: 54–7 utilises the frieze to place activities into the Forum, including those of children. 55 Laurence 2000. 56 For an online colour image, see http://www.romeinspompeii.net/forum.html. 57 Olivito 2013: 58–61. 58 For an online colour image, see https://vico.wikispaces.com/Clothing. Laes 2011a: 107–47 for an overview of texts and schooling. 59 Olivito 2013: 68–72. For an online colour image, see http://www.romeinspompeii. net/forum.html. 60 Barrett 1997 on agency in the Roman Empire coincides with Oswell 2013: 37–61 on agency and children. See also Vuolanto in the present volume. 61 Van Nijnatten 2013: 7. 62 Seifer 2012. 63 Wasserman and Zambo 2013. 64 Garraffoni and Laurence 2013: 126–9 with notes at 133–4. 65 Wilson 1980. 66 Bloomer 1997. 67 This paradigm shift is discussed by Corsaro 2015: 73–6 with examples of historians’ work. 68 De Spagnolis Conticello 1993–94 for the excavated context; Laes 2004b that needs to be read with Mouritsen 2005 on epigraphic recovery rate of decurions from Pompeii. 69 Such a viewpoint might even adjust the opening of the Res Gestae and our conception of Octavian as one too young to hold power at the age of 19. Elite children need not be seen as separated or delineated by age from adults, their status did not depend on their age, but upon their father’s (biological or adopted – dead or alive) power, and their own agency to have power over others inferior by status yet older.

4 Little tunics for little people The problems of visualising the wardrobe of the Roman child Mary Harlow

Introduction All clothing is men’s or children’s or women’s or that which may be worn by either sex or that which may be worn by slaves. Men’s clothing is provided for the benefit of the paterfamilias, such as togas, tunics, cloaks, bedspreads, coverlets and blankets and the like. Children’s garments are clothes used only for this purpose, such as togae praetextae, coats, chlamydes and cloaks which we provide for our sons. Women’s clothes are those acquired for the benefit of the materfamilias, which a man cannot easily wear without incurring censure, such as robes, wraps, undergarments, head coverings, belts, turbans, which have been acquired more with a view to covering the head rather than for decorative effect, coverlets and mantles.1 This extract from the Digest reflects the hierarchy of clothing that might be expressed in legacies and testamentary bequests. The desire on the part of the jurist, Ulpian, to categorise clothing in the traditional Roman sexual hierarchy, notably puts children, by which he means boys, above women. The extract also suggests that the Romans saw a clear differentiation between the clothing of men and women, but also between adult men and boys. However, it could also be argued that in this extract at least, the clothing of boys resembles a miniature version of clothing for adult men. Among the toga wearing classes, on formal occasions at least, a son might look like a small version of his father. The identification of children as small versions of adults places the historian of Roman children and childhood back into conversation with Philippe Ariès who argued that the development of a specialised children’s wardrobe in the sixteenth century was instrumental in the evolution of the idea of childhood as a separate stage of life.2 This chapter will examine a range of evidence for the dressing of children in the Roman period, and evaluate it with reference to Ariès.3 Images of children on sarcophagi, free standing and relief sculpture, and to a lesser extent, on wall paintings, mummy portraits, mosaics, silverware and pottery, provide a series of depictions which allow us to imagine the clothed (and unclothed) child in the world of Antiquity. The material remains of children’s clothing, in contrast to images of them clothed, can be used to nuance this picture

44  Mary Harlow and provide an interesting supplement to the discourse about the value of children both as individuals and as members of a family, and allow us to imagine how they might have looked in everyday life. After food and shelter, clothing must have been quite high in the economic demands of a household, whatever its status. Providing clothing for children required resources, and if created in the domestic environment, a commitment of time and labour. Archaeologists and historians tend to use iconography and material remains as complements to each other to produce a composite image of the Roman wardrobe: Roman everyday wear, for adults and children, was essentially made up of tunics and a mantle/cloak of some description. For citizens, including citizen children, the toga would be worn over the tunic when required.4 Tunics were usually made either in a basic square, rectangular or T-shape.5 Cloaks and mantles could also be made of simple rectangles or curved-edge semi-circles. Despite this simplicity of shape, clothing in the Roman wardrobe could be made visually distinct by the use of different raw materials (usually wool and linen, very occasionally cotton or silk); the application of dyes (colour was much more prevalent than museum collections of white marble statues suggest);6 weaving techniques (tabbies, twills, tapestry weave etc. which each produce a particular texture and influenced the drape of the fabric); density of weave and finish (from practically transparent to heavy and felted); and, of course, by the way a garment was worn (belted, unbelted, long, short, gathered, loose, fringed etc.) and additionally adorned with jewellery. There was plenty of scope for personal expression and ‘fashion’ even in the limited basic ranges of shape that made up the Roman wardrobe for several hundred years. Saying that children’s clothes were not noticeably different from those of adults does not mean they are not identifiable.

The iconography of children’s dress It is probably true to say that the most dominant influence in visualising children’s clothes in Antiquity remains the surviving visual rather than material or literary evidence. While ancient authors do write about children and about dress in almost all genres of literature – from epic, biography, satire, elegy, letters, forensic speeches and law codes to moralising treatises – they rarely describe items of clothing and even more rarely mention the clothed bodies of children. The one exception to this is the toga praetexta which is often used as a visual and literary tool to make moral points about parents or society in general.7 The toga praetexta is the most immediate visual symbol of the young citizen, both male and female. It is a small version of the adult garment, complete with purple border. It is an item of children’s clothing which has attracted most research interest from scholars as it is so emblematic of Roman values.8 It marked a child out as belonging to a particular group, and its praetextate border also ideally endowed him or her with protection from both physical and moral danger. Some of the most well-known renditions of children in Roman art appear on the Ara Pacis where the dress of both adults and children play their part in Augustus’ ideals of family morality and traditional values. On the south frieze, three children,

Little tunics for little people   45 two boys, one of whom is a toddler, and a girl all wear the toga praetexta. The boys also wear a bulla (Figure 4.1a).9 The toga praetexta is a garment worn, in sculptural representations at least, by both girls and boys. It is surprising as a unisex garment given its resonance as a marker of civic masculinity. The fact that both boys and girls wear it when young recognises their vulnerability as children and blurs gender boundaries in those for whom sexuality is not yet an issue.10 These three togate children on the Ara Pacis stand in clear contrast to a young boy further along the frieze whose non-citizen, non-Roman identity is marked by his dress and hair. He wears a short, belted tunic which slips off his shoulder, a torque around his neck and his hair is shoulder length and curly, in contrast to the cropped neat cut of the Roman boys. His shoes, which are laced are also distinctly non-Roman. On the north frieze, one tiny child is also notable in torque, curly hair and miniscule tunic which rides up to show his naked bottom. As we have no evidence for the Roman use of nappies (diapers) we might assume this is a very young child, his age (and again his non-Romanness), perhaps also evidenced by his bare feet. Behind him stands another boy in a belted tunic but as his lower portion is missing it is harder to provide him with an identity. Despite all the scholarly discussion and various identifications ascribed to the two boys wearing torques, their depiction on the Ara Pacis (Figure 4.1b) can still be understood to serve a number of purposes in terms of the Augustan agenda: they may be hostage princes or they may be Gaius and Lucius Caesar dressed as Trojan Princes. Their dress here, like that of their imperial citizen counterparts, is a costume. It may reflect everyday dress but on this frieze, it serves to act as a visual foil to the togate children, who are also dressed for the occasion and for the iconographic agenda. A similar pattern can be observed on other Roman monuments where dress is used to identify Romans and non-Romans in what appears to be a relatively

Figure 4.1  a) South side frieze of the Ara Pacis, showing on the right three children in togas, one girl and two boys (photo: Jan Haywood); b) detail of the north side frieze of the Ara Pacis, curly haired toddler in a short tunic – the tunic is only over one shoulder and maybe knotted at the front to take up excess fabric (photo: Ville Vuolanto)

46  Mary Harlow

Figure 4.2  Trajan’s column, scene XCI. The image shows two groups of children; the left hand group of three, standing with short-haired Roman men wear tunics and presumably the toga praetexta. To the right are two children, a boy and a girl, and a babe in arms. These two are differentiated by dress from each other and from the Roman children to their left (photo: DAI (Rome)) D-DAI-ROM-89.560

uncomplicated iconographic code. Janine Diddle Uzzi has argued that the 50 or so children depicted on Trajan’s column can be viewed as either Roman or nonRoman (Dacian) by their dress, context and gesture.11 In panel XCI of Trajan’s column (Figure 4.2) six children are shown. Of three children towards the left of the scene the central figure wears a long tunic and what appears to be a toga praetexta and may perhaps be identified as a girl. The boys on either side of her appear to also be wearing togas with short tunics but could be wearing cloaks rather than togas. The three stand with a group of short-haired men in togas or tunics and capes. Further to the right, two children and a babe in arms stand among a group of clearly non-Roman women (kerchiefs binding their hair, knotted drapery of their gowns) and men (long hair, beards, tunics and cloaks fastened on the shoulder). The dress of these two children, a boy and a girl, mimics that of the adults.12 As in similar iconographic contexts, dress acts as a costume, it is used as a pictorial identifier of status, age and ethnicity. It may relate to actual clothing or to the generic idea of non-Roman for the artist and audience of the column. This approach does not allow for any blurring of real sartorial boundaries; for the fact that away from Rome, Romans might look quite like provincials and that provincials might dress in a manner that would not look alien to Romans.13 Boys, and a few girls, appear on funerary monuments from Italy and occasionally from other parts of the empire wearing the toga praetexta14 where the garment stands, as in Italy, as a visual shorthand of their rank and status, and sometimes of their dedicator’s aspirations. Its use in the funerary memorials of freedmen and

Little tunics for little people   47 their free children is particularly pointed.15 It is worth noting that while Roman satirists complain about having to wear the toga there is no commentary on training a small child in how to wear all that drapery. The toga is traditionally not pinned but perhaps allowances were made for small children if in reality they did wear the garment. Young men were allegedly made to wear a toga with arms wrapped inside when they first put on the toga virilis.16 The well-known biographical sarcophagus of L. Cornelius Statius (see Figure 5.2 on page 65 below) is an excellent example of life stages defined partly by clothing. At the left edge the baby is being fed by his mother, semi-released from swaddling, as an infant or toddler he sits on his father’s shoulder wearing a short tunic but very soon he progresses to the full formal dress for a young citizen of tunic and toga praetexta in which he is shown even when riding in a miniature ram-drawn chariot, and finally as he recites to his father or his tutor.17 The child’s different ages are illustrated by changes in clothing which also reflect his status and that of his family. In her seminal work on children’s sarcophagi Janet Huskinson noted four types of children’s wear, aside from tiny togas and specialized ‘uniforms’ such as those of little priestesses of Isis or boy soldiers. In generic images, boys appear in loose short tunics with short or capped sleeves; or in longer tunics with cloaks; girls in long, ankle length tunics, sometimes belted peplos-style. In her study, clothing could add to the sense of physical maturity or immaturity hoping to be captured in the sculpture. It also played into age and gender stereotyping: boys are seen at play outside and in active engagement with each other; tunics show movement and occasionally fall off the shoulder in the excitement of physical interaction. Girls, in their longer garments, play more sedately and are often shown to be in interiors rather than in ‘free space’.18 This type of image shows generic looking children, often engaged in activities associated with childhood. Boys play with balls, sticks, hoops, nuts, they fight each other or play physical games such as leapfrog while girls tend to be more controlled and measured, even in play. Clothing and hairstyles are manipulated to add either movement or restraint to the image. Figure 4.3 is typical of gender and clothing difference. The boys are active and physically interact with each other. Their clothing shows sleeved, knee-length tunics, one has his belted to gather up excess length. The tunics worn by the girls are clearly longer and wider as they fall down the arms like sleeves, and all are constrained by belts at waist or bust level. One girl may be wearing an undertunic, exposed as she holds out her upper tunic like an apron to catch the nuts.19 The girls also have their hair controlled in neat buns. The iconography is relatively schematic and uncomplicated, dress is generically styled so that together with the activities, the viewer can quickly identify children and child associated themes. In other parts of the empire where Roman style funerary stelae were introduced, children generally continued to be depicted in small versions of adult garments, reflecting local clothing traditions and fashions. This is not the place for an extensive catalogue of provincial clothing.20 Ursula’s Rothe’s study of funerary monuments of the Rhine-Moselle region of the Roman empire uncovered a range of relationships that could be expressed through the iconography of local dress, the adoption or rejection of Roman costume, or a mixture of both within a single image. In almost all

48  Mary Harlow

Figure 4.3  Children playing with nuts. Marble panel from a Roman sarcophagus, third century ce. From Vigna Emendola on the Via Appia (Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican, inv. 1304. Vanni Archive / Art Resource. NY)

of these, children are portrayed as small versions of their parents, wearing a similar range of clothing depending on the intended message of the monument. The dress of children could, therefore, as in public monuments in Rome, reflect local loyalties or wider social aspirations – the two messages not being mutually exclusive. The monument commemorating the family of a veteran Roman soldier, Gaius Aeresius Saenus, is typical of this mix of cultures (Figure 4.4). Saenus lost his wife, Flavia Augustina who died aged 39, and his two children, who died respectively at the ages of one year and three days and one year, nine months and five days. The grave stele was found in the north of England and reflects local clothing traditions.21 On the tombstone one child is clearly seen wearing a replica of the father’s clothing. The family’s dress is representative of clothing in the north western provinces: they wear the ‘Gallic coat’, a large wide tunic usually

Figure 4.4 Grave stele for Flavia Augustina and her two children. Found on the Driffin Estate, The Mount, Yorkshire (image courtesy of York Museums Trust: http:// yorkmuseumstrust.org.uk: CC BY-SA 4.0)

Little tunics for little people   49 worn unbelted. It could be sleeveless but often, as here had wide sleeves, or fell so that sleeves appeared by default. A large amount of drapery fell in folds from the shoulder and down the arms. The length varied depending on whether the wearer was male or female. The over-cape is worn by men and boys only. It is sewn up the front and usually had a hood, which lay flat on the back when not worn on the head. The Gallic coat is a common iconographic identifier on many monuments from northwestern Europe.22 The iconography here, showing the effect of deep sleeves gives some idea of how they might have looked on the body. They appear comfortable to wear, but perhaps cumbersome so the belt discovered at Les Martres-de-Veyre may have been more often used than iconography suggests. For children in the northwestern provinces, there is very little evidence apart from iconography to discover how they dressed; they appear to move from swaddling bands to a Gallic coat type tunic if the image of the very young children of Gaius Aeresius Saenus is reliable. Children in the eastern provinces made a similar progression from swaddling bands to tiny tunics.23 The tunics illustrated here, which all fit into simple shapes, granted the child freedom of movement but might have also had constraints. Loose wide tunics would have allowed a fair amount of physical freedom although, as seen in the sarcophagi, they might have required a bit of hitching up. Those with sleeves might have required more control. Little girls in longer garments would need to learn the appropriate body language at an earlier age. As said above those citizen children who were required to wear the toga praetexta on occasion would presumably have to learn how to manage it, but it would be surprising if it was always as neat as shown on monuments.

Material evidence of children’s clothing Archaeologists, museum curators and textile experts have catalogued a range of garments, headgear and shoes that belonged to children. While by far the majority of them mimic adult garments, some show interesting details in decoration and tailoring that do not immediately translate to the contemporary adult wardrobe. Providing clothing for children was a demand on the economic resources of the family and to bury a child with their clothing was arguably a recognition of the personhood of that child and the willingness to lose garments which might have been passed on to other children. This is not the place (or space) for a full catalogue of recorded children’s tunics.24 The examples discussed here are chosen to illustrate some of the experiential and daily realities of children’s clothing which are not evident in iconography and are rarely discussed in ancient texts. The archaeological material provides a very tangible contact with the clothing of the past and despite often very static or flat museum presentation, allows us to develop some sense of how such clothing might sit on a child’s body. Both wool and linen can be woven either densely or so finely as to appear almost transparent or gauze-like. The texture of each can range from soft to coarse depending on the treatment of the raw material during the processing and spinning work, and affected again by finishing (washing and

50  Mary Harlow fulling). A large proportion of the clothing remains which can be dated to the Roman and late-Roman period were made to shape on the loom.25 This means that at the point at which the loom was set up the garment type had already been decided and the thread either spun with a particular garment in mind or chosen to suit that garment. So, if the child’s clothing was domestically produced, family time, labour and resources were directly dedicated to them. Archaeological finds of children’s clothing come, with very few exceptions, from sites where desert conditions have provided an environment which facilitated their survival. At Khirbet Qazone, a Nabatean cemetery site originally on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea (dated to between the second and third century), 50 per cent of the finds were child or infant sized tunics.26 Hero Granger-Taylor has examined these and her results demonstrate that while they conform to traditional shaping, also used for adult garments, and follow the models that are almost standard across the Mediterranean area in the Roman period. They also show some nice details which suggest care and thought were put into their making.27 Two infant tunics, measuring between approximately 28 and 32 cm in length, made of undyed wool with coloured clavi, have been recovered (Textiles 17 and 22). Only one side of each survives and Granger-Taylor posits that this may be because the tunics were separated for wrapping the body in burial or because the sides were separated in their lifetimes for repair or washing.28 Another tiny tunic from the same site (Textile 8), was made from cotton, a material rarely used for clothes in this period.29 When worn it would have measured c. 40 cm neck to hem and c. 39 cm in width. Whoever made it took care to sew a little decoration and originality to the neckline in purple wool and to finish it well. The cotton may also indicate an imported or traded item bought by the family for an infant.30 Many children’s garments have been found with a little touch of colour around the neck edge and it may be that this had amuletic powers, warding off evil in a world where many died before they reached the age of one.31 Another garment from this site also shows some effort put into the weaving techniques. Textile 36, measuring approx. 65 cm neck to lower edge and 75 cm across the chest – wider than it is long, a common feature in many tunics, adult or child – has a looped fringe on the bottom edge and a decorated neckline. The tunic was found in the grave (1.1) of a child aged about six, a girl with plaited hair and hennaed fingernails. A red woollen belt and a mantle were also found. This is a carefully buried child, and all the garments in the grave show signs of wear, suggesting they were worn in life.32 The Khirbet Qazone finds were made with children in mind demonstrating a willingness to devote time, resources and skill to the clothing of children, even in an area where the likely death of very young children was clearly evident. Khirbet Qazone is not exceptional in its clothing which fits into a general Mediterranean style of the period33 and it is a good example of the production of made-to-measure children’s garments found in situ. If we assume that like those of the child in grave 1.1, the garments were worn in life, then they were made as versions of adult styles, not cut down from larger garments. Across the Dead Sea, in Antinoopolis, a different type of children’s wardrobe has been uncovered. Cäcilia Fluck has examined the textiles from four children’s

Little tunics for little people   51

Figure 4.5  Tunic of a child (‘Kind 1’) from Antinoopolis. Note the flared shaping which is evidence of early cut and sewn technique, and the embroidered decoration at the neck, on the front and on the wrists (reproduced by kind permission of the Archaeological Mission at Antinoopolis (El Sheikh ‘Abadah) – Istituto Papirologico “G. Vitelli” (Università degli Studi di Firenze) and Cäcilia Fluck)

burials, dating from the third to the seventh century.34 The clothing of children in death reveals interesting layettes in terms of children’s wardrobes and demonstrates touching accounts of the relationships between the deceased and those who buried them. One new-born child (Kind 1, see Figure 4.5) buried together with his or her mother was wearing four layers of clothing beneath the traditional wrapping of a shroud.35 These tiny garments were all made of linen with decoration in coloured wools. Closest to the body was a plain hooded, sleeved tunic made out of six pieces of recycled linen. Over this lay another hooded tunic, also made from recycled linen with sleeves of a different length. This hood was decorated with four little tassels of black and red wool which ran along the central seam to the apex of the hood and would have run along the middle of the head if the hood was pulled up. The underarms of the tunic were left open. In life this may have meant that the sleeves were rarely used as such, the arm simply came out of this opening. Above the two hooded tunics, the infant wore a little dress with flared sides and sleeves. This was made of eight pieces of linen but in this case, they were cut and sewn to a pattern. The back and front including the upper parts of the sleeves were cut to shape and sewn at the shoulders. The flared shape comes from the addition of two gores on each side, all four sewn in. A rounded neckline was cut in and left open on the left shoulder. A red and white wool twisted cord was set in as a fastener at the neck. The dress has some decoration, which again, like the little cotton tunic from

52  Mary Harlow Khirbet Qazone may have an amuletic function. In addition to the cord at the neck opening, the neck and the lower edges of the sleeves are embroidered with a little row of squares in green wool. At the front of the dress is a line of green and yellow wool stitching ending in a circle with a cross in it. Both the shape of this dress and the presence of embroidery might put it at the later end of the date spectrum.36 Finally, on top of these three garments, the infant was dressed in a sleeveless hooded tunic constructed from two different linen textiles. The body of the tunic has clavi of red and brown stripes and is decorated around the neck with red and white wool. The hood is decorated with tapestry woven red wool circles with a cross inside, one on each side, while a red braid runs around the front edge, and fringes decorate the top. A linen scarf was wrapped around the infant’s neck. The care with which the infant was buried and the layering of garments is not unique at this site. The embroidered decoration in this example is unusual; other tiny tunics have tapestry-woven clavi and roundels in coloured wools, both plain and patterned. The tapestry-woven decoration is similar to that found in adult clothing but the embroidery is a rare technique in this period, which may, like the use of coloured wools at the neckline, be an attempt at both decoration and warding off evil.37 Another child, a boy (Kind 2), was found in the same context. He too was dressed in three layers of linen tunics. The middle tunic is T-shaped (woven-toshape) in linen with a tuck at the waistline to allow for growth. The neck opening and sleeve are edged with tablet weave in blue and the neck was fastened by a ribbon. The tunic has tiny clavi of a row of alternating red, yellow and green heart shaped leaves. The clavi and additional decoration on the shoulders and sleeves in red and green wool are woven in tapestry weave. This patterning and colour combination are picked up in the top tunic where the clavi also contain red and yellow circles, dots and squares.38 These examples highlight several relevant points: in Egypt the usual textile is linen, with wool used for coloured decoration. Some of these garments are made from second-hand material but they are made with care and show some interesting local elements in the sewn decoration and in the careful weaving of the tiny clavi. The garments made from recycled material are obviously not made to shape on the loom. These are early examples of clothing made by cutting and sewing pieces of cloth, a technique which only begin to appear in Late Antiquity, and interestingly, appears earlier in the wardrobes of children than those of adults. Again, it is noticeable that some of the earliest decorative stitching (done with a needle rather than woven in) appears on children’s garments.39 Perhaps it is not surprising that the two come together in children’s clothing given the time involved in spinning yarn, setting up a warp and weaving; this may be a more economical use of time, especially for infants who get so little wear out of their clothing. However, they all show skill and care in the shaping and decoration which suggests both an investment in the child and care for its appearance. The reality of infant and child death was uncompromising in Antiquity and researchers have argued for the presence of amuletic sewing, threads and designs on children’s (and adult garments).40 The use of amuletic designs or colours is still common in many cultures today and we should not be surprised to find it on

Little tunics for little people   53 the clothing of Roman period children, although it is difficult to securely define stitching as explicitly amuletic in many contexts. Burying an infant with so many clothes is a choice made by the surviving family, and presumably, local customs. Despite the fact the clothes of Kind 1 were made from recycled linen they were still made to tiny specifications with attention to detail and decoration. Was the child buried with its entire wardrobe? As the mother is buried alongside the newborn, perhaps this was the end of that little family and there was no need to retain any of the clothing? Maybe the family could afford to replace the garments, although this raises the question of their status. The garments found at Antinoopolis are also identified as made in children’s styles: in Egypt, hooded tunics seem to be restricted to children’s graves. It is posited by Fluck and others that this association with children is what led to the choice of the hood (koukoullion) as suitable for the clothing of monks. Its use by children translated as a symbol of innocence and was appropriated by the monks. Pachomius ordered that when the monks gathered together they should ‘put on their heads soft cowls like children’.41 Not all the garments in the Antinoopolis finds were made from recycled cloth. The woven-to-shape tunic in the little boy’s grave is evidence of clothing taking account of growth. Many tunics, both adult and child size have been found with tucks at the waistline. As many of the tunics are made of a wide fit, it is the length that would need altering as a child grew. This seems an eminently practical design and would lengthen the life of the garment considerably. The little flared dress of the newborn baby is also of interest as this is a style which does not become common Egypt until after the Arab conquest, although the earliest known examples are in linen as is this one. They are thought to follow Syrian or Persian styles; if so they are early linen versions of a style that came to be popular in wool.42 The published examples of children’s clothing from Khirbet Qazone and Antinoopolis demonstrate different methods of making clothes and both the presence and absence of garments designed explicitly for children. The tunics from Khirbet Qazone fit a general Mediterranean style of sleeveless and sleeved tunic that can be found across the empire for both adults and children and reflect the types of garments seen in sculpture, on mosaics and in mummy portraits. The examples of Antinoopolis in their cut and sewn techniques show the influence of styles from further east, and in their hooded tunics and flared dresses, demonstrate something that contemporaries saw as made particularly for children. Surviving archaeological textiles from the Roman provinces in Northern Europe are much more rare, but two examples from central Gaul are worth considering as they reflect both local and ‘Romanised’ clothing habits.43 In 1908 the mummified body of a small boy (aged about two or three and dated to the third century ce) was found buried in the necropolis of Fin Renard (Bourges, central Gaul) in a sleeved woollen tunic. The tunic is made in the woven-to-shape style, of undyed wool, probably falling to the knee or just below (length c. 50 cm × 75 cm in width). When worn it would resemble the Gallic coats of the children on the Flavia Augustina monument. It is decorated with two green stripes from shoulder to the knee-length lower edge which is enigmatic because they are painted on

54  Mary Harlow rather than woven in – a very rare feature which suggests that perhaps the garment was made especially for or retouched for burial.44 The remains of a ‘girl’ found in a pine coffin in the cemetery of Les Martres-deVeyre (Tomb D) was dressed in a large, long-sleeved wool tunic with a tuck, a pair of twill, knee-length stockings and a long length of cloth interpreted as a belt or sash. She also wore a pair of hobnailed shoes.45 The grave dates to the late second – early third century. The overlarge wool tunic was made of one large rectangular piece of textile folded in half and sewn up one side, and at the shoulders, with short sleeves added; it had a central tuck. In the process of reconstructing this outfit, Carol Van Driel Murray raised a series of questions: the central tuck was done rather crudely so was perhaps an attempt to make the tunic fit the deceased, rather than a garment from her own wardrobe. Creases on the tunic and initial reports by the original excavators suggest that the belt was originally tied at the waist, again perhaps to take up excess fabric. Reconstructing the tunic and inset sleeves was not so difficult but sorting out the neckline proved problematic as it gaped. This was solved by the use of a brooch, although one was not found in the original grave. The stockings were also found to be problematic and when reconstructed had an uncomfortable seam that ran under the foot. They were also made for feet larger than those suggested by the shoes, so perhaps were put in as part of the laying out of the body, or as Van Driel Murray suggests, perhaps she wore her brother’s or her father’s stockings in the winter.46 This tunic is probably a material example of the Gallic coat seen in iconography but depictions do not show it belted so the belt is an additional intriguing detail here. It is quite difficult to make the imaginative leap from the tangible reality of archaeological textiles, as displayed in museum exhibitions and catalogues, and indeed sometimes looking like a collection of rags, to clothing as worn in daily life. It requires yet another leap of the imagination to equate some of the archaeological textiles with clothing as portrayed in sculpture. Reconstructions, if they follow good protocols, are the best way to understand both the real behaviour of clothing on the body and the experiential nature of that clothing for the wearer.47 Experiments raise interesting questions, as in the case of the Les Martres-deVeyre outfit, and can often present unexpected solutions. Even making tunics to the same measurements as those in museum collections but using machine woven modern textiles can highlight aspects of clothing invisible in iconography and difficult to access and assess in the archaeology. A relatively square tunic that fits a well-built person, can also fit a smaller person with the help of a belt to contain and control the excess material, and look quite different. On a smaller person it may have the effect of looking sleeved, it will drape differently and body language will alter accordingly.48 This means that clothing could be unisex despite the extensive Roman rhetoric that insisted men and women look different. Once on a body, a tunic could fulfil the requirements of gender-appropriate wear if the length was right (long for women, shorter for men). This chapter has thus far looked at children’s clothing on Italian and regional sarcophagi and sculptural reliefs and as archaeological textiles.49 In all cases but Antinopoolis, the clothing of children is more or less made as small versions of

Little tunics for little people   55 adult items. In general then, children in Antiquity dressed like miniature versions of their parents. Once they were out of the swaddling clothes of their immediate infancy they probably progressed to tiny tunics made in small sizes or cut down from larger garments. Small girls and boys seem to wear similar garments; it is unclear at what point length really came to be a gender divider. Perhaps children learnt to wear their clothes in gendered ways from the outset; even the wearing of the most complex garment loses its difficulty with use and habitude.

Conclusions and a return to Ariès Visualising the everyday dressed child in a particular part of the empire has its problems, but both the archaeological and visual evidence provide a series of images and representations within which to frame a controlled imagination. In general, tunics of varying sizes, left loose or gathered by a belt of cloth, rope or leather would be the normal daily garb. The presence of details such as sleeves would depend on cultural taste but also simply on the size of the tunic, in the falling-off-the-shoulder effect. Cloaks would work in a similar manner: they could be wrapped, pinned, knotted or simply held together. Iconography suggests that children would be socialised into their wardrobes by emulating their parents or other older persons around them and that their wardrobes would form part of their own cultural inculcation and socialisation: they would learn to wear certain garments in specific ways to suit their age, status, rank and gender and understand how this reflected those qualities. In terms of ethnicity, dress is a strong identifier. An individual child might wear a simple tunic which would reflect the textile traditions of his or her own village and household. The quality of the basic materials and the weave would be a language easily read in Antiquity when most people were much closer to the processes of production. The people of Khirbet Qazone would know the little cotton tunic was a rarity, and additions of dyed wool and patterns speak to the economics, taste and care of the household in clothing its members. It is possible to see similarities across time and space in the examples presented here as the generic wardrobe across the empire shared shape and drape. One element that is often problematic is colour. It is generally accepted that colour played a much stronger role in adult female clothing than men’s – this is certainly the case in the corpus of Romano-Egyptian mummy portraits – and it has become almost orthodox to attribute the remains of coloured tunics to women and undyed to men. However, if this is the case, what we cannot know, is at what age little girls might have begun to wear coloured clothing in emulation of their mothers – or whether colour was acceptable for both boys and girls from birth and at some point it became less acceptable for formal male public dress. Many of the children’s tunics in museums have a coloured ground but as they are often also without provenance it is hard to attribute them to either sex. Visual imagery speaks a language of categorisation that was understood by the contemporary viewer and which the historian often attempts to align with contemporary mores derived from written sources. However, the idealising tendencies of both text and image are rarely complemented by material finds.

56  Mary Harlow Finds of archaeological textiles can aid our understanding of how children were valued: small size, specially made garments and even recycled or re-modelled garments demonstrate a desire to clothe children properly, to recognize them as individuals with particular needs (and even desires). Most finds that can securely be identified as belonging to children are found in burial contexts which suggests that commemorators were prepared to bury their children in clothing that went out of the cycle of wear – like a carved memorial, burying a child in their clothing makes a statement about the care (and resources) of the family. The seminal and influential work of Ariès on the invention of childhood as a separate stage of life occurring in the sixteenth century (in France, at least) has been contested by a number of scholars.50 His discussion of the development of a children’s wardrobe as one of the signifiers of this change has received less attention. This may be because while Ariès’s view of the lack of differentiation between the dress of children and adults until the late Middle Ages is essentially correct, given current research on the notion of childhood in Antiquity we might question his link between differentiation in dress, and differentiation in life stage. As the majority of clothing in the Roman period was made to shape on the loom, it is the construction process that dictates the style and form of the garment. Other factors, such as type of yarn, weave and colour differentiated ancient dress. Small size identified children’s clothing. The evidence for Antiquity does show some evidence of the creation of styles that begin as children’s clothes and are either an adaptation of adult dress from another culture (e.g. the shaped tunic of Antinoopolis) or evolve into adult dress (the hooded tunic and the shaped tunic). However, most children’s clothing was a smaller replica of versions made for adults. They were made with care and consideration for children’s bodies, tiny decoration carefully applied, and, if we take into account amuletic stitching, they were also made with an eye to a child’s essential vulnerability. The presence of clothing in burials, where it would be easy to simply shroud a child’s body in castoff textiles, or worn out clothing, speaks to a care for children as individuals and as members of the community. As with Antiquity, by virtue of the nature of the evidence, much of Ariès’s discussion addresses the upper classes. He argues that changes in dress occur more commonly for boys than for girls. He cites the shift in the young Louis XIII’s image of himself, aged four, when he was allowed to change from his childish robe to breeches and a man’s hat (only to have them taken away the next day, when he was promised they would be returned when he was eight). In reviewing the child’s wardrobe for seventeenth-century France, Ariès noted that small boys were feminised through dress, wearing long robes as opposed to the distinctly male garb of breeches, so a change of dress was a very visual mark of growing up. Girls went through fewer dress stages, moving from swaddling clothes to dressing like their mothers.51 Given the relatively generic tunic of the Roman world, a marked change in dress style across the life course is not a question with relevance to any but upper-class Romans. Among this group, a change in age and social status could be marked by dress: for boys, by the change from the toga praetexta to the toga

Little tunics for little people   57 virilis;52 and, arguably, for citizen girls, on marriage when they earned the right to wear the stola. This would be the normalising view that comes from text and iconography but it reveals little about everyday wear. Iconography would suggest that length was always a gender marker, but as a child grew, a tunic might remain in use and grow shorter, it might have a tuck to allow specifically for growth. If length was a serious concern it would mean that girls required their wardrobe to be renewed more often than their brothers. The evidence does not allow us to know at what point girls might have been required to wear full length dress, although we might assume this was only ever an upper-class concern.53 Little tunics may well have blurred gender boundaries between young children but expectations of behavioural norms might have countered any lack of clothing distinction. Loose and shorter tunics certainly allowed for physical activity, for the running, jumping and less controlled body language associated with childlike behaviour. Clothing cultures with strong gender messages can have a strong influence on social behaviour, and young children can learn how to comport themselves in longer and less controllable clothing if that is local custom. In any period, children can be treated with love or indifference but the evidence presented here demonstrates an age group clothed with care and attention to detail in the tiny decorative elements.

Notes 1 Digest 34.2.23.2. 2 Ariès 1996 (originally 1960). 3 Almost immediately upon its publication work of Ariès has been critiqued and his notion of the invention of childhood questioned. See, for example, Riché 1962. Work on Roman childhood has also engaged with Ariès, see the review in Harlow, Laurence and Vuolanto 2007. As Dixon (2001a: 9) says, despite its refutation, Ariès’s work remains valuable as it asked questions we might otherwise not have asked. It is worth returning to the discussion here as while Roman children have a relatively undifferentiated wardrobe, it is predominantly the construction of clothing that dictates its style in this period, an issue that was not considered by Ariès. 4 On the toga see Stone 1994; Goette 1990; George 2008; Davies 2005. By Late Antiquity the toga was largely a ceremonial garment, but it was still, even in its late forms, often the clothing of choice for portrait statues: Harlow 2004; Smith 1999. On toga praetexta for children see Gabelmann 1985; Goette 1990; Torelli 1990; Sebesta 2005; Dolansky 2008. 5 On the tunic see Pausch 2003. 6 For recent studies on polychromy see papers in Brinkmann, Primavesi and Hollein (eds) 2010; and Østergaard and Neilsen 2014. 7 See Quintilian, Inst. 11.3.92–149 on how to perform in a toga, for a rare description of an item of clothing. Cf. Cicero, Verr. 5.317; Heskel 1994. 8 Gabelmann 1985; Goette 1990; Sebesta 2005; Dolansky 2008. 9 Uzzi 2005: 144 describes the girl as wearing a ‘long pleated stola’ beneath her toga to match the garb of the imperial women surrounding her but this is hard to decipher, and would be unlikely given the stola is the garment of the married woman. On the stola see Scholz 1992. On the Ara Pacis and discussion of identification of figures see Kleiner 1992: 91–9; Uzzi 2005: 142–55. 10 On girls and the toga praetexta see: Sebesta 2005; Goette 1990 for images. On the toga on adult women as a marker of adultery see McGinn 2004; Dixon 2014.

58  Mary Harlow 11 Uzzi 2005: 61. 12 See Uzzi 2005: 61–6 for further discussion of similar scenes on the column. 13 Currie 1996: 159 has argued that all the children on Trajan’s column are Dacians in various stage of Romanisation. 14 See Gabelman 1985 for catalogue. For a North African example see Varner 1990. 15 See Rawson 2003a: 259–61, Figure 6.1 for a discussion of the funerary monument of Publicia Glypte’s young son and verna who both died before the age of 18 months and were jointly commemorated and depicted in togas, (CIL VI 22972). 16 Richardson and Richardson 1966. 17 Huskinson 1996; Rawson 2003a: 106, Figure 2.2; Carroll 2012: 141. 18 Huskinson 1996. See also Huskinson 2007. 19 This may be the dress described as a supparum (a girl’s linen under tunic) by Croom 2000: 119. 20 For the western provinces see: See Allason-Jones 2005; Carroll 2006, 2012; Coulon 2004; Croom 2000; Roche-Bernard 1993; Rothe 2009; Wild 1968, 1985. For Egypt and the Eastern provinces see Fluck 2010; Croom 2000; Finlayson 2002/2003; Goldman 1994; Stauffer 2012. 21 Allason-Jones 2005. 22 Wild 1968; Rothe 2009. 23 On swaddling see Carroll 2012. 24 There is a growing literature on children’s clothing in Antiquity, see: Fluck 2010; papers in Carroll and Wild 2012; Grömer and Hölbling-Steigberger 2010 and Croom 2000. Faith Morgan has collected an impressive catalogue of children’s garments from Antiquity in European and US museums for her PhD (Morgan 2015). This will hopefully be published in the near future. I am not a textile archaeologist and am highly dependent on the work of the experts whose research is used for the specific examples discussed here. Their work is published and easily accessible for the reader. 25 Granger Taylor 1982. 26 Granger Taylor 2000: 150: the site is traditionally dated by pottery to the first or second century ad but textile research would suggest a later dating to 3rd century as some features such as pin stripes were not evident in early sites (such as Cave of the Letters, c. ad 130s) but are present in Dura Europos (abandoned ad 257). 27 Granger Taylor 2000. 28 Granger Taylor 2000: 159. 29 On cotton see Wild 1997; Wild, Wild and Clapham 2008. Granger-Taylor 2000: Textile 8 was woven in a style known as the ‘bag-tunic’, more common in Pharaonic times. On Pharonic weaving practices Vogelsang Eastwood 1993. On the return of the ‘bag-tunic’ under Arab rule see Pritchard 2006. 30 Granger-Taylor 2000: 152–3 likens this garment with its purple neck edge to the under-tunics seen in contemporary mummy portraits. 31 On amuletic use of red in children’s clothing see Morgan 2015. For the Christian period see Dautermann Maguire et al. 1989; Maguire 1990; Dasen 2003. 32 Granger-Taylor 2000: 158–60. 33 Granger-Taylor 2000. 34 The excavations were under the directorship of Rosario Pintaudi: see Pintaudi 2008; Fluck 2010. 35 Fluck 2010: 182–4, figs 3–7. I owe thanks to Cäcilia Fluck and Rosario Pintaudi for allowing me to use their research and the image of the tiny tunic of Kind 1. 36 See Pritchard 2006. 37 Fluck 2010: Cat. Nos: Sleeved, plain hooded tunic, closest to the body (38 × 35 cm) with sleeves (14 cm): Kind 1: T_2009.03; Recycled, hooded tunic with sleeves of a different length (left: 13.5 cm, right: 18 cm; the body of the tunic: 41 × 32 cm): Kind 1: T_2009.02; little dress with flared sides and sleeves (40.5 × 42 cm, sleeves

Little tunics for little people   59 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52 53

15.5 cm): Kind 1: Kleid_2009.01; sleeveless hooded tunic (43 × 36 cm excluding hood): Kind 1: T_2009.01. Fluck 2010. Kind 2 tunics range in length from 45–50cm, Fluck suggests this would suit a child aged approx. one year. The middle tunic with tuck: Kind 2: T_2009.03; Upper tunic: Kind 2: T2009.02. On the late appearance of embroidery as a decorative technique see Droß-Krüpe and Paetz gen. Schieck 2014. Dautermann Maguire 1989; Pritchard 2006: 34; Morgan 2015. V. Pachom. MS Monac. Grae. 3 in Horn and Martens 2009: 326; Fluck 2010; Giorda 2011. Pritchard 2006: 111–15: The Whitworth collection in Manchester has four children’s wool tunics of this style but they are C14 dated to the eighth and ninth century and will not be considered here. See Desrosiers and Lorquin 1998 for a catalogue of Roman period archaeological textiles in Gaul. Roche-Bernard 1993: 8–9; Coulon 2004: 122–3; Desrosiers and Lorquin 1998: 63–4; Carroll 2012: 137. Wild 1985; Van Driel-Murray 1999. Van Driel-Murray 1999: 11. Demant 2009 on categories of reconstruction; Grömer 2009 on reconstructions of pre-Roman dress in Austria. On the theory and use of reconstructions see papers in Staubermann 2011. As part of her PhD, Faith Morgan (2015) reconstructed some late antique garments, arriving at some very interesting conclusions. Shoes were made in small sizes for children from a range of materials, again reflecting a commitment of resources to the younger members of the family. On footwear see various chapters in De Moor and Fluck 2011. See Van Driel-Murray 2001 for a good succinct discussion of understanding footwear and changing fashions. For an overview of all types of Roman footwear see Norma Goldman 1994. Diocletian’s Edict of Maximum Prices 9 for a list of different types of boots, sandals and respective prices. See Harlow, Laurence and Vuolanto 2007 for discussion and references. Ariès 1996: 51. Dolansky 2008; Torelli 1990; Harlow and Laurence 2002. On clothing young girls see Harlow and Laurence 2002; Olson 2008a and b.

5 Touching children in Roman Antiquity The sentimental discourse and the family Christian Laes

Introduction: ancient historians as anthropologists and time travellers It is a common travellers’ experience that one feels like ‘a stranger’ in a different world when people of that other culture share other ways and conventions of bodily interaction. How to greet, to hug or not to hug, how to embrace, how to court, bodily behaviour that may cause embarassment – these are all subjects often discussed in travel books. In this contribution, I will have a look at the tender touching of children in the Roman Empire, and the way this impacted family life. More specifically, I will focus on three instances of tender touches: the act of breastfeeding; touching in the wide sense (hugging, embracing); and kissing. Quite surprisingly, the subject has seldom been dealt with before, although it is of immediate interest to family historians and historians of childhood. Freud has pointed to the importance of physical contact in the first years (the first contact with the world is tactile) – but would this imply that there are very similar processes throughout all cultures?1 Of course, the history of gestures exists as an interdisciplinary research field, in which anthropology needs to be combined with various branches of history. Gestures in Antiquity have been studied thoroughly since the nineteenth century.2 So far, in the tradition of the family history of Roman Antiquity, it is mostly the darker sides of corporeal interaction that have been treated: child beating and wife beating.3 Fascinating and engaging as the subject might seem, one must immediately add an important caveat. As with many subjects in Roman social and cultural history, our knowledge is limited to fragments of fragments. The potential area of research is vast. With a population of over 50 million inhabitants, the borders of the Roman Empire extended roughly from Scotland in the West to Iraq in the East – the same territory nowadays embraces over 40 states. Besides the Greek and the Roman layers, the too-often-ignored Jewish component needs to be taken into account, together with dozens of other local cultural traditions. A large part of these traditions disappeared under the dominance of the Graeco-Roman culture, but others emerged in Christian Late Antiquity, where Coptic, Aethiopic, Syriac, Armenian, Persian, and even Arabic became firm fundaments for ‘national’ churches. We can very

Touching children in Roman Antiquity   61 well imagine ways of (sentimental) bodily behaviour being quite different in, say, a village in present-day France where Celtic customs were vigorous and a Syriac medium-sized town where Semitic customs intermingled with Greek customs and habits. However, the details of all of this are far beyond our knowledge. Cultural background and conventions, ethnicity, class, gender, ritual contexts, and even personal temperament strongly influence the way people behave in gestures and corporeal matters. Sometimes, the ancient writers themselves seem to have been aware of such differences or stereotypes. While Romans were known for dignified royal restraint, Greeks were viewed as acting as perfect comedians.4 Snorting was considered a Tarsian peculiarity. In the cities of Euboea, men apparently did not kiss each other. Dio Chrysostomus did not know this, so he appeared ridiculous when he kissed a certain Sotades and another man, whom he had helped some time before. And Plutarch asked why Roman women kissed their kinsmen on the lips, implying that this was a properly Roman habit, opposite to Greek usage. 5

The potential of iconography and consolatory literature Obviously, iconographical evidence has a vast potential for the present subject. But it is also notoriously difficult. To what extent do iconographical sources reflect reality? And which reality anyway? Let me start with a personal example: pictures taken some 30 years ago, some days before my Confirmation Day, in May 1985. In the photographs, my parents stand behind me, my brother and myself are sitting, and my parents are holding one hand on our shoulder, all of us in new clothes. Compared to photographs that are taken on the same occasion in Belgium nowadays (often quite exuberant, and surely very lively), the pictures look distanced and rather solemn; but I can testify that these images do not prove a lack of warmth or tenderness in my family. The same applies of course to families of 30 years before 1985, whose pictures were even more static. Is it possible to retrieve feelings, practices or conventions from pictures, and does it make sense to do so? The representation of physical contact on tombstones and other grave monuments all over the Roman Empire has been the subject of thorough research over the last 30 years.6 Quite unsurprisingly, affectionate physical contact with children is depicted. Sometimes, they are lifted up, they are embraced, touched on the shoulder, they hold another person’s hand. And some images do appear to be marvellously affectionate (see Figure 5.1a and b).7 But the key-words to understand such representations are social hierarchy, identification, and regional or local variety. For freedmen, marriage was a major achievement, through which they acquired full Roman citizenship for their offspring – accordingly, family pictures are prominent on gravestones of libertini in Italy.8 In the Danube provinces, depictions of families seem more prominent: in military environments, the ban on marriage, and the subsequent possibility for veterans to marry played an important role.9 Privileged space is another matter of social hierarchy: adult males on the Ara Pacis are depicted as largely ignoring little children who tug at their toga; while the interaction between children and adult females is more openly represented.10 Sometimes, the touching of the shoulder is just meant to

62  Christian Laes

Figure 5.1 Altar of Passiena Gemella, a) left side, b) right side. Inv. 1959.148.302. (Liverpool national museums)

identify who the persons mentioned in the inscription were: the husband touches his wife, while the mother puts her hand on the shoulder of the child.11 Extensive cataloguing has made it possible to show which type of touch prevails in which region of the Empire.12 In other cases, physical closeness in a depiction is explained by the lack of space on the stone. It takes the so-called ‘sentimental leap’ to understand these representations as utterances of tenderness. Although one is perfectly entitled to do so, this is not the crucial point of the matter.13 Age seems to be the key factor for understanding another sort of sources for which we have serial evidence over quite a few centuries: consolatory literature. Hundreds of pages have been written on Cicero’s excessive grief at the death of his daughter Tullia. In these numerous and often very emotional passages, there is no reference to physical contact with his beloved daughter, who was over 30 when she died in childbirth.14 In the same way, there is hardly any mention of sentimental touching in Seneca’s Ad Marciam. This daughter of Cremutius Cordus lost her son Metilius when he was already a young man – a factor which explains the absence of emotional body language.15 The same applies to Seneca’s Consolatio, written to his mother Helvia on the occasion of his exile – not much sentimental bodily contact between mother and adult son is mentioned, apart from the embracing which also occurred in the case of Cicero and Tullia.16 In sharp contrast with this are the poems for deceased slave children, as they appear in Statius’ Silvae. Kissing, sweet lips, hugging, embracing, and sensuality, are important features in the poet’s description of the deceased twelve-year-old

Touching children in Roman Antiquity   63 Glaucias, mignon and puer delicatus of Atedius Melior.17 The same items appear when Statius mourns his own beloved slave boy, who died as an infans. When he was crawling around, the foster father Statius picked him up to kiss him. In Statius’ lap, the little boy’s tears could dry, and then he could softly doze off. 18 In what stands out as a touching self-consolation after the deaths of his 19-year-old wife and his five- and ten-year-old sons, it is again striking that Quintilian refers to closeness and affection in the case of his younger child, while the ten-year-old deceased boy, who survived his mother, is praised for the promise of a future career which he already exhibited.19 Again, it would be pointless to make the ‘sentimental leap’, speculating about emotions and affection. What matters is that the sentimental discourse with references to bodily contact and affection was mostly reserved for young children.20 This discourse persisted well into Late Antiquity. Epigraphical poetry is another example of this: both pagan and Christian carmina epigraphica mention the charm, play, beauty and hugging of young children.21 A most remarkable instance comes from the city of Rome. Although one might think that the close physical contact described in the relationship between a mother and her 15-year-old son (iuvenem) belonged to a period some years before his death, the text insists on telling us that it had been like this all his life (dum tibi vita fuit): How often did you give sweet kisses to your mother, how often with your arms did you embrace her neck while you were alive? Fifteen years old you were. I wish you had grown up further, you were a sweet friend of mine. Fate, you have decided to take away my son as a young man from me. I wish the underworld had taken me away earlier. With this poem, you bring mourning back for everyone. Maybe this word should teach me just not to speak up. But it was true love which taught me to have these verses inscribed.22

The level of daily life: limits of family and proximity After this brief exploration of serial evidence, I proceed with more anecdotal and fragmentary evidence on breastfeeding, touching in the wider sense, and kissing – all in direct connection with the ideals and practicalities of the Roman family. It is obviously not my purpose to provide encyclopaedic information on these subjects. Instead, each discussion will be guided by the same principle. First, I sketch something of the reality, the occurrence or the acceptability of the gesture. Afterwards, I focus on who was allowed to perform the gesture towards whom, and the significance of age, gender, class or family in this context. Also, reference will be made to Christian sources concerning the matter; the vexed question of continuity and change comes up occasionally. Breastfeeding Before raising questions about the sentimental and emotional value attached to breastfeeding, it should be asked whether the act of breastfeeding was something to be depicted or openly discussed in Roman society. Were breasts ever to be seen

64  Christian Laes in public? They undoubtedly were, in the case of ‘specialised’ wailing women, but also in instances of disaster or calamities, when women who were involved or afflicted did not hesitate to pull their hair, and show and scratch their naked breasts. We have numerous references to nude breasts, and to beating naked breasts, even till blood follows. Of course, this is ritualised behaviour, limited to a very specific context.23 As for the depiction of breastfeeding in art, there is always the taboo of nudity, and the possible sexual connotation.24 Besides this, aesthetic tastes or fashion play their role in the decision whether to depict or not.25 Can we imagine women (mothers and/or wet-nurses) being seen while breastfeeding children? Among the aristocracy, mothers surely tended to refuse to feed their infants themselves, since it would spoil their beauty; another factor was the contempt for physical labour.26 In the case of low-class women and their exposed bodies, one can suppose less shyness about showing breasts at work. By modern western standards, the lactation period was long, approximating a period of three years in the wet-nursing contracts.27 But how common was wet-nursing? It does not make much sense to refer to nursing contracts, as the ‘normal’ situation of a mother feeding her own baby would not be mentioned in the form of a contract. In all likelihood, a majority of the population (the ‘invisible Romans’, as Robert Knapp named them28) simply could not afford wet-nurses, and certainly not over a long period. For this reason, scholars have suggested different demographic conditions for the poorer class, because of a longer lactation period restraining mothers’ fertility.29 The so-called middle classes amounted to about 60 per cent of the population of the Empire. On the other hand, even in slave environments (10–20 per cent), masters used wetnurses to manage their slaves’ household. The papyri do mention breastfeeding by mothers, but also some parents (or grandparents) who explicitly did not want it.30 Until Late Antiquity, there was a tradition of contempt that linked breastfeeding with servile work – once again, this does not exclude the possibility that many mothers did in fact breastfeed.31 Indeed, Christian discourse stressed the importance of breastfeeding by the mother herself, but at the same time acknowledged the presence of wet-nurses in several cases.32 The question here is: was breastfeeding sometimes depicted as a sentimental and caring act? The motif of the nursing mother only appears for Greece in the Hellenistic period, while it is abundant in Italy, where we see a widespread practice and celebration of it in material objects, such as votiva. In Rome itself, images are scarce and occur mostly in representations of family groups.33 Even empresses of the Antonine dynasty are sometimes depicted with bare breasts, e.g. on coins where they are associated with goddesses of fertility such as Fecunditas34 – witness also the symbolism of nature providing nourishment in the figure of Tellus with full breasts on the Ara Pacis. In the provinces, the depiction of breastfeeding by the mother is frequent, also showing the bare breasts.35 The same applies to wetnurses. Numerous statuettes and steles or gravestones remain. Wet-nurses are sometimes depicted during the act of nursing (though the act of carrying is more frequently depicted), witness the famous stele commissioned for Severina nutrix in Cologne.36 Also, the large breasts of nurses in some statuettes are remarkable.37

Touching children in Roman Antiquity   65

Figure 5.2  Cornelius Statius sarcophagus, c. 150 ce, probably from Ostia Antica. Inv. No. 659. Louvre Museum, Paris (photo: I. Shurygin)

A famous instance is the Cornelius Statius sarcophagus (see Figure 5.2), with a depiction of the mother or the nurse (this is often ambiguous). We find quite frequent specific mentions of lactation in Greek literature: often these are dramatic images of the caring mother. They often occur in a tragic and dramatic context. Older mothers show their breasts to their adult son as a visual performance of their mothering, and a plea not to forget it: Hecuba begs Hector not to go to fight, Clytemnaestra tries to prevent the attack of her son Orestes by revealing her breast, Jocasta does her utter best to dissuade her sons Eteocles and Polyneices from fighting by the same gesture.38 Roman aristocrats were no doubt acquainted with such passages, witness Statius39 – and in Greek and Latin literature from the Roman Empire we find the tragic tradition of desperate mothers showing their breasts to adult sons. But as with the depiction in art, there is an intermingling with wet-nurses, who could perform the same gesture. When Myrrha tries to commit suicide, it is the old nurse who guards the door that prevents her from the act, by showing her worn-out breast and grey hair.40 Are such literary passages only pathetic, belonging to the realm of tragedy, legend and myth? Jerome depicts a son who wants to leave to become a soldier of Christ. He would persevere even if his father were to throw himself in front of the door, or his mother were to tear up her robe and show her breasts. Admittedly, Jerome mentions this only as a possibility, but some kind of link with everyday reality cannot be denied.41 Do the literary sources explicitly acknowledge the intimacy and the emotional value attached to breastfeeding in early child-care? There was a positive discourse on the bonding of the mother and her young child, but breastfeeding is seldom explicitly mentioned in this context. Witness, however, phrases such as a gremio matris, which might include the act of breastfeeding.42 In a way, the bond is also revealed in the opposite discourse: the opponents of the practice of wet-nursing argue that there is the danger of too much bonding between wet-nurse and nursling. On a popular level, this is best illustrated in the fable of the lamb which calls the shegoat its real mother, since it was she that had given her milk.43 Roman aristocrats sometimes acknowledged that their young offspring were much more cherished by wet-nurses.44 There is a whole collection of ‘positive’ discourse that uplevels and valuates wet-nurses. I believe that the intention is to soften the unease caused by the

66  Christian Laes fact that although their social position was inferior, their role was important. They were made symbols of care and affection, but in this context, the sweet and touching aspects of breastfeeding, even the physical intimacy, are never mentioned.45 The physician Soranus focuses only on the physical aspects (strong nipples, etc.).46 In conclusion, one can say that breastfeeding was surely recognised and depicted as an act of intimacy, love, and care. It was represented in art and used as a literary motif. In literature, it is mostly mentioned retrospectively; the tender act itself is not so often described. There also was a sentimental discourse on mother– little child bonding, where the gremium seems to suggest physical intimacy. In iconography, wet-nurses are depicted on an equal basis with mothers. In literature, the intimacy of breastfeeding is only implied for the wet-nurse–child relationship; this may express unease or discomfort on the part of well-to-do parents. Touching in the wide sense (carrying, hugging, and embracing) It is not hard to imagine ancient Romans, like most present-day Mediterranean peoples, as a very ‘physical contact’ people. Once again, we have to take into account that most of our sources are from a male milieu from the Mediterranean region. The ancient texts display abundant evidence of warmhearted embracing, between friends, between officers and soldiers, during salutations between patrons and clients, and while saying farewell.47 We even read about male friends walking in the streets holding hands.48 Letters on papyri are full of greetings such as aspazomai. Of course, this does not necessarily equate with reality, although one immediately thinks of the affectoniate abbracci or besos that are a standard occurrence in Italian or Spanish letters and e-mails. The formula aspazomai (‘I embrace you’) occurs more than a thousand times, from Ptolemaic times until Late Antiquity. No forms of salutation seem to be typical of women, children or adult men.49 But the papyri do provide us with one unique example of the child’s perspective: a little boy writing to his father, claiming that he will not embrace him, nor say nice words to him if he does not take him along to Alexandria.50 Obviously, the child held in the arms and stretching its arms towards its parents, father or mother, is a topos in art and literature, from Hellenistic times onwards.51 Again, this gesture is part of the sentimental discourse about young children, which we have already encountered in epigraphical poetry. But did specific gestures for children exist – behaviour which would not be appropriate towards an adult? Taking hold of the chin is mentioned as such, although not really as a gesture of affection.52 Saluting a boy by pinching his cheek is another example. This is what Augustus did when Galba, still a puer, came to salute him together with other young boys.53 Caressing the hair seems to have been reserved for children (together with animals and slaves). These seem to have been gestures which were not restricted to family members.54 But, when a mother still caressed her adult son’s hair, this was considered a sign of intimacy, a gesture allowed only to the family or those close to it.55 It is telling that the caressing of the head is also a gesture permitted to the teacher towards his favourite adolescent pupil.56

Touching children in Roman Antiquity   67 Did other gestures too reveal close proximity? The intimate act of putting the arms around the neck seems to have been reserved for parents and children, or of course to husband and wife. It surely was not confined to young children.57 In one of the most touching scenes in Latin literature, the little boy Itys is killed by his own mother Procne, who takes revenge for the misdeed done by her husband to her sister Philomela. Little Itys comes, stretches his arms to his mummy’s neck and kisses her, as children do. Procne kills the boy nevertheless, but with death before his eyes, he begs her to be allowed to embrace her neck again. In vain... he looked too much like his father, and therefore he was killed.58 Kissing Kissing is famously a very culturally determined matter. Many expressions are attested in Antiquity. It is well known that Romans in daily life were enthusiastic kissers. In a society where close physical proximity reigned, high-class social equals kissed each other when greeting; it was a habit between friends, brothers, family members, and even between boxers and wrestlers when the struggle ended. Kissing expressed gratitude, established friendship, served as an act of reverence towards a newly appointed magistrate. It was also a way to express admission into a group, or an act of reconciliation.59 It was very much a part of the daily salutatio between client and patron.60 Some grammarians give the impression that there was a clear distinction between different kisses – in practice, there was not.61 The habit of kissing was so widespread among Roman aristocrats that it was at times forbidden, in order to avoid the spread of contagious disease.62 Romans very explicitly saw kissing as a privilege among members of the same family – accordingly, men and women may kiss, as long as they belong to the same family group, as long as they are propinqui in the wide sense. The fact was so well acknowledged that it might even be used in humorous allusions.63 Pliny the Elder offers a somewhat strange explanation for the fact that male relatives were allowed to kiss women.64 Indeed, ‘Why do the women kiss their kinsmen on the lips?’ is the title of one chapter of Plutarch’s Roman Questions – no matter how strange his explanations are, he considers this a typical Roman behaviour, different from Greek habits. For Plutarch, kissing is a token of kinship.65 At the beginning of the fifth century (more specifically in the year 419–420), Augustine confirms that kissing between male and female family members was still a custom, and he relates it to the habits of the old days.66 There seems to have been only one exception to the rule: the grown-up marriageable girl. I will come back to this later. The ius osculi needs to be understood as a natural extension of this idea of proximity. Who was allowed to kiss the emperor and his close family? Indeed, only a happy few intimate friends enjoyed the right and privilege of kissing the members of the emperor’s house while greeting them. At an earlier date, Xenophon reports very much the same thing about the Persian kings; and writers from the Roman period thought that kings who never kissed were exotic and strange.67 Agrippina cunningly managed to seduce her uncle Claudius because she had the right of the ius osculi in relation to him.68 Bad emperors just kissed everybody

68  Christian Laes publicly, as Caligula did with the pantomime player Mnester.69 Passages in the letters of Fronto mentioning his kissing the feet and hands of Marcus Aurelius’ little baby daughters, and pretending to find more delight in kissing their tiny hands and chubby feet than in kissing Marcus’ mouth and neck, should be understood in this way. The same goes for Fronto’s description of passionate kissing with his younger pupil Marcus Aurelius.70 Hence, Roman law codes go into details on who was legally allowed to kiss a magistrate at court.71 With all this in mind, it should not come as a surprise that being kissed by your sweet and delightful children was part and parcel of the sentimental discourse of childhood, both Greek and Roman. No longer now will your happy home give you welcome, no longer will your best of wives; no longer will your sweet children race to win the first kisses, and thrill your heart to its depths with sweetness. You will no longer be able to live in prosperity and to protect your own.72 Lucius Paulus, who defeated the Macedonian king Perseus, kissed and embraced his little daughter Tertia when he came home (and found her sad because her pet dog Persa had died).73 In the papyri, we encounter young Apion from the Fayum, who was serving in the fleet of Misenum. He writes to his father, thanks him for the sending of three golden coins, and says that he will kiss his father’s handwriting when he receives a letter from him.74 Of course, proximity could be expanded, so that other persons than biological relatives were also allowed to kiss children. But which ‘strangers’ were allowed to kiss children? For Theophrastus, it is typical of the flatterer to bring apples and pears to children, to hand them over to them and to kiss the little ones, while the father is present, and to call them: ‘chicks of a good strain’. This is surely inappropriate behaviour – not only the kissing.75 On the other hand, Plutarch has Thales kissing, laughing and acting in a most open-hearted way with Cleobulina, the daughter of his host – although he is not a family member, the behaviour is not at all considered indecent. Tellingly, it was Cleobulina herself who ran to Thales most spontaneously, whereas he did not know who she was. As she was standing in the colonnade, parting the hair of another host, she must have been quite young – otherwise Thales’ reaction could have been considered scandalous. We are also told that she was exceptionally smart, which might explain her inclination towards Thales, who is considered one of the Seven Sages.76 Here, proximity was absolutely the decisive factor. In the same way, Cicero is constantly worried about young Attica, the little daughter of his friend Atticus, whom he kissed as well. His worries about her health might be explained by the fact that at the same time (45 bce) Cicero had lost his daughter Tullia.77 Obviously, some kisses were considered more affectionate than others. Plutarch describes bestowing an affectionate kiss on little children, taking hold of these children by the ears and bidding the children do the same thing by them, as a typical way of approaching little ones – most people do so, and he has not only relatives in mind here.78 The gesture is known among lovers too.79 Aphrodite kissed little Eros on the cheek.80 The same ambivalence applies to kissing on

Touching children in Roman Antiquity   69 the eyes: it is mentioned as a gesture between parents and children, but also between lovers and even between very good friends.81 Kissing on the neck is also known as a gesture between lovers – but incidentally also for parents and even grandparents.82 From Catullus (Carm. 9.9), we know about good friends passionately kissing each other on the mouth and the eyes. Obviously, the act of kissing could involve some ambiguity, with the limits of expression of sympathy, friendship, eroticism, or sex becoming vague. Lucian is much aware of this in his mocking description of Alexander the False Prophet. He used to kiss and embrace wives while their worthless husbands were present.83 The subject of kissing children is also touched upon: Although he cautioned all to abstain from intercourse with boys on the ground that it was impious, for his own part this pattern of propriety made a clever arrangement. He commanded the cities in Pontus and Paphlagonia to send choir-boys for three years’ service, to sing hymns to the god in his household; they were required to examine, select and send the noblest, youngest and most handsome. These he kept under ward and treated like bought slaves, sleeping with them and affronting them in every way. He made it a rule, too, not to greet anyone over 18 years with his lips, or to embrace and kiss him; he kissed only the young, extending his hand to the others to be kissed by them. They were called ‘those within the kiss’.84 This fits the tradition of the ‘wicked teacher’: Eumolpus wins the trust of a mother by acting as a morally upright philosopher – of course, he seduces his boy pupil, who turns out to be quite willing to take part in the act of love. The first thing Eumolpus starts with are in fact ‘some kisses’ (aliquot basiolis).85 The ambiguity of kissing became more of an issue in Christian times. As Augustine’s testimony makes clear, it certainly was still a matter of proximity (cf. note 66). When Christians recited a passage from the Song of Songs about meeting and greeting a family member in public, the content must have sounded quite familiar to them.86 A kiss of peace (osculum pacis) was also exchanged between men and women.87 Together with the Judas kiss, the kiss of peace became a much discussed topic among patristic authors.88 Hence, the most beautiful definition of kissing on the mouth is found in Ambrose: Why should I mention the kiss on the mouth, a token of respect and charity? Also, doves kiss among each other, but what has this kissing to do with the beauty of a human kiss, by which the token of friendship and humanity is so clear, in which truthful affection of full charity is expressed.89 But Jerome reproaches priests who used the kiss as salutatio in the case of widowed matronae.90 In the case of a chaste elder woman and a bishop, it is said that she put her hands on his shoulders as a sign of intimacy and brotherhood in Christ. They managed to avoid suspicion by acting in this way.91 And the cheeks of young boys were clearly off-limits to monks since temptation was everywhere in the monastery of the desert.92

70  Christian Laes

Limits of gender and age Roman boys and their ’lecherous’ teachers Family historians of Antiquity have since long pointed out the ambiguity of the sentimental bonding between children of high-class families and social inferiors who often were around as servants or educators.93 As for sentimental body language, the fear of too close bonding is nowhere more clearly expressed than in the ancient discourse on ‘wicked’ and ‘lecherous’ educators who were ready to sexually abuse their pupils. Allegations of this kind are widespread throughout Greek and Roman literature. In the Roman satirical tradition, the schoolteacher or grammarian (H)amillus is said to ‘decline’ his pupils.94 Quite often, accusations and suspicion arise in the context of ‘Greek educators’, acting as wise men or philosophers, but actually using the ‘paedagogical excuse’ to indulge their sexual appetites for boys.95 The authors, therefore, mock these educators’ hypocrisy and threaten to reveal their true intentions to the worried parents.96 Although it is never explicitly stated, one can easily imagine revealing signs of body language – the already-mentioned kisses or caressing of the head – as indicators that ‘more’ was actually going on between teacher and pupil. As examples e contrario, the insistence on the necessity of having chaste educators points very much in the same direction.97 There is more than one factor that explains the preoccupations of Roman parents concerning this issue. Obviously, students were the ‘products’ of educators. In the same way, as aristocrats blamed cobblers – who were their social inferiors – for spoiling shoes, they accused teachers of corrupting youth.98 There were, of course, the typical Roman worries about Greek ways and behaviour, the suspicion that the teacher–student relationship in reality strongly resembled Alcibiades and Socrates or other famous instances of ‘Greek love’.99 However, more seems to be at stake. The relationship between a master and an apprentice incidentally transgressed the borders of the nuclear family. Teachers became ‘co-parents of the budding talent’, ‘second fathers’ and role models for their boys.100 Their sentimental friendship is sometimes expressed ‘in language that today seems startlingly amorous’.101 Political opponents – and by extension, the enemies of a family – could certainly make use of the opportunities of gossip in a face-to-face society to destroy or tarnish reputations. And in an aristocratic milieu, intergenerational tensions and vendettas might cause second-father educators to feel threatened by their juniors, or of course vice versa.102 Again, gossip was a strong weapon in such fights. Roman girls and their chaste bodies Needless to say, it was not only teenage boys who needed to be safeguarded against allegations of improper behaviour which might be revealed by bodily gestures and behaviour. Coming of age ignited specific worries in the case of girls: Women forthwith from the age of 14 are called by the men mistresses. Therefore, since they see that there is nothing else that they can obtain, but

Touching children in Roman Antiquity   71 only the power of lying with men, they begin to decorate themselves, and to place all their hopes in this. It is worth our while then to take care that they may know that they are valued (by men) for nothing else than appearing (being) decent and modest and discreet.103 Again, bodily signs, gesture, and behaviour are the primary indicators for deciding upon a girl’s chastity. How else could Democritus have addressed a young girl with the words ‘I greet you, girl’ (χαῖρε κόρη), while the next day (i.e. after the night of defloration) he used the sentence ‘I greet you, lady’ (χαῖρε γύναι)?104 The changes apparent at puberty altered the way a non-relative ought to properly address a young lady. Be cautious in describing her beauty, because of the scandal that may be caused unless you are a relative and can speak as one who cannot help knowing – this is the wise advice formulated in a fourth-century treatise on rhetoric.105 Roman legislation even knew a sort of concept of ‘stalking’ or ‘harassment’; appellare refers to inappropriate compliments, adsectari to the act of following a lady so closely and frequently that it nearly becomes harassment. To accost is with smooth words to make an attempt upon another’s virtue; this is not a shouting but an attempt contrary to sound morals. One who uses base language does not make an attempt upon virtue, he is liable to the action for insult. It is one thing to accost, another to follow. A person accosts who verbally solicits chastity; he who follows silently walks close behind; as assiduous proximity virtually reveals something disreputable.106 For a social historian, reading the tales by Valerius Maximus is always rewarding. Though the anecdotes should not be understood as ‘historical truth’, they were proposed to the audience as examples of excellent morals from the good-old-days.107 No less strong-minded was Pontius Aufidianus, a Roman knight. Learning that his daughter’s virginity had been betrayed to Fannius Saturninus by her tutor, he was not content to punish the rascally slave, he also killed the girl. Rather than celebrate a disgraceful marriage, he gave her an untimely funeral. Again, how stern a guardian of chastity did P. Maenius prove! He put to death a freedman, a great favourite of his, on learning that he had given a kiss to his daughter, a girl of marriageable age, even though he could seem to have done it in error, not in lust. But Maenius thought it important that the discipline of chastity be implanted in the girl’s still tender feelings by the harshness of the punishment, and by so terrible an example he taught her that she must bring to her husband not only unsullied virginity but pure kisses.108 Roman young women were clearly off-limits. Even a kiss might spoil their good reputation. The bodily gestures of ‘decent girls’ should always reveal chastity. No doubt, it was the task of the family to uphold their reputation. There is undoubtedly truth in the observation by the medical doctor Soranus, who notes that girls who are kept virgins lead a reclusive and contemplative existence, keeping them away from moving around or doing physical exercises and therefore causing them to be prone to obesity.109

72  Christian Laes

Conclusion From the 1990s onwards, historians of the Roman family have described it as a rather fluid and complex unit. Many reasons have been proposed: modes of architecture and cohabitation, the presence of slaves and other personnel, instability of family ties due to demographical reasons (husbands usually older than their wives, infant mortality, death in childbirth), the ease of divorce and the frequency of remarriage, expectations about marriage that were less romantic-sentimental than they are nowadays. The image of fluidity still stands, and rightly so.110 With this contribution, I suggest adding another factor for this fluidity: affective and sentimental body language. This was a society where close physical contact was surely not restricted to the nuclear family unit – an environment where affectionate bodily interaction was more the rule than the exception (comparable in some measure to African cultures – or Mediterranean people as we know them today). At the same time, our sources are from the higher class – and this was not only a physical society but also very much an honourable society. For these families too, borders of closeness were permeable. Proximity was never a purely biological fact, and in the case of the ius osculi, it could even be a matter of social promotion since it demonstrated a close link to the imperial family. However, such borders also needed to be guarded carefully. In the case of their children, there always was the danger of socially inferior intruders: wet-nurses who were indeed in very close physical contact; educators and teachers who sometimes became like fathers. Unease with the situation is expressed occasionally: nurses and teachers were raised in status, but ‘suspect’ teachers who came too close and turned out to be ‘wicked pederasts’ also became stock characters. In the same way, Statius’ poems about cherished children may reveal concerns for status inconsistency and the value of fostering.111 The unease was, of course, crystalised in the concern for the purity of the upper-class girls – for whom dangers were lurking anyway – and whose close physical contacts seem to have been limited to a rather restricted family circle. The impact of all this on the lives and socialisation of Roman high-class children is obvious. From a very young age, they had to learn whom to embrace, to kiss, or just to express their affection to, and how. Quite possibly, it was somehow made clear to them that the ones who were the first figures of love and care in their lives, the wetnurses, were people who did not belong to the respectable circles which would be the environment of their own future. The same care and caution were needed in dealing with other social inferiors, or simply with anyone outside the circle of the familia. Reputation was always at stake, and in this context, bodily behaviour was a most revealing marker. By knowing the appropriate gestures and by touching the right persons in the right way, embarassment and even social failure could be avoided. At the same time, one needs to take into account the factor of interiorisation. Both the iconographical and the literary evidence shows how parents and family members developed a special and specifically sentimental approach towards infants and young children. For patres familias, this is surely in contrast with the rather distanced approach they were supposed to take towards their elder children. One can at least speculate how this impacted on the way children saw

Touching children in Roman Antiquity   73 and perceived their parents when the years went by, and the expected behaviour that was informally learned in this way.112 According to Shereen El Feki, to understand a people’s culture is to know how they think about sex.113 I would extend this observation, by stating that the way people behave physically in public is at least as important as an aid to understanding a culture. Inevitably, our knowledge of Roman sexuality is mostly restricted to the lens of the higher classes – as is our knowledge of gestures and the representation of sentimental touches. But the little we have offers a glimpse which is worth looking at. It adds to our knowledge of a theme that is still too little understood: the Roman family. And it certainly helps to understand children and everyday life in the Roman past.

Acknowledgements Both before and during the conference, I felt strongly encouraged by help and advice from various scholars in this field. Many thanks are due to Martin Bloomer, Willy Clarysse, Lutz Graumann, Cornelia Horn, Delphine Nachtergaele, Konrad Vössing and Ville Vuolanto. I am also greatly indebted to Mark Golden, for both language advice and helpful suggestions. Where not otherwise indicated, translations are my own.

Notes 1 Dixon 1988: 9–11. 2 Sittl 1890 has proven to be an invaluable source of information for this contribution – in more than one way, it is still the fundamental work to start with. See Bremmer,and Roodenburg 1992 for a comparative world-history approach towards gestures. Recently, the most interesting project and volumes by Chaniotis 2012 and Chaniotis and Ducrey 2013 have been useful for the present chapter – although once again, it is striking that a separate study on sentimental touches is lacking in these two books. 3 Laes 2005; Dossey 2008; Mustakallio and Laes 2011. 4 Sittl 1890: 9 refers to Firmicus Maternus, Mathes. 1.3.3 (Itali fiunt regali semper nobilitate) and Tacitus, Ann. 15.20 (dignum fide constantiaque Romana capiamus consilium) for the Roman aspect of this question, and to Juvenal, Sat. 3.100 (natio comoeda est) on the Greeks. 5 Dio Chrysostom, Or. 33 (Tarsian snorting), on which see Bonner 1942; Ammianus Marcellinus 14.6.25 (snorting with the Italian plebs); Dio Chrysostomus, Or. 7.59 (not kissing in Euboea); Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 265c-d (kinsmen kissing women on the lips). 6 Reference works with beautiful pictures and/or excellent indexes for the present subject include Amedick 1991; Huskinson 1996 and 2007; Uzzi 2005; Kampen 2009; Mander 2012a and b. 7 Mander 2012a: 112–22 on ‘affectionate families’. Moving instances include a father holding his son’s hand (Mander 2012a: 112 Figure 98); a man holding a boy in his arms (Mander 2012a: 223 #291); embracing between adults and children (Mander 2012a: 114 Figures. 99–101). 8 Mander 2012b: 70–2. 9 Mander 2012b: 72–9. 10 Uzzi 2005: 64–6 and 125–6; Mander 2012b: 66–7. See also Harlow in the present volume, Figure 4.1a and b, p. 45.

74  Christian Laes 11 12 13 14

15

16

17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Mander 2012a: 117–22. Mander 2012a: 115; 2012b: 73. Mander 2012b. Cicero, Ad Fam. 4.5.2 is an instance of Cicero’s excessive grief. In 46 bce, not long before her death, Cicero mentions embracing his daughter: atque utinam continuo ad complexum meae Tulliae, ad osculum Atticae possim currere. Significantly, the kiss is meant for little Attica, Atticus’ daughter. Erskine 1997 aptly summarises the scholarly literature on Cicero and the expression of grief. Metilius is called iuvenem in Seneca, Ad Marc. 3.3. The only reference to kissing is Ad Marc. 3.1, where Livia (who is cited as an exemplum of a mother who has lost an adult son, namely Drusus) is said not to have received the last kiss (ultima oscula) of her son. Seneca, Cons. ad Helv. 15.1: complexu filii carissimi careo; non conspectu eius, non sermone possum frui. Tellingly, Helvia is advised to take delight in her little grandchild Marcus, at that moment about five years old: ad Helv. 18.3–5 (blandissimum puerum). See Wilson 1997 on Seneca and grief. See particularly Statius, Silv. 2.1.62–66. Statius, Silv. 5.5.83–85: reptantemque solo demissus ad oscula dextra / erexi blandoque sinu iam iamque cadentes/ exsopire genas. Quintilian, Inst. 6.1.8: ut ille mihi blandissimus me suis nutricibus, me aviae educanti, me omnibus qui sollicitare illas aetates solent anteferret. Already at a young age, the boy loved his father more than his wet-nurses. Contrast with Seneca, Epist. 99.14: Sine dubio multum philosophia profecit, si puerum nutrici adhuc quam patri notiorem animo forti desideras (to Marullus, who had lost a young son). Recent and excellent surveys of the sentimental discourse concerning children include Pratt 2013 (Greek literature) and Golden 2013 (Roman literature). Laes 2004c: 58–61 (pagan evidence); Laes 2011c: 324–5 (Christian evidence). ICUR II 5459: (...) Tu dulcis quotiens reddebas oscula matri / brachia per collum dum tibi vita fuit. / Sors mihi si iuvenem voluisti tollere natum / antea me raperent tartara grata magis. / Quintus ab undecimo quem nunc susceperat annus / cresceres ut melius blandus amicus eras./ Omnibus hic renovas magnos in carmine luctus / forsitan ut taceam littera sola docet. / Verus amor docuit istos infigere versus. Many references are collected in Sittl 1890: 19–20 and 25–7. See also Richlin 2001. Bonfante 1997: 174–7; Salzmann-Mitchell 2012, an article very much focused on the possible incest taboo between mother and son. Precisely this awkwardness about breastfeeding made wet-nurses acceptable, according to Salzmann-Mitchell 2012: 145. On the erotic connotations of nude breasts, see Gerber 1978 and Newbold 2000. The ancients did not like big breasts: Soranus, Gyn. 1.32; 2.15; Pliny, NH 27.76. Obvious in Martial, Epist. 2.52; 14.134 and 14.149. See Dalby 2000: 263 and Gevaert 2013: 526–31. Gellius 12.1.8 is the classical text here. Manca Masciadri and Montevecchi 1984. Knapp 2011. Parkin 2010: 113; Laes 2011a: 69–70; 80–1. Laes 2011a: 69; Hübner 2013: 83–4 (contrast P. Berenike 2.129, where a mother uses the fact of having breastfed for three years to claim filial piety, with P. Lond. III 951 on a father refusing to let his son-in-law have his daughter breastfeed her own baby). Harper 2011: 109–12. Herter 1964; Laes forthcoming. Bonfante 1997: 178–81; Salzmann-Mitchell 2012: 143. Minten 2002: 40–1. Carroll 2014. Rothe 2011. Schulze 1998; Sparreboom 2014.

Touching children in Roman Antiquity   75 38 Homer, Il. 22.79–84; Aeschylus, Lib. 896–898; Euripides, Phoen. 1570. For these and other examples, see Salzmann-Mitchell 2012: 144–51. 39 Statius, Silv. 5.5.15–17. A tragic perversion of the theme may occur in Suetonius, Nero 34 (atque in digressu papillas quoque exosculatus), where Nero kisses his mother’s breasts when he already had the murderous attack in mind. However, other manuscripts read pupillas, which would mean that he kissed her eyes (a common gesture, cf. supra p. 69). See Vössing 2004: 451. 40 Ovid, Met. 10.382–393. Also nurses in Seneca, Herc. Oet. 930; Polybius, Hist. 15.31.13 (Agathocleia shows the breasts with which she served the king). Mothers: Chariton, Call. 3.5.5–6. 41 Jerome, Epist. 14.2. 42 Dixon 1988: 104–35 on the Roman mother and the young child. Explicit acknowledgements in Plutarch, De amore prolis 496 b4-e; Augustine, Serm. 23.3. 43 Ps-Plutarch, De lib. ed. 3 b-f; Gellius, NA 12.1.17–23; Phaedrus, Fab. 3.15. 44 Quintilian, Inst. 6.1.8 (cf. supra note 19); Seneca, Epist. Mor. 99.14 (puerum nutrici adhuc quam patri notiorem). 45 Laes 2011a: 72–7 on positive and uplevelling discourse. See Persius, Sat. 3.18: et iratus mammae lallare recusas (here, as a pars pro toto, the nutrix is called ‘breast’); 46 Soranus, Gyn. 2.19. See Eichenauer 1988: 249–54 for a detailed account of the ideal midwife according to medical-physiological standards. 47 E.g. Terence, Heaut. 407 and Petronius, Sat. 139 (expression teneo te); Ovid, Met. 10.388 or Gellius 20.1.20 (embracing); Sidonius, Epist. 9.9.8 (amplexu saepe repetito); Plutarch, Brut. 4 (Pompey embracing Brutus); Livy 24.16.10 (between soldiers); Claudian, in Eutr. 1.257 (patron and client). See Sittl 1890: 31–2. 48 Theodorus Prodromus, De Rhodantis et Dosciclis amoribus 8.187 (admittedly late evidence: Prodromus is dated ca. 1100–1158). 49 See the studies by Ziemann 1910; Koskenniemi 1956; and White 1986. 50 P. Oxy. I 119. See Vuolanto in this volume, p. 19–20. 51 Callimachus, Hymn. 3.26–28 (daughter to father); Catullus, Carm. 61.216–220 (son to father); Ovid, Met. 6.359 (twins, son and daughter, towards mother); Fast. 3.221222 (grandchildren to grandparents); Anthol. Pal. 11.298.1 (son towards mother). Sittl 1890: 297–8. 52 Apollonius Rhodus, Arg. 3.128 (Aphrodite interrogating little Eros). However, in Plutarch, Garr. 2 we read about the garrulous persons who take hold of the beard of others when approaching them. For the iconographical evidence on Athenian vase painting, see McNiven 2007. 53 Suetonius, Galba 4. 54 Herodotus, Hist. 6.61 (woman carressing the head of a baby, who was being carried by a nurse); Polybius, Hist. 10.18.3 (Scipio caresses the heads of the little hostages, reassuring them that they will meet their parents again quite soon); Terence, Heaut. 762 (caressing the head of a slave). Sittl 1890: 33 on caressing animals. 55 Homer, Il. 1.361 (Thetis and Achilles); 5.372 (Dione and Aphrodite); 24.127 (Thetis and Achilles). 56 Plato, Phaedon 89b; Plutarch, Symp. 9.4.2; Lucilius, Sat. 29.893. 57 Ovid, Met. 1.762 (the adolescent Phaethon towards his mother Clymene); 14.585 (the adult Venus embracing Jupiter); 1.734 (Iupiter and Iuno). 58 Ovid, Met. 6.624–626; 640. 59 Duelists: Quintus Smyrnaeus, 4.271 and 4.380 (wrestlers); Longus, Daph. 4.6 (gratitude); Plutarch, Brut. 50 (friendship); Arrian, Epict. 1.19.24 (reverence); Apuleius, Met. 7.9; Petronius, Sat. 99 and 109 (reconciliation). See Sittl 1890: 38. The best overview of the matter is undoubtedly Thraede 2008. 60 Suetonius, Tib. 34 (cottidiana oscula); Martial, Epist. 8.44.5; 12.26.3. 61 Donatus, in Ter. Eun. 456: Oscula officiorum sunt, basia pudicorum affectuum, suavia libidinum vel amorum. See Moreau 1978.

76  Christian Laes 62 See particularly Suetonius, Tib. 34.2 and Pliny the Elder, NH 26.3. 63 Festus, De sign. verb. (p. 214–16 ed. Lindsay): s. v. osculana pugna: Quod inter cognatos, propinquosque institutum ab antiquis est, maximeque feminas. Propertius, El. 2.5.8-9: quin etiam falsos fingis tibi saepe propinquos, oscula nec desunt qui tibi iure ferant (Cynthia cheates on the poet, by claiming that all the men she kisses are actually her relatives); Valerius Maximus, Fact. et dict. mem. 3.8.6 (Sempronia recognises Equitius as her nephew by kissing him). 64 Pliny the Elder, NH 14.90: Cato ideo propinquos feminis osculum dare, ut scirent an temetum olerent. 65 Plutarch, Quaest. Rom. 265b–e. Indeed, some Greek texts suggest a different attitude. In Quintus Smyrnaeus, Posthom. 5.399 it is considered inappropriate that a mother-inlaw kisses her son-in-law. However, Heliodorus, Aeth. 6. 11 suggests kissing among family members. See Sittl 1890: 38. 66 Augustine, Quaest. in Hept. 1.87: Consuetudinis quidem fuit, maxime in illa simplicitate antiquorum, ut propinqui propinquas oscularentur, et hoc hodie fit in multis locis. 67 See already Herodotus, Hist. 1.134 (Persian hierarchy: kissing on the mouth was for equals, on the cheek where small social differences existed; proskynesis when there was a huge gap in social difference). Xenophon, Cyrop. 1.4.27 and later on Arrian, Anab. 7.11.1 on the same Persian kings. Xenophon, Cyrop. 2.2.31 states that Persians in general only kissed their relatives. Valerius Maximus, Fact. et dict. mem. 2.6. ext. 17 reports on Numidian kings who do not kiss anyone. Arrian, Anab. 7.11.6 says the same about Macedonian kings. 68 Suetonius, Claud. 26. 69 Suetonius, Calig. 55; Cassius Dio 59.27. 70 On the ius osculi, see Timpanaro 1979; Vössing 2004: 453; Laes 2009c – against an anachronistic or sensationalist interpretation (Fronto and Marcus Aurelius in love) as in Richlin 2006. 71 Codex Theodosianus 6.24.4. 72 Lucretius, RN 3.894–898, transl. W. H. D. Rouse: Iam iam non domus accipiet te laeta neque uxor/ optima, nec dulces occurrent oscula nati/ praeripere et tacita pectus dulcedine tangent. / Non poteris factis florentibus esse tuisque/ praesidium. Cf. supra p. 63 on the sentimental discourse of ancient childhood. Note the observation by Rouse in the Loeb edition: ‘It is important to realize that in 894–899 and 904–908 Lucretius is parodying the conventional utterances of the bereaved, with whose sentiments he disagrees (cf. 900–903, 909–911)’. 73 Cicero, De div. 1.103. 74 BGU II 423. 75 Theophrastus, Char. 2.6. 76 Plutarch, Sept. Sap. conv. 148c-d. 77 Cicero, Epist. ad Att. 16.11.8 (give a kiss to Attica); 12.11 (Atticae hilaritatem libenter audio). Cf. supra p. 62. 78 Plutarch, Rat. aud. 38c. Note the peculiar explanation by Plutarch for this behaviour: ‘thus insinuating in a playful way that they must love most those who confer benefit through the ears’. (transl. W. W. Goodwin). 79 Sittl 1890: 40 note 1 for many references. See e.g. Plautus, Asin. 668; Suidas s.v. χύτραν. 80 Apollonius Rhodus, Arg. 3.149. 81 Parents: Homer, Od. 17.39; 16.15; Quintus Smyrnaeus 14.183; Consol. Liviae 34. Lovers: Apuleius, Met. 3.14. Friends: Cicero, Epist. ad Fam. 16.27 (Cicero and Tiro). See Sittl 1890: 40 and supra note 39 on Nero kissing his mother Agrippina. 82 Quintus Smyrnaeus 14.183; 13.533; 7.640. See Sittl 1890: 41. 83 Lucian, Al. 38 and 42 about simpletons having their women kissed by Alexander. 84 Lucian, Al. 41; transl. A. M. Harmon.

Touching children in Roman Antiquity   77 85 Petronius, Sat. 85–87. ‘On the wicked teacher’, see supra p. 69. 86 Cant. 8:1 (quis mihi det te fratrem meum sugentem ubera matris meae, ut inveniam te foris et deosculer et iam me nemo despiciat). The girl in love wishes her beloved to be her brother (or at least suckling brother/collactaneus) so that they could meet and kiss outside their homes. 87 Rom 16:16; Tertullian, Ad Nat. 1.19; Ad Uxor. 2.4. 88 Penn 2005. 89 Ambrose, Hex. 6.68: Quid autem loquar de osculo oris, quod pietatis et charitatis est pignus? Osculantur se et columbae, sed quid ad humani osculi venustatem, quo amicitiae insigne humanitatisque praefulget, in quo plenae charitatis fidelis exprimitur affectus? 90 Jerome, Epist. 22.16. 91 Palladius, Hist. Laus. 137. 92 See Laes 2009a: 129–30 for abundant evidence about the boundaries of friendship and fear of pederasty and sex in Egyptian monastic life. 93 The best and most thought-provoking account of ‘outsiders and alliances’, with value for the whole of Antiquity, is Golden 1990: 141–68. 94 Juvenal, Sat. 10.224, and possibly implied in Martial, Epist. 7.62. 95 Petronius, Sat. 85. Eumolpus acts as the perfect guardian of the boy: ne quis praedator corporis admitteretur in domum. 96 Lucian, Dial. Mer. 4 (the philosopher/educator Aristaenetus is actually a pederast, and Dromo wants to reveal the truth to the boy’s father); Symp. 26 (allegations about a philosopher abusing Aristaenetus’ son); Al. 5–6 (the False Prophet Alexander was in his youth the eromenos of his wicked teacher, who was also a philosopher of nature; see Al. 41 for Alexander’s appetites for boys). Lucian, Eun. 8–9 – an undoubtedly satirical passage – claims that the eunuch Bogoas might be the best successor for the Peripatetic School. Thanks to his castration, he at least could not be accused of abusing boys. In Late Antiquity, Libanius, Or. 58.30 still mentions the possibility of abuse by teachers. 97 E.g. Quintilian, Inst. 1.2.4 (education at home and at school both imply the risk of moral corruption); 1.3.17 (necessity of morally upright educators) and 2.2 (a whole chapter on the mores of the ideal educator). See also CIL XI 3969 where a teacher from Capua is explicitly said to have been chaste towards his discipuli. 98 Joshel 1992: 64–8. 99 See Richlin 2011: 51 for further references to e.g. Plato’s Phaedrus. Already in the fourth century bce, Aeschines, Tim. 142–3 suggested that the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was actually erotic, although Homer never explicitly says so. 100 Quotes from Richlin 2011: 45–7. Significant passages include Cicero, Fam. 5.8.4 (Cicero about the young Crassus); 10.5.3 (Cicero advising young Plancus); Seneca, Contr. 1 pr. 11 (on Cicero’s ‘big boys’ or grandes praetextatos). See also Bernstein 2007 for the father-son relationship in Pliny’s letters. 101 See Richlin 2011: 48–50 for startling quotations, such as Cicero, Fam. 9.14.4 (nihil umquam in amore fuerit ardentius) to Dolabella; Fam. 16.27.2 (Te, ut dixi, fero oculis. Ego vos a. d. III K. videbo tuosque oculos, etiamsi te veniens in medio foro videro, dissuaviabor) Quintus Cicero to Tiro. 102 Richlin 2011: 49–53. See, e.g., the gossip about Cicero’s youth, as expressed by Ps.Sallust, Invect. in Cic. 2. 103 Epictetus, Ench. 40; transl. G. Long: Aἱ γυναῖκες εὐθὺς ἀπὸ τεσσαρεσκαίδεκα ἐτῶν ὑπὸ τῶν ἀνδρῶν κυρίαι καλοῦνται. τοιγαροῦν ὁρῶσαι, ὅτι ἄλλο μὲν οὐδὲν αὐταῖς πρόσεστι, μόνον δὲ συγκοιμῶνται τοῖς ἀνδράσι, ἄρχονται καλλωπίζεσθαι καὶ ἐν τούτῳ πάσας ἔχειν τὰς ἐλπίδας. προσέχειν οὖν ἄξιον, ἵνα αἴσθωνται, διότι ἐπ᾽ οὐδενὶ ἄλλῳ τιμῶνται ἢ τῷ κόσμιαι φαίνεσθαι καὶ αἰδήμονες. 104 The anecdote appears in Diogenes Laërtius, Vita et doctr. philos. 9.42.4–10. 105 Menander Rhetor, Rhet. 2.7.

78  Christian Laes 106 Digesta 47.10.15.20–22 (Ulpian) transl. A. Watson: Appellare est blanda oratione alterius pudicitiam adtemptare: hoc enim non est convicium, sed adversus bonos mores adtemptare. Qui turpibus verbis utitur, non temptat pudicitiam, sed iniuriarum tenetur. Aliud est appellare, aliud adsectari: appellat enim, qui sermone pudicitiam adtemptat, adsectatur, qui tacitus frequenter sequitur: adsiduo enim frequentia quasi praebet nonnullam infamiam. 107 Parker 1998. 108 Valerius Maximus, Fact. et dict. mem. 6.1.3–4; transl. D. R. Shackleton Bailey: Nec alio robore animi praeditus fuit Pontius Aufidianus eques Romanus, qui, postquam conperit filiae suae uirginitatem a paedagogo proditam Fannio Saturnino, non contentus sceleratum seruum adfecisse supplicio etiam ipsam puellam necauit. Ita ne turpes eius nuptias celebraret, acerbas exequias duxit. Quid P. Maenius, quam seuerum pudicitiae custodem egit! In libertum namque gratum admodum sibi animaduertit, quia eum nubilis iam aetatis filiae suae osculum dedisse cognouerat, cum praesertim non libidine, sed errore lapsus uideri posset. Ceterum amaritudine poenae teneris adhuc puellae sensibus castitatis disciplinam ingenerari magni aestimauit eique tam tristi exemplo praecepit ut non solum uirginitatem inlibatam, sed etiam oscula ad uirum sincera perferret. 109 Soranus, Gyn. 1.32. 110 Bradley 1991, a collection of papers by Bradley, all on the subject of the Roman family, is a classic in the field. See Laes 2011a. 111 Bernstein 2005. 112 Späth 2010 is a lucid essay on the matter of interiorisation in the relationships between Cicero, his son Marcus and his daughter Tullia. 113 El Feki 2013.

6 Being a niece or nephew Children’s social environment in Roman Oxyrhynchos April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto

Introduction Children experience the world largely through their relationships with other people, especially with peer relationships and those adults closest to them; their negotiation of these relationships is conditioned by child- and age-specific physiological, psychological and cultural circumstances.1 However, these major aspects of children’s lives in Antiquity are typically difficult to grasp, largely because of the focus of ancient sources on adult concerns, though not entirely beyond our reach. Our aim in this chapter is to examine one aspect of children’s social relationships in Antiquity from the rich source material of Roman Egypt – the relationships between children and their aunts and uncles. The family was pivotal in the transmission of cultural and social values, and children were crucial in this process.2 This significance is reflected by the field of study of children in the Roman world, which to date has had a twofold emphasis: either the focus has been on representations of childhood and their symbolic or metaphorical value in highlighting continuity and future prospects, or on children’s emotional, social or economic position within their natal families.3 Among this scholarship a wide consensus has emerged that ‘core loyalties and affection were between spouses and between parents and children’.4 Such a framework has encouraged some, though sporadic, appreciation of children’s wider social environments; it is hoped that a more nuanced view of these relationships will go some way towards reconstructing more comprehensively ancient children’s social world, and even their own negotiation of it. Everyday relationships with people, places and activities on a localized level comprise one of the most significant aspects of children’s experience and (self-)socialization that enriches their knowledge and understanding of their society, the world at large and their place within it.5 The influence of familial bonds beyond the immediate parent–child bond, in this context, has rarely been touched upon in scholarship on the Roman family; studies on nephews, nieces, uncles and aunts in the Roman world have been sparse and have concentrated on Roman elites and some terminological issues, rather than the broader social and familial patterns.6 Yet these ‘extended’ family bonds contributed significantly to the matrix of obligations and dependencies with the ancient family.

80  April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto Theoretically, patterns of family dynamics and demography within Roman Egypt would have given aunts and uncles a prominent role in the everyday lives of children. As newly-married women tended to move into their husbands’ family homes, it was common for numerous brothers and their wives to reside together and therefore a very common experience for children was to grow up living with their uncles, aunts and cousins. High mortality and a pattern of younger women marrying older men, meant that widowhood was a distinct possibility for relatively young mothers with young children.7 For fatherless children at least, their paternal uncles would, therefore, be well-placed to assume key legal and practical responsibilities. Our fundamental question is how this basic setting would have helped shape children’s daily lives. How far, and in what circumstances, did children interact beyond their immediate nuclear family contexts of parents and siblings? In particular, we ask what kind of obligations did aunts and uncles fulfil within the daily life of children in Roman Egypt, and were there particular expectations placed upon them from children’s perspectives. Can we discern a sense of aunts’ and uncles’ own expectations of their relationships and place within the family dynamic involving their nephews and nieces? How was children’s experience and everyday life – in households, local community and wider society – shaped by avuncular and materteral involvement and care? 8 Our research is based on a systematic reading of the sources pertaining to the local community of Oxyrhynchos, a major Hellenised metropolis in the Roman Empire and a centre for an administrative area, the Oxyrhynchite nome. The study is linked to our project Children in Oxyrhynchos: Everyday Life in an Ancient Metropolis which aims to reconstruct everyday lives of children within the physical and social environment of a well-recorded ancient metropolis, through a systematic and theorized analysis of the activities, relationships and experiences of children. In documentary and letter material from Oxyrhynchos, dating from the first to the sixth century ce, 49 texts prominently feature uncles and/or aunts of minor children. Our sample of material is, statistically-speaking, small as a proportion of the overall body of material of nearly 7,500 edited papyri we have studied and of the ca. 650 of these which refer to children and childhood. Though we draw on some observations from apparent trends in the sample we therefore do so with the proviso that cultural rather than statistical patterns are the focus of our analysis.9

Maternal and paternal uncles and aunts with their nephews and nieces Due to the demographic features of Roman Egypt in which daughters tended to marry earlier than sons, maternal relatives should be more prominent than paternal ones in the records of children’s lives. However, in our sample, the paternal relatives are slightly more visible. There appear in total 17 paternal uncles, 14 maternal uncles, eight paternal aunts and three maternal aunts of underage children.10 The everyday relationship between uncles and children is, however, hard to decipher in a number of cases, for instance when maternal uncles appear

Being a niece or nephew   81 specifically in relation to their (adult) sisters in their capacity as a supervisor (kurios).11 The same holds true of the cases in which brothers were working together with their sons as seasonal farm-hands; in one such instance a girl and her great-uncle had jointly received an inheritance, and in another, a maternal uncle had sent a recommendation letter on behalf of his nephew.12 In cases in which the uncle has acted (or was to be nominated) as a guardian for minors, paternal uncles appear in four cases and maternal uncles in three13 and twice uncles are involved in arranging guardianship without themselves acting as formal guardians.14 There are also cases in which uncles have acted as de facto guardians: once a maternal uncle had intervened in a case in which the mother had died leaving inheritance matters to be settled. In another case, a paternal granduncle had taken care of the orphan girl and a boy but was now seeking an official guardian to be nominated for them.15 In four cases, uncles take responsibility in the application process for elite group membership (epikrisis); in two of these he is paternal, once maternal and once both maternal and paternal since the boy’s parents are brother and sister.16 In each of these cases, as well as in cases in which uncles were taking care of the children while their parents were away from home, and in which uncles were taking their nephews as apprentices, the children were in close daily contact with their uncles.17 Uncles can sometimes appear in a rather negative light. There are two cases in which an orphan girl accuses her uncles of fraud concerning the inheritance,18 and once a paternal uncle is tangentially involved in a family conflict: a wife reports in her letter that she and their children ‘had suffered in some way because of [her husband’s] father’, who came with the husband’s brother and the officials trying to extract taxes from her ‘with insults’. In another case, a maternal grandfather and a paternal uncle of a girl together disputed her inheritance.19 The remainder of our uncle-cases are salutations in various letters.20 As one may expect, aunts appear less frequently than do uncles, as women, in general, are less visible in official public documents, but also because aunts in children’s households tended to be in-marrying daughters-in-law and only therefore largely feature in their capacities as wives. Yet the significance of aunts is clear from records in which they actively intervened in the lives of their young relatives. In one case we observe a paternal aunt nominated as a guardian in the provision of his brother’s will, and another paternal aunt arranged an apprenticeship contract for her nephew.21 Aunts appear frequently in the documents with their brothers, that is, with children’s uncles: in one such instance a maternal aunt and uncle appear together in a petition to organize guardianship for their deceased sister’s children and, in another case, a maternal uncle and aunt will inherit if they take care of the main heir, a minor girl.22 In one case, we see a paternal aunt requesting her brother (the child’s uncle) be nominated as the official guardian.23 Moreover, three census returns (concerning two households) mention an aunt and an uncle living together with a brother’s children; in one case we meet a paternal aunt and a boy who rent out a ship mast they owned together.24 In private letters, we encounter aunts at least in five cases, once with an uncle, but only a little information about the personal relationships in question can be deciphered.25

82  April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto In these non-literary texts, there appear 39 nephews and 15 nieces. In nine cases, children of unknown sex (and/or number) are mentioned. The difference in sex distribution can only partly be explained by a prominence of particular arrangements: documents dealing with apprenticeship and epikrisis (together nine cases) all concern boys. What is interesting is that in cases with paternal uncles (21 in total), only one does not include a boy, even if in three other cases there appears a girl with her brother(s).26 With maternal uncles there are six cases (out of 18) without boys – and, in all, nine girls and nine boys.27 This seems to suggest that the paternal uncle–nephew bond was hugely significant in terms of lineage and that the maternal uncle–niece bond was more significant for girls. The broad consequence of this was that brothers, their inmarrying wives and their children all lived together, a pattern which worked to strengthen the paternal line down subsequent generations. In this situation, from children’s perspective, their father’s siblings would play a more prominent role in their lives than would their mother’s siblings, who would most likely have lived elsewhere. While this picture is by no means challenged by our material from Oxyrhynchos – children appear frequently as co-resident with their paternal aunts and uncles (see below) – the number of maternal uncles, often appearing in partnership with the child’s mother, is significantly high. It would seem that the crucial difference was not that between paternal and maternal relatives. Uncles both maternal and paternal appear in documents most often in cases when the child(ren)’s father’s had died. There are exceptions, though: a father apprenticing his son to his brother; brothers with their sons as farm-hands; a paternal uncle helping his father to extract taxes from his brothers’ family; and a dispute between a maternal granduncle and a father. The difference, however, with cases where aunts appear are clear: in none of the documents in which they were active, were there any parents mentioned.28 Uncles were next in line to take care of children’s business if their fathers had died, and it was not unheard of that they would intervene in the lives of their younger relatives and their families even when parents were alive; however, aunts seem to have stepped in to take on a more official and active role if children had lost both of their parents. Family relations on both paternal and maternal sides are not always easy to discern since specific kinship terms for the aunts, uncles, nephews or nieces seldom appear in our material. This is not entirely unexpected given that in most of the documents the viewpoint taken relates to issues other than those of kinship. The kinship pattern is, rather, inferred from references such as ‘son of my brother (or sister)’; ‘child of my sister (or brother)’; ‘father’s/mother’s brother/sister’, or more vaguely in cases in which a person refers both to her siblings and her offspring in the same context.29 Thus, in most cases the kinship relationships are reconstructed by other evidence. The details of specific biological relationship is not the focus of familial concerns when it comes to matters of even, say, guardianship; what matters most are the details of the arrangements made by those closest to the children. In some cases, however, special kinship terms do appear. The usual Greek term for nephew/niece, ἀδελφιδέος/ἀδελφιδή, appears in eight cases, whereas θείος (or θίος) for a paternal uncle is found four times.30

Being a niece or nephew   83 What is striking is that aunts are not directly referred to as such – this seems to be in line with the fact that θείος for uncles is used only in administrative or juridical contexts, in which aunts rarely feature. The frequent use of expressions such as the daughter (or son) of a brother (or sister), in turn, resembles the popular Latin usage found in inscriptions across the Roman world, which prefer the expressions filius/a sororis/fratris over the more technical kinship vocabulary (nepos).31 The cases involving some sort of conflict with uncles warrant special comment. Of course, it may be that the responsibilities assumed by uncles and the occasional conflict in which they appear in a negative, or even manipulative, context, may be down to individual characteristics of those particular families and individuals involved. Still, the very existence of these conflicts tells of the everyday expectations of the relationships between minors and uncles. It indeed does seem striking that those physically, demographically and symbolically closest to children, as they were the next resort in cases where children were left without either parent, tended to assume roles and functions of nearness and trust.

Living together The household census records for Roman Egypt (taken on a 14-yearly basis, over the first three centuries ce) provide information on the residence patterns of children and other members of their households.32 There are in total 20 households recorded in the census material which feature children in Oxyrhynchos.33 Three of these (concerning two households) mention an aunt and an uncle living together with a brother’s children; in one of these, a man in his 60s lists his son, aged 32, a nephew, his son’s wife, aged 31, and another son aged four who was born away from home. There is another son mentioned who is away from home, and a daughter who has died. Here, a four-year-old boy lives with his father and mother, his paternal uncle and aunt by marriage, and paternal grandfather.34 In the other household, there appears the head of the family, aged 65, his two sons and a daughter, and further his two grandsons by his younger son (aged four and one) – who are, thus, living with their parental uncle and aunt. Moreover, paternal uncles appear in one census return with their nephews.35 The prominence of co-resident siblings (both adult and child) in these census returns indicates numerous instances of a cohabiting paternal uncle.36 Given the nature of the Romano-Egyptian census, we ought to expect that there be little variety in recording practices across the metropolises of Egypt. We would therefore reasonably expect documented arrangements in Oxyrhynchos to broadly follow patterns observed across the census material as a whole, particularly in urban contexts.37 From other sorts of texts, actual co-residency is often quite difficult to decipher. In private letters written ‘home’ we often see greetings added not only to spouses and children but to the writer’s brother and sisters. In one letter from a man to his brother, it appears that this paternal uncle is at present with his brother’s children, and adds their greetings to this letter to their father who is, for some reason, away from them.38 In the case of a boy, his aunt and the ship mast, they act through the aunt’s husband, who seems to have been the boy’s de facto guardian. If so, the boy

84  April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto probably lived in his aunt’s household.39 Similarly, it is difficult to decipher if the cases in which uncles act on behalf of their nephews and nieces would imply coresidency; in some cases this might have been probable, as when a paternal uncle registers simultaneously both his own and his deceased brother’s son in epikrisis lists, or when the uncles have administered the property of a full orphan minor girl (and defrauded her, as she later claimed).40 Still, in one apprentice case we see an orphan boy in his early teens who had been living with his paternal aunt – she had registered him on a list of apprentices. In another case, a boy, mentioned to have lost both parents, had apparently lived with his paternal aunt, and she was in control of his affairs.41 Another example shows us a young man writing home after having moved away to thank and greet his parents and uncle. And in another case an orphan boy, still a minor, lived with his sister’s family and her children – he was, in fact, their uncle.42 Sharing a household with one’s uncles and aunts was clearly not an uncommon position in which to find oneself. Across both urban and rural households with children, paternal uncles were common, aunts appeared frequently, but maternal uncles and aunts were a rarity – they would most likely have left the home upon marriage themselves.

Obligations and responsibility Children’s day-to-day living environment featured their aunts and uncles who often took both legal and daily responsibility for their upbringing. This relationship was both practical and symbolic; children would rely on their aunts and uncles for resolution of legal matters affecting their residence, property and rights but also for the symbolic importance of the family’s lineage through matters relating to inheritance and the continuity of the family. One paternal uncle, Theonas, draws up a formal list of property belonging to minors, Sarapas and Sarapous, whose father had died; there appear small items of furniture and crockery and a half share in three weavers’ looms.43 In a more complicated example of intergenerational care-taking, a great-uncle, gymnasiarch and member of the boulē of Oxyrhynchos, petitions the prefect of Egypt regarding the three children of his nephew, Aurelius Horion. The children had lived with their great-uncle, whose position in the city was extremely prominent.44 In both of these cases, it is unclear whether the uncle has an official status as guardian of the children concerned, yet they assume such responsibilities. In one late antique note relating to inheritance arrangements, a maternal uncle not only takes on the practical roles but goes to great lengths to ensure that none of the children will be upset or angered by the way in which the inheritance is divided. The uncle explains the division of money his sister left, between her three daughters, in two mandata so as to avoid dispute and the details of each are kept from the rest of the family. He shows concern that the youngest daughter might potentially lose out (hence the separate, secret, mandate for her) and that his own son might lay claim to some of the money if he knew about it, the deceased having been the boy’s aunt.45 In similar practical day-to-day matters of care, we see uncles and aunts making guardianship arrangements in cases where the child’s parents had died. Given the

Being a niece or nephew   85 likelihood that children would become orphaned before reaching majority, a large number of minors – and their inherited property, land and money – would have been under the direction of guardians or tutors of some sort.46 Such arrangements could easily have been open to manipulation either by appointed guardians or those who may have spotted an opportunity to gain from the death of a father.47 On balance of the various pitfalls and practicalities of such arrangements, parents tried to secure a trusted person to take care of their children and their property in the event of their death. Arrangements for guardianship became a standard feature of both marital agreements and wills.48 Juridically, first in line were the (paternal) uncles and the older brothers of the orphans. However, often the more natural choice was the mother.49 This background shows also in our material. Paternal uncles do appear relatively often as guardians in Oxyrhynchos. In one petition, for example, a mother hopes that her children’s paternal uncle would be appointed as a guardian – and herself a supervisor for the guardianship (epakoloutheetria), whereas in another case it is the uncle who supervises the official guardians. What is interesting here is that it was the mother’s choice for a paternal relative.50 Maternal uncles, however, were almost as numerous – and also aunts appear. For example, a petition attached to a local late antique edict for the arrangement of guardians for orphaned minors, is put forward by siblings, regarding their taking guardianship of their deceased sister’s minor children. One of these siblings is certainly a woman but it is unclear whether her sibling is a brother or a sister (more likely a brother).51 The testator here, contrary to Roman law and custom, wants his sister, paternal aunt of the boy in question, to become his guardian. Another paternal aunt, who had taken care of her nephew, requests him an official guardian, a paternal uncle – who had initially been reluctant to assume this duty.52 Often the cases of guardianship come to our attention only when there were problems; unfortunately, of these, a large proportion involves guardians whose possible family connection to their wards is left unspecified.53 In one case, however, Aurelia Didyme, in her petition to the strategos, writes that her mother had died when she was still a minor and already fatherless, and her paternal uncles, who together administered the property of their father, tried to defraud her.54 In another case it was a paternal uncle, serving as official guardian, who did not want to return the paternal property to his niece and her three little brothers. When the niece, Aurelia Eus, had already married and still got none of her inheritance back, she petitioned the prefect to correct the situation.55 In some conflicts, we do not know who would have been the bad guy of the story, like in a case in which a maternal grandfather and paternal uncle dispute about the inheritance of a girl who had lost her father.56 Such practical arrangements and obligations in economic matters often continued into adulthood. A first-century contract for a sale of a house shows Thais, 32 years old, buying from her sister Heraclous’ son Hatres, about 18 years old, a twelfth share of a two-storey house. In another, later, loan contract an uncle loans a considerable sum of money from his nephew.57 All these cases show the importance of in-family business: property was often moving around within the family group. This is easy to understand both in terms

86  April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto of the need to protect the family patrimony and in the anticipated ease of doing business with familiar and trusted people. The obligations and responsibilities placed on various members of the family group had obvious implications for the symbolic values placed on particular relationships, familial bonds and dynamics. As a combination of two important dimensions of familial values in Roman Egypt – sibling relationships and the continuity of paternal line – the roles of uncles, in particular, were emphasized and strengthened through the range of responsibilities.

Work and the gymnasium: local community at Oxyrhynchos There are a large number of apprenticeship contracts from Roman Egypt which relate to formal arrangements for the work of children, particularly in the weaving trade, which can be examined to tell us not only about the contributions of children to production but also about their experience and social relationships.58 In one of these Apollonous, a grandmother, apprentices an orphan boy whose nickname is Agelochos, to his uncle Heras the weaver, her son. The period of the apprenticeship is a regular two years, and the contractual obligations to learn and perform all instructions given to him by Heras are standard. Responsibilities for feeding and clothing the boy are shared between his grandmother and Heras again in a not uncommon division, and the boy will receive wages for his work and the usual requirement to add any sickness days to the end of his contract period. Here, as in many other cases, weaving is, or is developing, into a family trade, and the boy will be kept under the watchful eye of his relatives.59 Also in another case, a minor boy is to be sent to learn to become a weaver under his uncle, now for two-and-a-half years. The boy is in his early teens, as it also comes out that the uncle is to pay for the boy’s taxes, which will be due to him when he will be 14.60 In the first case the boy was to stay living with his grandmother, but for two years he would be in daily interaction with his uncle; in the other case, the boy would be living with his uncle during his learning period. In these cases, the uncle assists the boys’ venture into his local community and the world of work and learning, which forged and strengthened the social relationships beyond the home environment. There are some uncommon features in one of the apprenticeship contracts. Heraclas, a boy not yet of age, was sent away to learn the craft of weaving for two-and-a-half years away from the family home, arranged by his mother and his uncle. The contract itself is a fairly standard one. However, there has been some negotiation of Heraclas’ contract in terms of his own choice in his experience: he is permitted to choose himself whether to live away from home, with the master weaver or at home with his mother and uncle, during the apprentice period. Heracles has some, albeit limited, agency here in terms of his experience of this apprenticeship; there is no need to suspect his choice of living conditions is not genuinely intended to permit him some real degree of independence.61 In the fourth apprenticeship case, we have, in turn, a paternal aunt taking care of the registration of a boy in the official (tax) list of apprentices.62 These cases demonstrate the significance of the older relatives in cases where the child’s father had died. We also see attention paid to the specifics of the child’s working and

Being a niece or nephew   87 living conditions, even to his own volition, and the learning aspect of their work – pastoral care of a sort is key to many such contracts. Unfortunately, we have very little information on uncles’ or aunts’ involvement on the work of children of lower status – the receipts from mid-sixth century showing that brothers had worked as farm-hands together with their sons (as they had half a pay, we can interpret them to still be minors or at least not grown-ups), do not tell a lot about children’s experiences.63 Still, they give a sense of the milieu in which children were active and highlight the use of child labour as a part of a family enterprise, or a family strategy, and, again, that for these children their uncles were an integral part of the family sphere even when working outside their homes. To move on to examine the higher echelons of the social ladder, the symbolic significance of proving lineage among the ruling groups of the city, the gymnasial group and the (not that prestigious) metropolitan group, was of central importance for the local elites. The status was achieved through a special inquiring process, epikrisis.64 Though the age for the inquiring process and application for the ephebate was 13 or 14, it is evident that some families would be eager to place children for consideration at younger years. The implementation and documentation for the inquiry was on the responsibility not just of parents, but other family members too, and in many of these applications we meet uncles. For example, a second-century application for a four-year-old boy, Theon, to be registered as belonging to the gymnasial group, was submitted by his parents, and one of the co-signatories was Theon’s maternal uncle.65 Recorded in Oxyrhynchos we have an epikrisis application for a 13-year-old Sarapion, put forward by his uncle. The boy’s mother and father are full brother and sister, but they have probably died, as it is the uncle who is taking care of the boy and his registration.66 The transmission of family tradition for the urban elite in Roman Egypt is visible for us primarily through these applications often enumerating the inquired persons in preceding generations. A special case in this sense is a declaration to a strategos which mentions boys who had gone through the epikrisis application for the gymnasial class, with having paid the entrance fee for the office of theagus, ‘bearer of the gods’, constituting a lower priestly cultic order. These boys are cousins of the same age, the father of one being the uncle and guardian of the other – and himself a theagus, too.67 Especially for the fatherless boys, uncles seem to have served as indispensable links between their family groups and the wider local community.

From family structure and expectations to emotional attachment Theoretically, the age difference between spouses in first marriage68 should highlight the significance of maternal uncles and aunts, yet marriage patterns and the predominant cultural importance of the paternal line – and uncles rather than aunts more generally – is here a more significant factor. In fact, the number of (especially) maternal aunts appearing ‘alone’, that is, without any uncles also involved, is surprisingly low. Still, no great differences can be found between the involvement of paternal and maternal uncles to children’s lives; they were both present in the main documentary categories presented: public documents (like

88  April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto epikrisis registration); private agreements (like guardianship and administration of minors’ property); and salutations in letters. However, the number of maternal aunts appearing in the documents is very low compared to that of paternal aunts. Indeed, especially the census declarations show that due to the virilocal marriage pattern, small children were in everyday contexts more probably in contact with their paternal uncles and aunts than with their maternal relatives. This inevitably affected the emotional nearness of children towards the siblings of their parents. Unfortunately, the cases discussed above cannot necessarily provide clues about emotional and psychological relationships. Aunts and uncles would have intervened willingly out of their own individual interest, or out of interest for the kin group as a whole. The above-mentioned great-uncle wrote his official letter in overly-affectionate tones, and emphasized familial terms (‘cherishing the good will due my nature... towards the children of my nephew’), a clearly effective rhetoric rather than an emotionally affectionate piece in the first place.69 Likewise, the case in which a maternal uncle takes great care to ensure that none of the children would be upset following the division of the inheritance could be interpreted both as born of affection, but also as a strategy for evading domestic conflicts – a gesture to keep the family group together.70 Still, some aunts and uncles certainly showed affection for their siblings’ children. We see a number of references to them in the salutations of private and business letters. In a juxtaposition of affection for some children and disinterest in others, a certain Chaereas wrote to his brother, Dionysios and greets his nephews and nieces, mentioning that he is sending melon seeds and old clothes to share with them. On the other hand, the subject matter of this letter is business, regarding sales of children of slaves.71 Another Dionysos wrote to his sister regarding household matters, sending his own and his children’s greetings; so here an uncle sent his greetings to his nephews and nieces, and nephews and nieces send greetings to their aunt.72 Can we pass a paternal aunt having organized toys to be sent to her little nephew (with warm greetings) as only a business transaction?73 For children’s affection towards their aunts and uncles, in turn, we can catch a glimpse only through a private letter written later in life. A young man, recently moved away from his childhood home, expresses his ‘exuberant piety’, thankfulness and affection towards his parents and his uncle, acknowledging the goods and a letter they had sent him. It seems his uncle had lived in the same household as himself when he was a child.74

Conclusions The long-trusted (and yet frequently-contested) dichotomy of ‘nuclear’ and ‘extended’ family structures in the ancient world, at the heart of which lies a strong focus on the parent–child bond, has been subject to revision. When we allow children and their experience to be the focus of the family, we can observe many more influences on family structure, bonds and the values and obligations attached to them. Virilocal marriage pattern and demographic dynamics of the population of Roman Egypt would be necessarily reflected in family dynamics, and have

Being a niece or nephew   89 contributed towards a certain pattern of behaviours, strategies and circumstances. The transmission of cultural practices and values extends far beyond parent–child relationships, especially in an everyday context where children’s households and local environments were filled with the presence of extended family members. In these circumstances, aunts and uncles indeed had continued relevance and practical and affective presence in their nieces’ and nephews’ lives. They were important agents in day-to-day matters, and as cultural actors they shaped and strengthened both actual and symbolic familial dynamics in Roman Egypt. In many cases, the action taken by an uncle or aunt would have been culturally sanctioned, and their intervention was both expected and respected, especially in the case of the death of a child’s father. This shows especially in their appearance in (quasi-) official documents, like declarants or co-signatories in epikrisis applications, or in their role in protecting the family’s interests as official guardians or supervisors, or as more unofficial caretakers. Children could look to their aunts and uncles as an additional person within the family to help negotiate the transition to adulthood: they assisted in children’s experience of transition from home life to engagement with the physical and social world beyond their homes, and in the institutions and processes of their local communities.75 Sibling relations in Antiquity are at the heart of some of these patterns: children’s uncles and aunts are of course their parents’ brothers and sisters. In a society whose demographic and family dynamics supported the forming of tight sibling relationships, and in which living with aunts and uncles was not a rare phenomenon, the bonds, obligations and expectations of sibling relationships would have extended into adulthood and directed towards the children of any siblings. The responsibilities, expectations and experiences of being an uncle or aunt can therefore be viewed as an extension of the bond based on sibling-hood. Aunts and uncles who appear in seven literary texts from Oxyrhynchos serve to emphasize this symbolic importance. In two of these cases the relationships between an uncle and his niece are quite accidental to the argumentation itself,76 however, the other cases present the symbolic value and cultural importance both of sibling relationships among the older generation, developed through childhood and continued into adulthood and, especially, of the relationships between uncles and nephews (in the documentary cases, the paternal uncle–nephew bond was of greater importance for the continuity of the lineage, whereas nieces found support from their maternal uncles). Clearly, the expectation within sibling relationships was one of unity and solidarity, an expectation that uncles would take on a father’s role where necessary – either protecting the child or serving as a role model.77 It is perhaps no surprise to find this sentiment shared in other literary texts pertaining to the Roman world.78 In some instances the close ties between uncles and their young relatives are construed in terms of harm and danger, such as in an astrological text where the expectation was that in addition to fathers and mothers, it was only uncles who were seen as potential perpetrators of sexual violence (incest and rape) for the young of the household.79 Though it is methodologically problematic to draw any broad-ranging inference from this sort of material, we see in the reproduction of these myths and stories an

90  April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto identification with the cultural values they express in relation to particular kinds of familial relationships within the Hellenised elite circles of Oxyrhynchos.80 As a hypothesis one could expect the literary papyri from Oxyrhynchos to have affected to some degree their audience’s cultural understanding and expectations of the relationships they portray. On the other hand, the choices and adaptations of texts retelling Greek myths, comedy, and historical references can be seen as indicative of concerns, interests and values of the literary elite. Indeed, as a whole, a great proportion of the literary texts from Oxyrhynchos deal with subject matter relating to family issues – even if uncles and aunts appear only quite rarely.81 But what can we observe of the everyday expectations and experience children had of their aunts and uncles? It is clear from salutations in letters and different interventions in their lives that uncles and aunts maintained dutiful and affectionate relationships with their nephews and nieces. It would not be unreasonable to expect that children would rely on them for day-to-day emotional and practical support and engagement. They acted on behalf of their nephews and nieces in public, and took care of their needs especially when children had lost one or both of their parents. From the perspective of children, aunts and uncles were prominent social and cultural agents in their private and public lives, and any conflict or unease arising from obligations and this relationship appear not to have been anticipated – even if the reality might have proved otherwise. One might also observe a more general type of familial behaviour: an everyday will to meet the expectations and obligations of the proper roles for uncles and aunts. We found in our material no trace of ‘avunculate’, nor any clear differentiation between the roles of the older members of maternal and paternal kin. It is to be noted that traces of this type of pattern would be hidden by the everyday requirements of family members that were instead largely dictated by heavy mortality.82 Children in Roman Oxyrhynchos experienced both private and public life within the flexible boundaries of certain social environments. It is hoped that this chapter has demonstrated that one important part of this social world were the relationships between children and their aunts and uncles. They were not merely practical assistants, but brokered their nephews’ and nieces’ experiences in the transition to adulthood, acting as important social and cultural agents in children’s lives, but salso added significant emotional dimensions to children’s lives.

Notes 1 See e.g. Edwards, De Guzman, Brown and Kumru 2006; Hengst 2005. 2 See e.g. Dasen and Späth 2010: 9; Vuolanto 2015a: 28–40. 3 See especially the following edited volumes: Laes, Mustakallio and Vuolanto 2015; Evans Grubbs and Parkin with Bell 2013; Brubaker and Tougher 2013; Laes and Mustakallio 2011; Harlow and Laurence 2010; Dasen and Späth, 2010; Horn and Phoenix 2009; Horn and Martens 2009; Cohen and Rutter 2007; with the individual studies Bradley 2013; Laes 2011a; Rawson 2003a. 4 Rawson 2003a: 217. For discussion, see Hübner 2010: 73–91 and Pudsey 2011. This notion is closely tied with historical approaches to the Roman family, focused on the issue of nuclear and extended families, with discussions over the relative importance

Being a niece or nephew   91 5 6

7

8 9

10

11 12

13

of conjugal and parental bonds. See Saller and Shaw 1984, which opened up the dichotomous debate on the structure of ancient families. Edwards et al. 2006, esp. 23–6, 44; Hengst 2005; Qvortrup 1994. See Gardner 2001: 214–18, Harders 2009, Centlivres Challet 2012, Vuolanto 2013a: 63–4, 68 on (elite) family dynamics; Bremmer 1983 for an anthropological view of the importance of maternal uncles (‘avunculate’) and Bettini 1991 of the (early) Roman republic more generally; Lindsay 2009: 151–9 on adoption; all dealing with the Roman elites; Armani 2012 on terminology in epigraphic sources; Cribiore 2009 on uncles and the education of orphans in Late Antiquity. According to the census documentation of Roman Egypt, women typically married men with an average 7.8 years age-gap (Bagnall and Frier 2006). Though the statistical reliability of this figure is in question, we are in no doubt that the trend for women marrying older men was prominent, and sons would frequently remain unmarried in Roman Egypt well into their thirties. See Bagnall and Frier 2006: 111–28; Hübner 2013: esp. 31–49, 58–9, 92–106; Pudsey 2011, 2012, 2013. Or, at least, the shaping and limiting conditions of these experiences. See Vuolanto in this volume, p. 21. We also note the ambiguous use of the kinship terms (for brother, sister, mother, father) in letters to friends and older acquaintances to denote affection and nearness. For instance, P.Oxy. XXXI 3559 (second century ce) is not included in our discussion; the letter refers to children of a ‘brother’ who is revealed not to be a full brother, at least. See also P.Oxy. XIV 1678 (third century ce) in which an individual (likely an adolescent) writes home sending greetings to various named individuals, likely aunts and uncles, but as this is not specified the case is not included. Maternal uncles: C.Pap.Gr. 2.1.14; P.Oxy. II 379; P.Oxy. XLI 2971; P.Oxy Hels. 29; P.Oxy. XXXVIII 2858; P.Oxy. VII 1028; P.Oxy. XXXIV 2713; P.Oxy. XXIV 2416; P.Oxy. VI 888; P.Oxy. LXXV 5052; P. Mich. XVIII 789; P.Mich.inv. 87; PSI V 457; PSI XII 1247; Maternal aunts: P.Oxy. LIX 3998; P.Oxy. VI 888; P.Oxy. II 379. Paternal aunts: SB X 10220 (same family, i.e same aunt, in P.Oxy. II 288); P.Oxy. XXXIII 2671; P.Mert. I 26; PSI IX 1080; SB XIV 11899; SB VIII 9833; P.Oxy. III 495; P.Mich. III 171; Paternal uncles: P.Oxy. XXXI 2594; P.Oxy. XXXIV 2711; P.Oxy. X 1269; P.Oxy. I 117; P.Oxy. II 361; P.Oxy. LIX 3974; P.Oxy. XXXIII 2671; P.Oxy. LXXVIII 5182; P.Oxy. LIX 3998; P.Oxy. XVII 2133; BGU IV 1070 (= Chr. Mitt 323); P.Mert. I 26; PSI III 164; P.Coll.Youtie 67; SB X 10220 (same family, i.e same uncle, in P.Oxy. II 288); SB XXIV 16253 (= SB XII 10946); P. Princ. II 96. Of these uncles, one is in fact a paternal and one a maternal grand-uncle (P.Oxy. XXXIV 2711; P.Oxy. I 68). Maternal/paternal situation unknown; PSI III 236; P.Oxy. LVI 3862 – the boy seems to have lived in a same household with his uncle. In P.Oxy. XII 1452 the uncle is both paternal and maternal, as child’s parents are a full brother and sister. Of the eight cases in which the minority of the children is probable but not certain, one has both paternal and maternal uncles/aunts, four have maternal, and three paternal relatives. Both: P.Oxy. XXXVI 2787; Maternal: P.Oxy. I 68; P.Oxy. XIV 1679; P.Batav. 21; P.Ryl. IV 691. Paternal: P.Oxy. LIX 3989; P.Oxy. LXXVIII 5181; P.Col. X 262. See also P.Oxy. XXXIV 2720, with a maternal aunt of a 18-year-old man. Epikrisis: P.Oxy. VII 1028 and P.Oxy. XXXVIII 2858; Apprenticeship: P.Oxy. XXXXI 2971; Property matter (a loan): P.Oxy. LXXV 5052; Unclear case: P.Pap.Gr. 2.1.14. P.Princ. II 96; P.Oxy. I 68; P.Ryl. IV 691. A parallel case for an uncle (here paternal) acting for his nephew is the case of Aurelius Ammon and Aurelius Horion; the uncle attempts to assist Horion (after the death of his father) in his aim to continue the priestly family tradition as a prophetes in the Panopolite nome: P.Ammon 3 and 4 (348 ce). Paternal: P.Oxy. X 1269; P.Oxy. XVII 2133; BGU IV 1070 (=P.Chr.Mitt. 323); in P.Mert. I 26 the application for guardianship comes from an paternal aunt with her brother as the intended guardian. Maternal: P.Oxy. XXXIV 2713; P.Mich. XVIII 789;

92  April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27

28

29 30

31

P.Oxy. II 379 (here a maternal uncle with an aunt; the terms for guardianship do not appear, but the intention seems to be clear). Uncle as a supervisor for a guardian: P.Coll. Youtie 67; Petition for acquiring a guardian (with an aunt): P.Oxy. VI 888. This may also be a case of two aunts appearing together. P.Oxy. XXIV 2416; P.Oxy. XXXIV 2711. P.Oxy. LIX 3974 and PSI III 164 paternal, PSI V 457 maternal, P.Oxy. XII 1452 both. Parent away: PSI XII 1247 (maternal uncle with a grandfather); P.Oxy. XXXI 2594 (paternal uncle); Apprentice masters: P.Oxy.Hels. 29 (maternal) and SB XXIV 16253 (paternal). P.Oxy. XXXIV 2713 (maternal uncles); P.Oxy. XVII 2133 (paternal uncle). P.Oxy. LXXVIII 5182; P.Oxy. LIX 3998. In P.Oxy. XXXIV 2708 we encounter a nephew and niece, already adult, who are accused of defrauding their old uncle, and in PSI X 1102 a brother and sister claim their relatives (most probably their uncles or cousins) had robbed them of their inheritance during their younger years of minority. Paternal: P.Oxy. I 117; P.Oxy. LXXVIII 5181. Maternal: P.Oxy. XXXVI 2787; P.Oxy XIV 1679; P. Batav. 21; unsure: PSI III 236. P.Oxy. III 495 (181–9 ce); P.Mich. III 171 (58 ce); See also SB XIV 11881, with uncertain provenance, in which an aunt took care of orphan children, acquiring extra income for their upkeep by spinning. P.Oxy. VI 888; P.Oxy. II 379. P.Mert. I 26 (274 ce). Uncle and aunt: P.Oxy. 33.2671 (paternal, of a boy); SB X 10220 (the same uncle and aunt in P.Oxy. II 288). The ship mast case: SB VIII 9833. P.Oxy. XXXVI 2787 (paternal: a brother and his children salute a sister and her children); SB XIV 11899 (paternal); P.Oxy. LIX 3998 (maternal); P.Oxy. LIX 3989 (probably a paternal aunt). See however PSI IX 1080 (paternal). See also P.Oxy. XXXIV 2720, with a maternal aunt of an 18-year-old young man and P.Oxy. XIV 1678 in which a boy or young man salutes various women who may be his aunts. Girl in P.Oxy. LIX 3998; a girl and a boy in P.Oxy. X 1269, a girl and two boys in P.Oxy. XXXIV 2711; a girl with three boys in P.Oxy. XVII 2133. Of girls, four appear with their paternal and nine with maternal aunts/uncles (and one with an uncle who is both paternal and maternal). The numbers given for boys and girls here refer only to those non-literary texts in which we know the gender of the children. Uncles and fathers: P.Oxy. XXIV 16253; P.Princ. II 96; P.Oxy. LXXVIII 5182; P.Oxy. I 68. For aunts, it is possible that in some cases a parent was still alive: in SB VIII 9833 it is not explicit that father or mother had died; in P.Oxy. III 495 the same is true with the mother, and in P.Oxy. LIX 3998 we do not know anything about the mother. The numbers given here do not include cases in which uncles and aunts appear in the letter salutations, as in these cases it is not possible to know the situation of the other parent – on the other hand, there appear both mothers and fathers with both uncles and aunts in these. See e.g. PSI V 457; P.Oxy. XII 1452; SB XIV 11881; P.Ryl. IV 691; P.Oxy. III 495; P.Oxy. XLI 2971; SB XXIV 16253; P.Princ. II 96; P.Oxy. Hels. 29. When using the word θείος for an uncle, in two cases it is also pointed out that these are paternal uncles, see ‘πρὸς πατρὸς τοῦ αὐτοῦ ἀφ[ήλικος θεί]ο̣υ̣’ (P.Coll. Youtie 67) and ‘θείου πρὸς πατρὸς’ (P.Oxy. 17 2133), with BGU IV 1070 and P. Oxy. LVI 3862. Nieces and nephews: P.Oxy. X 1269; P.Oxy. VI 888; P.Oxy. XXXIV 2708 and 2711; P.Mert. I 26; SB IV 7449; SB VIII 9833; PSI III 164. For the use of these terms in classical Attic Greek, see Thompson 1971. See Armani 2012: 85–91 for Latin epigraphy. Such terminology does not pivot on the child’s viewpoint. This is also the case for other terms such as ἀνεψιός (cousin), which does not appear in connection with children, even though underage cousins feature in the material (for example P.Oxy. LIX 3974 and 3998). The term is only used with

Being a niece or nephew   93 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49 50

51

52 53 54 55

adult cousins (in our cases, in helping their female cousins: see P.Oxy. III 490; P.Oxy. VI 907; PSI IX 1065). See Pudsey 2013 tables. On the nature of the Romano-Egyptian census, and its representivity, see esp. Scheidel 2001b – especially as the ages are not given for large numbers of individuals. P.Oxy. XXXIII 2671; SB XXIV 16011; P.Col. X. 262; PSI VIII 874 col ii; P.Oxy. Hels. 10; P.Oxy. VIII 1110; P.Oxy. II 254; P.Oxy. II 256; P.Oxy. II 361; PSI I 53 col I; PSI I 53 col iv; PSI I 53 col vii; PSI I 53 col xi; PSI VIII 874 col i; P.Lond. inv. 2187; P.Princ. III 129 ii; P.Oxy. XII 1548; P.Flor. I 4; P.Oxy. III 479; P.Oxy. II 288 (11/12 ce) / SB X 10220 (12/13 ce). Cf. the 134 cases in census returns, which feature children, see Pudsey 2013, 491–503. Though the return (P.Oxy. XXXIII 2671) in fact relates to Leonidou in the Herakleopolite nome. See Pudsey 2013 Table 24.3. P.Oxy. II 288 (11/12 ce) / SB X 10220 (12/13 ce) ; P.Col. X 262. PSI I 53 col iv; PSI I 53 col vii; PSI I 53 col xi; P.Flor. I 4; PSI VIII 874 col i; P.Oxy. II 361; P.Oxy. VIII 1110; P.Oxy. Hels. 10. See extensive tables in Pudsey 2013. P.Oxy. XXXI 2594 (2nd c. ce). Here, also a ‘sister’ is mentioned, but more probably this refers to the wife of the recipient, as otherwise one would expect in this context ‘our sister’. SB VIII 9833. P.Oxy LIX 3974; P.Oxy XXXIV 2713. P. Mich III 171; P.Mert. I 26 (274 ce). P.Oxy. LVI 3862; P. Mich. inv. 87. See also p. 87. P.Oxy. X 1269 (early second century ce). It is unclear from this document where their mother is, or if the children are living with their uncle. P.Oxy. XXXIV 2711 (268–271 ce). Across the Hellenised semi-autonomous metropoleis of Roman Egypt, members of gymnasial group enjoyed lower rates of poll tax and socially honoured position, with a power of overseeing the entry of others into this group. P.Oxy. XXIV 2416 (sixth to seventh century ce). Approximately one sixth of the property was in the hands of fatherless children under fourteen years old and up to one third was owned by young people less than twenty-five years old (Saller 1994: 190, 203; Scheidel 2009). For example P.Oxy. VI 898 (123 ce), in which a minor complains his mother’s guardianship had failed him and his financial interests, and he sought a new guardian. See e.g. P.Oxy. II 265; P.Oxy. VI 907 (276 ce); P.Oxy. XXVI 2474 (3rd c. ce). For the legal background, see Krause 1995: 85–103 and Vuolanto 2002: 204–7, 211– 18. Further on guardianship in Egypt, see Krause 1994–1995: vol. 3, 104–12. For mothers and guardianship see Vuolanto 2002: 218–24. BGU IV 1070 (=P.Chr.Mitt. 323); P.Coll.Youtie 67. Even if we unfortunately lack information of any other living relatives possibly at hand. Paternal uncles as guardians also in P.Oxy. X 1269 and P.Oxy. XVII 2133. For mothers applying for guardians, see Vuolanto 2002: 219–21. P.Oxy. VI 888 (the edict refers to children without tutores, therefore under 14 years, or curatores, under 25 years, and does not distinguish between the two); maternal uncles as guardians also in P.Oxy. XXXIV 2713 and P.Mich. XVIII 789. See also a paternal uncle sending a recommendation letter for his nephew: P.Ryl. IV 691. P.Oxy. III 495; P.Mert. I 26. For example P.Oxy. XLVI 3302 and P.Oxy. LIV 3756 and 3757; P.Oxy. LIV 3764. P.Oxy. XXXIV 2713. Aurelia Didyme’s mother had died when Didyme was still under age and already fatherless. P.Oxy. XVII 2133. For a comparative case from Karanis is P.Cair.Isid.77, in which a maternal aunt seems to have taken care of the upbringing of two orphan girls, and

94  April Pudsey and Ville Vuolanto 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76

77

now claims that the girls’ guardians, their paternal uncles, have neglected their duties as guardians. P.Oxy. LIX 3998. P.Oxy. XXXIV 2720; P.Oxy. XXXIV 2744. On apprenticeship see Bradley 1985, Pudsey 2015 and Vuolanto 2015c. On situated learning more generally, see Coy 1989. P.Oxy. LVIII 3921 demonstrates the scale of the weaving trade in Oxyrhynchos; a widow presents a guardian’s annual accounts including abstracts of apprenticeship contracts for numerous minors. See also the archive of Tryphon the weaver discussed in Pudsey 2015 and Vuolanto 2015c. P.Oxy.Hels. 29 with Vuolanto 2015c. Another uncle is acting as the supervisor (kurios) of the grandmother. SB XXIV 16253. P.Oxy. XLI 2971. P.Mich. III 171. P.Princ. 2.96. See discussion in Pudsey 2015. P.Oxy. XXXVIII 2858 (171 ce). See Migliardi 1992: 1. For uncles registering, see PSI III 164 (paternal); PSI V 457 (maternal); P.Oxy. VII 1028 (probably a maternal uncle appearing with mother). P.Oxy. XII 1452 (127–8 ce) – but the case relates to the Arsinoite nome. Brother– sister marriage occurs occasionally within our material here, but the debates on its occurrence and reasons behind the practice are tangential to our discussion. See Hübner 2007 and 2013, esp. 175–87; Remijsen and Clarysse 2008; Rowlandson and Takahashi 2009. P.Oxy. LIX 3974. See Quaegebeur 1984 for theagoi. Bagnall and Frier 2006: 138–9. P.Oxy. XXXIV 2711. P.Oxy. XXIV 2416. P.Oxy. I 117. P.Oxy. XXXVI 2787. See also P.Oxy. XIV 1679; XXXI 2594; LXXVIII 5181; PSI III 236; P. Batav. 21 on salutations between uncles and nephews and nieces. PSI IX 1080. P.Oxy. LVI 3862 (late 4th or early 5th c. ce) – quoted expression cites the editor of the text. Some of the contexts discussed above are most probably specific to Roman Egypt and its Hellenistic, elite circles in cities like Oxyrhynchos; in particular the various elements of the gymnasial life, co-residentially structures and the practice of siblingmarriage. Indeed, when we compare children’s living environment with that in the villages of the Fayyum, slightly different patterns emerge in the demographic and household dynamics, and in other aspects of children’s experience. In Tebtynis, Soknopaiou Nesos and Karanis, the physical layout of housing and neighbourhood were different and contributed to slightly different social and kinship arrangements. Here, children in (typically larger) families would engage in play, dining, household work, social life and other activities in shared courtyards with other families as well as with their own kin. See Pudsey 2015. P.Oxy. LXVI 4516, giving lines 1661–1676 of Aristophanes’ Aves, with Heracles, and his uncle, Poseidon discussing about Athenian laws of inheritance, and P.Oxy. LXI 4105 (second or third century ce), with Thucydides, Pel. 6.55.1 discussing the order of birth of Hippias and his brothers based on the inclusion and absence of their children’s names in a monument. P.Oxy. XLII 3013 (second or third century ce) on Procne avenging on her and her sister’s behalf the behaviour of Tereus by making him eat their child. See also e.g. Pseudo-Apollodoros, Bibl. 3.14.8, pointing out that sisters’ father had himself married his maternal aunt, and Ovid, Metamorph. 6.426–674 for the best-known version of the

Being a niece or nephew   95

78 79 80 81 82

story. P.Oxy. LXXV 5043 (3rd c. ce), col. xix, gives lines 43–46 of Pindar’s Nemean Ode 5 eulogizing Pytheas, winner of the boys pancration, whose maternal uncle had been a renown athlete. P.Oxy. LXIV 4414 (2nd or 3rd c. ce) cites Apollonius Rhodius, Argon. 1, 190–201 on Meleager: As he was under-age, he was protected by his paternal uncle, with a maternal uncle given a minor role in looking after him. In P.Oxy. XXIV 2401 (4th c. ce fragment of Terence’s Andria) a young girl who was left in the care of her paternal uncle, finds her father. For early Roman world, see Harders 2009: 227–30 with further references; for later Roman contexts, see Vuolanto 2013a: 63–4. P.Oxy. LXVI 4504, col. 2 (third or fourth century ce), citing Elegiacs on Astrology of Anubio of Diospolis (from Egypt, from first to third centuries ce). See also Johnson 2010: 179–99. There are 154 literary papyri which explicitly relate to children in some sense in our database. For a discussion on avunculate and the proposal that maternal kin, especially uncles, would have a special relationship with their younger relatives both in Greek and (early) Roman thinking, see Harders 2009: 227 with esp. Bremmer 1983 and Bettini 1991: 13–132. For the importance of maternal uncles in particular, among the elites of Late Antiquity, see Vuolanto 2013b: 63–4, 68. For a critique of the avunculate theory, see Saller 1997.

Part II

What did the Roman children actually do?

7 Leisure as a site of child socialisation, agency and resistance in the Roman empire Jerry Toner

What was it like to play as a child in the late Roman world? What were the skills and attitudes that games inculcated in the young? How did children experience their leisure and how did this change over the course of the Roman empire? This chapter will try to answer these questions, however provisionally, by looking at some of the games and activities that filled children’s lives. It will focus on four main areas. The first is whether it is useful to apply the term ‘leisure’ to ancient children. Many children were obliged to start working young and it is not immediately clear that they had much of what we would term ‘leisure’. Second, it will look at the ways in which children were socialised in their play into certain types of cultural behaviour. But rather than seeing this as a purely passive process, whereby the children were forced into certain social roles, the emphasis in this piece will be on trying to see active elements to such socialisation, which allowed the children to engage with societal pressures in a dynamic and flexible way. The third aim will be to focus in more detail on the degree of agency that children had during their leisure activities. Instead of seeing them as constrained by communal norms into playing certain games, I will try to show that the freedom of the leisure period allowed children to express a relatively high level of individual decision-making. Finally, the chapter will examine how children’s leisure developed and altered as the Roman empire became Christian. A new set of understandings about the role of the child meant that the child’s experience of leisure was itself transformed.

Did children have leisure? Leisure and otium are not straightforward terms.1 For the educated adult elite, otium was a qualitative concept and represented the dignified free time which a gentleman was able to devote to morally valuable pursuits, whether they were public service or academic interests. Leisure in this view provided the basis for discriminating between the worthwhile life of a member of the elite and the laborious life of the non-elite, who were compelled by necessity to work, with their hands, for a living. The children of the wealthy were able to attend school or have specialist tutors. Education, in this sense, was itself a product of otium, that is to say, the freedom from having to work. The literary and rhetorical skills – the paideia – painstakingly acquired at school then provided the means for those

100  Jerry Toner at the top of society to establish and justify their very position of power. The problem with this is, of course, that it denies leisure to all but a small minority. Even if we allow that many more may have had some limited schooling, the basic levels of literacy and numeracy acquired in this way would have fallen well short of the exacting demands of paideia. We would want to adopt a far more inclusive approach that allows us to grant leisure to all of the child population regardless of socio-economic status. This is easier said than done. If we see leisure as being simply a negatively defined quantitative concept, as the residual time left over from work, then that creates its own difficulties. Such a division is more in line with stricter modern approaches to the compartmentalisation of time but cannot straightforwardly be applied to the ancient world.2 Moreover, it is not clear that all free time can be termed leisure. Much non-work time can be spent with family or participating in religion or simply being bored, none of which can satisfactorily be termed as leisure. Even if we see leisure as simply having time free of all such obligations, then it is also apparent that children’s experience of leisure was profoundly affected by their gender and their status. The structured routines and familial wealth of an elite child allowed for a clearer demarcation and quantity of free time and for far greater choice in playtime experiences, albeit often under the supervision of tutors and slave childminders. The children of the poor had to play as and when they could when they were not already working, and with whatever members of the kin group were available. In the context of childhood, we can probably most easily define leisure as play.3 In the Roman world, as is often the case today, play was synonymous with childhood. As Artemidorus put it, to dream of children at play with dice or knucklebones is not inauspicious because ‘it is usual for children always to be playing’.4 But we must accept that children from the lower levels of society would have had far more constraints placed on their ability to play. These children were far more likely to be put to work in some way in order to improve the family finances. For most parents, children acted as a source of income and a pension. The orator and writer Lucian, originally from a modest background, describes how at about the age of 13 he was sent out to work as an apprentice to a sculptor: ‘in a short time I would even delight my father by regularly bringing him an income’.5 Thirteen is likely to have been a late age to be put to productive use, probably reflecting Lucian’s somewhat wealthier family background. Something between age five and ten seems to have been the most common age for a non-elite child to be sent to work.6 One gravestone is inscribed: ‘In memory of Viccentia, a very nice girl, a worker in gold. She lived for nine years’.7 As one child in the later empire put it, ‘Today, dear God, I am seven years old, and must play no more. Here is my top, my hoop, and my ball: keep them all, my Lord’.8 For the purposes of this piece, I do not make any distinction between children at this stage of life and older adolescents. The Roman child steadily acquired his or her personal claim to full human status, but there does not seem to have been any change in the important role of play throughout the process.9 Roman attitudes to play were far more vital than simply seeing them as the frivolous pastimes

Child leisure in the Roman empire   101 of the young. Play sat at the heart of the civilised lifestyle which adult Romans celebrated in their Ludi. We tend to imagine that the games were the kind of inconsequential waste of time that Juvenal decried in his dismissal of such ‘bread and circuses’. But, as much modern scholarship has shown, the games are best understood as representing a way for the Romans to construct their community through the shared expression of core values, above all masculine and military virtue.10 The intense, bloody rituals of the arena gave physical voice to these ideals in a way that was readily visible and understandable to all. The Ludi taught how to be a winner in the Roman world. A tavern gambling board makes clear the conceptual link between play, games and empire: parthi occisi britto victus ludite romani [‘With the Briton conquered and the Parthian killed, play on the Romans!’]11 This link gave an added significance to children’s leisure activities in the Roman context because it underlined the importance of play in fostering the right kinds of attitude in the young. Play was something that had to be treated seriously.

Leisure and socialisation Regardless of the social background, all leisure activities served in part to socialise the child into his or her future roles.12 Once the rattles of infancy had been exchanged for hoops, dolls, knucklebones and balls, as well as games based on the imitation of heroes, such as charioteers and gladiators, Roman children were immersed in a world which gave them ample training in the kind of lifeskills that would enable them to succeed as adults. At a basic level, many boys’ games reflected the importance of social hierarchy in the Roman world.13 Games involved striving to attain high social rank, whether as a king, senator, judge or general.14 These were activities which parents would sometimes be happy to encourage, buying their sons imitation military uniforms.15 Being able to afford to own horses was also considered to be a mark of social superiority and children learned to aspire to this status in various forms of riding game.16 Galen recommends that at age seven, such make-believe riding could give place to actual riding for those who could afford it.17 It is noticeable that the types of games which Roman children played changed once they had reached about seven years of age. Different kinds of play were adopted, with greater emphasis on games governed by rules and involving physical strength, chance and the development of intellectual strategies.18 It is also apparent that this gear-shift in the type of game that boys played paralleled the greater emphasis on training in other areas of their life. This is the approximate age when children, whose parents could afford to educate them, would begin their learning in earnest. Equally, those children whose economic circumstances required them to go out to work

102  Jerry Toner would begin to learn a trade at this age. Whatever the social background, though, boys were expected to play with gusto, exhibiting the kind of enthusiasm that might give them a better chance to succeed in adult life. As when Minucius Felix observed boys playing at skipping stones across the water by the seashore during a holiday, the winner was the one whose shell went out furthest and bounced most frequently, and all of them were ‘eagerly gesticulating’ as they did so.19 Socialisation can easily be seen as a passive process but the previous example gives a sense of the active and voluntary involvement of the children who were themselves being socialised. Socialisation can be achieved through intimidation and fear – seemingly a standard tactic in the context of the Roman school – but in playtime, this approach could only work so far. Children had to be enticed into participating in playtime activities. Or, to put it more actively, children would only take part in games if they wanted to. A child cannot be forced to play; that would contradict the sense of spontaneity and pleasure which characterises most playtime activities. Instead, the activities had to be sufficiently interesting, entertaining and attractive to make children willing participants in their own socialisation. In their leisure, then, children acquired learning by active imitation and experience. This was as true of girls as it was for boys. Dolansky has shown that dolls – with their ornate hairstyles, moulded breasts and sometimes delineated genitalia – did not simply prepare girls for their futures as wives and mothers.20 The dolls’ capacity for movement made them useful for creative play, in ways we can only imagine, that could have resisted the usual passive, sedentary view of women. It allowed girls to articulate various forms of female physical expression, albeit within the relatively narrow confines of being brought up in a patriarchal society. John Chrysostom describes seeing girls playing with dolls by dressing them as brides and playing with miniature storage chests with a lock and key, learning the importance of safeguarding domestic supplies and valued items.21 In large part, this was functional training designed to inculcate certain social skills. But it also allowed sufficient selectivity on the part of the girls in respect to details of the bride’s dress, actions or words, or with regard to which valued items were placed in the chest, that the game provided an enticing playtime experience. Similarly, we can look beyond the usual schooling experiences of boys to see how other forms of leisure activity allowed them to shape their own identity. Fathers often took their sons to the baths and other public spaces, as well as to the games.22 The popularity of the stars of the games with children is widely attested, with boys often noted for being keen on chariot racing and gladiators. We find, for example, toy chariots as a standard theme of child sarcophagi; or the story of how the young Nero was once caught chatting about a recent crash in the Circus and had to lie to his tutor that he had been discussing the story of Hector’s body being dragged by chariot around Troy.23 That parents seem to have been prepared to let their children play as charioteers and gladiators, even dressing them as such according to Juvenal, suggests that these popular heroes were not considered to be inappropriate role models for boys to look up to.24 In the same way, therefore, that girls had some limited range of expression available to them in respect of their dolls, I suggest that by following and imitating their own favourites, the boys

Child leisure in the Roman empire   103 were able to use their heroes of the games in order to adopt and express their own favoured forms of character and identity in a range of socially acceptable ways. We can see the division of gladiators into clear brands, based on their appearance and fighting-technique, as corresponding to everyday Roman personality types. The solid, active, hard-worker at one end of the spectrum, personified by the secutor, versus the quick-witted trickster in the form of the retiarius. This tricky aspect of the netman made him the most reprehensible type, even among the shameful class of gladiators as a whole. He wore no mask, which would otherwise cover his shame from appearing in public, was almost naked and he carried inferior weapons. A trident and net were fit for a lowly fisherman not a real fighter. But he was quick, agile and nimble. Often gladiators had ironic stage names (such as ‘Delicatus’ – Pretty Boy, or ‘Amabilis’ – Lovely One), which allowed for the adoption or invention of all kinds of nomenclature by boy imitators. Boys were also able to adopt certain characteristics of these fighters according to their own tastes. They could choose to be solid and strong or they could highlight their wit and quick-thinking agility. Nor were they confined to selecting only a single gladiatorial role-model. They could choose from a range of options, including charioteers, animal hunters, boxers and athletes. One of the findings of Iona and Peter Opie’s classic study of the interaction between schoolchildren was that it differs from that of adults only in content.25 We can see Roman leisure as training children in the styles of interactions they would later require to participate in effective social relations in the adult sphere. We can also see that the relative spontaneity of play meant that this socialisation did not always take place in the controlled atmosphere of the classroom or even in the amphitheatre. Many of the games that children played took place in an environment less supervised by adults. These were street games, particularly those involving balls or gaming with nuts and knucklebones. One example of a street game given in a legal case underlines how unauthorised this kind of play could be, even though it does not indicate the age or social background of the players. Ulpian questions who would be liable under the Lex Aquilia if someone being shaved by a barber in a public space was hit by a ball. Many barbers were itinerant and so their clients simply sat in the open on a stool so what happened next is not an impossible scenario: ‘one of them hit the ball hard and it knocked the hands of a barber with the result that the throat of a slave whom the barber was shaving was cut by the jerking of the razor’.26 Even if Roman children were more supervised in these outdoor situations than we might imagine, we can still interpret the widespread popularity of such street play as providing an unofficial education in the personal qualities which the individual child would find useful in later life. Gaming was a particularly popular activity, so much so that such activities acquired a symbolic significance, becoming a standard motif to encapsulate ideas of childhood, both male and female, rich and poor.27 Both girls and boys gamed, the only difference on one sarcophagus scene being that the girls play nuts under a canopy to emphasise that their play is more restrained than the boys (see Dolansky p. 124–31). The kinds of life-skill such proto-gambling provided can be seen clearly on another sarcophagus, that of Lucius Aemilius Daphnus in the British Museum (Figure 7.1).

104  Jerry Toner

Figure 7.1  Sarcophagus of Lucius Aemilius Daphnus (© Trustees of the British Museum)

Groups of boys stand about playing. The tension and energy in the sarcophagus scenes emphasise that this was not simply a site for pleasant relaxation. The smallgroup sociability reflected the kind of male socialising that would characterise their adult lives. But within the groups, individual children were able to adopt a number of roles. Some of the boys argue, vigorously asserting their opinions in a public area. Others observe quietly. Some seem to be providing a commentary on the quality of play. Overall, therefore, we can see such games as offering a range of roles and identities for the children to adopt and adapt as they saw fit. Gaming also socialised children into other practical life-skills. As Leslie Kurke has suggested, ‘it is precisely their lowly, unexamined status that endows games with extraordinary power to inculcate values within culture’.28 Perhaps the first intellectual value which gaming expressed was the importance of having niche expertise. Gaming and board games required the learning of a significant body of detailed knowledge. Nuts, dice and knucklebones also improved dexterity and arithmetic calculations. They involved numerical sophistication. Being quick with numbers and fractions acted as a kind of ancient technological advantage. Such niche skill was probably particularly useful for members of the non-elite if they wanted to improve their economic situation. It was having the detailed knowledge which an artisanal skill or trade gave that could boost incomes significantly above those of the manual day-labourer. Gaming also highlighted the importance of status. The whole point of gaming for money was that it enabled the good player to get more money and so improve his or her position in society. The widespread censure we find in elite literature for popular gambling stemmed from concerns at what such social mobility meant for society and for its being achieved without work or birth.29 But for the player, gambling served as an expression, in a very practical form, of this widespread appetite for social mobility. Gambling, though, was a zero-sum game; there were no real winners or losers over the long term. As such, we can see this as a social ritual which provided an illusion of social mobility to its participants. However much people might hope to improve their prospects by means of local expertise, the popularity of such games also reflected the fundamental reality that

Child leisure in the Roman empire   105 improving status took a great deal of effort and, indeed, luck. The same chance that dominated performance in games also drove one’s achievements in life. For children, gaming was less about money and more about the short term kick of winning and maintaining their position in the pack, but the principle was the same. Status was won in the local sphere. It was the ability to do well within the community context, often in a crowded and competitive urban environment, which singled out the successful male. Standing up for oneself was an important part of winning as well as maintaining status and local reputation. These are all qualities which we find the child gamer learning. The frequent vigorous arguments that such gaming seemed to generate was all reflective of the kind of verbal and physical sparring such a competitive environment produced. Sometimes this desire for success was strong enough to encourage the gamers to cheat. This too was a skill that could prove useful in later life, as was the ability to conceal it by bluffing or indeed to spot when someone else was cheating. But it is also striking that the form of gaming reflected a strong social side to this competitiveness. The camaraderie of the local group provided communal bonds and networks. This was not just an individualistic, cut-throat model of social relations. Children had to choose their friends and allies and decide when the time was right to stand up to their competitors and enemies. Games with knucklebones, dice and nuts also expressed the popular valorisation of risk-assessment. In a world where poverty was never far away, and incomes were always vulnerable to the knock-on effects of poor harvests or the arbitrary patronage of the elite, the average Roman needed to learn the skills to control the risks he or she would face in life. Gaming taught children how to make decisions under pressure and within a social context. It told them when to be cautious and risk-averse and when to risk more. As in the moves of ancient board games, it was necessary to display tactical nous to improve one’s position in society.30 We can see all these games, therefore, as helping to generate in children the kind of personality type that the average individual needed to have in order to cope with his or her social environment. A range of options always presented themselves: when to be risk-loving or risk-averse, how to deal with the bad luck that would inevitably come your way, how to hold your own in a scrum of local peers. In effect, play offered children lessons in emotion management, showing them the techniques they could employ to be resilient and robust in a competitive milieu.31 This was probably equally as true for girls as for boys. Boys were seen as more valuable than girls, partly because girls would leave the household upon marriage. This may well have given many girls a greater sense of responsibility and independence.

Leisure and child agency Leisure therefore gave children the opportunity to construct their world as they wanted it to be, albeit within the confines of the cultural vocabulary available to them.32 It is also clear that the creative element to play meant that children of all social levels were able to fill their time by making use of whatever they found around them. As Epictetus says, ‘what do children do when they are left

106  Jerry Toner alone? They take up shells and ashes, and they build something, then pull it down, and build something else and so they never lack the means of passing time’.33 Whether it was simply tossing stones into the sea, building shells into towers, playing at gladiators or gaming with nuts, children of all social classes had a range of choices available to them. The emotional distance that Roman fathers often seem to have maintained between themselves and their families may also have been reflected in a low level of day-to-day involvement in the leisure of their children. The pater familias was undoubtedly a powerful figure in the lives of Roman children.34 Fathers made the important decisions regarding their children’s futures, and there were also rites and family crises which saw the father move full square into the child’s vision. And there will have been many occasions when the father took an active role in introducing his sons to the important elements of public life, such as going to baths, games and other leisure activities.35 But when the daily routine was in control, it is reasonable to assume that most fathers were too busy earning the family’s living or, if they were members of the elite, being involved in public life to be supervising the games their children were playing at home or in the street.36 Nor, indeed, did children always do what their fathers told them or agree with what they said.37 Low life expectancy will have seen many fathers die young in any case. Regardless of the degree of active paternal involvement in their offspring’s upbringing, Augustine’s famous account of his own childhood makes it clear that his friends had ample opportunity to use their leisure time in ways they saw fit. His gang used to hang out together, swapping food and trinkets with each other, and playing games in the street until late at night.38 Clearly, Augustine had a deeper theological purpose in describing these youthful antics. His stories concerning his childhood are carefully designed to stress the innate sinfulness of children, which can be expected to continue into adulthood.39 But even if we understand this as a stereotypical list of ‘bad-boy’ activities – in the way that describing children as hanging out on street corners, smoking and painting graffiti would create a particular image today – it is still possible to see in such a caricature an awareness of the relative freedom which children did have in their free time. It was the very licence to choose how to spend time that meant there was always the possibility that some would take liberties. Augustine also describes the kind of competitiveness such group activity generated: ‘I often sought dishonest victories, being myself conquered by the vain desire for pre-eminence’. Cheating, as we have seen, taught skills of its own, but the decision whether to cheat or not was in the hands of the individual child. When he caught others cheating, Augustine was outraged and quarrelled with them fiercely, even though he was himself guilty of perpetrating such frauds. In part, he and his friends were being dictated to by the norms of childhood behaviour that we saw above: that standing up in defence of one’s own sense of honour was a desirable skill for a Roman male to possess. As Augustine says, ‘these same sins as we grow older are transferred from tutors and masters; they pass from nuts and balls and sparrows, to magistrates and kings, to gold and lands and slaves’. It was all an actively acquired training for later life, however much Augustine did not

Child leisure in the Roman empire   107 approve of this process. The episode, therefore, shows that childhood agency was not always exercised on a purely individual basis. Peer group pressure exerted a strong influence on the children’s decision-making processes. Elsewhere we find Augustine recalling the peer pressure that influenced his decisions about what to get up to in his leisure time. He tells us that he engaged in acts of minor theft from his parents’ cellar and table, partly so that he would have something to swap for trinkets among his group of friends.40 Augustine’s famous story of pear-stealing also emphasises that he loved doing it ‘because of the companionship of my accomplices with whom I did it’.41 He says he would not have done it on his own. Augustine’s quarrels over cheating also show that a strong sense of communal justice existed among Augustine and his friends, however far short of this ideal they individually fell. Each boy expected the others to act honestly towards one another and observe a common code of good conduct even if in practice the desire for status meant that they were perfectly prepared to cheat to get what they wanted.

Christianity and the child at play What Augustine’s text shows above all is that the image of the child had acquired a new aspect in the world of the Christian Roman empire. From its early history, Christianity had been intimately involved in interfering with and reforming traditional Roman conceptions of the family. Believers joined a new family, acquiring brothers and sisters in faith under the protection of a divine Father. By formulating relations between its believers within the language of child–parent relations, early Christianity had sought to establish a set of bonds between its adherents that emulated the strongest and most powerful links within human society. In doing so, Christianity highlighted that the family and what it meant was a site of conflict. The Christian had to be prepared to place his or her Christian siblings above the actual family group which had reared them. As Ville Vuolanto has shown, Christianity had a need to undermine traditional familial loyalties. Christian ascetics sought to break the ties of family, attachment to which stood as the ultimate symbol of this-worldly loyalties.42 Jerome’s charge, Eustochium, once declared, as a daughter and a bride of Christ, that she had ‘forgotten her father’.43 It is hard to emphasise enough just how shocking a sentiment like this must have been within traditional pagan Roman society. Christianity was systematically trying to destabilise traditional Roman notions of what made a good child. In many Christian writings, the child at play became a powerful metaphor for the position of the adult struggling towards salvation against the distraction of earthly temptations. All Christians were now seen as God’s children in need of his guidance and correction.44 Clement’s Paedagogus, for example, written in the late second century ce, gives guidance to the lay Christian on how to resist the many temptations presented by living in a pagan world. It is an education for adults: ‘We are the children’, as Clement says, and when people converted to Christianity they ‘become as little children’.45 But with this change came a parallel shift in what was thought acceptable for all children, both actual and metaphorical, to do in their leisure. Adults at the Ludi were themselves seen as little better than

108  Jerry Toner errant children, falling for the sensuous temptations that the Roman world had to offer. Conversely, the image of the child at play became an admirable symbol of ‘humility, freedom from passion and non-sexual behaviour’.46 The large number of Christian texts which attack the games served to emphasise how important a role the games played in mainstream Roman culture. They represented a vital target for the Christians to attack if they were to change society itself.47 The games were attacked for their sensuousness. They were seen as insane: ‘They are all mad’, says Augustine, ‘the performers, the spectators and the host’.48 How could such huge sums be spent on actors, gladiators and charioteers when there were poor to be fed? The sexualised, crude atmosphere of the games was particularly disturbing to Christian writers. Tertullian argued that Christians should not go to the theatre, because that was the ‘home of immodesty’ and was completely disreputable.49 He was outraged by the lewd gestures and cross-dressing of popular Roman farces and the appearance of prostitutes on stage. He was astonished that a father who would carefully protect his virgin daughter’s ears from any bad language, would take her to the theatre where people swore freely. Above all, the Christians criticised the games for being inhumane. How horrific, they argued, that a man could be slaughtered for another’s pleasure. Crime was not only committed, but it was taught, with training and enabling men to have the power to murder in the arena. ‘What’, says Cyprian, ‘can be said more inhuman or more repulsive?’50 Those who took pleasure in them risked being ensnared by the devil. Opposition to so central a Roman institution as the games was an important way for the Christians to construct a new form of social identity. In part, this involved the inversion of Roman attitudes towards leisure. John Chrysostom, for example, argued that the games encouraged all kinds of urban violence and disputes: ‘For youth’, he says, ‘when it has joined hands with idleness, and is brought up surrounded by such great evils as the games, becomes fiercer than any wild beast’. He also recounts a story of how some barbarians once heard of the games and the extreme pleasure that the Romans took in them. ‘The Romans must have devised these pleasures’, they said, ‘so they could behave as if they didn’t have wives and children’. It was all, in Christian eyes, just so much juvenile fun – but fun that was violent and had got out of hand. The Romans needed to start behaving like true adults.51 Roman children and youths had been actively involved in defending their traditional forms of leisure against such Christian attack. When Christian zealots were martyred in the arenas of the empire, children in the crowd were in no way shielded from the gruesome events that took place before them. In fact, the young were sometimes in the vanguard of the assault on the Christians. When the martyr Thecla was burned, it was ‘the young men and the virgin girls’ who brought the wood and hay to build the fire.52 Of course, such attacks were not only designed to protect Roman leisure activities. They were aimed at defending the entire Roman way of life from the all-out assault it faced from Christian martyrs. We see this later, during Julian’s brief reign, when the Christian bishop of Arethusa, Mark, had found himself targeted by the local pagans keen to avenge his destruction of their temple. Again, young Romans played an active role in the defence of their traditional culture. The entire people rushed upon Mark, dragged him through the

Child leisure in the Roman empire   109 streets, and people of all ages, both male and female, assaulted him vigorously: ‘His ears were severed by fine ropes; the schoolboys played with him by throwing him up in the air and rolling him over and over, pushing him forward and stabbing him with their styluses’.53 By contrast, when the Christians wrote accounts of these sufferings, it was often made explicit that their texts were written for the benefit of both adults and children within the Christian community.54 Perpetua’s account of her imprisonment uses the case of her own brother, Dinocrates, who had died when only seven from a dreadful facial cancer, as a striking metaphor for the fate that awaited those pagan children. She dreamt she saw him, pale and parched, in a gloomy place of punishment. His face still bore the growth that had killed him. A large cistern of water stood before him but it was too high for him to reach and alleviate his thirst. But what happened next provided an image of the salvation that awaited all of God’s ‘children’. Once Perpetua had been sent for execution, she had another vision in which Dinocrates appeared clean and refreshed. His cancer was gone and the lip of the cistern was now low enough for him to drink from easily, which he did so unceasingly. He then began to play in the water, ‘joyfully in the manner of a child’.55 By the time of Augustine, the image of the child had become firmly entrenched in a Christian thought that had itself become the mainstream in Roman society.56 What was it about the child metaphor that lent itself so well to the later Christian empire? One answer might be that the family image suited a society in which a more all-encompassing form of authority and more penetrating form of government had evolved. It is not surprising that the first emperor Augustus had himself turned to the family image, as pater patriae, to help define the nature of his rule. The metaphor of the emperor as father to his subject ‘children’ helped to spell out the form that social obedience should take, and also justified the threat and use of corrective punishment. Within the context of the later empire, the child–parent image reflected the fact that imperial government had to legitimise its more intense, tough form of rule. The image helped to display imperial power, enforce domination and construct community. It can be seen as articulating the aspirations of the regime: to be at the head of a well-ordered, interconnected and contented society. It also neatly explained the expanded presence of the Roman state to those on the receiving end of it. It probably seemed perfectly natural for the father-cum-emperor to be involved in every aspect of his subject-children’s lives. The family metaphor may also have had greater appeal to the non-elite in late Roman society. The parent–child image reflected the concrete reality of daily life and boiled things down to readily understood personal terms. It enabled the elites of the later empire to forge links with those right down at the basest levels of society in a similar way that giving games had in the early empire. Like true, caring fathers the powerful took an interest in every intimate detail of their ‘children’s’ lives. Images drawn from family life therefore succeeded in expressing the depth of these new bonds to those at both ends of the social chain. To the powerful, the parent–child image emphasised their place at the head of this new Christian society; to the weak, it showed that their lowly status did not mean they had no stake in that world. The image served to reunite the two ends of the

110  Jerry Toner more hierarchical Roman society that had emerged in the aftermath of the thirdcentury crisis. This was not just a simple picture of contented pleasantness. The image expressed an urgent need to show that the new political system worked in concrete ways to the benefit of all members of society. Now everyone had to be a metaphorical child within the wider imperial family, no matter how dependent that made you on the whims of a powerful new master. Childhood had become, not just a time of play, but a time of mutual responsibility. This represented a rhetorical shift. It was a change in the way adults articulated their place in the world which had become dominated by Christianity. The key question for us is whether the shift in Christian rhetoric away from the degeneracy of the games towards the parent–child image as a parallel for the individual’s relationship with God and his agent on earth, the emperor, made any real difference to children’s lived experience. Did a more intense scrutiny on the nature of childhood reduce the range of options regarding personality types that children could choose to adopt? Did the more controlling atmosphere of the late empire mean that their degree of agency decreased? Or, to put this more actively, how did children respond to the dramatic social changes which transformed what it meant to be a child in Roman society? Children reacted to living in a Christian empire by changing the content of their games. Gladiators fell out of fashion, to be finally banned in 404 ce. Even though the charioteers remained steadfastly popular, children adopted other types of competitive play that reflected the world they saw around them. They aped the new ecclesiastical hierarchy. In one example, we find the young Athanasius playing a game with his friends in which he was chosen to be their bishop. While no doubt related to show that his sanctity was apparent even in youth, the story also reveals that children were able to adapt their status-focussed play towards new structures of power.57 Some forms of play were reinvented to imbue them with a Christian purpose. Song, for example, which had long been used in the pagan world as a means of helping to memorise facts and figures, was now used to help children learn the tenets of their new religion.58 Basil argued that when children sang psalms, they were in reality ‘training their souls’. John Chrysostom urged his flock to teach their children to sing, especially while eating together.59 It is easy to see these songs from the adult viewpoint, focussing on their functional benefits to the Christian community. But, as with earlier games, singing had itself to be sufficiently appealing to Christian children to make them want to sing at all. The very focus on song was itself an acceptance that children were unlikely to be greatly enticed by more serious forms of Christian instruction, such as sermons and readings of scripture. Even the Christian interest in exorcism filtered through into the play of children. In the fifth century, Theodoret describes how in one game, ‘a little girl dressed in rags put her friends into stitches of laughter by exorcising them’.60 In the later empire, exorcism had become what Peter Brown calls, ‘the Late Antique drama par excellence’.61 Ever since Jesus had cast out the demon from a possessed boy, Christian holy men had sought to emulate his miraculous act.62 To some extent, we can see exorcism as another metaphor for the role of the

Child leisure in the Roman empire   111 church in the individual’s struggle towards attaining salvation: the Church serving to drive out the external corruptions and temptations that no person on their own would have the strength to resist.63 But exorcism was also about mental disorder. The Christian focus on psychological problems may have reflected the simple fact that, for most people, life in the late Roman empire – children included – had got tougher. Whether it was paying the higher taxes, coping with increased barbarian threats, or dealing with the predations of a significantly enlarged state, the average Roman was under greater levels of stress than had previously been the case. Children had always been subject to various forms of abuse in the Roman empire, be they physical, economic, emotional or sexual. Greater demands on their adult keepers can only be expected to have resulted in children bearing an even greater brunt of adult stress displacement. By trying to cast out demons, Christianity may therefore have recognised some of the anxieties of the common man and tried to alleviate them. In its recognition that children too were frequent exhibitors of mental disorders, perhaps Christianity also understood something of the children’s point of view. Be that as it may, Theodoret’s story shows that Christian children used the licence of leisure to laugh about such pretensions, just as children had always had a reputation for laughing at the insane.64 Children’s play also reflected tensions within the Christian community. Theodoret describes a purification ritual which some boys in Samosata carried out when they were playing ball and Lucius, the head of the city’s Arian faction, passed by: it chanced that the ball was dropped and passed between the feet of an ass. The boys raised an outcry because they thought that their ball was polluted. On perceiving this Lucius told one of his retinue to stop and find out what was going on. The boys lit a fire and tossed the ball through the flames with the idea that by so doing they purified it.65 We can see that the children were adapting certain adult beliefs concerning purity and impurity.66 But the children can also be seen as picking up on the doctrinal struggles that existed in the adult community and applying them to the conditions of their own play. It is hard not to see an element of mockery in the way they purified the ball. Naturally, we need to be alert to the fact that Theodoret knows how to colour his story, portraying Lucius as a man capable of being ridiculed by children. But we still see them laughing at Lucius and his ideas, a man whose heresy was so insane that he deserved to be ridiculed by children as the mad has always been. Leisure had always been a site of conflict. While earlier Christian moralists had condemned the games in the strongest terms, it is clear that many ordinary believers continued to enjoy them, especially the less violent shows in the theatre and the Circus.67 We can see the attacks on the shows by Christian writers as attempts to impose their stern views on the many for whom such entertainments were a routine part of life. It was not obvious to them why the theatre or Circus were such bad things and they remained popular well into the Christian empire, with people continuing to take their children to see them. That many Christian writers saw the

112  Jerry Toner shows as corrupting and time-wasting should alert us to a discrepancy between what we can term ‘official’ views of what constituted a correct upbringing for a child and more common practice.68 Individual Christians still had a choice in how they acted, whatever the moralists said. Jerome, for example, argues that girls and boys should play separately, when it seems to have been normal for them to have played together and often to have shared the same toys.69 As Cornelia Horn and John Martens say, ‘one may readily assume that quite the opposite was typical’.70

Leisure and child resistance As Vuolanto has suggested, the fact that children fulfil expectations incompletely and according to their own temperament means, despite all the social constraints, there is still ‘a place for change and resistance’ in the manner of their socialisation.71 As with the fable of the kid on the roof-top insulting the wolf below, it was not inconceivable in antiquity for the young to express dissent towards their elders and betters.72 Indeed, the fact that parental influence was seen as capable of being negative and spoiling the child made it clear that parents were known to make wrong decisions about their children’s upbringing. Leisure provided a site for such child resistance. It was the relative freedom and spontaneity of leisure time that gave greater leeway for childhood difference and invention than was otherwise possible. Regrettably, the evidence for such resistance is very limited. One interesting example is the emperor Caracalla, who, as a child, broke down in tears when he saw a criminal condemned to the wild beasts in the arena. This was not how a Roman child was meant to react or feel. Executions were meant to reinforce social norms. Even if the point of the story is to reveal that Caracalla gave early warning signs of his later degeneracy, it still shows that alternative reactions to the public executions of the games were conceivable and perhaps even common enough to be recognisable. Or when, aged seven, Caracalla heard of a playmate being severely beaten for mixing with Jews, he refused to look his own father or the boy’s father in the eye for a long time since he held them both responsible.73 Again, the point of the story is not to commend the future emperor for his natural sense of empathy. We might also question how much contact a young member of the imperial family might have with his father, but it does show that some dissent was possible. Whether it had any effect, of course, is another matter. Augustine’s stories of his misspent youth also showed that children did not always do what they were told and it was often in their free time that they seem to have felt most emboldened to do their own thing. The incident of pear-theft also highlights the kind of group pleasure that Augustine and his gang took in their inappropriate leisure. The young Augustine was well aware that his actions were displeasing to his family. He makes it clear that he was able to indulge in his love of play and his passion for the ‘frivolous spectacles’, and was free to dream about imitating the stars of the popular shows, but that, aware of how this would be received at home, he says he ‘lied endlessly’ to cover up his behaviour. The whole point of the theft of pears was simply destructive, since the boys had no desire to eat the fruit. As Augustine says, the fact that it was forbidden ‘pleased us all the more’. This was

Child leisure in the Roman empire   113 the kind of destructive dissent that we can see in disaffected youth today. Leisure, therefore, can be seen as providing Roman children with the same kind of relatively free space in which to challenge the authority that, if we look only at their formal education, can otherwise seem to have been constantly smothering them. Roman children were always on the wrong end of an asymmetric power relationship. But that did not make them passive and supine. The weak always have some means of resisting, however small. Ausonius gives us an interesting fourth-century example of this in practice. Writing to his five- or six-year-old grandson who was about to start school, he reassures him that there will still be periods of leisure: it is a necessary relaxation. It is taken for granted that the boy will be terrified of the teacher. But, Ausonius warns him, ‘never shudder at the teacher’s appearance’. To do so would be a sign of weakness. Instead, he urges the boy to establish his own means of control: ‘once you’ve trained your face to remain impassive, he will never again seem an ogre’.74 The child could in this way refuse to give the teacher the satisfaction or feeling of power that seeing his fear might have generated. But in doing so, the child was also learning another facet of the same hard-faced self-control that the Roman education system was itself trying to foster. Resistance and socialisation could easily go hand-in-hand. In the later empire, children, actual or metaphorical, had become an important means by which Christians came to conceptualise the place of humanity beneath God. But for the children themselves, the advent of Christianity gave new possibilities for them to express themselves in their leisure. Whether it was playing at bishops, singing hymns or acting out the serious business of exorcism, Christian children continued to use leisure to exercise their own choices and create aspects of their own self-image. Play was never simply about passive socialisation into predetermined forms of culture. Leisure continued to offer all children, Christian or pagan, an element of freedom and provided them with the opportunity to push back the boundaries of their own confinement.

Notes 1 For a discussion of the concepts, see Toner 1995: 11–33. 2 See Huizinga 1949 for the classic work on the difficulties in separating play from other activities. For a more recent overview of pre-industrial attitudes towards work, see Lis and Soly 2012. Vanhaegendoren 2007 looks at elite attitudes in Greece towards the division between leisure and work. 3 See Toner 1995: 20–1. That does not, as Ariès 1960 pointed out, mean that play was restricted solely to children. 4 Artemidorus, Oneir. 3.1. 5 Lucian, Somn. 1–4. 6 Digest 7.7.6.1 has children working by five; see Bradley 1991: 115. Laes 2008 provides a comprehensive analysis of the surviving evidence for child slaves at work. Work did not, of course, exclude all possibility of free time. Apprenticeship contracts often decreed that there were to be two or three free days per month; see Laes 2008: 261. 7 CIL VI 9213. 8 Quoted in Wiedemann 1989: 153. 9 See McWilliam 2013 for the various stages of child socialisation.

114  Jerry Toner 10 For an overview and introduction, see Toner 2014. 11 ILS 8626a. 12 For socialisation of children in the Roman world, see Katajala-Peltomaa and Vuolanto 2011; McWilliam 2013. For types of child play, see Laes 2006 and Horn 2005. 13 See Wiedemann 1989: 150 for various examples. 14 See Seneca, de Const. Sap. 12.2 for boys copying senators and magistrates. 15 Martial, Epigr. 14.202. 16 Wiedemann 1989: 151. 17 Galen, De san. tuenda 1.8 (6.38 Kühn). 18 Wiedemann 1989: 152. 19 Minucius Felix, Octavius 3: certatim gestientes. See Horn and Martens 2009: 190–1. 20 Dolansky 2012. 21 John Chrysostom, Hom. in Jo. 81.3 (PG 59.440). 22 See Vuolanto 2013a: 586–7 for the introduction of boys into the public sphere. McWilliam 2013: 269–74 discusses the role of parents in the socialisation of children. 23 Tacitus, Dial. 29.3; Suetonius, Nero 22. 24 Juvenal, Sat. 5.154. 25 Opie and Opie 1959. 26 Digest 9.2.11.pr.; see also 9.2.52.4. 27 See Evans Grubbs 2013: 327. 28 Kurke 1999: 247. 29 See Toner 1995: 95–101. 30 See, for example, Polybius 1.84.7–8; Ovid, Ars 3.355–60. 31 Laes 2006 finds the same educational patterns in the use of fables as a learning tool. Such tales serve to teach the young certain key elements about the social environment in which they live and particular skills which will hold them in good stead as adults. 32 On child agency, see Katajala-Peltomaa and Vuolanto 2011 and Vuolanto in the present volume. 33 Epictetus, Diss. 3.13.18. 34 On the role of parents in socialisation, see McWilliam 2013: 269–74. 35 See Vuolanto 2013a: 286–7. 36 One interesting example of this is the joke in the Philogelos (87) in which an egghead found some gladiator’s armour in the house and began to play with it when he should have been studying. Suddenly his father returns. The boy throws down the shield and takes off the greaves but cannot finish before his father enters, so he grabs a book and starts reading with his helmet still on his head. Clearly the father is taking an active interest in his son’s education and, in a broad sense, is policing it. But he is also called out on public business and so the son is left to carry on his studies on his own. 37 The astrologer Firmicus Maternus describes (4.19.5) those who are plagued by domestic strife and are ‘always at odds with wife and children’. One proverb (Pub. Syr. 8) advises children: ‘Love your father if he is just, if not, tolerate him’. 38 Augustine, Conf. 1.18.30; 2.8.16. 39 See Bakke 2005: 92–4. 40 See Vuolanto 2013a: 593–5 on such actions as a way to strengthen group solidarity. 41 Augustine, Conf. 2.4–10; this quote at 2.8.16. On this episode, see Bakke 2005: 95–7. 42 Vuolanto 2015a. As he notes, the need for accommodation and the power of the family image meant that the new ascetic lifestyle had then to be reconciled with traditional Roman values by embedding familial terminology within ascetic rhetoric; see esp. pp. 75–9. See Horn and Phenix 2009: 289–90 on Christian families encouraging their children to become martyrs. 43 Jerome, Epist. 22.1. 44 See Horn 2005. Leyerle 1997 discusses the ways in which John Chrysostom uses children as tools to think about the failings of adults. 45 Clement of Alexandria, Paed. 1.5.

Child leisure in the Roman empire   115 46 See Leyerle 2013: 559. 47 On the importance of correct upbringing in Christian thought, see Bakke 2005: 152– 222. 48 Augustine, Enarr. in Psalm. 149.6. 49 Tertullian, De spect. 17 and 21. 50 Cyprian, Ad Donatum 7. 51 John Chrysostom, Hom. 37 in Matt. 10:7–9, 9. 52 Acts of Paul and Thecla 3.22. 53 Sozomen, HE 5.10. To some extent, the boys can be seen as giving back the blows they had received at school, but the target of their vengeance is still significant for the anti-pagan Christianity he symbolises. 54 See, for example, the opening to the account of Perpetua’s martyrdom (The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, praef.). 55 Pass. Perpet. et Felic. 2.3–4. 56 On family imagery in Early Christianity, see Vuolanto 2015a, especially chapters 2 and 3. 57 Rufinus HE 10.15; Socrates HE 1.15; Sozomen HE 2.17. See Horn and Martens 2009: 209–11. Katajala-Peltomaa and Vuolanto 2011: 91–2 discusses the importance of peer group, personal participation and imitation in learning in this passage as well as emphasising the role of child agency in linking religion and play. 58 On the use of didactic singing in earlier Roman culture, see Horsfall 2003: 11–19. I would like to thank Harry Morgan for pointing out to me the importance of song in Christian culture. Jerome (Epist. 107.4) also advises the use of play to inculcate religious learning; see Katajala-Peltomaa and Vuolanto 2011: 92. 59 Basil of Caesarea, Hom. in Psalmum 1; John Chrysostom, In Psalmum 41.2. On singing, see Mackey in this volume, p. 190–3. 60 Theodoret, Hist. relig. 9.9.13–16. 61 Brown 1978: 25. 62 Mark 9:14–29. 63 On mental health in the Roman world, see Toner 2009: 54–91. 64 Horace, Ars 455.6; Cicero, Verr. 2.4.148; Petronius, Sat. 92; Artemidorus, Oneir. 1.76. 65 Theodoret, HE 4.13. 66 See Katajala-Peltomaa and Vuolanto 2011: 91. 67 On Christian attitudes towards work and play and on the daily life of Christian children, see Horn and Martens 2009: 166–212, esp. 184 on attitudes to the games. See Vuolanto 2013a: 586–7 for examples of Christian attendance at the games with children. On the conflict between alternative Christian images of the family and traditional views, see Vuolanto 2015a. 68 See Vuolanto 2013a: 587. 69 Jerome, Epist. 128.3a. 70 Horn and Martens 2009: 203. 71 Vuolanto 2013a: 581. 72 Aesop 98. 73 SHA, Caracal. 1.3–7. 74 Ausonius, Epist. 22.

8 Roman girls and boys at play Realities and representations Fanny Dolansky

Introduction In his collection on dream interpretation written in the second century ce, Artemidorus reassures readers that “seeing a child play with dice, knucklebones, or counters is not bad, since it is customary for children to be always playing.”1 Yet even when actual children could not be seen, images of children at play with toys, pets, and peers could easily be seen in domestic décor, commemorative monuments, even on objects of daily use. From Artemidorus’ list, play with knucklebones is particularly well represented. At Vindonissa, a legionary camp in northern Switzerland occupied early in the first century ce, a piece of imported terra sigillata was discovered whose decorative frieze shows girls playing at knucklebones. The lavish tomb of the Haterii in Rome depicts three young children playing with knucklebones (or perhaps nuts) beneath the couch where Haterius’ wife reclines. From Herculaneum, a painting on marble portrays two girls in the midst of a game, identified as daughters of Niobe by the accompanying inscription (see Figure 8.1).2 A passage in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History further illustrates just how common seeing such images was. In his excursus on the history of ancient art, he includes among the masters of Classical and Hellenistic art the fifthcentury sculptor Polyclitus, renowned for his bronze statues of boys and young men such as the Doryphoros (“Spear-bearer”). Less well-known today but not in Antiquity was Polyclitus’ statue of two boys playing at knucklebones known by its Greek name Astragalizontes. Pliny declares “it is generally considered to be the most perfect work of art in existence.”3 He casually adds that the statue stood in the emperor Titus’ atrium, apparently finding it unremarkable that what the leading figure of his day chose to display in the central room of his house was a scene of children at play. Play was a quintessential part of Roman childhood as literary and epigraphic sources reveal and the material record amply confirms in toys such as rattles and dolls, and vivid depictions of games. Yet despite the wide range of evidence attesting to its prominence in the historical record, play has received only limited attention by scholars of Roman childhood whose discussions have primarily concentrated on literary evidence.4 The present study shifts the focus to material culture and seeks to highlight the rich potential of archaeological and art historical

Roman girls and boys at play   117

Figure 8.1 Two of Niobe’s daughters play at knucklebones (Naples Archaeological Museum inv. 9562 © Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY)

evidence to expand our knowledge of play beyond literary accounts which are mainly concerned with freeborn boys, especially the elite, and offer only glimpses of freeborn girls or slave children of either sex at play. More specifically, I am interested in the relationship of material culture to gender and juridical status, and how artifacts, and visual representations of play may have contributed to shaping children’s identities in these regards. Both artifacts and representations of play are products of adult ideas and in some cases ideals, yet children, as their consumers, need not be seen only as passive recipients of the messages they contained. Archaeologists studying children in past societies have asserted the importance of understanding socialization “as a process of negotiation and interpretation between children and adults as well as children and children.”5 My examination situates Roman children’s play within such a construct that recognizes the dynamic nature of socialization and rejects older notions of unidirectionality. As the editors of an influential volume on modern childhood insist, “children are and must be seen as active in the construction of their own lives, the lives of those around them and of the societies in which they live. Children are not just the passive subjects of social structures and processes.”6 I maintain that Roman children should likewise be seen as social actors who could exert some degree of agency while at play. Agency, however, is not an easy concept to define with respect to modern children, as Kylie Valentine has recently shown, owing to its divergent sociological and philosophical traditions, yet it is even more difficult to establish for Roman children. In her critique of current models of agency for childhood studies (by which she seems implicitly

118  Fanny Dolansky to mean modern childhood), Valentine outlines what she considers a “minimal” definition by which children are deemed agents because they “act purposively … they are not only acted upon; and they do not act only according to biological or mechanical programming.”7 Although Valentine finds this model insufficient for assessing children’s agency today and offers a more nuanced model that seems better suited to twenty-first-century contexts, it is this minimal definition of children’s agency that I have in mind when discussing Roman children and play, namely that they had the capacity to act independently and make choices albeit not exclusive of existing social constraints. I begin with an overview of the “realities” of children’s play, surveying objects manufactured as toys that survive from the material record, as well as drawing attention to evidence for children repurposing items as toys which has not previously been included in discussions of children’s play. In an effort to tease out the relationship of toys to socialization and identity formation, I consider at what stage of development toys arguably contributed to the construction of children’s early identities. I present a detailed case study of equestrian figures, a type of toy that is especially productive for assessing gender and status implications, and attempt to understand their socio-cultural significance in children’s hands rather than from the perspective of adult manufacturers or purchasers. I then turn to portrayals of children at play in diverse media and evaluate the messages embodied in these representations, questioning whether play was differentially defined on the basis of gender or status or both, with varying expectations depending on who was at play and perhaps with what or whom. In the final section, I return to the “realities” of play and the complicated issue of children’s agency, looking for traces in the historical record by Roman children themselves of using play as a forum for creative expression and a means of fashioning their own identities. Though this is difficult to find, I propose that the field of historical archaeology may offer some promising direction. This study draws on material evidence from different parts of the Roman empire spanning several centuries. Presumably there were variations in toys and games regionally and chronologically, though how significant these differences were is not clear. Rather than present an argument about change over time or space in the toys children favored or attitudes concerning their perceived functions, I aim to create a general picture of play activities and to fill in some gaps in our knowledge about gender and status in particular that literary sources have left behind.

Artifacts of play Not long after birth, infants were differentiated on the basis of both sex and juridical status through social practices and religious rituals such as naming conventions and the dies lustricus. One might expect the objects they were given to play with to have participated in the process of shaping their early identities, especially in light of Roman preoccupations with gender and status, yet objects manufactured as toys for very young children seem to have contributed little in this regard.8 Most toys for infants and young children – confirmed by the material

Roman girls and boys at play   119 record and literary sources – appear to be gender-neutral and lack any explicit markers of juridical status. Babies’ first toys were ones that made sounds such as crepundia, strings dangling with small toys or charms and worn across the shoulders or around the neck, and rattles which sources recommend for soothing crying or restless infants.9 Several good examples of rattles survive from the Gallic and German provinces in particular. Made from terracotta, silver, or bronze, these were in the form of disks with handles or shaped like animals, both real creatures including pigs and ducks, and imaginary ones such as birds with antlers; their hollow containers were filled with seeds or pebbles to produce sound, and some contained wolves’ teeth or pieces of coral seemingly for apotropaic purposes to protect children from invidia.10 Many surviving examples are small, measuring fewer than 9 cm in length, and likely could have been held by infants themselves.11 Greco-Roman authors also mention a number of items children enjoyed that have left no trace in the archaeological record either because they were made from perishable materials or were objects children had repurposed as toys thus would not necessarily be recognizable as such to archaeologists today. Lucian and Plutarch mention clay and wax for molding shapes, pieces of ice, and little dogs or cows made of dough.12 Minucius Felix describes boys picking up testae (shells or potsherds) smoothed by waves and skipping them along the water to see whose would travel farthest. Pottery shards from broken tableware and roof tiles seem to have been common and accessible to children. Commenting on how children, in contrast to adults, create their own diversions when left alone rather than act helpless or forlorn, Epictetus notes how they “gather up sherds (ostrakia) and dust and build something or other, then tear it down and build something else again; and so they are never at a loss as to how to spend their time.”13 Many of the toys that have been recovered could have been popular with children of various ages and both sexes, as well as different juridical and socioeconomic backgrounds. These include terracotta animal-shaped whistles, and small bronze, iron, and silver bells, some attached to a chain perhaps to be worn like crepundia.14 Wooden yo-yos and spinning tops, marbles, dice, knucklebones, and balls made from leather, textiles, or other organic materials could easily have been the playthings of boys and girls alike, even though literary sources tend to associate these almost exclusively with boys.15 However, art historical evidence affirms that girls played with some of the same toys as boys. Several terracotta figurines dating from the late third and first centuries bce represent solitary girls tossing balls, while a relief from a fragmentary second-century ce sarcophagus now in the Louvre depicts three girls engaged in a ball game, possibly reflecting one doctor’s recommendation that girls play ball games for exercise (see Figure 8.2).16 In statues and paintings, girls are similarly portrayed individually or with peers playing at knucklebones, as noted above. While few toys appear to communicate overt messages about gender and only offer insights into possible status differentiation by virtue of their material value, two types – dolls and equestrian figures – may provide more profitable case studies for how artifacts of play could function as mediators of gender and status as well. For both toys, we need to be cautious to avoid modern assumptions about children

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Figure 8.2  Second-century ce sarcophagus showing boys at play with nuts and girls with balls (Louvre Museum, Louvre Ma 99. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

and play unduly influencing our interpretation of the ancient evidence, especially with respect to gender. Just as today some girls play with toy trucks and boys with dolls, so too might children in Antiquity have enjoyed toys adults intended for others; furthermore, toy preferences also change depending on age and whether play is solitary or with others. Of the two groups of toys, dolls perhaps seem the most obvious example of how a toy could participate in the process of shaping identity. Here I offer some summary remarks from my earlier research on dolls before concentrating on the equestrian figures which have received less attention to date.17 My study of Roman dolls focused on a sample of ivory, bone, and cloth dolls found in several provinces and dating to the first four centuries ce. Overall, the dolls appear as miniature, upper-class matronae: adult female figures with molded breasts, swelling hips, and in some cases delineated genitalia, bearing ornate hairstyles, and jewelry. Many have jointed limbs which could have enabled posing but also dynamic movement, and a number resemble members of the imperial family in the second and third centuries ce such as Faustina the Elder and Younger. Scholars have traditionally regarded these as relatively straightforward objects that encouraged girls to contemplate futures as wives and mothers and engage in roleplaying to that effect.18 Yet three features which likely made them appealing to girls – the emphasis on adornment; their capacity for movement; and the use of imperial models – arguably also rendered them rather complex. Male attitudes concerning women’s adornment were ambiguous, and stereotypes about women and passivity persisted. Moreover, the dolls that resembled leading imperial women also to some extent communicated the ideologies associated with them about gender and hierarchy. Far from being straightforward, I suggest the dolls embodied conflicting expectations for girls about womanhood and femininity. To understand better how Roman girls might have interacted with dolls and responded to the messages they contained, I drew upon research by sociologists and developmental psychologists on contemporary girls’ play particularly with the fashion doll Barbie. Though some scholars perceive a predominantly negative outcome from girls’ interactions with Barbie, researchers conducting ethnographic studies with former Barbie players and those observing girls’ play with dolls reveal

Roman girls and boys at play   121 the importance of imagination in children’s play and its empowering effect as girls adopted a host of personae for their dolls and enacted scenarios that reflected their creativity and aspirations.19 In the course of play with dolls and other toys, children rely on their imaginations and assign roles and meanings to toys that may differ from those manufacturers appear to have intended; in doing so, they exhibit a considerable degree of agency. Although these modern insights cannot be applied directly or decisively to the ancient evidence, they can nevertheless be taken as suggestive of what might have occurred in earlier times when children used their imaginations as powerful and potentially transformative forces while at play. Once situated in their appropriate ideological milieu and divorced from modern assumptions about gender and status, the equestrian figures similarly emerge as complex artifacts of play. Several figures riding horses and rider-less horses have been found in Egypt, the Gallic, and German provinces. The Egyptian riders, carved from wood, are late Roman, or Coptic in date. One figure from Antinoöpolis sits on a horse that seems originally to have had wheels. Another stands between two horses that move on wheels like a chariot (see Figure 8.3); traces of red paint may reflect the particular preference of this toy’s young owner as teams racing chariots in the Circus Maximus at Rome and smaller provincial venues were known by their distinguishing colors of white, red, blue, and green.20 The rider and driver both have short hair, but no features that conclusively indicate their sex. A horse pull-toy of a similar era found at Karanis and now in the Kelsey Museum of the University of Michigan has a saddle and harness painted on its body but no rider.21 A terracotta rider and several terracotta horses from the northern provinces, most dating to the second or third centuries ce, further point to the popularity of equine toys.22 A solo rider found in Cologne appears to be male and is seated on a wheeled-horse whose muzzle is pierced, perhaps to hold a

Figure 8.3  Late Roman or Coptic rider standing between two horses (Louvre Museum, Louvre E27134. © RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY)

122  Fanny Dolansky string for pulling the toy along. A similar figure from Vichy has neither rider nor legs or wheels, but holes on either end of its torso strongly suggest it resembled the Cologne rider’s wheeled-horse. In Greco-Roman literature, freeborn, and particularly upper-class boys are readily associated with horses. Horace, for example, envisions boys riding on reeds as pretend horses, and he laments the ingenuus puer who does not know how to stay on his horse yet is skilled at games with hoops and dice.23 From references such as these, combined with the riders’ short hair which initially invites identification as male, one could reasonably propose that the horses with and without riders were boys’ toys that conveyed messages about masculine pursuits. Several considerations call this into question, however, beginning with the riders’ appearance. The riders’ short hair does not necessarily mean these figures must represent males or that girls would not have been able to identify with them. Some girls wore their hair short or cropped as sarcophagi and funerary monuments reflect such as the Villa Doria Pamphili monument from Rome, and one unusual epitaph for five-year-old Geminia Agathe Mater further attests, claiming, “I had a docile temperament, a pretty appearance which evoked respect, red hair let down at the back with my head cropped.”24 Female figures riding and driving horses must have also been fairly common sights. Galen recommends children learn to ride at the age of seven (without specifying boys alone), and affluent Romans of both sexes traveled on horseback. Images of divine and mythological women riding horses such as Diana, Epona, Dido, and Amazons, and others driving chariots, including Aurora, and Victoria, were ubiquitous, appearing on lamps, mosaics, sarcophagi, jewelry, and coins.25 Moreover, an equestrian statue of the maiden Cloelia conspicuously stood on the Via Sacra in Rome.26 Although mortal men typically drove chariots, Artemidorus suggests that women may have too, asserting that “it is good for women and maidens who are both free and rich to drive a chariot through a city” as it signifies they will obtain respected priesthoods, but poor women who dream of riding through the city on horseback foretell their own prostitution.27 Women also attended horse races at the Circus and in amphitheaters, and though there is more direct evidence for boys at these events, Augustus’ regulation that young people of both sexes have a chaperon for certain night performances intimates that girls were sometimes in attendance.28 These factors linking girls and women with horses and horse racing should, therefore, prompt us to consider a wider range of possible associations for equine toys which could have been boys’ and girls’ playthings and not limited to communicating messages only about males and masculinity.29 Yet to appreciate the toys’ significance more fully, status-related concerns also need to be taken into account. Thomas Wiedemann prefaced his discussion of horses and children’s play with the statement that “[h]orse riding, as always, was a sign of social superiority.” Artemidorus insists visions of riding on horseback through a city signified freedom, for this practice “is the prerogative of the free.” Certainly horses were the possessions of those with means and predominantly of freeborn status, but play with toys, or imaginary horses surely was not the exclusive privilege of the wealthy or the free.30 I see no reason why we cannot

Roman girls and boys at play   123 envision children of both sexes and all social strata enjoying equestrian toys if given the opportunity. For children from affluent families who could afford not only toy horses but real ones as well, these toys could mirror lived experiences and prospective ones particular to their social milieu. Yet, as research on, and observation of, contemporary children amply demonstrate, imagination is a potent force that can result in a considerable degree of agency as children ascribe roles and meanings to toys and use them in ways that differ from those adults intended. Thus, through play, elite children could have engaged with an entirely different future from what most likely awaited them, enjoying non-elite pursuits by playing at charioteers or soldiers instead of senators.31 And, surely play could have granted poor freeborn and slave children similar license such that in their hands, an equestrian figure could assume any role they desired rather than those limited to their station.

Images of play My discussion of toys as “realities” of children’s play, and the case study of equestrian figures in particular, has involved a degree of speculation about how children interacted with these objects based in part on comparative evidence for contemporary children’s play. It takes for granted that while at play, Roman children were actors within their own self-defined worlds, using creativity and imagination to engage with their toys and the ideas embedded in them concerning gender and status by the adults who commissioned or manufactured them. In turning to representations of children at play on funerary monuments and comprising statuary, we are dealing solidly with adult ideas about what children’s play involved – or perhaps should have involved. Images tell us something about the content of play in the form of games and interactions with pets and peers, yet they tell us more about adult perceptions and expectations of these activities. While I focus on eliciting such messages, I think it is important to keep in mind that fundamentally, these images reflect an abiding interest in children and recognition of, if not appreciation for, their attributes and antics within the context of play. Some scholars of Roman childhood have emphasized that play was preparatory for adulthood and an activity literary sources found useful for highlighting negative character traits associated with children such as impulsiveness and greed.32 Yet the majority of visual images capture a less serious dimension to children’s play and instead seem to celebrate the joy and sense of abandon that often epitomizes this quintessential childhood activity and facet of children’s culture. The variety and ubiquity of images of children at play strongly suggest that, other intentions notwithstanding, adults must have taken considerable pleasure in seeing children represented at leisure, doing the very things deemed characteristic of their age.33 While children’s play was represented in various media, some more profitable representations for exploring issues related to gender and status come from commemorative monuments. As with other images of children at play, those that adorned memorials belong to the everyday rather than a separate “funerary realm” visited only occasionally. Romans routinely passed by individual monuments and

124  Fanny Dolansky through necropoleis on their travels within cities and beyond, and frequented tombs for festivals and commemorative rituals, as well as other purposes.34 Tombs were integrated into the landscape and peoples’ lived experiences, thus, these images garnered regular audiences of both adults and children. A small but rich sample of scenes depicting children at play can be found in Janet Huskinson’s study of children’s sarcophagi from Rome and Ostia, which date to the first four centuries ce. Among these, seven represent small groups involved in games.35 Sarcophagi are the only medium where extended scenes of children’s games occur either with groups of one sex or both; moreover, because these compositions sometimes include boys and girls (though not playing together), they are particularly suited to a gendered analysis attuned to the depiction – and perhaps prescription – of different styles of play.36 The five sarcophagi in Huskinson’s catalog that feature same-sex groups all portray young boys playing games with nuts, though one (no. 1.35) also includes other activities such as games with hoops and leapfrog. These compositions are lively and dynamic: the figures interact with one another and their playthings, sometimes in a rather animated fashion. A mid-third century ce sarcophagus from Ostia now in the British Museum illustrates this well, as does an earlier, similar memorial in Vienna (no. 1.42). In the lower register of the left-hand portion of the latter, two boys sit on the ground with a pile of nuts between them. Three boys stand behind them, one covering his mouth as though stifling a giggle or whispering. To their immediate right, two boys are engaged in a struggle: one grabs the ear or hair of the other who tries to pull his hands away. Toward the center, another boy crouches to throw a nut while the boys behind him and to his right talk and gesture to one another.37 On the two sarcophagi that show groups of boys and girls in the same composition, the energetic quality of the boys’ activities is likewise apparent, especially when contrasted with the girls’ rather sedate play. In the left portion of the scene on a sarcophagus in the Louvre mentioned above (Figure 8.2), four boys are at play with nuts. One urges another to toss a nut down a sloped plane; to their right, a boy stands with his right arm extended in the air perhaps responding to the action, while another crouches on the ground collecting or arranging the nuts. In the right portion of the tableau, three girls who appear to be the boys’ coevals stand in a line before a wall. The girl closest to the wall tosses a ball against it; the girl directly behind her starts to raise her arm perhaps to catch it, while the third holds a ball in her hands. Unlike the boys who engage with one another, there is no clear indication that the girls are interacting and their half of the scene has a static quality to it. The second mixed-sex composition, dated to the late third century and in the Vatican Museums (Chiaramonti), is much more detailed (see Figure 8.4). Five girls are pictured in the left third of the panel. Two seated girls, one on a cushion, or low stool, appear to be playing a game with nuts. One girl standing behind them reaches her hand toward the girl seated on the cushion, but since her gaze lies elsewhere it is difficult to determine whether her gesture signals participation in the game; the other two girls look on. The central and right-hand sections of

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Figure 8.4  Late third-century ce sarcophagus depicting girls on the left and boys in the center and right playing games with nuts (Museo Chiaramonti, Vatican, inv. 1304. © Vanni Archive / Art Resource, NY)

the panel are filled with boys somewhat younger than the girls and shown in a variety of poses and activities: one pulls the hair of another who in turn grasps his offender’s forearm; to their right, a boy leans forward to toss a nut as several others look on intently. In these tableaux, the differences in styles of play and displays of emotion between the boys and girls are striking, features that surprisingly have not garnered much attention.38 The girls on the Louvre sarcophagus stand in an orderly line, dressed modestly in long tunics that are neatly arranged, as is their hair.39 On the Vatican sarcophagus, the girls are similarly styled and behave comparably: they appear to play quietly and cooperatively, the expressions on their faces placid. In contrast, the boys are engrossed in their games, even to the extent that physical contact and disarray ensue. The Vatican sarcophagus illustrates this well: as the boy in the center pulls his playmate’s hair, his own tunic slips off one shoulder to expose part of his upper body; another boy places his hand on the chest of the boy beside him as though to restrain him, again suggesting the intensity of their interactions. Annika Backe-Dahmen attributes the boys’ stances and gestures to their excitement over the score but does not offer an explanation why the girls, who are involved in a game of their own, play in such a “well-mannered” fashion.40 The portrayal of both sexes, especially their demeanor, and level of physicality in the midst of play, is consistent with representations in other media. Terracotta and marble figures of solitary girls tossing balls in the air or at play with knucklebones appear contemplative and serene, as a second-century ce marble sculpture, now in Berlin, exemplifies (see Figure 8.5).41 When playing with partners, girls sit composed, directing their gazes at the game before them as is evident in a marble painting from Herculaneum treated above (Figure 8.1) or the decorative frieze on a cup from Vindonissa. Depictions on funerary stelai of girls’ interactions with animals, perhaps but not necessarily pets, often appear tentative, or reserved. When they hold cats, dogs, or birds in their arms or laps, there is minimal actual engagement with the

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Figure 8.5  Second-century ce marble sculpture of a young girl playing knucklebones (© Bpk, Berlin / Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen, Berlin Sk 494/Johannes Laurentius/ Art Resource, NY)

animals, and in some cases none at all, such as on a monument for ten-year-old Avita who remains absorbed in her reading despite the approach of a canine companion (see Figure 8.6). Boys, on the other hand, are generally shown at ease with animals, as a relief from Orolaunum (Arlon) illustrates (see Figure 8.7). Sometimes they display discernible tenderness and affection when petting or feeding dogs, though on occasion they also appear lacking sensitivity as a well-known sculpture type of a young boy wrestling (or strangling?) a goose demonstrates.42 Boys’ physical play with animals and peers has additional parallels worth noting. A fragmentary marble sculpture, possibly of first-century bce date, now in the British Museum, preserves two boys fighting over a game of knucklebones and the moment when one has bitten the limb of his now missing opponent (see Figure 8.8). A similar theme is explored in a marble sculpture perhaps from the second century ce in Vienne, France. Two young boys, nude, squabble over a bird the boy on the right has in one hand; his companion grabs hold of his other arm with both of his hands and bites him.43 The tendency to portray girls “playing nicely” and boys “rough-and-tumble” may reflect children’s actual play styles to some extent or at least some children’s play, but it is hard to overlook the fact that such representations neatly align with established stereotypes that associate the female sex with passivity and the male with activity. I suggest that what the images of girls and boys on sarcophagi and in other media present to viewers is not so much the embodiment of prevailing stereotypes, but rather the elevation, and subsequent promotion of such ideas to the status of ideals. The same sort of ideals dominated representations of adult women and men, as Taylor has argued in his study of mirrors and representation in Roman

Figure 8.6  First-century ce marble tombstone for Avita (British Museum 1805.0703.187 © The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY)

Figure 8.7  Mid-first-century bce to late first-century ce funerary relief from Orolaunum (Arlon) showing boys with a dog, now in Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Met inv. E4097 (© Scala/Art Resource, NY)

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Figure 8.8  First-century bce (?) fragmentary marble sculpture of a boy biting the limb of his now missing opponent during a game of knucklebones (British Museum GR 1805.7– 3.7 © The Trustees of the British Museum/Art Resource, NY)

art: “[t]he ideal Roman woman was reflected being; the ideal Roman man… doing.”44 The cultivation of these ideals appears to have begun early through the crafting of images that could be read as indicators of how children ought to play and perhaps how they ought to comport themselves beyond play as well. One additional point regarding gender and stereotypes merits discussion. Scholars have noted how Greco-Roman authors use the theme of children at play to highlight perceived deficiencies, especially moral, and intellectual, and the consequent need for socialization and training for adulthood.45 Huskinson (1996: 89) contends that the sarcophagi scenes corroborate these views and show how “left to their own devices children will display symptoms of infirmitas, such as petulance, fear, vulnerability, unreason, subversiveness,” as is evident in “the[ir] uncontrolled emotions and free movements” while at play. Yet it is not children as a group but principally boys who are shown exhibiting these negative traits, particularly through their physical play, which is likewise the case in other media. This reminds us of the need to differentiate as much as possible, and to resist the tendency to speak of “children” as a homogenous group without distinctions based on sex, status, and other defining characteristics. Literary sources often do not allow us to distinguish boys from girls because mixed-sex groups become masculine by default, but visual sources can offer valuable opportunities to consider how attitudes regarding gender, and occasionally status, as key aspects of identity, may have shaped – and been shaped by – representations of children at play.46 The sarcophagi scenes, however, pose considerable challenges for discerning status differences among children of the same sex, whether juridical, or socioeconomic, especially in the representations of boys, as individuation is almost

Roman girls and boys at play   129 impossible due to the repetition within a tableau of nearly identical figures in terms of physiognomy and attire.47 Jason Mander indicates that this renders scenes somewhat artificial: “if [these compositions] are supposed to represent children from a common domus enjoying a moment of play (whether they be siblings or a mix of ingenui, libertini and servi), one might expect some form of differentiation in terms of size and physiognomy. Instead, they are almost always identical.”48 Two second-century ce sarcophagi discussed above are examples of this phenomenon: though several different activities are portrayed, it is as if the same boy is participating in each of them.49 Where art historical evidence is helpful for shedding further light on the relationship between play and juridical status is in memorials for young slaves that depict them with toys, birds, and dogs.50 Several examples are included in Mander’s recent study of children’s funerary portraits which provides valuable evidence for a subject that has largely been elusive to date.51 The evidence, however, remains limited both because the examples are few and not all definitively denote an association with play which is especially the case for portraits with birds and small animals. The two memorials for slave girls, both from Rome, present this interpretive challenge. The first (no. 92), a marble stele dated to the late first to second-century ce, was erected for Aucta, nearly five years old, by her mistress, and portrays a girl holding a large bird in her hands. A marble stele (no. 136) for Spes, who died before her third birthday, similarly depicts a girl holding a bird. In each case, the bird may symbolize a pet, but birds were also used in funerary imagery to connote qualities such as innocence and tenderness, and perhaps to represent the souls of the deceased.52 The five monuments for slave boys forge a stronger link between servile status and play. A limestone cippus (no. 186) found in Fermo (Firmum Picenum) portrays a seated boy who appears considerably older than 20-month-old Ursio identified in the inscription. The boy places his hands on a small dog which seems to lay its head on the boy’s leg, a touching gesture that suggests a close bond. A cippus (no. 370) found near Trier likewise commemorates a young slave, Primulus, who is shown seated reaching toward a dog and a large bowl; a fruit basket and toy wheel are pictured behind him (see Figure 8.9).53 Two examples of ten-year-old boys again intimate a connection with play either through the depiction of a toy or an animal that seems to be a playmate. A first-century ce stele (no. 225) from Verona contains a portrait of a boy, Facundus, holding a ball in his left hand. From Noviomagus Nemetum in Germania Superior (no. 460), a stele of Tiberian date commemorates the slave Peregrinus with a portrait of a boy holding a bird in his left hand and either a stick or whip in his right; a small dog wearing a collar looks up at him expectantly. Noting the exceptional nature of these memorials and the fact that many young slaves died without any commemoration, Mander (2012a: 52) comments that “the way in which the lucky few slave children seen here are visualized – with dress beyond their status and a multitude of playthings and animal companions – is extremely interesting.” However, no child is represented with “a multitude” of toys or pets; most are shown with a single object or animal presumably symbolizing its special value for the deceased and, in turn, his, or her special

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Figure 8.9  Cippus of Primulus, a slave, with a dog, and a toy wheel, now in Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Trier, inv. G. 37 theta (photo: Thomas Zühmer)

value to commemorators. The inscriptions that accompany some images may offer further useful insights as they point to close, even effective, relationships between the deceased, and commemorators. Aucta is described by her mistress as verna dulcissima, while the trio who made a memorial for Spes identify her as their delicata. The cippus for Primulus was erected by his parents who specify the little boy was their slave son (filio servo). The toys or animals depicted on these monuments may be intended to symbolize benevolence and generosity on the part of masters in allowing slaves access to pets and toys, or in the case of parental commemorators, to reflect their devotion by providing amusement to their children despite limited means. Although these representations leave a number of questions unanswered, they nonetheless add valuable pieces to the expanding picture of children’s play.

Agency, play, and the archaeological record In Lucian’s autobiographical sketch The Dream, a work roughly contemporaneous with Artemidorus with whom I began, Lucian reflects on his career as a rhetorician and the defining moment that led him on that path. His father had apprenticed him as a teenager to an uncle who was a stonemason and sculptor, a plan that failed miserably: He was thinking of how I’d played with wax when I was a child. The moment I was let out of school, I used to scrape all the wax off my writing-tablet, and model it into the shape of a cow or a horse or even a human being – and according to my father the results were quite lifelike. I was always getting

Roman girls and boys at play   131 into trouble with the teachers about it, but now it was taken as a sign of natural genius, and these early experiments of mine in the plastic arts encouraged everyone to believe that I’d soon learn the technique of sculpture.54 This reminiscence is a tantalizing piece of evidence, a rare testimony of children quite literally fashioning their own play and perhaps the closest we can get to a Roman child reflecting on his or her experience, even though in the end it obviously does not constitute evidence from a child per se.55 Similar traces in the material record are hard to find but perhaps not impossible with the help of other methodologies and the field of historical archaeology specifically. Several important studies concerning the ‘archaeology of children’ have appeared in the last 15 years which raise a number of salient issues and attempt to recover children’s agency.56 Among these, I have found Laurie Wilkie’s research especially useful for thinking about how the material record can be a productive source for children’s agency when contextualized using documentary records, an approach that has potential for Roman contexts, as one preliminary examination has already shown. Wilkie’s study of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century domestic sites in the United States combines material evidence with documentary and oral historical sources to investigate gender, race, and childhood experience. Her findings from a single-family home in Santa Monica, California, inhabited in the 1920s by Ernest and Katie Cordes and their daughters Irene and Margaret, provide an intriguing instance of play as a forum for children’s self-expression and agency. Among the materials removed from the dwelling’s garbage pit (in use 1920–1922) were the heads of several porcelain and bisque dolls. Wilkie attributes these to Irene who would have been between five and seven at the time of deposition and the Cordes’ only child in the first year or more of the pit’s use. The doll heads were highly fragmented, as though violently, and intentionally broken; this observation, combined with the number of dolls deposited in a relatively short time, led Wilkie to question why Irene might have been systematically destroying very expensive toys. Rather than explaining the behavior as a sign of rebellion against gender stereotypes, Wilkie turned to historical records for the family to lend insights into the condition of the material remains. She proposed that Irene’s destruction of her dolls might have been a response to stressful changes in her status by becoming an older sister in 1921 after several years as an only child. Wilkie insists that Irene’s behavior, as inferred from the archaeological remains, “underscores that children…could use material culture to assert both their opinions and sense of individuality,” and urges scholars to pay closer attention to the ways children used toys as a means of social dialog. Employing documentary sources to help interpret material remains seems especially promising for Roman contexts for which both types of evidence exist such as at the Egyptian site of Karanis. Peter van Minnen amply demonstrates the potential integrating papyrus records with archaeological data holds for repopulating Karanis’ houses and reconstructing aspects of their inhabitants’ lives, including children at play. He advocates what he calls a house-by-house or family-by-family approach by which the papyri associated with a specific house, which are often informative about the composition and activities of the family that

132  Fanny Dolansky occupied it, are integrated with its archaeological finds. He stresses (1994: 233) that such an approach goes a long way to correct the age bias in archaeological studies. Unlike adults – predominantly males – children can rarely be documented as agents in the archaeological record except in cemeteries. In Karanis, the situation is entirely different. No cemeteries were excavated, but in almost all the houses various toys and dolls were unearthed… With the aid of papyri found in a particular house we are in a position to identify the children that once played with the toys and dolls found in the same house. He provides a case study of a house owned by a man named Socrates. Several rooms contained children’s playthings, both fragmentary and intact, including a wooden spinning top, wheels for toys and pegs to attach them, and a potsherd with a drawing believed to be a child’s. He plausibly assumes these belonged to Socrates’ children when they were little and still living in the house: twin sons who were adults by the time the house was abandoned, and a daughter who moved out after marriage. He suspects that toys were much more common in other houses in Karanis where papyri documents may be able to attribute ownership to otherwise anonymous playthings and some degree of children’s agency may be recovered in a manner similar to Wilkie has shown. The evidence from Karanis presents many challenges, but may yield significant rewards with further study as van Minnen urged over two decades ago.57

Conclusions My aim has been to highlight the potential of material culture to enhance our knowledge of children’s play and to assess the visual evidence for ways artifacts and representations of play contributed to shaping children’s identities with respect to gender and status. Most toys from the archaeological record appear to be genderneutral and lack explicit markers of juridical status which suggests their role in identity formation was limited. Dolls and equestrian figures are exceptions, both gendered toys with definite status connotations. Though some maintain these were simple or straight-forward toys, I contend they were multivalent objects instead that could assume many roles and functions under the powerful influence of children’s imaginations, including some that differed from what adults may have intended. In their use of toys and games, children were arguably social actors, but representations of children’s play decidedly concern adult ideas and expectations in the main. Close study of scenes of girls’ and boys’ games on sarcophagi reveals important perceived differences in styles of play on the basis of gender: girls play quietly and cooperatively while boys play physically and competitively. Images on funerary stelai and freestanding sculpture of children playing with animals or peers likewise reflect these distinctions. Set within a wider ideological context, these images can be read as prescriptive, communicating to children how each sex ought to behave while at play. Yet such intentions notwithstanding, we should not lose

Roman girls and boys at play   133 sight of the essential significance of the variety and ubiquity of visual representations of children’s play. The prevalence of such images reflects an abiding interest in children and suggests adults took considerable pleasure seeing them engaged in the activities and antics thought to be characteristic of their stage in life.

Acknowledgments In addition to the helpful suggestions from participants in the Oslo workshop and the volume’s editors, this chapter has benefited from the critique and encouragement of Keith Bradley who first introduced me to the study of Roman children and childhood as an M.A. student and has done much to foster both the field and my contributions to it since. Mark Golden, whose work on Greek children and childhood has likewise been pioneering, offered astute observations, and valuable supplements to the bibliography at a later stage. I am also grateful to the Humanities Research Institute at Brock University for a grant that supported this research and the reproduction costs in particular.

Notes 1 Artemidorus, Oneir. 3.1. Translations of Artemidorus are from Robert White (1975); for his value as a source on Roman childhood, see Bradley 2001. 2 Vindonissa: Curle 1917: 134; Coulon 2004: 83. For a recent discussion of the imagery on the tomb of the Haterii, see Mayer 2012: 133–4. 3 Pliny the Elder, NH 34.19.55. See Beschi 1978 for the influence of Polyclitus’ statue. 4 Rawson 2003a and Laes 2011a contain only brief sections on play, though Laes and Strubbe 2006 (which I have not seen) has a chapter devoted to the subject. The earlier studies of Néraudau 1984 and Wiedemann 1989 include more substantial and informative discussions based predominantly on literary sources (for which Herter 1927 and 1961 remains useful); both, however, predate the publication of several valuable works that collect material evidence for toys and play, namely Jouer dans l’antiquité 1991, Shumka 1993, Huskinson 1996, and Mander 2012a. See also Väterlein 1976. In addition, Willemsen 2003 includes both images and helpful reconstructions of some items not in other studies. 5 Schwartzman 2005: 125. See also Vuolanto in this volume. 6 James and Prout 1997: 8. As James 2009: 34 notes in her survey of social science approaches to children and agency, the shift to viewing children as social actors dates from the 1970s. Useful discussions can also be found in James, Jenks, and Prout 1998; James and James 2004; and Baxter 2005a. The concerns of Sobo 2015: 64 about ‘fetishizing agency’ are also worth heeding. 7 Valentine 2011: 349. See also Vuolanto in this volume. 8 The apparent lack of gender coding in infant toys is striking from a modern western perspective in which gender coding is prevalent almost immediately after birth in toys, clothing, and décor which follow traditionally gendered color and decorative schemes (e.g., Pomerleau, Bolduc, Malcuit and Cossette 1990; Buckley 1996; Hendershot 1996: 90). 9 In Roman comedies, crepundia are the tokens used by parents to identify and be reunited with long-lost children (e.g., Plautus, Cist. 635, Rud. 1081; Cicero, Brut. 313; Jerome, Epist. 128.5). For rattles, see Martial, Epigr. 14.54, Plutarch, Mor. 714e, Jouer dans l’antiquité 1991: 50–3, nos. 1–7, and Bradley 1994b: 149 with references to nurses using them.

134  Fanny Dolansky 10 Jouer dans l’antiquité 1991: 52. For children and invidia, see Persius, Sat. 2.31–34; Plutarch, Mor. 682b; Macrobius, Sat. 1.6.7. The use of animal-shaped toys is significant for its connections with pet keeping which seems to have been conventional in the central era (Bradley 1998), and for the importance of animals as children’s companions and playmates which is well represented in funerary art especially (see below). 11 At Karanis in Egypt, three rattles made from woven palm fiber were found; one contained glass sherds to produce sound. Johnson 2007: 98 suggests a young child could have manipulated these relatively easily because they are small and light. 12 Ps-Lucian, Halc. 4 and Lucian, Somn. 2; Plutarch, Mor. 508c–d; Plutarch, Mor. 673e. 13 Minucius Felix, Oct. 3.5–6; Epictetus, Disc. 3.13.18. 14 Whistles and bells: Jouer dans l’antiquité 1991: 52–53, nos. 8–10. 15 For example, Virgil, Aen. 7.378–383, Tibullus, El. 1.5.3–4, Persius, Sat. 3.51 (spinning tops); Martial, Epigr. 14.47, Plutarch, Cic. 17.2–3 (balls); Seneca, Const. 12.2, Suetonius, Aug. 83 (dice, knucklebones, marbles, and nuts). 16 On ball games, see Jouer dans l’antiquité 1991: 92–9 and nos. 116–119 for figurines. Recommendation: Rufus of Ephesus (Regimen for Girls) ap. Orib. Coll. Med. lib. inc. 18.11–15. Néraudau’s (1984: 300) suggestion that girls played ball games so long as they were not “too violent” seems to be merely speculation. 17 Dolansky 2012; see also Harlow 2013. Gourevitch 2011b appeared too late for inclusion in my 2012 study; we address similar concerns, though do not draw on entirely the same sample of evidence and reach different conclusions regarding the significance of the dolls’ physical attributes. 18 Although boys may have also played with dolls, as Elderkin 1930: 455 and Shumka 1993: 170–1 have proposed, neither literary nor material evidence connects them with dolls of either sex; literary evidence associating girls with dolls and archaeological evidence for dolls in several girls’ burials suggest girls were their primary ‘consumers’. 19 Attfield 1996. 20 For riders with or without horses, see Jouer dans l’antiquité 1991: 88–91, no. 57. Cf. Juvenal, Sat. 5.143-144 and Suetonius, Nero 22.1 for children’s support of certain teams. 21 KM 7692 (in Johnson 2007: 89 with figure 5.4 on 91). 22 Jouer dans l’antiquité 1991: nos. 76–9. Cf. Rahmani 1981: 72–4 for sixth to seventhcentury ce clay horse figurines from Israel that were children’s pull-toys. 23 Horace, Sat. 2.3.248 and Carm. 3.254–58. Cf. Valerius Maximus, Facta et dicta memor. 8.8 ext. 1 for an anecdote about Socrates using a reed as a pretend horse while playing with his children, and see Bradley 1998: 524 and 526 for additional sources linking upper-class boys and youth with horses. 24 Huskinson 1996: 88; George 2001: 181 with plate 11.2; CIL VI 19007 (Translation: Courtney 1995: 167, no. 179). 25 Galen, De san. tuend. 1.8 (6.38 Kühn). Travel on horseback: Anderson 1996: 728. Epona, a goddess associated with horses and mules, was worshipped throughout the empire. Though better known from material remains, both pagan and Christian sources mention her cult (e.g., Juvenal 8.157, Apuleius, met. 3.27.1–2, Tertullian, apol. 16.5). Winkle 2014 provides a recent discussion of Epona and similarities to Isis, including iconography of the two goddesses individually and in a syncretized form as Isis-Epona from wall paintings in Pompeian lararia. Three representations of Dido hunting with Aeneas are known (based on Virgil, Aen. 4.129–159): a mosaic from a villa in Arcadia belonging to the second-century ce sophist Herodes Atticus; an Antonine sarcophagus from Rome for a seven-year-old girl; and a fourth-century mosaic from a villa in the town of Low Ham in Somerset, England. On these images, see Anderson 2006: 157–9. Junkelmann 1990: 224–45 surveys valuable numismatic and material evidence for many goddesses associated with horses and chariots. 26 Sources on Cloelia’s statue include: Livy 2.13.11, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 5.35.2, and Pliny the Elder, NH 34.28–29. Plutarch (QR 83 = Mor. 284a) reports

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27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41

a story that seems to have been widely known of the maiden Helvia who was struck from her horse by lightning which led to an investigation of the Vestal Virgins in 114 bce. Wiedemann 1989: 151; Artemidorus, Oneir. 1.56. While his inclusion of dreams involving women driving chariots or riding horses cannot prove they engaged in these practices, as Bradley (2001: 43) maintains, his work is valuable precisely ‘as a record of social attitudes and conventions widely shared and understood in the era of the Antonines’ (my emphasis). Thus, the image of a woman driving a chariot or riding a horse is presented as something plausible which is key. Ovid, Ars am. 1.135-136 and Suetonius, Aug. 31; Edmondson 1996: 82, 85–86; Humphrey 1986: 76. Cf. Gilchrist 1999: 70–71 on women’s adoption of male symbols of power, including driving or riding. Slave children in larger households might have sometimes used the same toys as their freeborn playmates when playing with their masters’ children, as in the case of collactanei (see Bradley 1991: 149–55). Cf. Golden 2015: 47–8 who argues the Greek game drapetinda (“runaway slave”), which involved a reversal of roles, gave children “a chance to manipulate and even deny social categories that structure[d] their world and the world of adults too.” E.g., Wiedemann 1989: 146–53; Rawson 2003a: 84–5, 128. Cf. Huskinson 1996: 89, 91 who stresses sarcophagi scenes present children lacking skills and morality essential for participation in adult society, though she acknowledges a positive side to the representation of play in terms of being fun and natural for children. In contrast, note Bradley 1999: 187 on Plutarch specifically whom he proposes “evidently took childhood to be the time of life most marked by the capacity to play for play’s own sake.” Cf. Bradley 1998: 556 on decorative sculptures of children with animals. For necropoleis as places of social interaction, see Purcell 1987 and Graham 2005. Visibility of tombs: Dyson 1992: 147–8. Ritual use, including regular visits: Dolansky 2011: 131–7. Same-sex groups: nos. 1.5, 1.12, 1.13, 1.35, 1.42; mixed-sex groups: 1.20, 1.37; individual with toy(s): 1.29. Mander 2012a: 47–8 discusses the challenges of portraying certain toys and games in different genres of funerary art, especially portraits, and the freedom afforded by sarcophagi instead. Cf. a third-century ce sarcophagus now in London (no. 1.13) which offers a similar though less populated scene. Huskinson 1996: 17 plausibly suggests from the resemblances that sculptors were drawing from an established repertoire of games scenes. For example, Amedick 1991: 97–8 describes the different figures in these compositions but does not broach why they are portrayed so distinctly. Huskinson 1996: 17 offers brief remarks about the portrayal of the boys “in the heat of the activity” but does not discuss the differences in representation of the two sexes at play in her section on gender (114–15). See Dolansky 2012: 270–75 for connections between hair and self-control. Backe-Dahmen 2006: 212–13. Cf. a mid-second century ce terracotta statuette of an adolescent girl or young woman playing knucklebones (Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich 6753) illustrated in Jouer dans l’antiquité 1991: 100, ill. 89. The partial nudity of the marble sculpture adds a curious element to the imagery of children at play. Art historians contend that the drapery slipping from the girl’s shoulder was meant to evoke goddesses and perhaps Venus specifically. Mander 2012a: 59 notes that such references to Venus – “the essence of female beauty” – are fairly subtle in the portraits he has examined, while Huskinson 1996: 114 remarks concerning sarcophagi that “the off-the-shoulderrobe, derived from Hellenistic goddess-types, lends seductiveness even to a young child as well as resonances of the divine.”

136  Fanny Dolansky 42 A fifth-century ce mosaic from Istanbul (pictured in Toynbee 1973, figure 49) of a boy squeezing a puppy that appears to cry out similarly illustrates the potential for boys’ interactions with animals to tend toward forcefulness and even violence. For an extended discussion of Roman children’s sometimes complicated relationships with animals, see Bradley 1998: 545–56 and Bradley 1999: 187 for examples in Plutarch. 43 Musée archéologique Saint-Pierre inv. R 2001-5-024, in Terrer et al. 2003: 11, no. 24. 44 Taylor 2008: 20. 45 E.g., Wiedemann 1989: 148; Rawson 2003a: 84–5, 129. 46 Cf. Shumka 1993: 56 on the lack of specificity in the use of pueri. 47 Though the girls depicted in the Vatican sarcophagus look nearly identical, those on the Louvre sarcophagus show slight variations in hairstyles and dress. 48 Mander 2012a: 48. The artificiality Mander detects (cf. Huskinson 1996: 89) is actually even greater given the complete absence of servile childminders who never appear supervising or participating in children’s play though literary sources indicate they sometimes did (e.g., Plutarch, Mor. 608d). As Mark Golden has helpfully suggested to me, such representations may exclude slaves in order to stress elite children’s independence and freedom, perhaps even gesturing toward their agency. 49 Cf. the scenes in Huskinson 1996, nos. 1.12 and 1.35. 50 Literary references to slaves and play (either with toys or others) are rare: Tibullus, El. 1.5.25 (a verna playing on his mistress’ lap); Martial, Epigr. 14.54 (a rattle for a crying vernula); Seneca, Epist. 12.3 (recalling his slave Felicio receiving gifts of sigillaria in childhood). Wiggins 1985 offers an interesting study of the play of slave children in the antebellum United States based primarily on oral histories of former slaves. Though his findings cannot be brought to bear on the Roman evidence in large part because the latter is so limited, they are intriguing nonetheless. His informants indicated preferences for role-playing games and those that re-enacted life events such as church meetings and funerals, but also slave auctions, as well as games that lacked the elimination of any players which Wiggins 1985: 181 suggests may reflect fears about the fragility of family and social life. 51 I have identified seven examples in Mander’s catalogue (2012a) of which six children can be clearly identified as slaves through nomenclature, either by the designation servus (nos. 370, 460) or verna (no. 92), or the possessive genitive (nos. 186, 220, 225). The seventh is less conclusive, but the name of the deceased (Spes), her designation as delicata, and the possible servile background of two of her three commemorators combine to suggest her status was likely servile as well. 52 Huskinson 1996: 88; Mander 2012a: 42. 53 See also Mander 2012a no. 220 for three-year-old Nerantus, slave of Marcus Arrius, whose cippus shows a boy holding a bird in his right hand; a dog wearing a collar lies below the portrait and inscription. 54 Lucian, Somn. 2, trans. Turner 1961. 55 Lucian is certainly a less traditionally Roman source than others given his Syrian origins and composition in Greek, but he was not unfamiliar with Roman customs and attitudes or Rome itself. Like Plutarch or Artemidorus, he offers unique and valuable perspectives on Roman childhood. See Bradley 1991: 112–13 for another use of Lucian’s The Dream in writing the history of Roman childhood. 56 Sofaer Derevenski 2000; Wilkie 2000; Baxter 2005a, 2005b. 57 Johnson’s 2007 dissertation examines considerable material evidence for children at Karanis, but more could be done with the combination of archaeological and papyrological evidence.

9 The writing on the wall Age, agency, and material culture in Roman Campania Katherine V. Huntley

Introduction Within Roman archaeology, children’s agency is an oft-overlooked factor in the formation of the archaeological record. This stems in part from a modern perception that children’s behaviors are capricious, unproductive, and disturb the normal patterns created by adults. In contrast, ethnographic and cognitive research has found children’s behaviors to be both patterned and meaningful and that children are active participants in many aspects of social life. Through an interdisciplinary approach incorporating these findings, it is possible to better understand the archaeological evidence of children’s lives in the Roman world. Graffiti, an abundant type of material culture from the Roman period, presents a unique opportunity to study children’s agency because it is possible to identify with some certainty graffiti that was the work of children. Patterns in the location and subject matter of the graffiti demonstrate that Roman children, rather than being capricious and removed from ‘normal’ society, are involved in activities, and networks within the house and outside of it. Furthermore, the graffiti demonstrates that children were capable interpreters of social expectations and aware of their physical and social environments. Their behaviors are in fact highly patterned. The sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 ce, have long served as important sources of evidence for the study of everyday life in the Roman world. Nevertheless, any substantial evidence for children’s lives in these sites seems to remain elusive; the Vesuvian sites are virtually bereft of anything that might be categorized as distinctive children’s material culture.1 Only a child’s bed from Herculaneum2 has been recovered. There is only one reference to doll limbs found at one of the Vesuvian sites and exhibited in the Museo di Pompei, though they were apparently destroyed when the antiquarium and site were heavily bombed during World War II.3 Many of the images of diminutive people, such as the famous fresco of workers cleaning garments in treading vats from a fullonica (VI.8.20) come under contestation as to whether they depict children or slaves, who were often portrayed as diminutive in art to reflect their low social status.4 For the case of the fuller workers, Miko Flohr makes the argument that the job of treading cloth would have been a likely job for

138  Katherine V. Huntley slave children; the size of treading stalls found at sites such as Ostia would have been better suited for children as individuals of small stature.5 While it would be utterly silly to assume there were no children in Pompeii and Herculaneum, the questions about how to recognize and recover their activities from the archaeological record remain difficult to answer. Together these two sites, along with other settlements destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, contain thousands of graffiti. Since the graffiti, in essence, represents the material remains of actions and decisions,6 they can serve as useful evidence for accessing children’s behaviors, responsibilities, and agency. In order to move forward, archaeologists must reject the notion of a categorically distinct group of objects that can be labeled as “children’s material culture.” Additionally, the nature of the archaeological record does not generally allow archaeologists to identify activities like play. Ancient houses lacked specific areas designated for children; nurseries and playrooms are a feature of the modern, western world.7 Without distinctive children’s material culture there is simply no way to devise a methodology to recover play activities. The graffiti represents unique material evidence of human activities and, in the case presented here, children’s activities. Children’s graffiti represents their actions and decisions in a clearer way than so-called “children’s objects” can with the current state of field archaeology.

Children’s material culture? The identification of distinctive material culture used by children is often the focus of discussions of their everyday lives in archaeology. Archaeologists have concentrated on the concept of distinctive material culture and a distinctive social world for children. Numerous articles on dolls and toys from the Roman world demonstrate a focus on objects that are most familiar to modern western ideas of what children’s objects should be: small, cute, and educational.8 Such associations between these objects and children are never straightforward and interpretations of such artifacts are fraught with assumptions, particularly when they lack proper contextual information as they often do. Ancient dolls are among the most frequently discussed and exhibited “evidence” of children’s lives. They apparently do three things: teach girls about marriage; prepare them for motherhood; and have strict gender associations.9 However, in the case of dolls in the Roman world, determining use in life is difficult at best because of a very important fact: dolls are almost exclusively recovered from burials and are rarely found on settlement sites.10 This may not necessarily be due to their absence, but rather a survival of materials in the archaeological record or even the ability of archaeologists to recognize the remains. Nevertheless, the evidence for their use in daily life is lacking. While some scholars infer the use of dolls as being for role-play, such suggestions are quite vague and unhelpful. Saying a doll is used in role-play is much the same as saying a drinking vessel is used for drinking; dolls are incredibly versatile objects. Furthermore the notion that dolls instill adult virtues11

The writing on the wall   139 in children and that children use the dolls either as they are instructed by parents or in imitation, greatly diminishes the agency of the children.12 A modern and well-documented example of the ways in which socio-cultural expectations affect role-play and the ways in which children interpret these expectations and act according to their own agency is the study of nineteenthcentury American dolls conducted by Miriam Formanek-Brunell.13 She found that in the nineteenth century young girls were expected to hold funerals for their dolls as mourning was romanticized in American society at that time. Such role-play allowed young girls to practice proper feminine behavior as mourners. No doubt this would be a strange notion to American parents only a century or so later. More surprising perhaps is that the girls in Formanek-Brunell’s study did not simply mimic the desired behaviors, but rather interpreted them in their own way. Many girls chose to hold violent executions for their dolls, much to the horror of their parents. While such behavior did not reflect the society’s notion of proper femininity, it was neither random, nor unpatterned. The children understood the association between dolls and funerals but chose to negotiate the relationship in their own way: by enacting executions. This behavior, rather than being capricious, has logic to it. After all, how can one hold a funeral for something that is not yet dead? While it is obviously not possible to draw direct comparisons between Roman Italy and nineteenth-century America, Formanek-Brunell’s study serves as a good example not only of how different the role-playing expectations of adults might vary between cultures and societies, but also the ways that children might interpret such expectations and modify their behavior. Studies in developmental psychology have found this to be a key aspect to socialization: children do not mimic behavior, rather they interpret, and negotiate expectations for their behavior. As this chapter will demonstrate, the negotiation of such social expectations are evident in the patterns of children’s graffiti.

Play and learning in the archaeological record: the unique case of graffiti In order to access children’s lives and agency through the archaeological record it may be more productive to focus on the identification of children’s activities rather than on a distinctive body of objects that children may have used. Some archaeologists studying children have conducted such research, focusing on learning activities. Notably, archaeologists have looked at fingerprints to understand children’s roles in pottery production and evidence of flint-knapping practice in prehistoric populations.14 Under “normal” circumstances the identification of activities in the archaeological record is difficult outside of closed contexts like burials. This is true even in Pompeii, where the locations that objects are found in are not necessarily the location in which they were used. Examination of the 79 ce artifact assemblages, found that many of the objects were found put away in storage.15 Moreover, knowledge of the way objects were used is often not based on good contextual information.16 The identification of children’s activities is all the more

140  Katherine V. Huntley challenging. In order to move forward, Roman archaeologists must reject the idea of identifying categorically material culture that is distinctively children’s. Graffiti presents a unique source of evidence because it is not distinctly children’s material culture, but children’s graffiti that is distinctive from that of adults. Graffiti are clear remains of children’s activities in Pompeii and Herculaneum in the form of graffiti. The eruption of Mount Vesuvius preserved the somewhat delicate wall plaster into which thousands of graffiti were carved. Graffiti is usually considered epigraphical evidence: text with a materiality to it. It can be studied as material culture rather than treated as text by considering it the remains of human actions and decisions.17 While graffiti lacks proper archaeological context and associated assemblages, the Vesuvian graffiti have good spatial context. Even taking into account the limitations of the graffiti evidence, it is possible to see patterns in the locations of the graffiti and their subject matter. These patterns can, in turn, provide evidence of children’s agency, their behavior patterns, and the social expectations and responsibilities affecting them. Certain instances of pictorial and textual18 graffiti have been thought by excavators to be the work of children based solely on the “crudeness” of the graffiti or its low placement on the wall.19 There are more scientific ways to identify graffiti that may have been the work of children. Studies in developmental psychology have identified patterns and rules in the drawings of young children that relate directly to cognitive development.20 Researchers found that young children, up to the age of about 10 to 12 years, progress through a series of developmental stages that are reflected in how they represent their world through drawing. Furthermore, these recognizable patterns and rules appear in the drawings of young children regardless of their cultural upbringing.21 Children in Nepal, when given paper and crayons for the first time, demonstrated experience in scribbling, and drew forms and patterns identified in earlier studies of American children.22 Children not normally accustomed to images will be able to identify the content of simple drawings of children from other cultures.23 For instance, children from cultures that do not encourage, or which even actively discourage the representation of the human figure, such as Islamic cultures, will still recognize illustrations of human beings.24 Even a historical study by Corrado Ricci of Italian children’s drawing, L’arte dei Bambini published in 1887, revealed many of the same patterns in the way children drew as those of the cross-cultural developmental psychology studies of the late twentieth century. The prime reason it is possible to identify the work of children is because as a social group its members are also defined by physiological and psychological characteristics. Their brains are developing and it is these changes that are reflected in the patterns they draw and thus in the graffiti.25 Developmental psychologists have determined the key role of young children’s drawing is that it is a process of interpretation and not reproduction; the drawings are representations of the child’s knowledge and perceptions rather than an imitation of what the child sees with his or her eyes.26 For example, when drawing a person in a rowboat, the child will draw the entire figure, even

The writing on the wall   141

Figure 9.1  Early human figures from the outer wall of the Termopolio dell’Asellina (IX. xi.2), Pompeii (picture: Katherine Huntley)

though the lower half of the figure should be obscured by the side of the boat. The child does this because he or she knows that the person’s lower half is in the boat, even though it would be hidden by the side of the boat. It is more important for the child to represent the knowledge that the figure is whole than to make the side of the boat opaque. The wholeness of the human figure is of primary concern. This common phenomenon is known in developmental psychology as a transparency.27 Following the same rule, the earliest human figures that young children draw are heads with limbs fanning out like sun rays, because the head is the most important part of a person for a young child, so he, or she will emphasize it in drawings. An example of this among the ancient graffiti can be found on the outer wall of the Termopolio di Asellina (IX.xi.2) along the Via dell’Abbondanza in Pompeii (Figure 9.1). These two human figures28 contain a number of elements found in the drawings of young children, including the radial, symmetrical composition, and the focus on the head, which is the most important component in early socialization. All young children draw people facing forward; drawing people in profile is a relatively late occurence in their development. The earliest drawings of young children are scribbles, back and forth motions, which are developmentally important for both visual and motor needs. From scribbles, children’s drawings evolve into a set of six definite (diagrams) around the age of two to three years, which are combined to form representational figures. Diagrams generally are easy to separate from other line formations. They develop from scribbling and rarely appear on their own, often being combined with scribbles or other diagrams.29 For instance, ladder cross squares develop from multiple horizontal and single vertical line scribbles. One example of this30 is found drawn on the wall of a cubiculum in the Casa del Menandro (Figure 9.2a).31 Excavators and epigraphers have described it as perhaps being a crude representation of a sandal or the hull of a ship.32 However, it greatly resembles a common type of image drawn by young children, containing an emergent diagram (Figure 9.2b and 9.2d). Another graffito from the garden peristyle of the Casa dell’Efebo shows the same forms, only the child has drawn a square diagram rather than an oval (Figure 9.2c).33 From there, drawings become more complex and schematic, combining

Figure 9.2a  A ladder cross oval graffito from the Casa del Menandro (I.X.4), Pompeii (picture: Katherine Huntley)

Figure 9.2b  A comparative image: ladder crossed oval drawing by a young child (3 years, 2 months) from Switzerland (D. Maurer and C. Riboni, Wie Bilder “entstehen” – Morphologie Europa, 2007. European children, nr. 9071, http://www.early-pictures.ch/eu/de/)

Figure 9.2c  Graffito from the Theater Corridor, the Casa dell’Efebo (I.VII.12), Pompeii (picture: Katherine Huntley)

The writing on the wall   143

Figure 9.2d  A comparative image: ladder crossed squares drawing by a young child from Indonesia (D. Maurer, C. Riboni and B. Gujer, Wie Bilder “entstehen” – Produkt und Kode, 2007. Asian children, nr. 79047, http://www.early-pictures.ch/as/de/)

multiple diagrams to form aggregates. This stage lasts until around the age of seven years. This is also the stage when recognizable human figures, like those on the wall of the Termopolio dell’Asellina, begin to appear.34 After the age of seven, children’s drawings begin to move away from subjective representations toward visual realism and objectivism. This is the point when children begin to draw people in profile. There is a rather wide period of transition and researchers have identified it as happening between the ages of seven and 10 years. This transition is sometimes marked by certain confusions, such as maintaining the second eye.35 A graffito36 from Pompeii’s Grand Palaestra shows a human figure likely to have been drawn by a child at this transitory stage. Though the figure is turned to the side, the child still shows both the arm,s and also both eyes remain on the side of the face. These rules and patterns that related to cognitive development served as markers for the methodology used to identify children’s graffiti for this study.

Identifying children’s graffiti in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae For this study only, pictorial graffiti were included, because the research in developmental psychology examined pictorial images in children’s drawings and not text. While there were thousands of graffiti found in Pompeii and Herculaneum, recording practices varied both throughout the 250 years in which the sites have undergone excavation and among the various areas and structures under excavation. Poor preservation has meant that many of the graffiti no longer survive in situ. In many cases, images of the graffiti were recorded in the excavation journals and archives, though many have undoubtedly been completely lost. Much of the pictorial graffiti was just considered crude because graffiti were considered crude. After all, the phenomenon of graffiti as street art is a development really only of the past two decades.

144  Katherine V. Huntley Some examples of graffiti were identified early on as the work of children based exclusively on their particular crudeness or their low placement on the walls. For instance, the two radial figures from the outer wall of the Termopolio di Asellina have long been considered the work of children (Figure 9.1). Any parent with small children would recognize these as representations of people. Although in the past no scientific criteria were used in the identification of these figures as the work of children, it does support the theory that children draw in very particular, recognizable ways. A total of 545 pictorial graffiti were found and recorded during the excavations of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the villas San Marco and Arianna near Stabiae that took place over some 250 years ago. They were evaluated on the basis of having indications, such as the clear presence of diagrams, aggregates, or developmental mistakes or miscalculations.37 Out of these 545 pictorial graffiti, 161 contained elements identifying them as having likely been the work of children. While there is no way to know definitively that these were the works of young children, there is visual evidence suggesting that they indeed may have been. Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that children were not drawing on the walls, especially if they witnessed adults doing it and there was no social taboo against such actions. An examination of the placement and subject matter of the children’s graffiti reveals patterns in children’s activities and their locations.

Choice and the spatial distribution of children’s activities There are clear patterns in the spatial distribution of the young children’s graffiti that may be indicative not only of differing social expectations for behavior but of children’s competency in interpreting these expectations. Areas with little or no children’s graffiti were spaces associated with work, ceremony, or potentially hazardous conditions. Just over 40 percent of the children’s graffiti was found inside 22 separate domestic buildings. The location patterns are interesting in terms of both where the children’s graffiti is found and where it is absent. Within domestic buildings, there were three types of rooms that contained no children’s graffiti: the atria, the tablina, and the kitchens. It should be noted these were rooms that had very little graffiti overall. These three room types have specific associations with work and formality, attested to in both the literature and the archaeological record.38 The literature stresses the formal functions of the atrium as the place where the head of the household and his family would greet his clients during the morning salutatio.39 Many of the atria of the houses in Pompeii and Herculaneum also contained fixtures that appear to be shrines for the household gods, while literary sources attest to the presence of ancestral imagines.40 With its lavish decoration, the atrium was a space devoted to display and ceremony. Still, these were also rooms with practical uses. Penelope Allison’s analysis of artifact assemblages in Pompeii identified artifacts associated with craftwork, most notably loom weights for weaving. Joanne Berry’s study of the assemblages from the Casa di M. Epidius

The writing on the wall   145 Primus found crafting tools in the atrium as well.41 The medium-sized rooms off the atria across from the entrances to the houses, which are often termed tablina by historians and archaeologists, supposedly served as the offices of the houses’ owners and were physically part of the display of the salutatio.42 The last category of room, the kitchen, is clearly associated with food preparation. Their defining features, when identified archaeologically, are burned areas and cooking fixtures. The lack of children’s graffiti in these three rooms most likely reflects children’s comprehension of the social expectations for behaviors within these spaces. Rooms associated with ceremonial functions certainly would have had more stringent rules for children’s behavior. The overall rarity of graffiti in atria and tablina also would seem to indicate that drawing on the walls was inappropriate for all; children were conforming to the examples set by elders and peers. The only literary references that give insight into specific locations in the house where children might have played place them in the atrium.43 Since the atrium had both ceremonial and mundane functions, it may have been that there were stricter rules for children in that room. Beyond the use of the room for greeting clients and guests, the atrium with its compluvium had ample light for work activities, particularly weaving. Loom weights, which are all that survive archaeologically of the warpweighted loom, were an artifact commonly found in atria. These large looms used in the Roman world might have posed a serious threat to young children if they were playing nearby. Warp-weighted looms would reach 2 m high and 3 m long or more.44 During the first century ce in Italy the traditional warp-weighted looms were being gradually replaced by the vertical two-beamed (tubular) loom.45 Both would have been imposing and potentially dangerous contraptions for young children. Tubular looms were smaller, but could well be more than 1.2 m tall and thus taller than a small child.46 Since such workspaces may have posed threats to young children, adults, and caretakers would have supervised activity and urged caution.47 Likewise, kitchens, with their cooking fixtures, and fires, would have been dangerous places to play. When young children were allowed in these spaces, it must also have been under supervision. The presence of supervisors would have led children to modify their actions by reinforcing social expectations for their behavior; it would not have robbed them of their agency. The children would have had to make the choice to obey the social expectations in those spaces or to misbehave. Also important to consider is that children might have been working in the kitchens, atria, and other spaces associated with work. Young children may have been involved in learning to cook, weave, or how to do some other job. Their activity and progress would have been supervised and the task at hand would have demanded their attention. A marble relief from Pompeii48 shows a workshop for metal housewares (Figure 9.3). A young child stands calmly beside a parent, worker, or supervisor, clings to his garment, and observes the scene intently. Children would have made up a significant portion of the workforce in the Roman world. Keith Bradley’s study of apprenticeship contracts in Roman Egypt suggests that most children entered apprenticeships in their early teens.49 The child in the marble relief appears to be much younger. Formal apprenticeships may not have been the only way to enter into some crafts or else it may not have been children’s

146  Katherine V. Huntley

Figure 9.3  A marble relief from Pompeii shows a workshop for metal housewares (Inv. 6575 © Museo Archaeologico Nazionale di Napoli)

first exposure to work.50 It is worth noting that only three examples of children’s graffiti were found in spaces designated as workshops. Once again this suggests that the uses of particular spaces influenced children’s behavior. Thus, the reasons why children’s graffiti are not found in these three types of rooms reflects children’s agency, their understanding of social rules, and the other kinds of activities they engaged in. The pattern in the spaces where children’s graffiti do show up also suggests such agency and knowledge. While adults worked in the kitchens or atria, children certainly may have spent some time learning and working alongside them. When they were not involved in learning and working, children seem to have sought out more private spaces, far from the eyes of caretakers and supervisors, in which to play. Approximately 44 percent of children’s graffiti found in houses were located in the smaller rooms off of the front halls. These spaces off of the atrium may have offered young children the opportunity to break from work or learning and to play in more private spaces, away from adult supervisors.51 Similar patterns can be seen in the locations of children’s graffiti outside of domestic buildings; in public spaces children modified their behaviors to conform to social expectations. For instance, within the bath complexes, the twelve examples of children’s graffiti were found in the changing room areas and the palaestra.52 Baths were dangerous places; just like at modern swimming pools, the risk of slipping, and falling was ever present. A few extant inscriptions make reference to children who were killed while attending the baths. One epitaph found in Rome commemorates an eight-year-old boy, who perished in the pool at the Baths of Mars.53 Caretakers might have instructed children in similar safety procedures as today: walk, do not run; watch where you are going; pay attention

The writing on the wall   147 to what is going on around you. Furthermore, in Roman culture, bathing was highly ritualized. The lack of graffiti within the actual baths may indicate that behavior was strongly directed toward bathing or play associated with bathing. The process of bathing was considerably important as a social activity and also for reasons related to medicine and hygiene.54 Ancient schoolbooks detailed the processes of bathing, though most of these date to the third century or later.55 So children might have been freer to play and write graffiti in the parts of the baths that were less dangerous and less ritualized: the changing rooms and palaestra. Children’s graffiti were present in a few public areas where there were large numbers of graffiti, such as the Theater Corridor and the Grand Palaestra. These are two areas of Pompeii that are littered with all sorts of graffiti. The presence of children’s graffiti demonstrates they had lives outside of domestic spaces. Additionally, they were participating in activities deemed acceptable for those spaces; their awareness of this may have been gained through watching peers, older children, and adults also engaging in this activity. Within the Grand Palaestra all but two examples of children’s graffiti were located on a few columns in the northeast corner, suggesting a space that may have been designated specifically for young children.56 The Grand Palaestra’s association with the Iuventus, an organization of the city’s elite youth, may indicate a space where younger children could watch their older peers and siblings. Overall, patterns in the spatial distribution of children’s graffiti provides insight into children’s activities and behaviors. The patterns are illustrative of children’s agency in the ways they modified their behaviors and activities based on the spaces they were in and the expected or appropriate behaviors for those spaces.

Children’s activities and the subject matter of their graffiti Graffiti also contained patterns that may relate to aspects and activities of children’s everyday lives. The most common subject themes among the children’s graffiti with recognizable features were human figures, animal figures, and certain objects, notably ships.57 Animal motifs, which made up 38 percent of the children’s graffiti and a total of 61 examples, account for one of the most common themes.58 The choice to represent animals with such frequency may reflect an interest in animals and perhaps a close relationship with them as well. There have been a number of studies of literature and iconography that found strong associations between children and animals.59 Children in the Roman world would have had a significant amount of contact with all sorts of animals. Ancient city-dwellers all lived in close proximity to the animals they consumed and the animals they used. The most famous examples of animal remains from the eruption represent just that: the cast of the dog now on display in the forum workshop in Pompeii was a guard dog, chained up to the fauces of the Casa di M. Vesonio Primo by its master to watch the property; the cast of a pig60, the most commonly consumed animal in Roman Italy in the first century ce; the skeletons of four mules, stabled right next to the bakery of the Casa dei Casti Amanti, in which they would have been put to work grinding grain;

148  Katherine V. Huntley the skeleton of a horse in a stable (I.viii.12), the remains of its tack, alongside a pile of human bones, perhaps its groom. The five types of identifiable animals portrayed in children’s graffiti are dogs, birds, equids, cervids, and a group of nondescript quadrupeds; there is also a category of unknown animals.61 The animals that children chose to portray may reflect those animals they encountered and interacted with in their lives and also those they were exposed to through the rich visual culture present in Pompeii and Herculaneum. There is ample evidence from literature and iconography that links children with particular animals. Dogs, birds, and lizards appear to have been the most common companion animals for children. Both types of animals appear frequently in funerary iconography.62 As Bradley and Bodson have demonstrated, Roman literature abounds with references to children keeping pets. While dogs and birds were certainly the most commonly mentioned, horses, lizards, and even insects were alluded to on occasion as well.63 Sorabella argues that the presence of lizards on funerary monuments may be indicative of their use as children’s pets.64 Of these types of animals, birds were most frequently depicted in children’s graffiti with fifteen examples. Horses or equids of some kind appear in eleven graffiti. Dogs, however, are only clearly present in two graffiti, which feature deer as well. There were no recognizable representations of lizards in the children’s graffiti.65 Still, in many cases children’s associations with animals were less about the animal functioning as a pet and plaything. While studies of the literature and epigraphic evidence suggest that pet-keeping was common in the Roman world, among people and households of all different social and economic status,66 there is little archaeological evidence of pets.67 The majority of animals in the archaeological record were kept for consumption or for their use as work animals. Modern ethnographic studies have found that one of the most consistent responsibilities assigned to young children between the ages of five and seven across cultures is the care of animals.68 Animal care is thus widely seen as an appropriate activity for young children. Thus, one of the main reasons the young children of Pompeii and Herculaneum were drawing animals is because they were certainly interacting with them and probably caring for them. Dog remains are commonly recovered from the sites around Vesuvius, but they are primarily robust bones from guard dogs.69 The long gracile remains of a hunting hound were recovered from House I.xiii.170 and a small specimen was found in a garden assemblage.71 In truth, archaeologists have not recovered many remains of dogs that were not kept for their work.72 In terms of Pompeian visual culture there are two frescos depicting small terrier-like lapdogs,73 but again hounds and guard dogs are the most commonly depicted canines in frescoes, sculptures, and mosaics. There were three potential examples of canids in children’s graffiti74 as part of compositions with cervids in imitation of a hunting scene with a hound crouching on top of a deer. All three were found in the Casa dei Cervi (IV.21) at Herculaneum, suggesting the children might have been influenced by the art depicting such scenes or perhaps even the hobby of hunting practiced by the inhabitants. A few of the quadrupeds could potentially represent dogs, but none had any clear characteristics to suggest this. Perhaps if the majority of dogs in

The writing on the wall   149 Pompeii were guard dogs or hunting dogs, young children might not have had the same interactions they would have with a pet dog. Guard dogs, which may have been bred and trained to be aggressive animals, might have been a source of fear rather than interest for them. Birds are common among children’s graffiti, totaling fifteen examples. Many of the representations appear to be songbirds. Examples include a sparrow-like bird from the Villa San Marco75 and a four-legged songbird from the fauces of the Casa degli Amanti (I.x.11)76. One example of a bird77 also appears to perhaps represent an egret or other long necked avian, which are often portrayed in fresco garden scenes. The bird was scratched into a wall in a room east of the atrium of the Casa di Minucio Fusco. Birds are important in terms of visual representations of Pompeian homes and gardens. Colorful birds are found on mosaics, in frescoes, and as statuary. A room adjacent to the atrium of one house (I.ix.3) contains the image of a young boy playing with a white dove.78 Terracotta bird figurines are relatively common finds in Pompeian houses. Children appear to have been influenced by this visual culture and wild birds that lived in the region. Interestingly, there are no clear representations of domestic fowl among the children’s graffiti. There is no archaeological evidence of pet or caged birds.79 Similarly, children may have been influenced by visual culture to draw deer. Cervid bones are rare in Vesuvian sites. While hunting may have been an elite sport, it does not seem that the majority of people consumed wild deer meat. Less than 10 percent of the meat available came from wild animals, including deer, hare, rabbit, wild boar, and dormouse.80 It is, however, possible that the children lived in a household that engaged in hunting activities, which led to their interest in deer. Of the nine representations of deer, identifiable due to the presence of antlers, all but two were found in the Casa dei Cervi. The other two were found in the Casa del Criptoportico (I.vi.2) and the Casa di Trittolemo (VII.vii.5).81 All three of these were large, elite residences. All of the horse graffiti created by children was found in the area known as the Theater Corridor (VIII.vii.20). Both sides of the corridor were covered in graffiti, many of it depicting horses and ships. Located very close to the Porta Stabia, the children and other individuals present probably witnessed a great deal of traffic moving into and out of the city. Horses and horse-drawn vehicles likely attracted the attention of children who then were inspired to draw the animals on the walls. Toy horses have also been recovered and may have inspired children as well.82 The majority of the quadrupeds, though variable, and sometimes difficult to identify, likely represent domestic animals for use and consumption, namely pigs, sheep, and goats. A number of the ambiguous quadrupeds may have been intended to be pigs. A graffito83 from the summer triclinium in the Casa di Trebio Valente (III.ii.1) depicts an animal with a large snout, short neck, and round body that could perhaps be a representation of a pig (Figure 9.4). MacKinnon’s study of animal bone assemblages from Roman Italy, which included available data from Vesuvian sites, shows that pig was by far the most frequently butchered animal. Evidence from the bones show that the pigs were usually butchered prior to reaching full adulthood and size, usually before the age of three years, with males being killed as younger

150  Katherine V. Huntley

Figure 9.4  A graffito, possibly of a pig from the summer triclinium of the Casa di Trebio Valens (III.II.1) (picture: Katherine Huntley)

animals.84 Roman pigs were also smaller compared to modern counterparts,85 they would have been easier for a child or group of children to mind. Several of the quadruped graffiti have fluffy bodies, short necks, and skinny legs, suggesting that they may be representations of sheep. Many sheep would have been kept in flocks and moved along transhumance routes, though faunal remains from excavation suggest that individuals and small groups of sheep might have been kept in on the farm or in the home throughout the year. This is expected as wool was an important resource in the Roman world, though sheep were also kept for their meat and milk.86 Three clear examples of sheep graffiti87 were found along the south portico of the Grand Palaestra. This could possibly support the theory that the Grand Palaestra functioned as an occasional market.88 Sheep that were moving along transhumant routes might have been brought into this market when they were to be sold. There the animals may have caught the eye and interest of children. The graffiti evidence attests to the fact that children interacted with many different types of animals in many different situations. Furthermore, it demonstrates the wide variety of activities children would have been involved in.

Conclusions Evidence from children’s graffiti in Pompeii and Herculaneum speaks to patterns in their actions and behaviors. It makes visible their activities that would otherwise be invisible in the archaeological record. The patterns demonstrate that children’s behaviors are not random or capricious. Children made clear decisions in where they carved graffiti and the realities of their lives seem to have influenced the types of things they drew. Furthermore, they suggest that children’s activities were interwoven with those of the household and wider community; children were neither isolated nor involved solely in leisurely play. The form and subject matter of children’s graffiti bears witness to the physical, psychological, and social development that children in the Roman world would have undergone. Patterns in the houses and baths suggest not only that young children were supervised, but also that they understood the rules and social boundaries

The writing on the wall   151 that governed those places. Supervision did not necessarily rob children of their agency; it reinforced existing social expectations for their behavior. The presence of children’s graffiti in private spaces away from adults and outside of houses, in places like the Grand Palaestra and Theater Corridor, indicates children’s social worlds were not necessarily tied to their adult caregivers. Children would have interacted with siblings, peers, and older children as well. Sometimes their companions would have been pets or other animals, as the subject matter of their graffiti attests. The animal graffiti also represent the changing responsibilities that children would have encountered as they grew up; they would go from being watched over themselves to watching over animals. Taking on new responsibilities played an important and necessary role in the enculturation process of children in the Roman world. While it may be possible to extrapolate some of these patterns to use when analyzing the physical and archaeological remains, it must be done with caution. Archaeological assemblages and deposits do not lend themselves to the interpretation of daily activities, such as play, even at the Vesuvian sites, as they have been thought to do in the past. Nevertheless, when considered alongside the literary, historical, art historical, and archaeological evidence, children’s graffiti provides unique insight into what children in ancient Pompeii and Herculaneum were doing, what they knew, and what was important to them.

Notes 1 Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 10 and 117; Allison 2004: 165. 2 Mols 1999: 44. 3 Rinaldi 1956: 1112. There is also no mention of doll parts in the catalogue Fiorelli 1897. There are some votive copper alloy limbs that Rinaldi may have mistaken for doll limbs. 4 Tanzer 1939: 12. 5 Flohr 2013: 260. 6 A definition of material culture proposed by Deetz 1968: 31. 7 Wallace-Hadrill 1994:10, 117; Allison 2004: 165. 8 See for example Manson 1991; Cavalier et al. 1991; Janssen 1996; Andres 2000; von Driel-Murray 2005. 9 See for instance Elderkin 1930; Manson and Simeoni 1986; Janssen 1996; Rawson 2000. 10 There is one recognizable doll fragment recovered from the site of Ontur in Spain. Bone and ivory dolls have also been recovered from workshops, where they were being produced. 11 See Dolansky 2012, where she presents an interesting variation on the argument that dolls instill adult values in children. In contrast she focuses on the ways that dolls were instilled with adult values, drawing solid connections between the dolls and Roman literature and art. 12 See Dolansky in this volume for playing, role-playing, and agency with dolls. 13 Formanek-Brunell 1998: 30–2. 14 See for example Finlay 1997 and Grimm 2000 on evidence for learning to knap stone tools and Kamp et al. 1999 on using fingerprints to identify pottery made by children. Additionally, Greenfield 2000 uses ethnographic examples to illustrate how archaeologists might see evidence of children’s contributions in weaving and changes in weaving patterns. 15 Allison 2004.

152  Katherine V. Huntley 16 Eckhardt and Crummy 2006: 91, who note that only in recent years this has been changing and artefact studies are now being conducted with proper contextual information and statistical analysis of contextualized assemblages, see for example Cool and Baxter 2002. 17 Huntley 2011: 73; Baird and Taylor 2011: 6–7. 18 For an examination of textual graffiti, including abecedariae, see Kepartová 1984: 207–9. 19 Koloski-Ostrow 1990: 59; Kepartová 1984: 207; Maulucci 1993: 77; Beard 2008: 15. Kepartová 1984: 208 also attributes a graffito of a Labyrinth (CIL IV 2331) and geometric graffiti found in the so-called Scuola di Cornelii Amandus e Proculus to older children. 20 Di Leo 1970; Kellogg 1959; Sundberg and Ballinger 1968; Kellogg 1969; Efland 2002. 21 Cultural upbringing can affect the rate at which children progress through these developmental stages. Children in societies that encourage drawing or provide instruction will often develop more quickly. See Kellogg 1969 and Efland 2002. It is difficult to know the rate of cognitive development in Roman children. There is little evidence, historical or archaeological, regarding the extent to which children in the ancient Roman world were encouraged to draw or whether they received any instruction on how to do so as part of either formal or informal education. Marcus Cornelius Fronto remarks in a letter that he gives his young grandson writing paper and tablets (Epistulae ad amicos I.12). This does suggest that privileged young children had access to writing/drawing materials, but it is difficult to extrapolate this to the wider population of children, particularly the poor or servile. Fronto’s remark also does not reveal whether children were given instruction in drawing, though it is not out of the realm of possibility. This might be a factor that is also related to socio-economic status, since careers such as painting and architecture would have required abilities in draughtsmanship and visual representation. Parents, caretakers, tutors, or owners may have wanted to foster such skills. Nevertheless, gauging the particular rate of development of Roman children is problematic with such scant evidence. 22 Kellogg 1969: 98. 23 Tramonti 2005: 49. 24 Pinto, Bombi and Cordioli 1999: 454. 25 For a similar perspective incorporating developmental psychology, see also Mackey in this volume. 26 Di Leo 1970: 40. 27 Di Leo 1970: 51. 28 Maulucci 1993: 74. 29 Kellogg 1969: 45. The six diagrams identified by Kellogg are the square/rectangle, circle/oval, the Greek cross, the diagonal cross, triangle, and odd shape. 30 Langner 2001: no. 2232. 31 Two other examples of this type of graffiti are in a cubiculum in IX.5.18 (Langner 2002: no. 2205) and in the courtyard of the Praedia di Giulia Felice, II.iv.6 (Della Corte NSc 1958: 124 no. 234). 32 Langner 2001: taf. 144. 33 CIL IV 8183, Langner 2001: taf. 34. He identifies this one as the net of a retiarius. 34 Kellogg 1969: 52. 35 Di Leo 1969: 80. 36 CIL IV 8608. 37 For an in-depth discussion of the identification method see Huntley 2011. 38 Huntley 2011: 79. 39 Seneca, de Ben. 6.33; George 1999: 303. 40 Pliny the Elder, NH 34.6–7; Polybius, Hist. 6.53; Vitruvius, de Arch. 3.6.3. 41 Allison 2004: 146; Berry 1997: 193. 42 Wallace-Hadrill 1994: 12, 47; Clarke 1991: 6.

The writing on the wall   153 43 Vergil, Aen. 8.379 (quem pueri magno in gyro vacua atria circum) and Lucretius, RN 4.401–4 (atria vorsari et circumcursare columnae). Perhaps as aristocratic men, Lucretius and Vergil did not spend much time in the atrium while the women and slaves were working there. They may have just assumed that since the caretakers were in the atrium, the children must have been playing in there as well. 44 Wild 1988: 31. 45 Sebesta 1997: 539. 46 Wild 1970: 72. 47 See Graumann in this volume. 48 Now in the Museo Archaeologico Nazionale di Napoli, inv. 6575; Ward-Perkins and Claridge 1976: 287. 49 Bradley 1991. See also Pudsey and Vuolanto in this volume. 50 A further issue worth noting is that excavations in Pompeii have focused on elite houses and public structures. For shop owners and crafts people they may have lived in or above their place of work. Thus their children would have probably had a significant amount of exposure to the work. 51 Huntley 2011: 80. 52 Huntley 2011: 85. 53 CIL VI 16740. For the same case, see also Graumann in this volume, p. 274. 54 Fagan 2002: 10. 55 Dionisotti 1982: 115–16. 56 Huntley 2011: 84. 57 It is worth noting that the animals, humans, and methods of transportation are among the most common themes in the drawings of children studied by Kellogg and Di Leo. 58 Huntley 2011: 78. 59 Bradley 1998; Rawson 2003a: 129–30; Sorabella 2007. 60 Originally found in the villa rustica at Boscoreale, now on display in Pompeii. 61 There were 9 cervids, 15 representations of birds, 11 of equids, 23 of not readily identifiable quadrupeds, and 3 unknown animals, one of which may be some sort of sea creature (Langner 2001: no. 1604), one that may be a spider (Langner 2001: no. 975), and one that may be a caterpillar (Della Corte 1939: 242 no. 9 fig. 1). It is sometimes difficult to discern what the child is trying to represent, so it is not possible to identify particular species. 62 See for example the sarcophagus of a young boy playing with a goose, early second century ce from Luni, now in the Terme Dioclenziano and the funeral altar of a young boy with his dog, 50–70 ce, in Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. See also Sorabella 2007 on lizards and children. 63 Bradley 1998 and Bodson 2000. See for literary examples of bird keeping in Pliny the Elder, NH 10.120 and Petronius, Sat. 46.5. and for examples of dog keeping Petronius, Sat. 64.5–6 and Juvenal, Sat. 9.60–61. 64 Sorabella 2007. 65 It is of course always possible that one of the quadrupeds is meant to be a lizard. 66 Bodson 2000: 30. Petronius, Sat. 64.5–6 mentions Croesus, the delicae of Trimalchio has a puppy; Juvenal, Sat. 9.60–61 contains an account of a rural slave boy with a puppy as a companion. 67 It is worthy to note, however, that smaller animals, such as lizards and song birds, and insects are much more difficult to recover and more likely to be missed during excavation. The animals might have escaped or crawled into crevasses. 68 Rogoff et al. 1975. 69 King 2002: 413. 70 Giordano and Pelagalli 1957. 71 Jashemski 1979: 279. The dog had an estimated shoulder height of 45 cm. 72 Perhaps dogs that were considered pets were taken by their owners when they fled.

154  Katherine V. Huntley 73 One in the Casa dei Epigrammi (V.i.18) and the other in the viridarium of the Casa di Adone Ferito (VI.vii.18). King 2002 suggests the former may be a depiction of an actual family pet, since a name is painted above the dog’s head and it was clearly a later addition, having been placed over the frame between other scenes. 74 Langner 2001: nos. 1108, 1109, 1110. 75 Langner 2001: no. 1696. 76 CIL IV 8395. 77 CIL IV 8385. 78 Kepartová 1984: 197. Kepartová points out that Della Corte identified a graffito puer Successus, Succ[es]s[u]s carved on the fresco, suggesting that a child, probably a slave or son of a freedman, identified in some way with the boy in the image. 79 Watson 2002: 358. 80 MacKinnon 2004: 190. 81 Maulucci 1993: 109 and 172. 82 For a discussion of toy horses see Dolansky in this volume. 83 CIL IV 8830. 84 MacKinnon 2004: 243. 85 King 2002: 445; MacKinnon 2004: 243 found that wither heights varied, suggesting the existence of different breeds. 86 MacKinnon 2004: 110. 87 CIL IV 8544; CIL IV 8597; CIL IV 8608. 88 Richardson 1988: 214.

10 Why Roman pupils lacked a long vacation Konrad Vössing

From a modern perspective, summer holidays play for both the teacher and the pupil an integral role in the school experience. Both have a guaranteed and universally accepted right to a lengthy break from their courses – especially in view of their general health. This was not the case in Roman elementary and grammar schools, a fact that this chapter will address. This lack should not only be acknowledged as a sign of the difference in educational organization; we should also investigate its causes and results, so that it can be integrated into the social history of childhood. First, however, one should consider the historical sources, especially since a widely known poem by Martial (10.62) is usually cited as proof of the existence of summer holidays in Roman schools.

Introduction Trying to prove the non-existence of a historical phenomenon is always difficult, except for cases in which the issue of the absence was addressed at the time. But this is only to be expected, if the absence was in any way notable. Since in the Roman context, as will be demonstrated, it was not noteworthy, the argument rests on the lack of corroboratory source material from that time, and on the lack of any premise for holidays in the modern sense. These issues will be considered in the second part of this chapter, after we have ascertained whether or not the sources provide us with any indications of the existence of school holidays. The word holiday is derived from the culture of religious festivals (as is the German equivalent Ferien). Festival (like the German verb feiern or the noun Fest) has its Latin root in the word feriae (or the older fesiae),1 a term that, although grammatically plural, can also be used in the singular when describing a festive day.2 As is generally known, the festivals in Rome could be of a personal nature (feriae privatae) such as family celebrations, or else they were public occasions that applied to all citizens (feriae publicae). The latter were divided into festivals that took place on a set date (feriae stativae) and festivals without a fixed date, which had to be determined annually by the priests (feriae conceptivae). Ideally, on those days all forms of labour ceased, especially anything of a legal nature. Human activity, being bound to the acts of the gods, had to be suspended in order to grant them due privacy on those days.3 With regard to the question of holidays,

156  Konrad Vössing it is important to stress that this notion was an ideal, and that no imperative requirements existed or were enforced.4 There was a very large and variable number of feriae, which the state attempted to influence.5 However, only a small number fell within the narrow sector of state responsibility, for example holidays concerning the courts of law. We are aware of state measures that ensured the observance of certain feriae in relation to the teaching of rhetoric,6 but grammar and elementary schools were not affected. This does not mean that classes took place every day of the year. First of all, once every eight-day week, on the market days called nundinae, schools were closed, at least for younger pupils. However, we cannot be certain whether this also applied to grammar classes, nor whether the days off could be explained by the location of many schools in relation to the marketplace. Other teachers’ classes may have taken place if they were not impaired by the hustle and bustle of the market. In any case, the cancellation of lessons was not regulated, and the decision was made individually by the teachers themselves. The only evidence available is a satire by Varro, in which he states: ‘the lazy little ones wait for the market day to be dismissed by the teacher to go and play’.7 Furthermore, there were at least two groups of festival days on which it seems to have been usual for teachers to cancel their classes, the so-called Quinquatrus, a day in March sacred to Minerva,8 and the Saturnalia, the festive days of Saturn in the second half of December.9 It is telling that both were actually festivals (and holidays) for teachers, so that the pupils profited from them only indirectly. While Minerva was regarded as the tutelary goddess of knowledge transfer, and hence of the intellectual professions, the Saturnalia had a special meaning for slaves, who were allowed to celebrate freely and together with their masters on December 17.10 It seems that the servile, or at least dependent status of many teachers, turned the Saturnalia into days off for the teachers and thus into holidays for the pupils.11 Consequently, these holidays do not qualify as a measure for the protection of the pupils: they were holidays for teachers. It was left up to their discretion to decide how long their schools were closed, and they also forwent payment (see below). This also applied to other festive days which presumably varied from region to region.12 In Antiquity, the rituals were essentially the concern of the individual city. When considering the extreme lack of relevant evidence in regard to school holidays, we have to compare them with the abundance of laments about corporal punishment.13 It is not unusual for adults to discuss their school time sufferings (the role this plays in regard to our topic remains to be seen), but a lack of holidays is not of great significance. Thus we have to assume that the question of holidays did not occur to children, perhaps because it was generally accepted that school lessons took place during the whole year and were suspended only on particular days. These days were neither guaranteed nor universally observed. Accordingly, there was no emotional response or longing in regard to a long summer holiday. This unifying emotion and deep incision into the school year is essentially modern.

Why Roman pupils lacked a long vacation   157

Summertime pedagogics in Martial 10.62? At this point it is necessary to respond to a poem whose interpretation poses difficulties to scholars. Contrary to our results so far, modern readings seem to extract from this text evidence of summer holidays. We are dealing with a renowned piece from the tenth book of Epigrams (10.62) which was written in 95/96 ce.14 Ludi magister, parce simplici turbae: Sic te frequentes audiant capillati Et delicatae diligat chorus mensae, Nec calculator nec notarius velox Maiore quisquam circulo coronetur. Albae leone flammeo calent luces Tostamque fervens Iulius coquit messem. Cirrata loris horridis Scythiae pellis, Qua vapulavit Marsyas Celaeneaeus, Ferulaeque tristes, sceptra paedagogorum, Cessent et Idus dormiant in Octobres: Aestate pueri si valent, satis discunt.

5

10

David Shackleton Bailey translates this as follows:15 Schoolmaster, spare your innocent flock; so may long-haired boys crowd to hear you and the dainty band around your table hold you in affection, nor any teacher of arithmetic or rapid master of shorthand be surrounded by a larger circle. The bright days glow beneath the flaming Lion and blazing July ripens the roasted harvest. Idle be the Scythian’s leather, fringed with horrid lashes, with which Marsyas of Celaenae was scourged, and the sinister rods, sceptres of pedagogues; let them sleep till October’s Ides. If boys keep well in summertime, they learn enough.

5

10

It is pleasant to see the concern that Martial seems to demonstrate for the children, displaying both compassion and empathy. A recent German translation of Martial gives this poem the title: ‘The last day of school before the summer holidays’,16 thereby regarding it as a heartwarming plea on behalf of the weak. More importantly, this pleading seems to provide us with a certain reference to summer holidays. It is probably on the base of this deduction that the European schools of the early modern era referred to summer holidays as feriae caniculares, explained by the heat on those particular days (ob caniculae aestum).17

158  Konrad Vössing However, this sensitivity is not convincing when one considers other statements made by the satirist. If there was one thing Martial lacked, it was the genial bonhomie of a well-intentioned citizen who offers advice in the hope of promoting the wellbeing of the socially disadvantaged or poor. None of his other poems about schools displays any compassion with the pupils or with the teachers.18 Is this epigram an exception? Various antiquarian elements in the text ought to make us suspicious. Although scholars have accepted it as a testimony to summer holidays,19 one must ask why Martial would concern himself with such things. It has long been noted, with a certain unease, that it is only in this poem that we hear of these three months of school holidays.20 There is no other testimony to this long summer break,21 which would have meant financial ruin for the teachers, who were usually paid for the hours of classes on a monthly basis.22 Does Martial really demand, even if only in a satirical manner, that the schools should close completely in summer? That would be absurd. The opening verses speak of the incentive to get more pupils than one’s competitors, that is to say, to earn more money. The idea of ‘honour’ is not something that would motivate a schoolmaster. How does this then compare with an unpaid holiday lasting a quarter of a year? This led to the proposal of another theory: that not all teachers, but only one particular ludi magister was being encouraged to release pupils for these months, since he would outdo any competitors by being the only one to offer such holidays.23 However, the presentation of the teacher does not include any individual characteristics, and is quite clearly a stereotypical representation. But what about the plural form in line 10? In addition to this, the last line of the poem seems less like a reaction to a specific situation and more like a general affirmation. Furthermore, this interpretation is based on the incorrect assumption that it was the pupils themselves who chose their teacher. All these difficulties led some scholars long ago, in their search for a meaningful ‘reforming’ goal for the poem, to propose that the teacher was meant not to take a summer break, but to take a summer break from beating the boys. The verb parcere would then refer, not to the closing of the school, but to a restraint in the use of corporal punishment.24 This is, I believe, the only convincing interpretation. The idea that the act of ‘sparing’ refers to school attendance per se is, in general terms, too modern; it makes sense only against the background of a schooling that is guaranteed by the state, with a corresponding obligation to attend school – an obligation experienced as onerous. Even in Antiquity, people were aware that pupils waited impatiently for their rare free days. But this led people to refer to them as ‘lazy’.25 Adults never complained about excessively demanding schooling, nor did they ever seek greater freedoms for children at that time. Learning to read and write was an expensive privilege and had an inherent value that was never relativized by adults in favour of holidays of any kind. Consequently, the proposal made by the poet to the teacher was, with the exception of its final line, not at all about free time or learning, but about beating. This relates much better to the overall structure of the poem. If parcere in line 1 meant the discharging of the pupils, then one is left with a rather tenuous link to the following sentence, since it touches upon consequences that would then not occur until some

Why Roman pupils lacked a long vacation   159 months later. This interpretation would spoil the punchline, which typically occurs at the end of Martial’s poems. Reading the whole poem with an assumed existence of three months of holidays turns the conclusion into a rather lame summing up. If, however, school was in fact held in this summer period, the concluding line is an ironic and highly aggressive barb against the ludi magister. The implication is that the pedagogy of the magister is his whip and that only his ferula enables his pupils to learn. Without it, there are no results and if he therefore has to refrain from using it, the pupils will learn nearly nothing, but who cares? We are confronted here with a typical attack on a classic victim of satire, a member of a profession that was little respected and received no recognition with regard to personal feelings or to the value of their work.26 This evaluation fits well with another of Martial’s Epigrams, in which he proposed to a schoolmaster, who was disturbing the neighbourhood with his voice, to let his pupils go and ‘to receive as much for keeping quiet as for making noise’.27 This proposition, like that in 10.62, is not real, but ironic. Nevertheless, the basic fact that the teacher has to earn a living is not ignored. Hence, in the summer months there was no general pause, but merely a respite. This request is, as I have said, ironic, since Martial’s aim was not a pedagogical innovation but a punchline. As we shall see, it was only in appearance that he was moved by kindly feelings towards the pupils. But there is more to the poem than this, for we have not yet examined the turba simplex that was instructed and reprimanded by its teacher. One should not overlook the number of problems that emerge if the usual interpretation of the epigram’s scenario (a ludi magister and his normal elementary instruction) is adopted. First, the problem of the mensa. Did teachers in Antiquity stand behind a table? There is no evidence or archaeological sources for this. In fact, what would be the use of a table in such a context? Second, we have the problem of the capillati or long-haired pueri or paides. This term, when used properly, is applied to long-haired luxury slaves with beautifully styled hair, not to ‘normal’ children.28 Furthermore, there is the problem of the calculator and the notarius. The instruction given was not, despite what is often asserted, a part of the normal elementary school. It belonged rather to professional training, although it differed from an apprenticeship in that the training of the pupils of the calculator and the notarius was study-based. This meant that they had to pay.29 Finally, we have the problem of the paedagogus (l.10–12). This may have been underestimated because the paedagogi are more or less consciously equated with pedagogues and teachers, notwithstanding the sharp distinction between the two professions in Antiquity. Even if we consider the paedagogus, as is generally accepted, as an attendant and tutor of children,30 what would his role be here? Besides, how can it be explained that his ‘sceptre’ should rest for three months, when it is his task to supervise and discipline the children constantly both inside and outside of the house? Beneath these problems lies the general difficulty in presenting Martial as a committed advocate of the pupils. As I have said, this is not how we know the satirists in general and especially Martial. They were not defenders of children. What is then the motivation for his positive interest in the simplex turba? In order

160  Konrad Vössing to resolve this question, we need to take a closer look at the poem, to understand what it is really about.

Martial 10.62 and the turba simplex Let us begin with the last problem, that of the paedagogus. Our starting point here ought not to be the paedagogus, who accompanies the child to school, but rather the paedagogium puerorum, i.e. the organized instruction of slaves in large households. The teachers here were also called paedagogi, as another poem by Martial shows.31 Therefore, we are not dealing with two distinct men here. Instead, the teacher and the paedagogus are in fact identical in Mart. 10.62, not because the teacher is a pedagogue in the modern sense of the word, but because he is involved in the schooling of slaves. This, in turn, provides the key to our first problem, that of the mensa delicata which has nothing to do with the schoolmasters table (which did not exist in Antiquity). Mensa actually refers to the entire sphere of the banquet, and the genitive here seems to denote the provenance of the pueri. If this is correct, line 3 should be translated without the inimitable hypallage of mensa delicata as follows: ‘And the sweet band of little table servants may hold you in affection’.32 They came to school as it were from the banqueting table of their master’s houses, where they were used to serve and entertain as young favourite slaves.33 As deliciae (see below), they were subject as a matter of course to the sexual needs of the dominus. At the same time, they were the pride of the dominus, not only because of their physical attractiveness, but also because they received an education, for example in the paedagogium. This is exactly the context in which we meet the two other teachers, the calculator, who educated his pupils in the art of household book-keeping,34 and the notarius, who prepared them for work as a secretary or in the master’s scriptorium.35 Both the calculator and the notarius serve as a point of comparison to the ludi magister (l. 4-5) and were simultaneously practitioners of their arts and teachers. In very large and rich households, this education took place in the paedagogium, but often it was outsourced, that is, entrusted to paid teachers. This meant that the ludi magister, to a certain extent, was in direct competition with the notarius and the calculator, since he too educated slaves – but on a more general level, rather than in specialized areas.36 It is now that the ambiguity of puer or ‘boy’, ‘slave’ and ‘little pet slave’ comes into its own. The key terms capillati and mensa delicata (which remained incomprehensible up to now) immediately inform the reader about the milieu in which the teacher worked. They were not people in need of help, but objects who were (as deliciae) near and dear to their owners and whose ‘market value’ must not be allowed to deteriorate.37 The teacher is to refrain from beating them in the summertime, notoriously dangerous with regard to general health, so that the owners of the slaves would not suffer any damage to their property. This means that they will perhaps not learn very much during the summer period, but in view of the poor quality of the teacher’s instruction, that would be no great loss. The pupils in this teacher’s class were certainly not exclusively slaves. ‘Normal’ pupils from poorer families would also have attended, but Martial is not interested in

Why Roman pupils lacked a long vacation   161 them here. He concentrates instead on the unfree as ‘customers’. As for the teacher, one quality on which his role depended upon in the epigram was, in any case, his economic independence, which made him a ludi magister, whereas a paedagogus puerorum worked normally in a large household. This freelance profession is the starting point for the poet’s only apparently well-intentioned advice. Martial’s real addressees had without a doubt their own young children taught at home; they did not send them to such establishments, and the ludi magister was relevant to them only as the one who educated their vernae. In other words, these men were slave owners who were rich enough to have luxury slaves, but not rich enough to have their own school for slaves.38 This school had to succeed against competitors in the open market, and this is the meaning of diligere in verse 3. The goal of the magister is not to win the genuine affection of his pupils, but only to have a large number of them. He should be cautious in the use of his rod, not for the sake of protecting the children, but in order to endear himself to his employers. Martial’s use of another word, which I believe has also been overlooked, is a further indication that we are dealing here with the world of slaves. This is the simplicitas of the pupils. The idea that this might mean the ‘dear little children’ or that Martial is trying to evoke compassion for their lowly social status or intellectual limitations, would be completely foreign to Roman social psychology, and especially to Roman satirists. Simplex must have been meant as a prima facie or positive attribute, in the sense of ‘honest’, ‘natural’ and ‘innocent’. These could be considered appropriate characteristics of children in general, but that is precisely what the luxury slaves were not. They were to a certain extent artefacts (capillati, but diu leves), to say nothing of their lost sexual innocence. This is why Martial seems to speak once more in highly ironic terms of these abecedarians.39 We could therefore formulate the message of the epigram as follows: Little magister, do not take so seriously the scanty teaching material that you beat into pupils. In that case, your school will flourish. If you are prudent, you should leave the expensive luxury bodies of your pupils in peace, especially in the dangerous Roman summer. The fact that they will not learn very much from you in that period is ‘irrelevant’. It is perhaps worth specifying once again the two basic misunderstandings that are often linked to this poem. It is not marked by any kind of compassion for schoolchildren, on the grounds that they are small; nor is it marked by concern for their health, because they are weak. Martial and his laughing audience did not have their own children in mind when they heard of the pupils of this ludi magister. Their reaction was that of the owners of slaves and members of an educated class who could only laugh at the litteratura of the schoolmaster. If compassion existed, it was only in an ironic form. This applies both to the pupils, who were to be spared only for a time, to prevent them from becoming a money-losing business, and to their teacher, who had simply not understood how ridiculously low the educational value of his teaching was. The blows are reined in because they express both his overestimation of his own abilities and the underestimation of

162  Konrad Vössing his pupil’s worth. It is from these contrasts that the poem derives its humour.40 The teacher is doubly blind. His turba simplex is worth more than it seems, whereas exactly the opposite is true of his teaching. We have read this poem in search of any positive valuation of a long summer pause in schools – and thereby a consonance with the ‘tiny voices’ of the children in question. In this respect, a close inspection was disillusioning. While searching for the perspective of the children and their school experience in this epigram we met rather ‘coarse’ resistance. Childhood experience was generally shaped, inter alia, by a sense of weakness. The teaching programme in school was not only enforced, but also timetabled ‘from above’. The opinion of the pupils did not matter and is rarely conveyed. With regard to holidays, it is nevertheless striking that the desire for a long vacation and summer holidays is nowhere expressed.

Why it is only from a modern perspective that school holidays were lacking in ancient Rome When trying to summarize the reasons for the lack of a longer recess of school, as well as the lack of laments in regard to this deficiency, we note three fundamental differences. Although none of these differences is a new discovery, their consequences have not yet been sufficiently considered, particularly because they directly oppose present-day expectations: 1 2

3

The absence of an urban or even state-run school policy and of a higher authority that was able to impose general rules for classes and their length.41 In relation to this, the teacher’s direct dependence on the monthly payment of his pupils has to be mentioned. Salaries paid by the city or other communities were exceptional. They never replaced the individual school fees, but instead complemented them.42 This dependence turned longer holidays into a financial risk for many teachers, and this was not something they would take voluntarily. The phenomenon of school holidays in modern times is connected to the notion of appropriate, indeed necessary, recreation and ultimately derives its legitimation from the achievement of compulsory schooling. This argument is therefore closely connected to the first one. The modern state, through its regulation and enforcement of school attendance for all citizens, also has an obligation to their wellbeing. A system based on the individual will of the pupils or their parents, and the corresponding individual contracts, was highly unlikely to develop by itself the notion of a universally needed limitation, especially since reflections on the constitutive elements of childhood were a rare occurrence.43

In Antiquity, limitations on the children’s school attendance referred only to specific situations and were constantly negotiable: in this or that city; at this or that location; in this or that school; concerning this or that payment. The consequence is that universal long holidays were non-existent both in reality and as a concept. Therefore they could not be missed.

Why Roman pupils lacked a long vacation   163

Acknowledgement I would like to thank Janico Albrecht and Emma Hamilton for their assistance in the translation.

Notes

1 2 3 4

5 6

7

8

9 10

11 12

13 14

Festus, De sign. verb. 76 and 323 (Lindsay). Cf. Thesaurus Linguae Latinae VI 1, s.v. feriae, col. 502–4. Cf. Cicero, Leg. 2.55. A list of these feriae is handed down by Varro, Ling. 6.12. There were feriae imperativae, but these were exceptional days of rest announced ad hoc because of particular circumstances and therefore applying only to the specific situation, cf. Macrobius, Sat. 1.16.6. Cf. Cassius Dio, Hist. Rom. 60.17.1 (Claudius); Tacitus, Hist. 4.40 (Vespasian). Advocati and rhetores/oratores often were the same people. This applies to the feriae vindemiarum (in September), court holidays since the Late Republic, as well as to the feriae messium in July (Beaujeu 1967). The earliest testimony for a transfer of the feriae vindemiales to rhetoric classes is Cyprian, Ad Donat.1 (in Carthage, cf. Vössing 1997, n. 1058); for the feriae messium cf. Gellius 9.15.1 (feriae aestivae; cf. 18.5.1). The precise date of the court holidays varied from province to province (cf. Codex Theodosianus 2.8.19; Digesta 2.12.4). Moreover, we know a lot of exceptions from the rule that a rhetor did not teach in summer (cf. Walden 1909: 279–80). Varro, Men. frg. 279 = 278 in Cèbe 1985: 1220 (= Marcipor X) with the commentary on p. 1259–61. Cf. Halkin 1932. For the schools of Late Antiquity cf. Ausonius, Protr. ad nep. 9-10, who speaks of intervalla ‘making easier the weariness of long toil’; these times of leisure may also refer to festivals, see l. 11: nisi varientur festa profestis. Horace, Epist. 2.2.197 (cf. Porphyrius ad loc.); Juvenal, Sat. 10.115–116; Tertullian, Idol. 10.2, 4 (on this: Vössing 1997: 306–14); Symmachus, Epist. 5.85.3. The actual festive day, 19 March, was extended by several days over the course of time (19–23 March; see Wissowa 1912: 203–6), although we do not know whether all of them were ‘days off school’. Here too, the original holiday on December 17 expanded steadily with time, see Nilsson 1921. Like the rites of the Saturnalia in general (cf. Priscian, Inst. gramm. 8, p. 377 (Hertz), quoting Cato the Elder), the emphasis on the slaves originated from the Greek east, cf. Athenaeus, Deipn. 14.639b; Macrobius, Sat. 1.10.22 for the festival of Kronos; for a different view: Latte 1960: 254 who presumes a rural custom from Italy. In any case, the licentia of the slave on the Saturnalia (Macrobius 1.7.26) was one of their characteristics, cf. Lefèvre 1988: 36–7. The calendar of Polemius Silvius (fifth century ce, based on older sources, cf. Rüpke 1995: 151–60) still refers to the feriae servorum (Inscr. It. XIII 2, p. 275). Martial, Epigr. 5.84: Iam tristis nucibus puer relictis/ clamoso reuocatur a magistro,/ ... Saturnalia transiere tota. Cf. also Pliny, Epist. 8.7.1. Cf. Tertullian, Idol. 10.3: Flaminicae et aediles sacrificant creati: schola honoratur feriis. It is only here that we learn about these free days on the occasion of the first sacrifices of the new priestesses for the empresses and of the aediles. However, the same cannot simply be assumed for other cities (cf. Vössing 1997: 313–14). In every case, it is a misguided conclusion that schools were closed at every greater festival (Halkin 1932: 126). Cf. Laes 2005 and Martin Bloomer in this volume. Cf. the commentary of Friedländer 1886: 62–4; Citroni 1989: 217–20; Nauta 2002: 441–2.

164  Konrad Vössing 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

22

23 24

25

26 27 28

29 30 31

Shackleton Bailey 1993, ad loc. Barié and Schindler 2013, ad loc. Van Miert 2009: 168. Cf. Martial, Epigr. 5.84.2; 8.3.15-16; 9.68 (see below note 27); 10.60; 12.57.4–5; Booth 1976. Cf. for example Marrou 1955: 363; Baldwin 1969: 210; Pernot 2008: 53. Cf. also the following note. Bonner 1977: 139 obviously doubts the long duration of these holidays and does not make a clear statement about their beginning. When accepting the poem as a proof for the existence of holidays though the indication of the time is clear: mid-July (line 6f.: until mid-July, the Sun stood in the constellation of the Lion) until mid-October (line 11). It is methodically questionable to rearrange the dates because of considerations of practicability, as did Reggiani 1997: 77: ‘Una lunga pausa di vacanze era necessaria, nei mesi piu caldi dell’estate, da fine giugno a tutto settembre’. She explains the necessity for this time table by appealing to the custom of open-air classes. Marrou 1955: 363 adds only Augustine, Conf. 9.2.2 as reference to substantiate the quality of this testimony of a long vacation (‘bien attesté’). However, Augustine mentions only rhetoric classes and the feriae vindemiales, the court holidays in September (cf. above, note 6). For Horace, Sat. 1.6.75 cf. the following note. Horace, Sat. 1.6.75, concerning the monthly school fee paid by the pupils (ibant octonos referentes idibus aeris), is interpreted by Marquardt 1886: vol. 1, 94 as a parallel to Martial, Epigr. 10.62. One reading (octonis idibus) would indeed make a school season of eight months every year seem plausible. August Mau pointed out in his work on Marquardt 1886 (vol. 1, 94, n. 4) that this does not match the time data of Martial. Four months without income would be even more unrealistic than three. The reading octonos... must therefore definitively be preferred, cf. also Blümner 1911: 315, n.8. Nicolai 1963: 208–9. Oswald and Schuller 2008: 87–8 interpret the text in the same way (‘Schülerkeilen mithilfe langer Ferien’), as did Blümner 1911: 315, n. 5. This was already pointed out by Mau, cit. (cf. note 22). It seems unreasonable to make a difference between parcere in line 1 and cessare in line 11 (as did Nicolai 1963: 208: ‘Der Dichter gibt dem Magister den Rat, [er] … solle … erstens den Stock selten gebrauchen und zweitens in der Sommerhitze die Schule für drei Monate …’); the whole poem is in fact about the same situation in the summertime. Varro, cit. (n. 7 above). Cf. also Augustine, Serm. 62.18 (held at Carthago): Sicut enim pueris insensatis ad lutum ludentibus et manus inquinantibus, paedagogus cum uenit seuerus, lutum de manu excutit, codicem porrigit... Et tamen pueri euadunt ab oculis paedagogi, et redeunt ad lutum furtim; et quando inueniuntur, abscondunt manus, ne uideantur. See above note 18. These are the final lines of the poem: Vis, garrule, quantum accipis ut clames, accipere ut taceas? (Martial, Epigr. 9.68.11–12). Cf. Catullus, Carm. 37.17 (cf. Booth 1985b); Horace, Carm. 1.29.7; Petronius, Sat. 27.1 (inter pueros capillatos); 34.4 (duo Aethiopes capillati); 57.9 (puer capillatus); Martial, Epigr. 2.57.5 (grex capillatus); 3.58.30 (see n. 31 below). A different situation is presented in Persius, Sat. 1.2930, where the pupils are described as cirrati (curly-haired) and are by no means depicted as a dishonourable audience. The reference is to normal pupils (against the assumption of Booth 1985a) who are marked in a neutral way. For the training of apprentices in Antiquity cf. Dreyer 2006. Schuppe 1942; Laes 2009b; Vössing 2015 (with bibliography). Martial, Epigr. 3.58 (the pupils of this paedagogus are called here lascivi capillati or delicati). For the paedagogium puerorum (or eruditorium puerorum, cf. Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum 4.143.4; 374.54; 5.319.56) cf. Mohler 1940; Forbes 1955;

Why Roman pupils lacked a long vacation   165 32

33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40

41 42 43

Booth 1979; Laes 2011a: 186–8. For the teachers, the paedagogi or paedagogi puerorum, see also CIL VI 1827-1836; SHA, Hadr. 2.7 (in the emperor’s palace). The translators and commentators normally connect the mensa with the magister: ‘your table’ (Friedländer 1886; Paoli 1990: 168; Shackleton Bailey 1993; Barié and Schindler 2013), although there is nowhere any hint of a teacher’s mensa, not even in the schola grammatici; in fact, the typical furniture was his pulpitum, cf. Horace, Epist. 1.19.40; Suetonius, Gramm. 4; Sidonius Apollinaris, Epist. 2.9.4. Vössing 2004: 210–12; Dunbabin 2003: 443–5; Schnurbusch 2011: 97–100. The calculator was not at all the teacher of calculation in elementary school, as is often assumed due to a misunderstanding by Rufinus, Orig. in Num. hom. 27.13, but a book-keeper, or the one who was entrusted with teaching the slaves calculations and book-keeping, cf. Vössing 1997: 577; Bérenger 1999; for the education of the vernae, the house-born slaves, cf. Herrmann-Otto 1994: 306–22; for the calculatores: ibid. 314–16 and 332–3. Cf. for example CIL XII 8355 (= Galsterer 2010, no. 440); for a prosopographical list of notarii (unfortunately without specific dates) cf. Teitler 1985: 107–200; cf. also Teitler 2007: 521–2 for slaves as shorthand writers. It is not by chance that in Diocletian’s Edictum de pretiis venalium (301 ce) we find the magister (institutor litterarum), the calculator and the notarius side by side – the latter two with a wage level increased by half (7.68–70); thinking of the prosperity of these specialists could therefore be a stimulus for the magister. For the sexual and affective implications of the relationship between the dominus and his pueri (delicati) or deliciae cf. Asso 2010; Laes 2003 and 2010b; Sanna 2004; Sigismund Nielsen 2013: 297–8. For slave schools cf. note 31. Diu levis: Martial, Epigr. 2.48.5; cf. 5.48. Martial writes ironically about the quality of the ‘class’ in a different way in 8.3.15-16. Further tensions are added: the booth of a small ludi magister is contrasted with the poetic portrayal of summer heat, and the reality of corporal punishment is contrasted with its mythical precursors. This results, in the case of Marsyas, in a grotesque exaggeration. See Vössing 2002. See Pliny, Epist. 4.13.5 with Vössing 2006. Evans Grubbs and Parkin 2013.

11 Becoming a Roman student W. Martin Bloomer

Introduction How did Roman children come to think of themselves as students? And more fundamentally what did it mean, especially to the child, to be a student? These seem simple, perhaps even universal questions. But we know the danger of assuming that one century’s child, student, or soldier is the same as another century’s. For the historian, a term like student can be a perilous kind of homonym, especially since it is one of those words describing a humble, quotidian status. One is less tempted to believe that a Roman emperor had the same status, powers and costume as emperor Napoleon (even if he encouraged the belief). There is something about children and schooling, however, that kindles a certain sense of familiarity. We have all been students; most of the readers of this book have been students of Latin; perhaps we imagine that we are in some way continuing the culture of classical education. A hard look at the realities of childhood in the Roman empire (to be found in this volume) may be the cure for any such nostalgic act of identification. Still, we may well then ask in a critical and historical spirit: how did the child pass from home to school, and how did the child then think of him – or herself as a “student”? My effort to identify the changes in attitude toward the child and by the student requires examining a broad array of evidence that is embroiled in literary, personal, and ideological interests. Especially challenging, whether the evidence be the literary memoir or a sculptural relief of a dead child, is the fact that this effort must repeatedly follow in the traces of adult commemoration. The mature man remembering his difficult schooling, or the parent extolling his dead heir, or even the educational theorist describing the ideal passage of child to student and student to man inevitably involves the historian in adult ideas, which may only dimly reflect childhood experience. Still, this evidence will be of great importance since it reveals an imaginary world or the ideal social protocols for the young student. It may also unwittingly reveal clues of real experience. In addition, there is strong evidence for how such social protocols were communicated to the child. The curriculum itself provided scripts for the child to practice his or her coming into studentship. These scripts operate between ventriloquism – the child repeating adult modes of describing and discussing the child’s subjectivity – and childhood experience itself, since the exercises were read and written, memorized

Becoming a Roman student   167 and reused, even resisted, and parodied by the student. The historian’s interest in a child’s experience of education must then be broadened beyond the somewhat naïve hope of recuperating authentic experience to the analysis of the acculturation of given values and practices. The evidence for the child’s resistance to the acts of inculcation and to the values or practices themselves, somewhat broader than has hitherto been described, is of crucial importance for understanding how the child interiorized the values and skills that the adult educational establishment was so earnestly and zealously seeking to transmit. This chapter reviews the commemoration by adults of children as students and considers a number of ways that the child’s experience of schooling encouraged a specific view of the child as a student, with certain skills, and dispositions.1 Then the chapter turns from the realm of commemoration, idealization, and prescription – those preeminently adult modes for thinking about and directing thinking about the student – to treat evidence for the child’s own experience of education. Admittedly, this evidence is difficult, and does not escape from adult prescriptions about how a child was to feel, but the evidence of children’s difficulty with schooling and resistance to schooling, the misuse of school materials and methods, and willful misbehavior sheds considerable light on the child’s developing selfidentification as a student.2

Parental pride and adult commemoration Cicero himself affords us a glimpse into paternal care for the education of children. He arranged for tutors for his son and nephew, directly supervised their studies at home, and sent them to Greece for advanced study where he checked on them by letter. He was proud of his daughter’s educational achievements.3 Parents’ pride in their children’s educational abilities and their status as students is evident throughout Greek and Latin literature. Education broadly speaking could be a maker, not simply a marker of status. Intellectuals wrote of education as the subjects fit for the free. More concretely, signs of the importance placed on education for the individual’s identity come from grave monuments that celebrate the literacy and free status of the dead, but also of their survivors or heirs. The communication of this pride in literacy comes through the iconography of the monument, the relations commemorated, the very use of inscribed formal language, and at times explicit statements of educational achievement.4 That slaves, especially in the Roman world were expert readers and writers does not seem to have deflated in the least the great ideological claims of the liberal arts and literacy. By representing advanced literacy as the characteristic of the free, ancient education helped explain why the elite was superior to the non-elite. By dividing the mental from the manual arts, the theorists mystified social divisions. At the same time, education could be a vehicle for social mobility as well as social cohesion since it delivered real, useful skills – of reading, writing, and speaking – that were necessary for commerce, army, and government. Schooling may certainly seek practical and social ends at the same time, but successful schooling seems to be predicated on some interior change in its young

168  W. Martin Bloomer practitioners. We need not credit all of the grand claims that traditional liberal education has asserted – that it will make men moral or perfect communicators and ideal governors – but schooling has often succeeded in changing the child, tied to home and subject to orders and punishment, to the student, a quasi man, quasi adult whose activity anticipates that of the good or ideal citizen, endowed with strong persuasive speaking skills and practiced in analyzing and proposing solutions for familial, social, and civic strife. Through schooling the free child was encouraged to believe both that his education marked a new, higher stage of life, and that much of this achievement was of his own making. The encouragement both of children in education and of the education of children was tied to changes in Roman social, cultural, and intellectual history. Romans of the late republic and early empire highly valued the free child, male, and female.5 This heightened sense of the value of children was communicated to the future in three modes: literature generally; educational thinking in particular; and most commonly in physical monuments, especially tombstones (how the increased valuation of free children was communicated synchronically is another question, involving these media but also legislation, religious processions, birth rituals, rites of passage, etc.). 6 Adult commemoration need not be taken as a transparent index of social practice, but it does communicate norms and expectations. Roman social historians have responded at times with enthusiasm, at times with skepticism to the records of tender sentiment among the members of the Roman familia.7 They have been responding to the high valuations of the child both in commemorative practice (erecting tombstones for children, elite and sub-elite), the statements of family connection on inscriptions and scattered throughout Roman literature, and the direct testimony of the educational theorists, Quintilian and Plutarch especially, who detail the increasingly complex and rigorous education given to free children.

From commemoration to experience An account of children’s experience cannot simply follow the tender lines of sentimental memory – the nice things children say or are recorded to have said about their parents and vice versa. Instead, various evidence from the process of learning offers insight into children’s experience. Again this evidence can express adult expectation and exaggeration, for the educational theorists are almost invariably optimists: their program, they almost guarantee, will make children into docile students and ultimately, capable men. The evidence that attests to the practices of compulsion in education offers a less rosy but more realistic picture (the harsh picture of the punishing schoolmaster can be exaggerated, by the satirists, or by adult memory). The ubiquity of corporal punishment in the schoolroom has been often remarked. The systematicity of practices of compulsion has not received so much attention.8 The default Western, modern, academic notion seems to be that corporal punishment is an aberration. Punishment is understood as a departure from the norm of the student’s or the teacher’s behavior: really bad behavior, whatever

Becoming a Roman student   169 that means, from the student might merit punishment or, if the cause is laid to the teacher, the adult is seen either as pathological (sadistic) or occasional (the teacher has given in to a fit of anger). The traditional attitude, however, has been that punishment is the norm (both regular and right). Such sententiae as “work hard lest you be beaten”9 or “the unpunished man is the uneducated” or “the roots of education are bitter, its fruit sweet” (the last, originally from the Greek Isocrates, reappears in the Latin curriculum)10 are part of the special subset of the media of education that justifies its methods. They are in genre both protrepsis and apologia. They encourage the beaten child that his beating is for a purpose, that it is natural, and unavoidable and even, to a certain extent, desirable. Ideological statements about punishment, pro as well as contra, gave theoretical formulation to what was common, traditional practice, but there was, in addition, a related but implicit systematicity undergirding the practice of punishment. Teaching practices and curricular material encouraged a culture of fear which dangled punishment as an ever-present possibility before the child. The child’s experience of punishment was thus system-wide, in the sense that he read and wrote about it in addition to witnessing it or experiencing it in the flesh. The adult attitudes conveyed by theoretical statements, curricular materials, and lived experience were successful, so to speak, to the degree that the child came to believe not simply that punishment was the way of the world but that it was needed and appropriate. In tension but not in contradiction to this disposition, children engaged in resistance. This resistance had elements of escape and denial within it, but the very fantasy of escape and the act of denial can contain or even constitute an answering violence. When school materials are used to deface property and even to assault other children or in a remarkable literary fantasy to assault the harsh teacher, the student is transferring adults’ violence from his body to surrogates for the punishing adults. Rather than seeing this as a divertimento in the life of the student, I propose that this is an end of schooling.

The child driven through the curriculum Traditional analysis of the purposes, sources, motivations, and effects of the school curriculum has equated a complex social and cultural institution to the series of books or lessons that made up the curriculum. The ancient and medieval student was imagined as running up a ladder from first reading, the Psalter, Aesop, Cato, to harder poets, and prose, history, theology, or philosophy. The means of delivering these texts has been less emphasized. For the question of how the Psalter or Virgil was taught, we do have some prescriptions and idealizations and of course, for some later periods, teachers’ and students’ books. The hermeneumata, progymnasmata, and colloquies present idealized routines of education.11 So, too, the question and answer style of some grammars reflect ancient school practice. Priscian’s Partitiones show a rather full and idealized teaching of the first lines of the Aeneid. Most of these and certainly the great theorists of education treat this running course as a successful enterprise. Thus, these writings about the curriculum, both the prescriptive remarks of theorists and the portions of the

170  W. Martin Bloomer curriculum that model use of the curriculum, are in fact ideal scripts which admit few difficulties, for the teacher, or pupil.12 For the first century educator Quintilian, the process of education is difficult but attainable, given the proper sequence of curriculum and proper supervision by the father’s delegate, the master/teacher. By following Quintilian’s clear and detailed sequence of steps, the child, he claims, will grow properly, and advance to a moral and oratorical maturity. The theorists and the exercises also have answers for why the child should embark upon education. In part protreptic and in part practical guide, Quintilian’s work especially combines a synthesis of teaching sequences, a summary of rhetorical theory, and recommendations tailored to two stages of the child, the beginning/elementary learner and the more advanced learner who is distinguished by having his own judgment. But how should the teacher or the parent keep the child engaged? Again, Quintilian and the colloquies admit this can be a problem, but the right curriculum and a reasonable master seem to be the answer. Quintilian famously recommends the use of games and competition to keep the child motivated until the child’s own judgment can direct him. The age of reason is for the great schoolmaster synonymous with the age of self-motivation.13 The Hellenistic school exercises have a more straightforward answer to motivating the child: the most frequently copied line to appear on the writing tablets is philoponei mē darēs – work hard (study well) lest you be beaten. As the material record shows, physical compulsion was not so easily eradicated. Quintilian, Plutarch, and later Himerius, argued strongly against it, each concerned in his own way with creating a different set of motivators for the child and with restricting the set of agents who could hit a freeborn child.14 In some elite, exceptional schools, punishment could then be avoided. The line from the papyri and wax tablets helped renew the poles of school experience: good studentship as the desideratum, almost present; equally almost present is physical chastisement. Writing the line again and again seems something like a magical chant, an incantation that the student could perform to keep violence at bay. The almost compulsive act to ward off violence can, of course, be a reflex of fear not of fact. Good studentship and punishment exist in symbiosis. A passage from the Roman playwright Plautus in the third century bce along with various later monastic rules describes a system of schooling in which the mispronunciation of a single syllable could result in a beating.15 This world where the lash lurks behind every syllable is a world of the adult’s making and, perhaps most importantly, the child’s belief. For the child student, it is of course a sentiment, a feeling, a disposition to one’s schoolwork, one’s schoolteacher, and one’s future or ongoing identity. Physical punishment may seem to us either entirely inadmissible or justifiable in cases of egregious misconduct, or we may understand it as some pathology of the instructor: the adult teacher out of occasional anger, or engrained habit, strikes the child. The old theorists do not, of course, speak of pathology, or the complex of frustration, aggression (some of this sexual), and resentment which we may reasonably surmise colored the teacher’s impulse to strike his student. The differences in age and status in all probability exacerbated the emotional relations of teacher and student: the Greek freedman teaching his upper-class Roman students, or the old monk

Becoming a Roman student   171 teaching his wards could have had complex and contrary feelings for their students. But the traditional school as an institution understood and applied punishment in ways fundamentally different from the modern. These attitudes and practices in turn affected the possibility, and the child’s calculation, of avoiding punishment. The lines that schoolchildren have to copy or memorize – either general adult sentiments about the deferred good and present pain that is education, e.g., the roots of education are bitter, its fruits sweet, or specific adult correctives, e.g., for the recent school, “I will not throw pencils in class,” a line to be copied in a fair hand on the blackboard many times, or for the ancient school, “work hard lest you be punished,” a line copied on wax tablet or papyrus – do not guarantee the desired behavior. But they are graphic, visual, and often audible proof of punishment. They also try to affect the memory of the punished, hence their repetition. At the least we can conclude that such adult correctives of the child become a form of ventriloquism – the child’s hand and voice following the adult script. The curriculum has longer forms that perform and not simply prescribe correction. For instance, Aelfric of Eynsham has his boys say they would rather be whipped than ignorant. Aelfric, master of Aelfric Bata, lived ca. 955–1010, but he is continuing ancient practice and sentiment.16 Here is the school scene he places in his colloquy: Sumite uirgas duas et stet unus in dextera parte culi illius et alter in sinistra, et sic inuicem percutite super culum eius et dorsum, et flagellate eum bene prius, et ego uolo postea. (166: Take up two rods. Place one boy on the right side of his buttocks and the other on the left. Take turns hitting him both on his buttocks and back. Flog him well first, and I’ll do it after). The involvement of fellow students in the spectacle of punishment is no doubt true to reality. The worst punishment in the Greek and Roman school had the punished held by another student while beaten by the master (called katōmizein in Greek, catomidiare in Latin)17. The centrality of punishment in schooling is reflected not just in the scenes of orderly punishment (where things go the master’s way) but in two other genres of the school curriculum. The following extract from Aelfric’s grammar is a more subtle way that school materials kept punishment in the eye and ear of the student. The grammar here presents a bilingual lesson in the lexicon of punishment as at the same time it introduces the most basic item of grammar and schooling: VERBVM is a verb, and verb means an action or suffering or consent. An action is when you say, aro I plow; uerbero I flog. Suffering is when you say: uerberor I am flogged; ligor I am bound. Consent is when you say, amor I am loved; doceor I am taught.18 The paradigms here are strongly transitive verbs. Violent physical actions are communicated first in the active voice, then in the passive. But the passage

172  W. Martin Bloomer also moves by association, verbum with verbero, and onto verberor. The final movement is of course consent when the student is not the subject or object of physical process, but the willing recipient of love and teaching. The association of the last two is only conceivable when the student takes the harsh, physical action of schoolmaster, and schooling as an expression of concern for him and his new state of learning. The use of the verb for beating as a paradigm in the student’s learning of grammar goes back to the grammar of Greek in Hellenistic times, the work of Dionysius Thrax which had tuptō, I beat, as the paradigm for the thematic verb.19 (Modern grammars of classical Greek tend to use the opposite verb, luō I free, let loose.) Corporal punishment thus was a complex, multi-faceted feature of school experience, which theorized, and naturalized beating throughout the curriculum. The system of punishment in this textual world imagined for the student and performed by the student could be described as a world of ideal, total fear, but with the prospect of escape. Indeed, this world might be better described as a world of potential punishment, of persistent, ubiquitous threat. The point of violence is to instill fear. Thus, Chrysostom recommends infrequent physical punishment, lest the boy become inured to pain. So, children were overshadowed by the threat of punishment, rather than frequent recipients of actual punishment.20 Again, it is true that the evidence presents us with adult attitudes in texts written by adults to shape the child’s experience of his or her own schooling. The texts, however, are not simply prescriptions – a species of adult imperatives whose effect on the dispositions and behavior of their targets we cannot ever fully know. Rather, the texts are performative scripts. They require or invite the student to take up their terms and categories and play out little scenes. They present imaginations of the student’s situation and thus ply the student with little scripts to understand his or her situation. The script can be excessive. Like the sarcophagi that show children happily playing, maybe even eternally playing (see Fanny Dolansky in this volume), these are not scenes of reality but rather social protocols. I offer three examples of larger scale modeling within the school curriculum of the right attitude to punishment and learning. The first is drawn from the account of the chreia, the sayings tale, one of the preliminary exercises. The fourthcentury grammarian Aphthonius is here offering a model interpretation of the saying attributed to Isocrates about the bitter roots of education: The ones in love with paideia begin with labor, but these labors end in profit. Such was his philosophizing, and we will show our wondrous approval in what follows. The lovers of education are conscripted with the leaders of paideia, to approach them is fearful, to leave them foolish ignorance. Fear ever attends children, both immediately, and prospectively. Pedagogues receive the students, fearful in aspect, worse once they punish: fear precedes the task and punishment follows the fear; the children’s faults are punished, right answers are treated as expected and unremarkable. Fathers are more harsh than the pedagogues: interrogating the children’s routes [to and from school], ordering them to be the first to arrive, and suspecting [that they are dallying

Becoming a Roman student   173 in] the agora. And if ever there is need of punishment, they forget the nature of the child. But by being a child in these circumstances and coming into manhood one is crowned with excellence (aretē). If a child from fear of these things flees his teachers, runs from his father, and avoids his pedagogue, he is utterly bereft of words and in company with his fear loses eloquence. All these considerations led Isocrates to his judgment, bitter is the root of education. Aphthonius does express some sympathy for the child – the world is harsh and unresponsive to his young state. Perhaps this note of sympathy resonated with the young children who had to memorize the saying and learn how to explain and defend it. The curriculum did contain other readings even more appealing to a student’s hopes for a reprieve. Comic passages described a world of total punishment where a single slip in pronunciation earned a beating,21 but the speaker of this stiff discipline is a pedagogue who is lamenting that nowadays no such discipline holds, rather the boy can run to his father to be delivered from his pedagogue’s blows. In Prudentius’ poem, The Crown of the Martyrs (line 9), schoolboys have their revenge on a harsh master, who is in fact the martyr being celebrated. The shorthand teacher Cassian had been a strict taskmaster. The Roman magistrate condemns the Christian teacher to death by turning him over to his students who write him to death, scratching, and stabbing with their styli. Despite Prudentius’ intent to celebrate the teacher as a Christian martyr, it is hard to imagine that the poem was read by schoolchildren without some secret thrill of revenge. The fantasy of revenge, punishing the punisher, is not so common in the school curriculum as the contemplation of escape. Such school exercises as Apthonius’ remarks on Isocrates’ chreia remind the student that better times are coming. A number of the Distichs of Cato, a basic reading, and writing text, set the student’s present labors against future gains, and freedom from blows.22 This topos of the freedom being earned through education seems to have as its correlate, the memory of the adult of his corporal punishment in school. The adult commemoration of school violence is then more than lingering trauma; it is another indication of the efficacy of the ancient thinking that school violence led to a good end. The two phenomena just discussed, the encouragement of the belief that present pain led to future maturity and the adult’s recollection that his memory of school violence separates his current status from his former, did not challenge the system of punishment. Evidence of resistance to this official script or social protocol of the school comes from notices and traces of student misbehavior. The students’ revenge is appropriate, like a contrapasso in Dante, because they have been tortured by learning to write. As the late antique or medieval pupil copied or glossed the Latin tale from Prudentius, he, or she, was also reinforcing a memory of schooling as affliction. The great historian of education in Antiquity Henri Marrou wrote simply, “When the men of antiquity thought back to their schooldays they immediately remembered the beatings” and cited in support Horace, Suetonius, and Quintilian. More passages could easily be added, especially

174  W. Martin Bloomer from Augustine and Ausonius’ Protrepticus ad nepotem.23 But Marrou’s original French expresses the thought differently, ‟Pour tous les anciens, le souvenir de l’école reste associé à celui des coups.”24 The recollection of school inevitably triggers tales of blows. Now Augustine said that everyone would choose to die rather than to return to school;25 and his own sense of trauma is no doubt exacerbated or even encouraged by his theological point, for this passage cited by Marrou and others in fact says that human beings would prefer death to infantia, which is certainly pre-school age, in fact pre-speaking but also that stage before man’s knowledge of logos – speech, reason, and God. Nonetheless, Augustine’s argument is possible because his readers have been to school and associate it with torments (which he names at Confessions 1.9). Schooling was literally synonymous with punishment. Juvenal uses as an idiom for “go to school”, “We too held out our hand to be struck” – Et nos subduximus ferulae manum26. Memory of school trauma identifies the victim as a student, or more precisely, as one who has matured beyond and through schooling. There is a certain pride in saying, “And we too have endured…”. It may not be as satisfying as imagining stabbing to death that old, brutal teacher, but of course, it belongs to human experience and adulthood, not to adolescent fantasy. Pride in suffering may be explained in part by assuming that the mature scholar thought it had been necessary to his education, an attitude encouraged, as we have seen by the school curriculum and by the ventriloquized voice of the master (as the grammarian Diomedes [396.7] put it vapulando corrigitur, “correction comes from beating”). But to judge from other societies and literatures, it is not surprising to find pride in taking a beating from the group of men who have survived a harsh school, club, or military unit.27 Perhaps, even though girls were educated, we should use the terms “Boys’ World” to describe the nexus of memory, pain, resistance, and escape that characterized ancient schooling. Acts of resistance to schooling were numerous, from truancy to vandalism, and included the breaking of the teacher’s tablets and the scratching of school verses on house walls.28 Fantasies of escape and revenge, motivated by the reality of punishment, were part and parcel of what it meant to be a student. The free student could dream of delivery from punishment. And again, an essential part of being a student was that the boy and girl read and wrote of this happier prospect. Perhaps with acts of resistance and the act of bitter memory we have moved through the experience that was a boy’s world. Rather than define the experience of ancient education exclusively by reference to curriculum or by invoking the desired final product, the grandly competent culture hero promised by Cicero, Quintilian, and others, we might stress that a fundamental experience of school was the nexus of fear, resistance, and fantastical revenge and imagined coming into power. Such school attitudes then shaped the memory of the adult. The survivor’s memory and commemoration helped to contain the violence and sense of victimhood to the pre-adult world of the school. The adult world, the “real” world that sets itself in memory against an anticipatory, scholastic childhood or studentship is thereby reserved for the well-schooled free men who do not use physical violence against one another but are adept in other, verbal forms of coercion, such as law, or formal speech.

Becoming a Roman student   175

Acknowledgment In preparing this chapter, I have benefited greatly from the comments and conversation of Dr. Robert L’Arrivée and Dr. Hailey LaVoy.

Notes 1 These questions are then a subset of the more general ideas of how adults imagined the child, for which see Aasgaard in this volume on adults’ metaphors and models. 2 The stages of studentship were not so distinct as in modern systems that descend from and develop European nationalist and bourgeois institutions. Schooling of elite children (girls especially) was often conducted at home, and education, or even the sense of being a student could extend well past adolescence. For example, after his early career as an orator Cicero returned at the age of 29 to the capital in 77 bce from advanced studies in the Greek East, a retooling of his oratorical style (Brut. 313-16); see also Plutarch, Cicero 3.4–4.5. On Cicero’s ongoing education, see Treggiari 2015. Ambitious Roman young men who attended a leading orator and came routinely to his home were called students, discipuli or auditores (see Fantham 2004: 93). 3 See Treggiari 2015 who cites for Cicero’s pride in his daughter’s learning, Ad Quintum 3.3; Ad fam. 249.2; Lactantius, Inst. 1.15.20. In a letter to his brother Cicero promised to supervise his nephew’s instruction, Ad Quintum 17.2. 4 Meyer 1990. 5 Rawson 2003a. 6 See Rawson 2003a. 7 See most generally the essays in Rawson and Weaver 1997, especially the first chapter by Richard Saller (Saller 1997). 8 For theoretical analysis of corporal punishment of children see especially Donnelly and Straus 2005 and the review of scholarship in Lenta 2012. For comparative study, see Pate 2012. 9 See Marrou 1955 and Cribiore 1996. 10 The Latin version is found in Priscian, Praexercitamina 432.12; other grammarians assigned it to Cato (probably on the influence of the Distichs of Cato), e.g., Diomedes 310.2; see Morin 2001: 599 for additional examples. 11 On the progymnasmata, the school exercises preliminary to full rhetorical composition and delivery, see Dionisotti 1982 and Penella 2015. On colloquia, see Dickey 2012. 12 There are occasional notes of frustration: in Bata’s Colloquy 25, the teacher complains that his frequent punishments do the scholars no good – see Dumitrescu 2011: 87. 13 On Quintilian’s conception of the child as a learner, see Bloomer 2011b. 14 See Saller 1991 and 1994; Laes 2005; Shaw 2001; and Bloomer 2015 with bibliography. 15 See the discussion of Benedict, Rule of St. Benedict 45, and one of his sources The Rule of the Master in Bloomer 2015. 16 Well discussed by Dumitrescu 2011. 17 Bonner 1977: 118 provides a drawing of a lost wall painting that illustrated such a punishment, although probably not in a school context. 18 Translation from Dumitrescu 2009: 241. 19 See Marrou 1956: 172. 20 See Leyerle 1997. 21 E.g. Plautus, Bacchides 422–34. 22 See Bloomer 2015 and De Bruyn 1999 on Christian discourse. 23 Marrou 1956: 272 with Horace, Epist. 2.1.70; Suetonius, Gram. 9.2; Quintilian, Inst. 1.3.14; Ausonius, Protrepticus ad nepotem 14–34. For Augustine see below. 24 Marrou 1955: 367.

176  W. Martin Bloomer 25 Augustine, Civ. Dei 21.14. 26 Juvenal, Sat. 1.15. 27 A literary parallel comes from the modern novel where the young hero’s progress almost necessarily treats his school punishment. In Chapter 20 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tom takes a beating for Becky’s sake. He is by this time inured to beating and to school. The concerns in the tradition of the modern novel may perhaps be traced to Rousseau’s Confessions where he contrasts his mild upbringing by Mlle. Lambercier with the brutal and unjust beating by his uncle Bernard. The chastisement by a male under a false charge is compared to the expulsion from Eden, with a loss of confidence in authority and a new, strong urge to rebel, which develops into disdain for power and sympathy for those who suffer. These are ideal preconditions for the Bildungsroman. The celebration of boyhood weathering abuse is nowhere stronger than in Kipling, see especially for paragons of imperialists in training the heroes of the short stories ‘The Impressionists‘, ‘Regulus’, and ‘The Satisfaction of a Gentleman’ in Stalky and Co (1899). 28 Truancy: Herodas, Mimes 3; breaking tablets: Basil of Caesarea, Hom. Temp. Famis Sicc. 67 C (PG 31.317); see Cribiore 1996: 54–5; school graffiti: Franklin (1996– 1997); and Bloomer 2015 with bibliography.

Part III

Religious practices and sacred spaces

12 Roman children as religious agents The cognitive foundations of cult Jacob L. Mackey

Introduction This chapter offers an account of Roman children’s cognitive agency in their own religious learning. It serves as an alternative to accounts in which Roman children figure as passively moulded by socializing agents or forces.1 On my account, Roman children were recognized as agents, who in turn recognized others as agents from and with whom they could learn. Romans could often describe children as passively shaped by adults, but they could also note children’s active learning. Two such examples instance the chronological sweep of the evidence from the Latin west considered here: Cicero’s recognition that children learn without instruction, sine doctrina, motivated by examples of virtuous behaviour and, centuries later, Augustine’s insistence that he learned of his own accord, by paying attention, advertendo, rather than under coercion.2 I focus here on traditional Roman religion because this domain was not primarily an object of formal pedagogy, and certainly not of catechesis, but was instead acquired informally, through observation of and participation with others. Even when religious knowledge was taught formally – I discuss the case of choral hymns – the pedagogy was, so far as the evidence permits analysis, such as to yield to children a substantial degree of cognitive autonomy. Beryl Rawson’s work on Roman children was often informed by anthropologists, who ‘developed theories of informal learning, recognizing different processes such as mimesis, identification and cooperation’.3 In this spirit, I base my approach on the work of some developmental psychologists who formulate and test theories about what underlying cognitive competencies makes ‘processes such as mimesis, identification and cooperation’ possible in the first place, as well as cross-culturally so well-attested as mechanisms of informal learning. Roman children’s religious learning and its role in the transmission of religious culture is receiving renewed interest.4 Although one hesitates now to follow Simon Price in supposing that the capacity for belief originated with Christianity,5 we should nonetheless recognize the value of his suggestion that we view GrecoRoman ‘ritual as a public cognitive system’, and we should not neglect his question about ‘the sort of knowledge... contained in ritual’.6 A parsimonious answer is ‘performative knowledge’ or ‘savoir rituel’.7 To study Roman children’s religious

180  Jacob L. Mackey learning is to explore one avenue for the transmission of such performative knowledge or savoir rituel. But the ontogenetic perspective will also reveal just how complex was its cognitive structure. In what follows, I examine Roman children’s ‘social learning’, that is, learning by observing or interacting with others.8 Social learning involves cognitive processes, such as perceiving others’ intentions, imitating others and sharing intentionality with others. These processes result in distinctively cultural cognitive products, such as shared religious behavioural norms, shared commitments to collective religious goals, and shared religious beliefs. When process yields product, religious transmission has occurred. I follow Ville Vuolanto in my approach to agency: individual agency amounts to a person’s capacity to act intentionally or cause things to happen within a space of possibilities for and constraints on action. It is also important to state up front what I take ‘belief’ and ‘intentionality’ to denote, especially because there has been confusion about the former term.9 My employment of these words and related lexemes is consistent with their use in the mainstream of contemporary philosophy, cognitive science and the social sciences, not to mention everyday usage.10 ‘Intentionality’ refers to the directedness or ‘aboutness’ of some mental states.11 Such states include attention, desire, fear, or a plan (an ‘intention’, not to be confused with aboutness per se). Belief, like attention, desire and so forth, is an intentional state. Beliefs are about, that is, they are mental representations of, states of affairs that one takes to exist (compare desires, which are about states of affairs that one wishes did exist). It is crucial to see not only that but also how intentionality, beliefs and indeed agency may be shared. Two or more people share intentionality when they share attention, a desire, a plan, a belief, or another intentional state toward an entity or state of affairs with mutual recognition that they are so sharing.12 In turn, shared agency requires shared intentionality. For our purposes, two or more people share agency when they act together as a result of: (1) sharing intentions to act together; (2) with mutual recognition of sharing such intentions. In such cases, you and I intend to act only as part of our acting: we share ‘we-intentions’. The resulting action is a joint action.13 A final point is worth making explicit: the young of Homo sapiens can only become socialized and learn their culture if they enter the world with some primitive capacities that do not themselves result from socialization and enculturation. Our biological line of inheritance grants us both our characteristic human physiology as well as some core cognitive competencies that underlie and potentiate our sociability and our acquisition of any of the cultural lines of inheritance that characterize human communities.14 These early-developing core cognitive competencies include the predisposition to treat other people as intentional agents like ourselves as well as the motivation to share intentional states with other agents. The biologically primitive capacity to see others as agents and the biologically primitive motivation to share intentionality with other agents potentiate social life and social learning, thereby opening the cultural line of inheritance, in all its local specificity, to children.15 Here, I discuss the

Roman children as religious agents   181 contributions these cognitive competencies made to Roman children’s active social learning in three different modes: (1) imitative learning; (2) participatory learning; and (3) instructed learning.16

Imitation and individual agency: learning to pray Let us approach the central focus of this section – Prudentius’ depiction of a Roman child learning to pray – by exploring, albeit too briefly, the Romans’ recognition that children’s imitation was active, or ‘agent-based’,17 and that their imitative agency was crucial to their cultural learning.18 By surveying Quintilian and Augustine on language acquisition,19 we shall see that Romans could connect imitation to cultural transmission, to ethical and social development, and to the perception of others’ intentions and feelings. Quintilian saw imitation as a natural capacity. Prescribing oratorical training ab infantia, he held that a capacity for imitatio was the surest sign, after a quick and exact memory, that a child possessed a ‘teachable nature’.20 Beyond the specific domain of oratorical training, imitatio served for Quintilian as a general theory of cultural transmission.21 There can be no doubt, he wrote, ‘but that a great part of ars is contained in imitation’, given that ‘it is useful to follow what has been well discovered’.22 Not only do aspiring orators, musicians and painters imitate in order to learn, but even peasants follow the exempla of experience-tested agricultural practices.23 So, for Quintilian, the cultural line of inheritance depends on individuals possessing not only the capacity to imitate but also the discrimination and agency to choose what to imitate. In the case of children, who possess agency, but lack discrimination, the ‘what’ must be carefully mediated by adults. In the specific case of children’s language learning, a theory holding that adults employ child-directed baby-talk ‘so that infants may imitate them’ was available to Romans.24 Quintilian observed that children did indeed actively try to imitate what they heard: ‘A child’s nurses are the first people he will hear, and he will try [conabitur] to form their words by imitating [imitando] them’. Given children’s indiscriminate tendency to imitate, Quintilian advises care in selecting nurses who speak properly.25 Imitation, for Quintilian, was more than just a mode of linguistic learning or even of cultural transmission more broadly, and there was more to worry about than a nurse’s accent. For imitation had profound ethical and social dimensions as well.26 Frequens imitatio transit in mores,27 and therefore children should not imitate another’s ‘deportment, or walk or noticeable defects’.28 Nor should they imitate the behaviours of drunks or slaves, as these may ‘infect’ [inficiunt] their receptive minds [mens].29 Instead – and here we are transported to the classroom – children should learn socially, in groups of their age-mates, rather than alone at home. For the schola affords not only direct but also indirect instruction,30 and allows children to learn by imitating, and even by competing against, more accomplished peers.31 Behind Quintilian’s prohibitions and prescriptions stands his recognition that children imitate actively and even competitively, if not always prudently. Teaching, character-building and proper socialization required Roman adults to limit the space

182  Jacob L. Mackey within which children could exercise their imitative agency, that is, to mediate children’s access to models of thought, speech and action. The connections Quintilian drew between imitation and the youthful mens or between imitation and mores reveal that he considered imitation to have cognitive dimensions beyond mere behavioural mimicry.32 Indeed, recent theoretical and empirical work shows that imitation relies upon a cognitive capacity to perceive others’ mental states.33 Often called ‘folk psychology’, ‘theory of mind’, ‘mentalizing’, or ‘mindreading’, this social-cognitive capacity, which begins to develop in early infancy, causes us: (1) to recognize others as agents; and (2) to intuit their intentional and affective states. Social cognition also causes us (3) to see others’ actions as goal-directed or teleological, that is, as aiming to satisfy their desires, based on their beliefs and perceptions.34 The relevance for imitation is this: children imitatively adopt not only the overt behaviours but also the beliefs and goals they attribute to their models. That a child must perceive others’ mental states in order to imitate, and that a Roman could recognize this, emerges from Augustine’s account of his acquisition of language in his Confessiones. He builds his narrative from what he has been told of his own infancy, from his observation of other infants, and (he claims) from memory.35 The infant Augustine tried to communicate his needs to his caregivers: ‘I wanted to express my desires to those who could fulfil them’.36 Frustration over his inability to share his desires led him ‘to seek out signs through which I could make my feelings known to others’.37 Yet how to acquire such communicative signs? Augustine noted that language is not learned through formal instruction.38 Rather, his linguistic learning depended not only upon his experience of his own feelings and desires but also upon his social-cognitive capacity to attune himself to the psychological states of those around him. He began to grasp that adults attended to objects and that they had intentions toward the objects of their attention. The relevant passage is worth quoting at modest length: When my elders uttered a word for something and when they moved their body toward the thing upon uttering the word, I saw and I grasped thereby that that thing was referred to by them because they made those sounds when they wished to point it out. Moreover, what they wanted was made clear by the motion of their body, a kind of natural language of all peoples [verbis naturalibus omnium gentium], which by means of facial expression, and by the glance of the eyes, and by the movement of the other limbs, and by inflections of the voice, indicates the mind’s disposition [affectio animi] to seek, acquire, reject or avoid something.39 The young Augustine discerned the intentional states of adults in their gaze and gestures. He perceived that the intentionality, affectio animi,40 of adults not only was directed toward objects but also embodied attitudes toward those objects, their desirability, undesirability and so forth. Inferring the object of an adult’s attention and intentions, he associated that object with the adult’s concomitant

Roman children as religious agents   183 utterances, and thereby learned the names of things, thus bringing his infancy, in the etymological sense, to an end. Augustine learned to speak by imitating adults, much as we have seen Quintilian describe.41 But it is crucial to Augustine’s account that an intuitive grasp of other people’s intentionality preceded and grounded his imitative learning of Latin’s conventional code. He construes a pre-linguistic, socialcognitive competence in his infant self, who apprehended glances and gestures as a natural language, i.e., as embodying and expressing intentional attitudes. It was only when he had grasped the intentional states of adult language-users that he could imitate their words appropriately and thus gain the linguistic competence required to communicate his own intentional states to them and thereby satisfy his desires.42 We shall see much the same social-cognitive story implicit in Prudentius’ description of a child learning to pray. Learning to pray in Antiquity no doubt sometimes involved explicit pedagogy.43 Sulpicia/Tibullus, for example, depicts a mother attempting to instruct her daughter in her prayer to Iuno Natalis, but the girl resists, silently petitioning the goddess for love.44 More often, however, children must have learned to pray much as Augustine described learning language: indirectly, through observing others and grasping their intentions.45 Augustine had implicated a sensitivity to the intentional states and feelings of others in the very possibility of imitative language learning. A congruent account of learning to pray may be found in Prudentius’ treatment of the Roman child’s imitative induction into traditional cult. Contra Symmachum 1.197-244 surely contains our most extensive meditation on Roman children’s traditional religious enculturation. Prudentius locates the rudiments of traditional religious learning where we might expect to find them, with the family, especially women:46 The child had observed a stone, shaped in the appearance of and consecrated to Fortuna with her rich horn, standing in the home and his mother going pale as she prayed to it. Then he himself, placed on his nurse’s shoulders, pressing the stone with his lips, poured forth childish vows [puerilia vota / fudit], and begged good things for himself [opes...sibi] from the blind rock, convinced [persuasum...habuit] that what he wanted should be sought there.47 Note that what Prudentius describes is not mindless mimicry; indeed, the scene could scarcely irk his ire if he saw it as mindless mimicry, for he is primarily exercised about the beliefs – vana superstitio (1.198) – that the child internalizes through imitation. In Prudentius’ account, the child overhears the prayer that his mother directs to her statuette of Fortuna and grasps the intentional states that motivate her action. Social-cognitive competence, of the sort the infant Augustine possessed, as well as linguistic competence, of the sort Augustine sought, grants the child access to his mother’s beliefs about the statuette and her goals in praying to it. The mother’s pallor, a sign of emotional arousal – marked but not interpreted by Prudentius – may plausibly be read as a signal of and testimony to the authenticity of her

184  Jacob L. Mackey beliefs and desires.48 Like Augustine’s verba naturalia omnium gentium, i.e., the gestures and expressions that disclose people’s subjective attitudes, the mother’s pallid face witnesses the solemnity of her entreaty. Motivated by the maternal example, the child imitates his mother’s beliefs (persuasum habuit) and goals (opes sibi), and with his nurse’s help, her actions (puerilia vota fudit). In presenting this tableau, Prudentius has in his sights more than just learning to pray. Indeed, he echoes, from a Christian perspective, Quintilian’s big-picture concern for the effect of imitatio on mores. Imitation passes into character as ‘the credulous boy’ learns to pray, learns his rites, and so goes on to become a traditional Roman man, ‘maintaining the absurd practice’ of his family cult.49 As this implies, Prudentius, like Quintilian, also saw imitation as a mode of cultural transmission: Roman religion ‘has run uninterrupted through a thousand generations’ in the imitative manner he details.50 Even if Prudentius’ polemic scarcely counts as documentary evidence, he was surely on to a fundamental fact about the nature of traditional religious learning. One avenue of learning open to the Roman child was that of observation, imitation and hence adoption of beliefs and practices of domestic cult.51 In this way, she could acquire much of ‘la culture rituelle commune des Romains’.52 Such religious learning was social insofar as it involved observing others. Nonetheless, it was individualistic in important respects,53 driven by the child’s own initiative and agency, not by cooperation between adult and child, much less by the pressure of an external, inculcating force. Like Augustine learning language, Prudentius’ child exploits his models by perceiving and then imitating their intentions and actions for his own benefit. And yet ultimately, of course, the benefit to the child was a social and cooperative one. Learning to pray enabled Prudentius’ child to share his wishes with the gods, just as learning to speak allowed Augustine to ‘share’54 his desires with adults, in the expectation in each case that addressees would respond cooperatively. Beyond this, too, the acquisition of religious knowledge aligned Prudentius’ child horizontally with his family and vertically with his ancestors, just as the acquisition of language aligned Augustine with fellow users of Latin, dead and alive, in the ‘stormy partnership of human life’.55 But let us turn now from this comparatively individualistic mode of social learning, in which children see others as agents whose intentions and actions they may imitate, to a cooperative mode of social learning, in which children approach others as agents with whom they may share intentionality and agency.

Religious participation: from joint attention to cultural cognition What cognitive endowments are required to participate cooperatively in joint activity? In joint action, agents must be able to share intentionality. At a minimum, two or more people share agency in joint action when they act together as a result of sharing intentions to act together, with these shared ‘we-intentions’ mutually manifest. So, for example, Gaius and Quintus may walk into the forum side-byside, but they are engaged in joint action only if they both intend to go together and if this shared intention is manifest between them. Without shared intentionality,

Roman children as religious agents   185 Gaius and Quintus are merely two people chancing to show up in the forum at the same time. There is more to say, even about so simple an example, but it must wait for our discussion of cognitively more complex collective cult. Just as Romans could theorize about imitation, so too they could theorize about sharing intentionality and agency. A distinctively Roman example comes from the jurist Ulpian, who illustrated the shared intentionality underlying joint action with an embodied metaphor. Those who share an intention (consentiunt) to act jointly (qui inter se agunt) come together cognitively ‘from different affections of the mind’ to a single purpose (una sententia), just as those who share a single physical location come together bodily ‘from different places’.56 I submit that contexts of shared intentionality and joint action such as Ulpian describes constituted potent spaces of social learning, in which Roman children could acquire specifically cultural forms of intentionality as well as specifically collective forms of culture. Indeed, joint attention alone – an elementary joint action57 in which two people intentionally perceive a third entity together – could open the cultural line of inheritance for Roman children in ways that went beyond the imitative learning sketched in the previous section. For such sharing, if only of attention, creates an ontogenetically primitive ‘we’. Romans like Lucretius were aware that even pre-linguistic children could jointly attend with another to a third object. As the poet notes, the ‘speechlessness of the tongue’ (infantia linguae) causes children to point in order to share attention.58 But there was more to Roman children’s religious learning than just Lucretian joint attention. We shall see that by acting jointly in cult, Roman children could learn ‘our’ collective liturgical norms. By forming joint goals to perform individual acts of cult, they could ultimately develop a shared commitment, a sense of pietas, toward ‘our’ ritual institutions. And by perceiving the intentions and perspectives of others toward the cult act within a shared space of joint attention, they could acquire ‘our’ beliefs about a ritual’s nature, purpose and ‘theology’. All the latter, cultural forms of cognition are built on the former, more primitive abilities to perceive and share intentionality and agency. Tibullus – to take a Roman example of, rather than a Roman theory about, joint action – depicts a father and daughter sacrificing together. Father offers cakes to his Lar, while the daughter (filia parva) offers honeycomb (purum favum).59 Ovid alludes to this tableau in presenting a family sacrificing together at the Terminalia: An altar is made. Here, the country wife herself brings in a potsherd fire taken from the warm hearth. The old man chops wood and arranges the pieces with skill and struggles to fix branches in the hard ground. Then he encourages the first flames with dry bark. His son stands and holds a wide basket in his hands, then, when he has tossed grain thrice into the flames, his little daughter [filia parva] offers sliced honeycombs [incisos...favos]. Others hold wine. Each pours a libation to the flames. Dressed in white, the group watches and maintains silence [linguis...favet]. Communal Terminus is sprinkled by the slaughtered lamb, and he doesn’t complain when offered a suckling pig. Sincere neighbours gather and throng the sacrificial feast, and they sing your praises, holy Terminus.60

186  Jacob L. Mackey Ovid offers a more complicated act of cult than does Tibullus, involving choreography among mother, father, son, and filia parva – who offers honeycombs, plural and sliced – others in the household, and neighbours. We have already seen that sharing intentionality with mutual recognition of such sharing is the minimum condition for engaging in simple joint action. But Ovid’s collective cult act is more complex than walking together to the forum. So let us enrich our account of joint action, with special attention to how Ovid’s children might have learned while participating. Note, first, that in a rule-governed joint action such as cult, participants had to share some liturgical norms. For example, everyone had to know and suppose that everyone else knew, when to maintain ritual silence (favere linguis). Second, participants had to share a sense that everyone was committed to observing such norms now, e.g., that everyone would, in fact, remain silent when appropriate. More generally, participants had to share a mutually manifest commitment to the ritual’s enactment, that is, a joint goal to perform the cult act together. If not, cooperation could hardly get off the ground. Finally, participants might have shared beliefs about the ritual’s nature, purpose, and what we might call its informal ‘theology’. That is, they might have entertained shared beliefs, however non-doctrinaire, about the god61 they were worshipping. And they might have shared a sense of the nature62 of their worship and its purpose.63 The question immediately arises: can we expect such cognitive complexity in the children in Ovid’s portrait, whose ages he does not specify? While Roman children might not, in their first ritual engagements, have shared cultural intentionality – norms, cult commitments, beliefs – with other participants, we can expect them, by three years of age, to have the cognitive faculties for acquiring such shared cultural intentionality. Romans seem to have intuited this, for Tibullus and Ovid both witness the important fact that Roman children could participate in cult as camilli or camillae, ‘assistants’, whose roles complemented those of their elders.64 The cognitive developments that allowed children to participate as cult assistants also made them active acquirers, rather than passive recipients, of ritual norms, of joint commitments to put those norms into action, and of shared religious beliefs. Let us explore this contention. 1. Norms. By the age of three, children have been engaging in joint action for some time. They now begin to take advantage of new opportunities for social learning, including new forms of imitation, that joint action affords. For example, they take complementary roles with partners in collaborative actions,65 and in so doing, they learn their partners’ roles. Such learning enables ‘role-reversal imitation’,66 in which a child assumes the role of her partner in a joint action. Unlike the imitation of Prudentius’ child, role-reversal imitation is inherently collaborative, or ‘we’-based, for it necessarily involves representing oneself and one’s partners acting together in interdependent, complementary ways. We may infer that this form of imitation contributed to Roman children’s cultural learning when they served their parents as camilli or camillae in cult and thereby learned not only their own but also their parents’ complementary roles.

Roman children as religious agents   187 Such role-reversal imitation may be connected to young children’s motivation to discover and to follow social norms, presumably in order to learn how ‘we’ do things, i.e., the group’s values and conventions. Children adopt a ‘ritual stance’,67 or ‘normative stance’,68 whereby they perceive certain actions as governed by shared conventions and adopt those conventions themselves. Children’s internalization or ‘ownership’ of norms is revealed by the fact that three-year-olds not only act in accord with norms in contexts such as rule-based game-playing but also protest breaches of norms and enforce norms on others in such contexts.69 One possible trigger for the adoption of the ‘ritual stance’ is the ‘causal opacity’ of ritualized or conventional actions.70 Sometimes the end to which an action is a means is obvious; the action is causally transparent. So, a child may see the smashing of a nut with a stone as a means to obtain the nutmeat. Other actions are more opaque from a means-end perspective. Why, for example, must the camillus throw grain into the fire during worship of Terminus? Why three times?71 When the ‘ritual’ or ‘normative stance’ is triggered, it can lead to ‘overimitation’ in culture-learners.72 That is, learners encode the behaviour as normatively indispensable, as part of ‘our’ conventional cultural repertoire, and thus imitate it meticulously. I would submit that the causal opacity of Roman ritual, together with children’s propensity to overimitate causally opaque actions, contributed to the orthopraxy of Roman religion.73 2. Joint commitments. Joint action, in which people act together cooperatively toward a shared goal, whether the goal is just the action itself or some outcome, necessarily creates commitments and obligations. If Gaius could not count on Quintus to do his part, and vice versa, it is hard to see how they could ever get to the forum together. In a general sense, children’s proclivity to cooperate in joint action was not lost on the Romans. Cicero, for example, channelling Antiochus, remarks that soon after children begin to walk, ‘they delight in the company of their peers, gather happily with them, and devote themselves (dant se) to playing games’.74 Once a Roman child has learned the conventional norms of behaviour that govern a game or a cult act, she and other participants must still ‘devote themselves’ to performing it together, that is, form a joint commitment to enact the joint action. Such commitments, involving norms of cooperation, may come about explicitly or tacitly. The normative nature of joint commitments and the obligations they generate is best seen in the breach. For example, if on the way to the forum Quintus abruptly peels away from Gaius and wanders into a taberna, Gaius has good cause to protest.75 At three years of age, children already spontaneously jointly commit to joint activities. They sense that such commitments carry obligations, because they reliably attempt to re-engage derelict partners, and they exhibit leave-taking behaviour when they themselves disengage from the activity. In other words, joint action entails, even for young children, a sense that they and their partners have entered into a mutual obligation, or that they are subject to a norm of cooperation, to act together toward their joint goal.76 For a very young Roman, joint commitments might at first have been limited to spontaneous, isolated moments of joint action, such as the game-playing mentioned by Cicero. But recent empirical studies offer reasons to accept the Durkheimian thesis that repeatedly cooperating in collective cult actions, such as

188  Jacob L. Mackey those depicted by Tibullus and Ovid, contributed to children’s sense of identity and group cohesion.77 Indeed, Cicero had already voiced a similar notion. For him, kinship entails in itself cognitive and affective bonds of benevolentia and caritas; but he also singled out the significance for family bonding of sharing the same sacra and other forms of cult.78 The upshot is that it requires little inference to suppose that regularly committing to specific cult actions with one’s family might contribute to the development of a larger sense of commitment to ‘our’ cult tradition. This larger sense of cultic commitment, or pietas, was surely in Cicero’s sights when he wrote of the importance of preserving family traditions, the ritus familiae patrumque. And such a sense of pietas is surely at the heart of stories such as that of C. Fabius Dorsuo, who braved the Gauls besieging the Capitol in order to perform his family’s annual cult on the Quirinal.79 Here, then, we see the ontogeny of community in the joint commitments that are the precondition for acting together at all. That is, we see how Roman children might have constructed a sense of their community, and of commitment to their community’s traditions, through sharing intentionality and agency in joint ritual actions of the sort Ovid describes. 3. Shared beliefs. Prudentius’ child acquired his beliefs about Fortuna by perceiving and adopting his mother’s attitudes toward the goddess’ statuette. In joint action, this sort of intention-perception and intention-adoption deepens into intention-sharing. The child’s joint attention with culturally experienced elders to the ritual act – its implements, gestures, prayers and hymns – allowed the child to enter and share with adults a space of cognitive ‘common ground’,80 where the attitudes and perspectives of all participants were mutually manifest. In this joint-attentional space, the child not only perceived but also shared with others their representational and motivational states toward the ritual (e.g., its nature and purpose), and its gods (e.g., who they are and how ‘we’ feel toward them). As these beliefs, perspectives, goals and feelings became part of the common ground that the child shared with others, she would come to hold them, not as ‘mother’s’ or ‘mine’, but as ‘ours’.81 Needless to say, this might have been a tacit process. It need not and for Romans did not involve explicit declarations of theological creeds, but rather the sort of social-cognitive competence for attuning oneself to the psychological states of others that we saw in Augustine. So, we should not imagine a Roman child entering into her first act of domestic cult with a fully-formed cultural cognitive architecture in place: certainly not shared beliefs about the nature or purpose of the ritual or the gods invoked in it, nor any clear sense of the norms of ritual practice. But we should expect the child to have attended actively and jointly with others to the cult act and even to have formed the joint goal of performing that action with them, however innocent she yet was as to its cultural and cultic nature. As she learned the ritual’s performative norms in the course of practice, e.g., what to do with her honeycombs and when, and as she learned the nature of her family’s worship and the ‘theology’ of Terminus in the joint-attentional space she shared with her elders, including listening to (and eventually joining in) the singing of the hymn, her commitment to the ritual as what ‘we’ do would deepen. This is cultural transmission.

Roman children as religious agents   189 I have suggested simply this. Within a space of ‘pre-cultural’ joint attention and joint action, Ovid’s Roman children came to share both a primitive sense of collective commitment as well as the cultural forms of intentionality and agency distinctive of their community. In this ‘pre-cultural’ joint-attentional space, the children not only got their own perspective on the object of shared attention but also intuited and inferred others’ perspectives. In this way, through sharing attention to and agency in ritual performance, Roman children grasped and gradually came to share with experienced elders more properly cultural forms of intentionality, such as practical norms, a sense of a ritual’s purpose, informal theologies and the commitment of pietas. The Roman child who started out with a capacity to share attention and to act jointly (cognitive processes) would soon have found herself launched into a cultural reality of norm-governed practices and gods (cultural cognitive products). Ovid’s simple act of domestic pietas was thus structured by and supported the acquisition of, a complex matrix of shared intentionality. Though Ovid does not use overtly psychological language, if we are to recover the agency of Roman children, we must allow ourselves reasonable inferences about their cognitive processes of cultural learning in the episode as he describes it. I have tried to show that from the perspective of ontogeny, what John Scheid has called ‘savoir rituel’ and what Denis Feeney has called ‘performative knowledge’ possessed a cognitive structure that included, first, joint-attentional engagement and the joint goal to act together, as well as, later, shared norms of performance, a shared sense of pietas, and shared theological beliefs. Ovid’s ritual thus promoted group cohesion as well as the sharing of cultural intentionality – that is, distinctively Roman beliefs and norms – even as it reproduced itself with reasonable accuracy across generations. Cicero wrote that ‘it is consequential to practice the same sacra’. I have tried to show how and why, from a cognitive perspective, this was so.

Religious instruction: Roman children’s cognitive agency Now we turn to a rare context in which Roman religion featured deliberate pedagogy, to wit, training in choral hymns. Songs and singing permeated Roman culture, often as a means of pedagogy.82 But the choral training of children qua religious pedagogy has been overlooked in recent discussions of religious transmission at Rome.83 For Cicero, our social nature predisposes us to learn from as well as to teach one another.84 Learning and teaching represent an inherently cooperative (albeit hierarchical) joint activity, underwritten by recursive layers of shared intentionality. Instruction is formally similar to cooperative communication. Just as in communication a speaker has intentions toward the intentional states of auditors (e.g., ‘I want you to know’), so in instruction a teacher has intentions toward the intentional states of students (e.g., ‘I want you to learn’). And just as auditors recognize that speakers have intentions toward their intentional states (e.g., ‘she wants me to know’), so students recognize that teachers have pedagogical intentions toward their intentional states (e.g., ‘she wants me to learn’). Teachers and students thus know together that they are sharing intentions to teach and to learn.85 So, on a Quintilianic note, instruction depends upon a

190  Jacob L. Mackey primitive natural sociability, congressus naturalis, but transforms it into the social virtue of a sensus communis that we share with fellow citizens.86 When we point to the training of Roman choruses for civic cult, we must admit up front that instruction in sacred hymn singing would not have been the rule for all Roman children all of the time, but rather something reserved for special occasions, such as times of crisis or the secular games, and for select children, especially girls, as we shall see, who had both parents living (patrimi matrimique) and were perhaps typically from the upper-classes.87 It is possible that hymn singing in non-civic contexts was more widespread but not necessarily formally taught, as witnessed by the chorus of neighbours in Ovid’s Terminalia.88 Whatever its incidence, choral training represented, in a sense, a formalized, collective version of the prayer-learning that we have already seen Roman children do individually (see Figure 12.1).89 With these caveats in mind, let us turn to our evidence for the introduction of choral hymn singing at Rome, in order to expiate prodigies in 207 bce, during the Second Punic War:90

Figure 12.1  Mosaic (third century ce) depicting a sacred choir or schola cantorum from the temple of Diana Tifatina, over which the abbey of Sant’Angelo in Formis (eleventh century) was built, on the slope of Monte Tifata, near Capua; the mosaic is displayed in Sala X of the Museo Provinciale Campano di Capua (photo generously supplied by Ornella Massa)

Roman children as religious agents   191 The priests decreed that 27 young girls (virgines ter novenae) should sing a hymn [carmen canerent] while walking through the city. When they were learning [discerent] this hymn, composed by the poet Livius, in the temple of Jupiter Stator, the temple of Juno Regina on the Aventine was struck by lightning.91 Rather than inquire into either the nature of Livius Andronicus’ hymn, which Livy professed to find less than sophisticated or the historical context – political, religious and literary – of its composition,92 let us ask what we can recover of the children’s cognitive agency from this evidence. The active verbs discere and canere, to which we shall return below, jump out.93 The virgines had convened in a locus sacer, the temple of Jupiter Stator in the forum,94 in order to learn (discere) a carmen uniquely composed for the occasion of their novel expiatory ritual. We have to infer that the girls devoted considerable mental energy to memorization of this new material over a brief period of time (they surely had a deadline). The fact that they undertook this learning together in a special place suggests, moreover, that they were taught or trained, perhaps by priests or by Livius himself. What can we say about the young girls’ experience of memorizing the carmen? We might look, though with all due caution, to Catullus 62, a wedding poem structured as if to be sung antiphonally in a contest between a chorus of boys and a chorus of girls. In the following lines the boys bemoan the girls’ superior preparation: Behold how the unwed girls recollect what they have studied (meditata). Not in vain do they study [meditantur]; they have something worth remembering [memorabile]. No wonder they have immersed their entire mind (tota mente) deep in their work [laborant].95 The thing to note here is Catullus’ emphasis on the strenuousness of the girls’ agency, their commitment to memorizing the song, eminently memorable though it was, and their devotion of all their cognitive energy, tota mente, to the task. We need believe neither that Catullus’ song describes a particular ‘real life’ situation nor that it was itself ever sung in a ritual context to suppose that the poet does, in fact, depict a facet of the world of Roman children’s experience that would have been recognizable to his audience. So far, our young virgines have received instruction in the singing of their hymn and they have laboured to practice and learn it. The payoff would presumably have been successful performance, which Livy marks, as we saw, with the verb canere. While we can recover that experience only in our imaginations, we do have some evidence (of a slippery nature, because self-interested) for the experience of the memory of having sung a sacred hymn. In a poem published in 13 bce, Horace imagines a young woman, now married, looking back with satisfaction on having learned and sung his Carmen saeculare four years earlier: Married now, you will say, ‘When the age brought round the festal days again, I recited the hymn [reddidi carmen] that pleased the gods, trained [docilis] in the meters of the poet Horace’.96

192  Jacob L. Mackey Where our Livian and Catullan texts emphasize children’s agency with verbs such as discere, meditari and laborare, here we find more explicit reference to pedagogy in the word docilis, which echoes docili iuventae from C.S. 45 as well as doctus chorus from C.S. 75, reminding us that the children learned by instruction, perhaps from Horace himself. Horace coordinates the verbs discere and docere, reflecting the cooperative nature of teaching and learning, in another recollection of the Carmen saeculare: How would innocent boys and unmarried girls learn prayers [disceret unde preces], if the Muse had not granted them a poet? The chorus begs for help [poscit opem], and feels the divine presence [praesentia numina sentit], pleads for [implorat] heavenly rain – persuasive with the prayer that has been taught [docta prece)]– averts disease, dispels dangers feared, requests peace and a bounteous year for crops.97 This passage opens up a new aspect of children’s religious agency for us. All of our passages thus far, with their emphases on learning, teaching and cognitive effort, describe a mode of pedagogy that is, in a sense, orthoprax rather than orthodox. The important thing was that the children learned to sing their hymns correctly and in unison. The instruction and learning that we must imagine in these cases is teaching and learning how. Correspondingly, we have so far been discussing a first domain of cognitive agency exercised by Roman children during religious instruction: the domain of active learning and memorizing in response to the pedagogical intentions of adults. But now we may identify a second domain in which Roman children exercised cognitive agency. Recall that we have no evidence for catechistic pedagogy, for creedal instruction, for authoritative explanations of ritual of the sort found in late antique Christian homilies.98 The absence of catechesis in the training of Roman choruses left open to Roman children the exercise of inferential agency about the existence and nature of the gods whose carmina they were learning. Creeds and catechisms present their propositional contents in Assertive speech acts. That is, the propositional contents of creeds and doctrines are asserted as truths to be believed. But Roman hymns and prayers often convey their propositional contents under the Directive illocutionary force of wish, plea or request.99 In Horace’s Epistle, the children’s prayer does not assert as an article of faith that Apollo brings aid, that he sends rain, that he averts disease and so forth. Rather, the chorus begs and pleads (poscere and implorare) that Apollo bring aid, send rain and the rest. The psychological state expressed toward the propositional content of a petitionary prayer or a hymn is thus often one of hope or desire rather than belief per se. So, choral carmina communicate their theological content nondogmatically and indirectly, permitting children an inferential agency or cognitive autonomy that doctrinal, creed-based religions at least attempt to foreclose. The children’s inferential agency, or cognitive autonomy, took as its point of departure the pragmatics of the hymn as a speech act. The sheer pragmatics, absent any theological instruction, of singing a carmen for the gods would have

Roman children as religious agents   193 sponsored Roman children’s theological inferences, and even their theological experiences, as Horace suggests when he writes that in singing his hymn the choristers had an epiphany: praesentia numina sentit.100 That is, to sing a hymn for Apollo, to beg for help and rain from Apollo, allows children to presuppose the theological propositions that Apollo does exist and can offer help and rain. Moreover, insofar as Roman children made such theological presuppositions they implicitly joined their fellow choristers and their elders – the poet who wrote the hymn, the civic authorities supervising its choral production, their approving parents101 – in a space of theological common ground, where certain beliefs about the gods were simply presumed to be shared.102 Thus, choral hymn singing afforded children a rich context in which to make theological inferences and so to join their community in shared, cultural cognition.

Conclusion I have aimed in this chapter both to account for Roman children’s religious learning sine doctrina – for traditional Roman religion knew no catechism – and to offer a more fine-grained, cognitive account of religious socialization than is often found in the scholarship, where we read of contexts of socialization, such as the domus and adult agents of socialization, such as nurses, mothers and fathers. Such contexts and agents are of course vitally important to discover, and much work remains to be done in these areas. Nonetheless, we hear very little of Roman children’s agency in their own socialization and the cognitive endowments that might underlie that agency. I have argued that Roman children’s capacities for social cognition – not only understanding but also sharing in the intentionality of others – potentiated their agency in religious imitation, ritual participation and choral hymn learning. These three aspects of Roman children’s religious agency constituted powerful, non-dogmatic, inferential modes of social learning. It was the particular nature of Roman religious transmission that not only sustained Rome’s religious traditions but also contributed to the flexibility and informality of Rome’s noncompulsory theology, over which not a single religious war was ever fought.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Keith Bradley for encouraging me, at an early stage, to follow through with this research. I also thank the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, where I began the research represented here. The staff and fellows at NDIAS in Spring 2013 offered tremendous support, and I am grateful to them.

Notes 1 See Laes and Vuolanto, this volume; Vuolanto, this volume. Much of the research embodied in this chapter was undertaken during a generous Spring 2013 fellowship at the collegial and supportive Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study. 2 Cicero, Fin. 5.42 and Augustine, Conf. 1.14.23.

194  Jacob L. Mackey 3 Rawson 2003: 127. 4 Bremmer 1995: 36–8; Prescendi 2010; Vuolanto 2010. More generally, on children’s participation in Roman religion: van der Leeuw 1939; Néraudau 1979: 183–241; Mantle 2002; Rawson 2003: 311–35; Néraudau 1984: 223–50. Graphic depictions of children in cult: Spaulding 1911; Tulloch 2012. 5 Price 1984: 10–11: ‘the feeling that belief is a distinct and natural capacity which is shared by all human beings’ is ‘nonsense’. Price’s position was already venerable in 1984. Cf. Nock 1934: Roman religion was ‘in its essence a matter of cult acts’ (p. 465); ‘it was not a matter of belief’ (p. 469). See, more recently, Beard, North, and Price 1998: 42: ‘experiences, beliefs and disbeliefs had no particularly privileged role in defining an individual’s actions, behaviour or sense of identity’. 6 Price 1984: 8–9. 7 ‘Performative knowledge’: Feeney 1998: 138–9. ‘Savoir rituel’: Scheid 1990: 673. ‘Performative knowledge’ did not, of course, foreclose the possibility of ‘systematising expositions of religious knowledge’ (Feeney 1998: 139), as in ‘philosophical, literary or antiquarian’ works (Feeney 1998: 140). 8 Hoppitt and Laland 2013: 3–5. 9 Vuolanto in this volume. Confusion about ‘belief’: e.g., Price 1984: 10–11. The antibelief position is now widely recognized as wrong: see Mackey forthcoming (c) and e.g., Bendlin 2000 and 2001; Harrison 2000: 18–23; King 2003; Parker 2011: 1–39; Versnel 2011: 539–59. Cf. e.g. Linder and Scheid 1993; Feeney 1998; Scheid 2005; Ando 2008. 10 Thus, I am not redefining ‘belief’ to fit my agenda, but rather (following Searle 1983: 14–15) insisting on its logical properties: a belief is about states of affairs that are taken to obtain. 11 See e.g. Searle 1983: 1–36. Ancient theories of intentionality: Sorabji 1991 (2013). It should go without saying that the Romans did not need a theory or concept of intentionality to have intentionality. 12 Shared intentionality: Searle 1990 (2002); Tuomela 2005. Children’s development of shared intentionality: Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne and Moll 2005; Tomasello and Carpenter 2007. 13 Shared agency and ‘we-intentions’: Searle 1990 (2002); Tuomela 2010; cf. Gilbert 1990 and Bratman 1992. ‘Joint action’: Fiebich and Gallagher 2013. Children’s development of shared agency: Tomasello and Hamann 2012. 14 Cf. Tomasello 1999: 13–55. 15 Herrmann and Tomasello 2012: 709: ‘Human beings biologically inherit the cognitive skills necessary for developing in a cultural environment’. See Searle 1990 (2002): 104–5; Tomasello 1999; Meltzoff 2007; Moll and Tomasello 2007; Behne et al. 2008; Tomasello and Moll 2010. 16 Cf. the tripartition in Tomasello, Kruger and Ratner 1993. 17 Dautenhahn and Nehaniv 2002: 1: ‘Imitation is best considered as the behavior of an autonomous agent in relation to its environment, including other autonomous agents’ (original emphasis). The ‘autonomous agent’ here is simply a being (p. 7) ‘able to represent, access, and to some extent control its behavior and relationship to the (social) environment, based on experiences in the past and predictions about the future’. 18 More on Roman theories of children’s imitation: Bloomer 2011; Mackey, forthcoming (a). In sharp contrast to my thesis here, Morgan 1998: 240–70 (esp. 252) sees Roman children’s imitation as passive. 19 I discuss these texts and several others, but with different ends in view, in Mackey, forthcoming (b). 20 Quintilian, Inst. 1. pr. 5; Inst. 1.3.1: imitatio...est docilis naturae. All translations are my own. 21 Cf. Fantham 1995: 131 on Quintilian’s ‘recognition of imitation as the method by which writing and all physical crafts are developed – the method which also shapes the first steps in every intellectual discipline’.

Roman children as religious agents   195 22 Quintilian, Inst. 10.2.1. 23 Quintilian, Inst. 10.2.2. 24 Pseudo-Acronian scholium ad Hor. Sat. 1.3.48: blandientes infantibus infringere linguam suam solent ut eos imitentur. Cf. Lucretius, RN 5.229–30: nec cuiquam adhibendast / almae nutricis blanda atque infracta loquella. Universality of “motherese”: Falk 2009: 120–30. Its pedagogical value: Falk 2009 passim; Csibra and Gergely 2006. Heraeus 1904 is the classic work on the speech of Roman children. 25 Quintilian, Inst. 1.1.4–5. 26 Cf. Bloomer 2011: 119: ‘Imitation is not simply the individual’s urge to mimic, but part of a hierarchical, social nexus that ties together the (male) agents of education. School imitates society in reproducing idealized male social relations, amicitia’. 27 Quintilian, Inst. 1.11.3. 28 Quintilian, Inst. 1.3.1. 29 Quintilian, Inst. 1.11.2. 30 Quintilian, Inst. 1.2.21: domi ea sola discere potest quae ipsi praecipientur, in schola etiam quae aliis. 31 Quintilian, Inst. 1.2.29: utile igitur habere, quos (sc. condiscipulos) imitari primum, mox vincere velit. Cf. 1.2.26. 32 Quintilian, Inst. 1.11.2–3. 33 Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner 1993: 497–9; Meltzoff 1995; Goldman 2005; Tomasello and Carpenter 2005; Carpenter, Call and Tomasello 2005; Carpenter 2006. 34 Scholarship on this topic is vast. I take no stand here on social cognition as a ‘Theory of Mind Module’ (e.g., Leslie 1994), an ‘intentional stance’ (Dennett 1987), ‘simulation’ (e.g., Goldman 2006), ‘embodied simulation’ (Gallese and Sinigaglia 2011), or narrative practice (Hutto 2008). I follow Gallagher 2008 in finding most terms for social cognition inadequate to what is often (not always) a matter of direct perception or intuition rather than inference based on a ‘theory’ or a ‘simulation’. Cross-cultural evidence for social cognition: Callaghan et al. 2005; including imitation: Callaghan et al. 2011. For ‘A Roman folk model of the mind,’ see Short 2012. 35 Augustine, Conf. 1.6.8, 1.7.11, 1.7.12, and 1.8.13. 36 Augustine, Conf. 1.6.8. 37 Augustine, Conf. 1.6.10. 38 Augustine, Conf. 1.8.13: non enim docebant me maiores homines, praebentes mihi verba certo aliquo ordine doctrinae sicut paulo post litteras. 39 Augustine, Conf. 1.8.13. 40 O’Donnell 1992 ad loc. does not remark on affectio animi, although the term is regularly used by, e.g., Cicero, to mean something like ‘disposition’: e.g., Tusc. 4.34 and 4.53; Fin. 3.65; Off. 3.29. 41 Augustine does not use imitatio or its cognates here, though he does imply that the language learning of infantes occurs imitando at Doct. Chr. 4.3.5. Imitatio typically carries a negative valence in Confessions, e.g. at 1.16.25, 1.18.28, and 1.19.30. Explicit discussion of imitatio as a learning modality at Augustine, Mus. 1.4.6ff. 42 Pre-linguistic, social-cognitive foundations of coded linguistic communication: Tomasello 2008: 57–71; Searle 2007. The ‘Augustinian Infant’ returns to the study of language-learning: Bloom 2000: 55–87. 43 For example, magistrates ‘learned’ prayers by having them dictated to them: see, e.g., Klinghardt 1999. 44 Tibullus 3.12.15–16: praecipit et natae mater studiosa, quod optat: / illa aliud tacita iam sua mente rogat. 45 This mode of prayer-learning persisted into Christian times: Aug. Conf. 1.9.14: invenimus autem, domine, homines rogantes te et didicimus ab eis. 46 Family as locus of early education: Marrou 1956: 313–15; Wiedemann 1989: 143–75. Family and religious learning: Bremmer 1995; Prescendi 2010: 76–9. The role of mothers: e.g., Cicero, Brut. 211: filios non tam in gremio educatos quam in sermone

196  Jacob L. Mackey 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82

matris; Tacitus, Dia. 28.4: gremio ac sinu matris educabatur; Dixon 1988: 104–40. The role of nurses: Bradley 1994b. Prudentius, c. Symm. 1.205–211. See Alcorta and Sosis 2005: 333; Bulbulia and Sosis 2011: 365–6. Prudentius, c. Symm. 1.213–214: insulsum tenuit...credulus usum, / privatos celebrans agnorum sanguine divos. Prudentius, c. Symm. 1.198–9. Wiedemann 1989: 158: Roman children learn by ‘watching and copying the behaviour of someone who already possesses the ars’. Scheid 1990: 673: ‘le citoyen apportait un savoir rituel, oralement transmis dans le cadre familial’. Cf. Tomasello 1996: 320–5. O’Donnell 1992 ad Conf. 1.8.13 recommends ‘shared’ for Augustine’s communicavi. Augustine, Conf. 1.8.13. Digesta 2.14.1.3 = Ulpian, 4 ad ed. So Fiebich and Gallagher 2013. Lucretius, RN 5.1030–1032. On infant pointing cross-culturally, see Liszkowski et al. 2012. Tibullus, El. 1.10.19–24. Ovid, Fasti 2.645–658. Ovid, Fasti 2.641–2: Termine, sive lapis sive es defossus in agro / stipes. Here, a traditional honorific rite: solito … honore (Ovid, Fasti 2.639). Praise: cantant laudes, Termine sancte, tuas (Ovid, Fasti 2.658). Servius, ad Aen. 11.558. Romans could even imagine a child taking over domestic worship in the face of parental neglect, e.g., Plautus, Aul. 23–5. Warneken, Chen, and Tomasello 2006. By 18 months: Carpenter, Tomasello, and Striano 2005; Fletcher, Warneken and Tomasello 2012. Herrmann, Legare, Harris and Whitehouse 2013. Rakoczy and Schmidt 2013. Rakoczy and Schmidt 2013. See Tomasello 2009: 28–44. Herrmann, Legare, Harris and Whitehouse 2013. Cf. Rüpke 2007: 87–90 on Roman ritual’s frequent lack of a ‘pragmatic basis’. See Kenward 2012; Keupp, Behne and Rakoczy 2013. Overimitation among Bushmen: Nielsen and Tomaselli 2010. Further cognitive aspects of Roman orthopraxy: Mackey, forthcoming (c). Cicero, Fin. 5.42: deinde aequalibus delectantur libenterque se cum iis congregant dantque se ad ludendum. Roman children’s games: Väterlein 1976 and Wiedemann 1989: 148–53. See further, Gilbert 1990. Note that Roman law formalized one person’s legal obligationes to another due to their joint commitment (consensus) in certain contexts: consensu fiunt obligationes (Gaius, Inst. 3.135). See Mousourakis 2012: 183–7; Birks 2014: 2–5. Gräfenhain, Behne, Carpenter and Tomasello 2009; Tomasello 2009: 60–7. Legare and Wen 2014; Whitehouse and Lanman 2014. Cicero, Off. 1.54 with 55: magnum est enim eadem habere monumenta maiorum, eisdem uti sacris, sepulchra habere communia. Cicero, Leg. 2.19; Livy, 5.46.1–4. Clark 1996: 92–121. Cf. Tomasello 1999: 56–93. Tomasello and Moll 2010: 339–45. See esp. Horsfall 2003: 11–19 and 31–47. Music in Roman religion: Wille 1967: 26–74 (for ‘sakraler Chorgesang’, see pp. 47–52) and Quasten 1983 (pp. 75–7 on choirs of women or girls, and pp. 87–8 on boys’ choirs). Singing (including choral) in

Roman children as religious agents   197 early Christianity: Smith 2011: 174–5 Despite its promising title, Habinek 2005 has little to offer the study of Roman song per se. 83 E.g., by Prescendi 2010. The classic study of ‘Rhythmisch-musikalische Heilpädagogik’ is Wille 1962. 84 Cicero, Fin. 3.66: ita non solum ad discendum propensi sumus, verum etiam ad docendum. 85 On cooperative communication, see Grice 1989: 86–116 and 213–23, esp. 220; Sperber and Wilson 1995: 21–31 (esp. 29) and 54–64; Tomasello 2008: 72–99. 86 Inst. 1.2.20. For sensus communis, cf. Cicero, De orat. 2.16.68; Seneca, Epist. 5.4. 87 Patrimi matrimique and upper-class: Mantle 2002: 105–6. Vestals also gave and received religious pedagogy for periods of 10 years (learning) and 10 years (teaching): Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 2.67.2; Plutarch, Num. 10.1. 88 Cf., e.g., Catullus, Carm. 34 and Green 2007: 138–40. See, too, a mosaic depicting a chorus of children from the temple of Diana Tifatina on Monte Tifata near Capua. See further, Wille 1967: 47–52; Mantle 2002: 86–91. 89 This is not to elide the distinction proposed in Scheid 2007 between prayer (precatio: a verbal formula that ‘performs’ the cult act) and hymn (carmen: a verbal ‘œuvre d’art’ for the gods’ enjoyment). 90 See Boyce 1937 and Forsythe 2012: 64–7 for discussions of the occasion. 91 Livy, Ab urbe cond. 27.37.7. 92 See Feeney (2016: 225–9) for the literary-historical aspects of Livius’ hymn. 93 We might also suppose that the lightning strike on the temple of Juno caused cognitive distress for the virgines, whose hymn was in honour of that goddess: Livy, Ab urbe cond. 27.37.12: carmen in Iunonem Reginam canentes. 94 Coarelli 2007: 89–91. 95 Catullus, Carm. 62: 12–14. 96 Horace, C.S. 4.6.41–44. 97 Horace, Epist. 2.1.132–7. 98 See Schwartz 2013: 1–6 and 17–25 for late-antique catechism. Outline of catechetical practices: Johnson 2007: 111. Catechism of children in early Christianity: Horn and Martens 2009: 161–3. 99 On speech acts and illocutionary force, see Searle 1979. A note about ‘propositional content’: Beliefs and desires are about stuff, not propositions. However, like Assertive and Directive speech acts, they represent this stuff as their propositional content. See further, Searle 1983: 4–7 and 16–19. 100 Ovid recounts a similar prayerful epiphany at Fasti 6.251: in prece totus eram: caelestia numina sensi. 101 Note that the costs, in time and materials, associated with ritual contexts of choral hymn-singing will have testified or at least strongly implied that the adults who bore those costs were sincere about and committed to the propositional contents of carmina: see Irons 2001 and Henrich 2009. 102 On pragmatic presupposition and common ground, see Stalnaker 2014: 2–4 and 55–8.

13 Jewish childhood in the Roman Galilee Sabbath in Tiberias (c. 300 ce) Hagith Sivan

Introduction The narrative that forms the backbone of this study is told by Eleazar, a Jewish boy nearing 13 who lives in Galilean Tiberias (Tveria), through whom we share a child’s experience of the weekly Sabbath. By endowing the boy with a name, a family and a city, his story brings together important yet also disparate strands, namely the cityscape of a predominantly Jewish city in late ancient Palestine; rabbinic Sabbath rules and their impact on the environment; and an investigation of the Sabbath schedule of children within the religious, social and economic boundaries delineated by law, urbanism and Jewishness. Through the alert eyes of a child it is possible to project domestic and public spaces where children were expected to conform to specific models of behaviour during the Sabbath. In what follows I reconstruct the city’s material culture as gleaned from the archaeological remains of late Roman Tiberias and its rural hinterland. In conjunction I aim at projecting a sense of the weekly celebration of the Sabbath, as described, discussed and debated in rabbinic sources. Above all, I aspire to capture a childhood-Sabbath routine by delving into these literary, visual and material cultures through the eyes of the children themselves. Our protagonist, Eleazar, grows up in a society in which males are monopolizing the status of ‘men’ and the discourse appropriate to their Jewishness. He would be familiar with most of the rules that govern children’s lives, perhaps even question a few. But he is not likely to interrogate the process by which children are made men, and men are made Jewish. His daily routine is divided between home, school and public arenas, a living diversity of complementary components that stand at the heart of Jewish identity. His Sabbath routine often revolves around the same route, a factor that rendered the city intimately familiar. As a boy on the verge of official manhood, Eleazar recognizes the distinctiveness of his urban environment that aspires to entrench and transmit identity.1 ***

Eleazar’s story Nestled between a lake and a mountain my town, a Galilean centre of Jewish life and learning, takes its decidedly un-Jewish name from a Roman emperor who had little

Jewish childhood in Roman Galilee   199 love for humanity. On the other side of our land, on the coast of the Mediterranean, the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate dedicated a temple to the same imperial recluse who never bothered to visit the territory where he was so honoured.2 Some rabbis claim that the name Tiberias is derived from the fact that our city is the naval (tabur) of the world. They also insist that Miriam, the exemplary sister of Moses, had her life-giving well not in the desert but right in our sea.3 Tradition has it that in the first century ce our town was founded by Herod Antipas, scion of the hateful Herod. He chose an odd location for our city, right atop a cemetery! No wonder, father tells me, that good Jews were reluctant to move there before a famous rabbi conducted a wholesale purification of the area.4 I am not sure how this was done; maybe it is just a legend to explain why so many refugees settled in our town after the valiant but futile revolt against emperor Hadrian (post 135 ce). In the days of Herod Antipas Tiberias boasted a royal palace decorated with images of animals and its ceilings were covered with real gold. He also ordered the construction of a stadium and a theatre which has recently been refurbished with fine masonry and lavish décor.5 Above all, Herodian Tiberias boasted a very large synagogue or ‘prayer house’ which, I am told, could contain all the city’s inhabitants. It became the scene of a ferocious verbal clash on the eve of that terrible revolt of my ancestors against Nero. Apparently the acrimonious debate over opposing or supporting the Romans threatened to erupt into a violent riot ‘but for the arrival of the sixth hour (noon) at which it is our custom on the Sabbath to take our midday meal’.6 The would-be contestants repaired to their respective homes to eat. Such is the power of our Sabbath, and perhaps of the call of the stomach too. Or maybe it was just too hot, as it often gets in our town during the long summer days. The souvenirs of that failed rebellion (66–70 ce) still scorch our collective memory. Our beautiful city escaped destruction. It opened its gates to the Roman conqueror and was spared, but many in my town now follow a calendar that begins its annual count from the year of the destruction of our Temple in Jerusalem (69/70 ce).7 As father and I hasten, as is our custom, to the bathhouse for immersion and purification on the eve of the Sabbath, I give little thought to the mighty emperors who rule us from afar. The sun was already faint when I emerged from the study room to join father. I am tired. Friday usually starts early with helping father to set up his shop. Then, at father’s insistent urging, I spend the day at school, immersed in reading the Torah portion for the day and, as darkness starts to envelop our class, I nearly fall asleep under the watchful eye of the teacher. He rebukes me sharply. He himself is not allowed to read but he has to ensure that his pupils do not nod off over their portion (M Shab 1.3). I find it an odd preoccupation for such a learnt adult. I wonder whether we, boys, are permitted to continue reading in the Torah even as Friday’s sun begins to set because we are trusted not to tilt the oil lamp, a motion resulting in the necessity to burn more oil which is tantamount to a violation of the Sabbath rule of you shall not light fire on the Sabbath. Or whether we are allowed to continue reading because we gladly anticipate that the oil lamp will anyway die out, putting an end to class.8 It is tedious enough to sit in a room adjacent to the synagogue and to learn the rules that govern the life of a

200  Hagith Sivan Jew without exerting my eyes to read in the light of a faint oil lamp. Our teacher is kind, although probably poorly paid.9 This is one profession that I would not care to pursue even if our rabbis assert that no town deserves its name if it does not have at least one teacher of children, not to mention a butcher and a doctor. In school we learnt that the Sabbath is so important that it lends its name to the weekdays. Such counting means that we go back to school on the first day after the Sabbath and we continue to study on the second day after the Sabbath, and thereafter till the sixth day after the Sabbath.10 The exact point, however, where Friday ends and the Sabbath starts has been a matter of controversy,11 as are many other rules and regulations that inform Jewish identity. Father and mother, who do their best to follow the rules, worry about the precise time when they ought to stop whatever they were doing so as not to desecrate the Sabbath. Several rules have direct bearing on father’s activities. He is a fishmonger. According to my teacher the school of Shammai maintained that it is forbidden to spread traps for beasts, birds and fish, unless they can be caught the same day (i.e. before the entry of the Sabbath); but the school of Hillel did allow it.12 Such a dispensation enables father to maintain fresh supplies for his shop till the last moment, just before its closure in honour of the Sabbath when neither customers nor shopkeepers can no longer clearly see the merchandise. Those great sages of the era of our Temple even decreed that if a child sets aside figs for the Sabbath without tithing them before the Sabbath he cannot eat them until after Sabbath is over and they have been tithed (M Maas. 4.2). I must remember this rule and be a good Jew so that I can enjoy eating figs on the Sabbath. On our way to the bathhouse we pass by a vast building site right at the centre of town. I can already see that this will become a very imposing structure. Not that Tiberias lacks impressive buildings. I wonder what the new structure is destined for. Amidst its foundations I glimpse the remains of a long wall with traces of red fresco, marble slabs and a water cistern with arches.13 Father tells me that these used to belong to the palace of Herod Antipas. According to father the new structure will be a basilica, a kind of a public centre where our officials, members of what some call a ‘Sanhedrin’, will hold regular meetings. I am not so sure. Even if the building is to serve an assembly of leaders and legal experts I do not understand why they need so many rooms. Besides, rumour has it that the building is destined to host our foremost citizen, the patriarch himself and his family. At any rate, the courtyard already looks beautiful. We are now passing by the covered market near the basilica where smells of varied merchandise constantly mix with odours from the sea. Next to the market there is a small fish pond. It was dug in the middle of a temple that had been constructed, I am told, in honour of another Hadrian, may his bones turn to dust. It is believed that this temple had been erected atop a synagogue. Why? Because a debate over the type of Sabbath bolt led to an unholy tearing of the Torah, a sin for which the synagogue paid for a terrible price.14 If you do not like fishy smells do not live in Tiberias. Even our famous bathhouses smell of fish. But on Friday evening, as the Sabbath descends in all her glory, you can inhale a profusion of fragrances people use in order to remove fishy smells from garments or to counter whatever they deem to be bad smells in general. We like to

Jewish childhood in Roman Galilee   201 use incense in Tiberias, as do the people of the town of Sepphoris with whom we enter a rivalry of Sabbath incense frowned upon by our Rabbi Yohanan: If one were walking on the eve of Sabbath in Tiberias, or at the conclusion of Sabbath in Sepphoris, and smelled an odour [of spices], he does not say a blessing, because the probability is that they are being used only to perfume garments.15 We do have our peculiar customs. We are notorious for liking our spaces and food nicely heated, even on the Sabbath when no Jew is allowed to heat up anything.16 Alone of all the Jewish cities of the Land of Israel, the denizens of my Tiberias received rabbinic dispensation, albeit reluctantly, to use our hot springs for washing even on the Sabbath.17 R. Hananya b. Akabya even permitted the men of Tiberias three other things: to draw water from a balcony on the Sabbath, to store fruit in pea-stalks and to dry ourselves with a towel.18 Immersion on Friday evening has become an integral component of our Sabbath rituals. On this Friday father chose to head to the south baths in Hammat. They are located at some distance from our residence but father occasionally likes to immerse in the famed hot baths there and the walk is within permissible Sabbath boundaries. Long ago, he tells me, Hammat had been a separate urban entity but Tiberias gobbled it up although a wall, our southern wall, still separates the two from each other. Hammat Tiberias is much older than Tiberias, dating all the way back to Genesis’ famous flood.19 Even our rabbis acknowledged the attraction of this wonderful gift of God: R. Dosethai son of R. Jannai said: Why are the thermal springs of Tiberias not situated in Jerusalem? [This is so] in order to prevent festival pilgrims from saying: ‘Had we undertaken a pilgrimage solely to bathe in the hot springs of Tiberias, it would have sufficed [to fulfil the commandment of pilgrimage to Jerusalem]. Consequently, this would have been a futile pilgrimage.20 Hammat’s springs are not only deliciously hot but also therapeutic. They attract even the most famous sages, including Rabbi Akiva who died a martyr’s death at the hands of the Romans long ago. Mother says that the water of the hot spring is so hot that she can even cook with them but this is forbidden on the Sabbath. The bathhouse itself is very attractive. Its walls are covered with polished white marble and it contains so many rooms that I often get lost when father allows me to wander around between dressing rooms and the pool rooms.21 Amidst so much beauty and human nakedness you can see strewn fragments of statues of pagan divinities that not long ago our famous Rabbi Yohanan ordered to be demolished, notwithstanding that on another occasion the same rabbi looked at paintings on the wall and said nothing whatsoever.22 I find it fascinating that none of our gentile neighbours complained to the authorities. Perhaps the governor in remote Caesarea Maritima is too busy to attend to the fate of his gods in a provincial town on the other side of his province. Father told me that when he himself was a

202  Hagith Sivan very small child he saw Rabbi Yohanan frequently sitting at the gate of the women’s ritual bath in town. Yohanan, who was reputedly very handsome, believed that any woman who looked at him would end up bearing children as beautiful as he was.23 To judge by the smile on father’s face when he recounts the story, you would think that mother, too, looked at the rabbi when she was pregnant with me. Sadly, our greatest sage lost his own 10 children, the youngest dying when he fell into a boiling pot! I have always wondered why Rabbi Yohanan used to say that after our Temple had been destroyed the power of prophecy was given to children and to fools!24 I believe that he simply justified his own actions by relying on what we, children, innocently utter without comprehension as though touched by divine inspiration: He (Yohanan) said to a child: ‘Tell me the [last] verse you have learnt [today at school]’. The child answered: Now Samuel was dead (I Sam 28:3)… Said [R. Yohanan], ‘This means that Samuel [i.e. the famed Babylonian sage and not the biblical prophet] has died’. But it was not the case; Samuel was not dead. The encounter [between the sage and the child] was told to allow R. Yohanan to stay at home [and not to trouble with travelling to Babylonia to pay respect to Rabbi Samuel].25 On the way to the baths we pass by the site of a new synagogue which is being constructed atop of what father says had been a gymnasium.26 Places have their history and we can sometimes glimpse it through ruins. I can already see that the floor of the synagogue will be spectacular. Father, who has customers among the rich and the mighty, told me that when complete, the synagogue mosaic will feature a zodiac, which is, as we know well, not exactly a Jewish decorative theme.27 But I suppose that we can look at it as a symbol of our calendar, although father tells me that this, too, is a hotly debated subject. At any rate, I can already distinguish the outline of a Menorah in the area above the zodiac. And what is more Jewish than a Menorah? I am surprised that our strict rabbis, especially Yohanan’s pupils, had not opposed this mixture of symbols in so sacred a place. Father explained that the synagogue will also be embellished with mosaics featuring donors’ inscriptions, mostly in Greek rather than Hebrew or Aramaic. He sounds wistful, perhaps because his income cannot rise to the level of a commemorative mosaic in so hallowed a location. I can read Hebrew and Aramaic but my Greek is fairly minimal, consisting of phrases learnt from gentile customers my age, unlike the Greek of children my age who are living in the household of our patriarch where Greek is taught by the best of teachers. I suppose that whoever donated the money to have the synagogue built and its floors decorated also dictated its ornamentation and its scripts. Father tells me that there are 13 synagogues in our city. I suppose that in each one of them there is a school for boys, just like mine, where we traverse a river of literacy led by our teacher, from the alphabet to the book of Leviticus and thence to the rest of the Torah and the Oral Torah (the Mishnah). Admittedly, Leviticus is the most boring of all our Torah. But it teaches discipline and the rules of purity which are so important in our daily life. I would have preferred the book of Genesis, as Rabbi Assi recommended.28

Jewish childhood in Roman Galilee   203 I love to listen to the sounds of the coming Sabbath as silence slowly spreads over the usual hubbub of our city. Granted, I do enjoy the feast of the Tabernacles (Sukkot) and I love to shake the lulav (palm branch), but Sukkot comes only once a year and Sabbath arrives every six days. What a blessing. I hear that gentiles mock us for being lazy and skipping a day of work. But what do they know of divine commands? What do they know of our past, so beautifully narrated in our Bible? The so-called Christians know a lot but they deny our Sabbath. It was a stroke of luck, according to mother, that I was born in time to be circumcised not on the Sabbath. I lost count of the arguments for and against circumcision on the Sabbath. I know that there are countless activities which are banned in order to induce a true and complete rest. Frankly, I have trouble in remembering even the Sabbath’s 39 forbidden labours.29 All I remember is that these deal with three main categories: bread, which is a favourite item on my diet; clothing, about which I do not much care; and leather, a product about which I know nothing. What I find intriguing is that if a fire breaks out on the Sabbath, which I have seen happen not infrequently, we children are not allowed to put out the flames. Well, actually, father is not allowed to charge me with such a task, which is admittedly dangerous, but if I happen to be in the neighbourhood of the disaster by chance I can do my best to quench the fire and no one will hold me guilty for transgressing the Sabbath. Mother believes that any offence against the Sabbath will result in our death.30 We have reached the baths. A lofty entrance opens all the way to the pools, which are surrounded by massive walls. Sad to say, but I see children my age begging at the gate, and they are Jewish, too. Inside the walls are the water pipes which convey the steaming water from the hot springs sizzling out from the mountain side.31 The water cascades down the basalt, emitting an overpowering smell of scalding sulphur. Even in town we can smell some of it, which may account for our lavish use of fragrances, so censured by the rabbis, as I already mentioned. I look at the tall columns that support the roof, a perfect place to play ‘hide and seek’, but I doubt if the adults, now engaged in Sabbath ablutions, will approve. Before entering the baths father recites a brief prayer.32 For the rest of our time there we put aside any talk about our Torah, nor pray or even ask about friends’ health. At the entry we receive a glass of water.33 Before entering, we make a stop at the toilet where everyone is expected to maintain silence. I am not quite certain what our rabbis meant when they do not impute impurity to the water that comes out of our body during our visits to the excrement area. I know that mother was very careful not to wash sister’s nappies on the Sabbath since it was believed that women who do so pay with their lives for such a transgression.34 Thankfully, we get our drinking water in Tiberias not from our sea whence we get our fish but from a lovely spring somewhere in the Galilee whose water, via aqueduct, reaches choice locations in town.35 Most men at the baths come there, like father, to clean their bodies for the Sabbath. At the foyer, father pays the entry fee and then we walk into a large room with marble benches where we deposit our cloths into a wall recess for safe custody after taking off our shoes, removing our prayer shawl, loosening our belt and taking off the outer gown and the under shirt.36 As father descends into

204  Hagith Sivan the pool he whispers a benediction. I am not allowed to enter with him since it is improper for father and son to bath together. While father is in the water we are entertained by a jester, a dangerous profession at times.37 Father washes his body carefully, scrubbing his face, hands and feet. For him it is a ritual of bodily purification, as it is for the majority of Friday bathers. There are, however, those who come for the curative properties of the water and they alone can return even on the Sabbath itself.38 Purification can even act as a mnemonic. Once when father was conversing with a distinguished rabbi on Friday evening, the latter abruptly stood to leave, naked. He suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to listen to his grandchild reading the daily Torah lesson. When father inquired why he could not give up a single lesson for a curative bath, the rabbi responded that hearing a Torah lesson from a child is like standing at Mount Sinai itself.39 All around us men converse in hushed tones while we, boys about to become men, listen respectfully or pretend to. I hear that our thermal baths serve not only to cure the body but also as scenes of religious contest.40 I am sure that during the week, when Jews, Samaritans, Christians and other gentiles use the baths, all kinds of debates take place and I am certain that our wise men always have the upper hand. After all, our rabbis are trained in disputations, as seems clear from their discussions in the Mishnah. They know how to defend the Torah and our way of life, especially against the followers of the Galilean rabbi from Nazareth who long ago, they believe, wrought miracles in the vicinity of our lake. I want to hurry home to tell my little sister, Leah, of the thermal session. She is recovering from fever. Mother believes that the amulet she purchased for her cure was responsible for her healing.41 Father is adamant that the local medicine expert did it. I think that mother is right. The poor girl had been shivering for an entire week, convulsed by fits which mother believed were induced by demons and spirits and not by insects, and consequently had to be exorcized. My sister is lucky. Her fever could have been fatal.42 Father and mother already discuss potential bridegrooms for Leah. She is six years old and it is apparently not too early to contemplate a betrothal. I am Eleazar son of Sela,43 and I am older than her by a good seven years. I am called after my great grandfather who had emigrated from the south (Judaea) to the Galilee long ago after our city had been purified. I overheard father saying to mother that he would be willing to sell all his possessions to enable me to marry the daughter of a rabbinic scholar. But who wants a girl who will always interfere with her superior knowledge of all matters of the law and will shame her betrothed in front of house guests?44 Father is also worried about my future profession. He does not want me to deal with fish but to possess a clean and easy craft. I am not sure what this means but I certainly do not want to be poor. I see kids my age around the markets at the end of a trading day whose fathers cannot even afford to purchase the wine for the Kiddush on the Sabbath.45 Father gives charity regularly to ensure my share in the world to come. But he always warns me and my friends against taking anything from a stranger, especially food items, unless the stranger somehow informs mother about this gift.46 Otherwise, mother would suspect witchcraft and not the kindness of strangers. We live in the zone between Tiberias and Hammat, not far from the cardo, the town’s main street which runs north–south along the city centre, and within

Jewish childhood in Roman Galilee   205 comfortable walking distance to several synagogues. Sometimes we journey with a cart and a horse to visit our relatives in the rural hinterland and we attend services at their synagogue on the Sabbath. In my uncle’s village the synagogue boasts a beautiful mosaic floor showing our history, from the enslavement in Egypt through the Exodus to our fight for liberation from Philistine yoke. I was pleased to see the fallen Goliath, vanquished by David, who could not have been much older than I am now.47 Tiberias’ hinterland is dotted with many such small settlements which benefit from a fertile soil which is so rich that its fruit had the power to allure people away from the thrice mandated pilgrimage to Jerusalem.48 Nowadays only a few ascend to our ancient capital. The Roman government does not want us there for obvious reasons. At home, mother’s pride and joy is the cylindrical oven in which she bakes the Sabbath special bread (hallah). Baking is one of the chores assigned to her by the rabbis. Friday starts especially early for mother. It is a day of intense preparations for the Sabbath. Mother wakes up before dawn to bake,49 and she supervises our maids. Together they prepare the meat, salt the fish, cut the vegetables and carry everything necessary for the Sabbath. My little sister is in charge of gathering flowers and small branches to decorate our table.50 After each Sabbath meal we inhale the refreshing smell of the flowers, their pleasant odour providing a fragrant epilogue to a day of rest. I remember once seeing an old man holding two very large bundles of myrtle and running at twilight. When father asked him why he carried two instead of one for a single Sabbath, the man replied that one is for ‘remembrance’ and the other for ‘observance’.51 This is, I believe, what literal and true adherence to the Commandments means, as we, Jews, are enjoined to remember and to observe the Sabbath. Sabbath arrives at last. It is now completely dark. Upon our return home father enquires whether mother and my sister had completed a Sabbath eruv.52 What he meant was whether mother had sent an item of food to other mothers in adjacent courtyards to be received by them and their small children. This ‘mixture’ of courtyards is designed to enable us to carry or transfer items beyond the domicile without running the risk of violating the Sabbath’s ban on carrying. Children can play an instrumental role in creating a neighbourly eruv. I heard a story about two of our neighbours who, after years of not exchanging a word, became friends on account of eruv executed by their children. The reconciliation also explains why a house needs an eruv: It was decided to introduce eruv into courtyards for the sake of neighbourly peace. How come? Say, a woman sends her son to a neighbour. The neighbour hugs and kisses the child. His mother then reflects that the gesture shows that the neighbour thinks well of her and (hence peace comes to the neighbourhood).53 Through eruv we, children, can assemble, carry and play outdoors on the Sabbath, in our yard or the neighbour’s, as long as we remain within the eruv boundaries.54 To receive the Sabbath at home my parents ensure that they, as well as we, children, don clean clothes. We have special clothing for the Sabbath which in our town is a sign of some wealth since many cannot afford such a luxury. We

206  Hagith Sivan do not have special shoes. Thank goodness that we need not fit our feet into tight sandals with nails, the kind that Roman soldiers wear.55 Imagine the racket that these sandals would make on the Sabbath, a day of peace and quiet, and the terror that they would induce if anyone believed them to herald the arrival of real Roman troops. Some rabbis also recommend that no one wears new shoes on the Sabbath unless they have been previously worn. But how do you measure this ‘worn’? In Tiberias it is the distance which you cover had you walked in your new shoes from the great study house to the shop of Rabbi Hoshaya.56 My sister is allowed to wear pretty ribbons in her hair which she can show off when she leaves the house during the Sabbath, as long as she stays within permissible Sabbath boundaries.57 I, too, can wear kesharim, a kind of knotted garland which mother ties around my neck, like an amulet, to prevent disease and to protect me from witchcraft.58 Mother lights Sabbath candles. She is careful with the task, maybe because she is afraid of aborting.59 Sometimes she is the one to light, other times father does it, and occasionally we, children, are also allowed to light a Sabbath candle. Father believes that the more candles he lights up the wiser his sons, that is I and future brothers, will turn out to be.60 There are so many candles that our house looks ready to welcome even God to our beautiful Sabbath table. I am hungry. I know that there are many Sabbath rules relating to food, how to keep it warm without heating it up, whether I can eat eggs that continue to cook in hot water or not, but right now I want to eat as much as I can without appearing to gorge on my food. We often have a guest for Sabbath meals. Last week it was one of the local sages who examined the wine which father poured for him in the light of a candle.61 Mother thought that he was rude but father explained that he was merely acting upon instructions from his own rabbi. On Sabbath father likes to launch into a discourse about the day’s sanctity, history and uniqueness.62 Our Sabbath, he explains, is a day of rest that marked the conclusion of the Creation which Genesis unfolds. For us, the ‘children of Israel’, the Sabbath was mandated in the wilderness when our ancestors entered a covenant based on ten foundational tenets.63 The Sabbath commandment mirrored the divine ordering of the very week of creation. It further reminded the Israelites that they had been enslaved in Egypt, whence they were delivered with a promise of a territory of their own as well as of a day that routinely, once a week, celebrates freedom from labour. Within the Ten Commandments the Sabbath ordinance forms a striking exception. Only the Sabbath commandment regulates the behaviour of adults at home by specifying the manner in which a man commands his own household, wife, children, slaves and even beasts of burden. When father recites the two versions of the Sabbath commandment, he always smiles at the mention of children and adds that keeping the Sabbath, as the great rabbi Shimon said, means eating, drinking and wearing clean clothes.64 Much of the day of the Sabbath father and I spend in the synagogue. Father is especially fond of the synagogue near the Hammat Tiberias baths, which is within the permissible boundaries of walking. Over a century ago the famous rabbi Meir used to preach there all day long.65 Everyone in our town knows the story of how rabbi Meir willingly submitted himself to humiliation in order to save a marriage,

Jewish childhood in Roman Galilee   207 not his but that of an unknown lady who stayed so late to listen to him on Friday night that her husband suspected her of committing adultery with the rabbi. It is a very old story that has done the rounds for many decades and it made the synagogue famous. Many people in our town flock to our synagogues and study houses on the Sabbath to listen to sermons. In our courtyard on the Sabbath my sister and her little friends play with a live locust. I am not sure whether this creature is pure or impure. The rabbis permit this game since they assume that small kids are not likely to eat a locust, live or dead. And if they accidentally kill it in the course of their game the rabbis assumed that, at the most, the children would deliver a funerary oration over its corpse. Toddlers are even allowed to kill lice with impunity on the Sabbath since they do not have religious obligations as yet.66 Sometimes on the Sabbath I leave home to join my friends in gathering grass, but I am always careful to remain within Sabbath boundaries. If there is an emergency, like a fire somewhere, the adults can use us to extinguish it, providing no one sent us specifically to do it, as I already explained.67 Sabbath is a day of complete rest not only of the body but also of the mind. Some say that fathers are not allowed to teach their sons how to read for the first time on the Sabbath because this is labour and not leisure. I am allowed, though, to revise the Torah portion that I studied on Friday, before the onset of the Sabbath: Children are not to study a new portion of Bible on the Sabbath; but they may make a first revision on the Sabbath… But in the matter of the Sabbath a new passage may not be studied for the first time for this reason: that the parents of the children may be free for the observance of the Sabbath. An alternative answer is this: because on the Sabbath they eat and drink [more than on weekdays] and feel sluggish; as Samuel said: The change in one’s regular diet is the beginning of digestive trouble.68 It is not easy to grow up Jewish. Even our sages agreed that Sabbath rules are like mountains hanging by the hair since Torah’s teaching on the Sabbath is scant but the rules are many.69 No wonder that they pondered every aspect of the Sabbath, often without reaching a firm conclusion. For example, The School of Manasseh taught that on the Sabbath one may make arrangements for the betrothal of young girls, for the elementary education of a child, and even for teaching a child a trade! …your own affairs are forbidden, but the affairs of Heaven are permitted.70 As the first star appears in the sky the Sabbath draws to its blissful ending. Over a glass of wine father recites the dividing prayer (havdala) that draws distinction between the sacred and the secular, the holy and the profane (BT Shab 150b). Three stars are shining and another beautiful Sabbath is over. ***

208  Hagith Sivan

The urban context Eleazar’s city, Tiberias, provides an urban context charged with significance.71 It was designed as and remained a predominantly Jewish town, an exception even in late ancient Palestine. Trouble had brewed at its inception as a royal foundation of Herod Antipas in 19/20 ce. While the selected location was impeccable, on a lake just north of therapeutic hot baths, the selection of the area to be inhabited proved less auspicious since the city was apparently established atop a cemetery, a proximity considered by Jewish law to impute impurity. Tiberias’ earliest settlers, according to the historian Josephus, had been a riffraff composed of Galileans marked by poverty or by servitude and lured by promises of liberty and of free housing. In return for such bounty the new inhabitants were forbidden to move away from the city.72 By the middle of the first century the city already boasted its very own Jewish intellectual, Justus, a historian-turned-rebel-turned-deserter, who rose to prominence during the Jewish revolt against Nero (66–70 ce).73 Destined to become Josephus’ nemesis in both politics and historiography, Justus was well educated, mastered Greek and was not a mean orator.74 It is unclear where he would have acquired either his Greek proficiency or his Jewish education. Greek remained the favoured language of funerary commemorations of donors’ inscriptions throughout the history of Roman Tiberias.75 Visitors to either the city’s cemeteries or frequenters of its synagogues, including children, would have presumably recognized Greek even if unable to read it. Spared destruction by Vespasian, Tiberias’ origins in a graveyard continued to plague potential settlers until Rabbi Simon bar Yochai (Rashbi) undertook its purification. The action, if historical, was accomplished well over a century after Tiberias’ foundation, possibly because of the large scale displacement of Jews to the Galilee following the failure of the Bar Kochba revolt in the early 130s ce.76 Archaeological remains associated with early Roman Tiberias include a floor attributed to the palace of Herod Antipas and the city’s imposing southern gate.77 The markets served not only as centres of economic exchange but also as hubs of rabbinic activities, as can be inferred from a reference to Ben Azzai (mid second century), a well-known sage who frequented these markets not to shop but rather to preach on the finer points of Torah to anyone who cared to listen.78 A temple to Hadrian (117–138 ce) was constructed in the heart of the city in the early second century. Two centuries later the Hadrianeum stood as a white elephant in the heart of the city, an imposing and unfinished monument begging conversion.79 Apparently a portion of the precinct was usefully turned into a fish pond,80 an installation that must have lent a peculiar smell to the city centre. Tiberias also boasted a stadium (initially constructed in the first century) which excavations located on the northeastern perimeter of the city, and a theatre, located on the western side of the cardo, whose history spanned several centuries of activities. There is a curious disjuncture between the character of the city, defined as Jewish by its modern observers, and the conventional components of a GrecoRoman urban centre revealed by archaeologists.81 If Tiberias’s reputedly multiple synagogues lent it a distinctly Jewish hue, those so far unearthed are quite small,

Jewish childhood in Roman Galilee   209 containing at the most, a few hundred seats.82 Yet, the town’s Jewish character seems not in doubt. A few decades after the destruction of the Jerusalemite Temple Rabban Gamaliel of Yavneh and the Elders visited Tiberias where the former was ‘caught’ reading the book of Job in translation (into Greek?).83 While in Tiberias, Gamaliel issued a rule about using a certain type of key to lock a synagogue in the city on the Sabbath.84 Perhaps such key controversies elicited the following story that involved children acting as a shield between the permissible and the forbidden on the Sabbath: R. Isaac b. Bisna (c. 300 ce) once lost the keys of the school house in a public domain on a Sabbath. When he came to R. Pedat the latter said to him: ‘Take a few boys and girls [to the spot] for if they find [the keys] they will bring them back’… If a child (katan) came to extinguish [fire on the Sabbath], he must be told: ‘Do not put it out’, since it is the duty of the Israelites present to enforce his Sabbath rest! R. Yochanan said: Only when [the child acts] according to his father’s instruction he is to be prevented [from putting out the fire].85 The passage demonstrates the scope of children’s agency when adults are circumscribed by Sabbath’s biblically ordained rest. The rule is linked with Rabbi Yohanan, Tiberias’ most famous rabbi. In Eleazar’s narrative, I am using such episodes to convey the experiences of childhood in both temporal and spacial contexts. By the middle of the third century Tiberias had become a rabbinic stronghold, apparently boasting a rabbinic academy and its very own 13 synagogues.86 Two names of rabbinic sages are especially linked with the city, including its adjacent settlement of Hammat Tiberias. One is rabbi Meir who resided in Hammat for a while in the middle of the second century; the other is rabbi Yohanan who was active in Tiberias in the first half of the third century.87 The former is accredited with the remarkable observation that as long as children continue to chirp [as they learn the Torah in study houses] no gentile is able to injure Jews.88 The centrality of Tiberias in Jewish life in Palestine was cemented with the permanent settlement in the city of the Jewish Patriarch, the foremost dignitary of the land (c. 300 ce).89 The move coincided with the construction of a ‘basilica’ measuring some 2000 square feet and built apparently atop the royal residence of the city’s royal founder.90 A member of the patriarch’s household, Severus, endowed a stunning mosaic on the floor of the synagogue at Hammat Tiberias, rich with symbols associated with Judaism, with the Jerusalemite Temple, as well as with the decidedly non-Jewish zodiac and Helios riding a chariot (late fourth century). Reflecting this integrative mode is the apparent relaxation of Sabbath rules only in Tiberias, precisely on account of the city’s hot springs. In Tiberias alone the rabbis allowed residents to cook food on the Sabbath using the natural heat that emanated in the hot springs (BT Pes 41a). Throughout its history in Antiquity Tiberias displayed Jewishness’ multiple facets. The city’s synagogues and funerary inscriptions, in Greek, Aramaic and Hebrew, as well as its architecture and art, suggest a symbiosis built on a delicate interplay between tenets of Jewish piety and urban philanthropy. The degree of

210  Hagith Sivan familiarity with Greek among urban Jews is impossible to assess and probably relates to social and economic status. The degree of ‘Hellenization’ of the class of donors in Tiberias is equally an open question. Tiberiad scholars of biblical Hebrew attracted the attention of erudite monks keen on acquiring proficiency in the original language of the Hebrew Bible.91

The temporal framework: the Sabbath Of the practices that non-Jewish observers habitually associated with Judaism, namely circumcision, food regulations and purification rites,92 the Sabbath day was the most visible and conspicuous.93 It was regular, repetitive, celebrated in the home and in the synagogue wherever Jews lived, whether in the Mediterranean Diaspora or Roman Palestine or Parthian-Sasanid Persia. Several Sabbath features drew criticism from gentiles. Sabbath’s apparent complete inactivity, at odds within an environment of labour without a break, was often taken as a mark of indolence, hence confirming the otherness of Jews. Around 400 Jerome even claimed that Jews spent the Sabbath in utter immobility, virtually chained to chairs.94 Gentiles considered Sabbath candles responsible for generating soot, hardly a welcome addition to urban pollution.95 Such comments, however, are no more than snippets, tantalizing voyeurism based on sight, hearsay and possible informants. They reflect a failure to grasp both the attachment of Jews from infancy to this biblically ordained fest, as well as the continuous rabbinic grappling with the implications of biblical guidelines. Of the plethora of rabbinic rules relating to the Sabbath a few touched on the behaviour of children. In one instance teachers are enjoined to monitor the Torah reading of children at school on the eve of the Sabbath (Friday).96 If fire erupted somewhere, children were barred from extinguishing it lest it would appear that an adult authorized this transgression of the rule of Sabbath rest (M Shab. 16.6, above). Potential Sabbath’s transgressions by children prompted questions of responsibility for one’s actions, whether the child’s own or the child’s father. In commenting on the biblical Sabbath commandment (Ex 20:10) that enjoined a man to ensure complete rest for all members of his household, including slaves, animals, sons and daughters, a distinction was drawn between actions dictated by an adult (which are forbidden) and those taken by an enterprising child on its own accord: ‘Do not tell your child (katan) to bring a vessel in from the market or a basket of goods from the market’. Perhaps the intention [of this saying] was to supervise a child lest it breaks the vessel or drops the bundle. But the text (Ex 20:10) specifies ‘you’. [Consequently there is no point in forbidding a child to do these because] just as you act according to your own mind, so does a child since it is its own labour.97 Among activities that did not amount to transgressing the Sabbath the rabbis included circumcision, an action in which a baby boy is a passive agent; and carrying

Jewish childhood in Roman Galilee   211 one’s infant, even if the latter is clutching an impure object, like a stone, in its hand.98 Such rules often hinged on the precise age of transition from childhood to adulthood: when did a child reach an age of comprehending that he is clutching an item considered impure? In other words, how was an age of legal obligation determined?

Rabbinic terminology of childhood Whatever glimpses of ‘everyday life’ are perceptible, rabbinic compilations of Late Antiquity, the main source here used, do not supply a full, continuous routine, either on weekdays or on the Sabbath.99 Nor are there school texts that show how Jewish children acted out situations that imitated Jewish social structures. We can only guess how schools were used as an arena for rehearsing the experiences in real life, inclusive of status, sexuality, conflict and violence.100 To what extent, then, did rabbinic writings reflect realities in general, and of children’s lives in particular, remains an open-ended question.101 The redaction of rabbinic discussions, disagreements and sayings was calculated to produce intellectual genealogies that worked vertically and horizontally to connect teachers with disciples, teachers with teachers and disciples with disciples. The deployment of children in this ideological arsenal ultimately constituted a type that could be discussed in gnomic phrases only: children are there because in any discourse about origins there is limited room for the ‘other’, be they children, women or gentiles. Eleazar is approaching the age of 13 at which children (male) were considered ripe to assume all Torah obligations (mitzvoth). Yet, childhood did not have fixed boundaries, nor were these merely a matter of calculating the age at which one crossed the threshold of childhood to become an adult.102 Even as age 13 gradually emerged to signify the formal ending of childhood (perhaps between 200 and 300 ce, if not later), various criteria continued to be used to determine physical, mental and sexual maturity, each entailing different parameters of evaluating a child’s ability to fulfil the commandments of the Torah. Recommendations hinged on which types of religious obligations were viable within the scope of children’s physical and/or mental and/or procreative capacities.103 Infancy was individual, defined as the period during which a child was dependent on his mother, and therefore exempt from these obligations. Dependence was defined as the period during which mothers had to clean after their sons, and the age at which a child upon awaking would have cried out instantly to his mother.104 Small children were entrusted with economic transactions involving movable property if they possessed daat, a term equated with discernment measured as a child’s ability to differentiate between a stone (an inanimate useless object) and a nut (an edible item).105 The validity of the deal depended entirely on the child’s ability to understand the value of the items traded, regardless of his age. In matters relating to personal law, such as betrothal, divorce and levirate marriage, rabbinic opinion fixed puberty or sexual maturity as the measuring rod of childhood. The sprouting of two pubic hairs, verified through an examination, served as the threshold of leaving childhood behind. Since such signs differed from one child to another, a more precise and possibly universal age-frame had to be devised.106

212  Hagith Sivan Intimately linked with rabbinic observations on child development was an effort to outline an educational programme for children, an endeavour that further entailed reflections on the nature and scope of parental responsibilities vis-àvis children. A celebrated passage from the Mishnah asserts that at five a child ought to learn the Torah, at 10 a Mishnah and at 13 he is to assume all Torah obligations.107 In a rabbinic wrangling over definitions of a minor (katan) and a major (gadol), a tradition handed down in the name of Rabbi Yohanan defined ‘childhood’ in terms of dependence on paternal support.108 Efforts to inculcate Jewishness accompanied the integration of boys into domestic and public spaces. Boys deemed minor (ketanim) could, and probably were encouraged to read the Megilla (scroll of Esther) in front of adults, to say the prayer over food (at home), and even to blow a horn.109 Whereas the period of minority, in itself, had no clearly defined edges, the rabbinic model of acculturation was based on individual rather than collective mindfulness. Children’s agency appears as malleable, and as controversial, as rabbinic definitions of minority. Some tannaitic sources (i.e. pre-200 ce) validate certain actions performed by children, distinguishing however between doing and thinking since they hold that minors lack viable mental capacity. Others assert that a child’s intention is reflected in its action, thereby attaching to it legal implications.110 For example, vegetables that children had picked before the Sabbath, if they designate them for Sabbath use then these items must be liable to tithing.111 Minors’ agency, when their intent or thought is discernable through their action, is legally binding. The Sabbath’s eruv likewise highlights how diverse were rabbinic perceptions of the validity of children’s actions. By one opinion the empowering of children, both girls and boys, to actively become involved in delineating Sabbath boundaries was acceptable since it was considered a training in fulfilling the commandments.112 By another opinion, any action carried out without full awareness of its import carried no legal validity. The former apparently became the norm, based, it seems, on reciprocity of action and intention and in adults–children relations.

Acknowledgement This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Yizhar Hirschfeld, Tiberias’ excavator. In the following, M = Mishnah; T = Tosefta; PT = Talmud Yerushalmi; BT = Bablonian Talmud; ARN = Avot de Rabbi Nathan; further, see Abbreviations in this volume p.xiv.

Notes 1 Day 2007 passim. 2 Taylor 2006: 555–82. 3 BT Meg 6a; LevR 22:4; Tanhuma A (Buber), Huqqat 20, 129, with Antonelli 2004: 365–6. 4 PT Meg 1.1; BT Meg 6a; Shab 33b–34a with Oppenheimer 1991 passim. 5 Josephus, Vita 65–9; Zangenberg 2010: 471–84.

Jewish childhood in Roman Galilee   213 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Josephus, Vita 276–80. Sivan 2008: chapter 6 (liturgical dates). Quote: Ex 35:2–3; BT Shab 12b–13a (above); with Hezser 2001: 48 and 75. Heszer 2001: 40–1; PT Kid 4.12. M Tamid 7.4 with Gilat 1985: 12. See also PT Rosh Hashana 1.1 where the Torah origins of this form of counting is discounted. BT Shab 34b; PT Ber 1.1 with Gilat 1985: 24. M Shab 1.6. Hirschfeld and Meir 2006 with plans and images. BT Yev 96b. On the conflation of the rabbinic dispute over synagogue bolts on the Sabbath (M Eruv 10.10) with a report leading to the tearing of a Torah codex, and thence to a prediction of the synagogue’s eventual conversion into a place of pagan worship, Miller 2006: 284–5. Sivan 2008 on attempts to convert the temple to a bathhouse and a church. BT Ber 53a. On hot baths see Dvorjetski 2007: 127–43. M Shab 3.4; BT Shab 40a. BT Eruv 87b. BT San 108a. BT Pes 8b. PT San 14.19; BT Shab 40b but see also BT Pes 41a. Dvorjetski 2007: 137 for description. PT AZ 4.4., 43d with Kimelman 1980, passim. BT BM 84a. On beliefs that eye contact with a particular kind of humans or animals can affect the viewer’s physicality, Swartz 1996: 165; see also Boyarin 1992: 81–5. BT Ber 5b; BT BB 12b. BT Hull 95b. On children as presumed receptacles of cosmic wisdom, Swartz 2003: 155–66, esp. 160. Taylor 2006: 54. Dothan 1983 and 2000. The zodiac mosaic is usually dated to the late fourth century. BT Ber 8a; LevR 7.3 with Hezser 2001: 76. M Shab 7.2. M San 7.8; Mekhilta Shabbta Ki tissa 1 on Exod 31:14, with Doering 2010: 570. For an enchanting description of the baths, then and a century ago, with magnificent photos, see Fletcher 1913: 365–70. PT Ber 9.4; PT Nid 2.7; BT Nid 21a with Dvorjetski 2007: 226. BT Shab 10b; Dvorjetski 2007: 234. BT Ber 62a; M Mach 6.7; BT Shab 32a. Alexandre 2008. Buchmann 1957: 31–2 for the description. PT Ber 2.8. LevR 34.3; BT Shab 25b; PT Shab 14.3 with Dvorjetski 2007: 236. PT Shab 1.2, 3a. PT Shab 1.2 and above; PT San 7.13 with Dvorjetski 2007: 290. Trachtenberg 2004: 132–52, on amulets, esp. 139 on charms to protect children against the hazards of infancy. Wandrey 2000: 262, on cameo from Horvat Kanaf recovered from a residential site. Name inspired by a Greek inscription from Tiberias, Damati 1999. In general, see Ilan 2012. BT Pes 49b and PT Shab 1.3 (3b) with Hauptman 2010: 94. BT Kidd 82b and BT Beitza 15b with Gilat 1985: 22, but see T Shab 16 which forbids distribution of charity to the poor on the Sabbath in the synagogue on page 207. BT Pes 8a and BT Shab 10b.

214  Hagith Sivan 47 The description is based on the discoveries in Khir beit Hamam. See Sivan 2013. The mosaics have been dated to c. 300 ce. 48 BT Pes 8b. 49 M Ket 5.5; BT BK 82a with Gilat 1985: 8. 50 BT Shab 119a; LevR 23.6 with Gilat 1985: 10. 51 BT Shab 33b with Ex 20:8 and Deut 5:12. 52 T Eruv 2.11 with Hauptman 2010: 97. 53 Tanhuma Genesis Noah 16; Hauptman 2010: 98. 54 Fonrobert 2004 and 2005: 11 on the three types of eruv, sharing courtyards and alleyways, eruv of distance and of cooking. See also Fonrobert 2011 and Instone Brewer 2011: 87–114. 55 BT Shab 113a; PT Peah 8.7; PT Shab 6.2 with Gilat 1985: 10. 56 PT Shab 6.2, 8a. 57 M Shab 6.6, Venice ms – on ketanot; M Shab 6.9 on boys; PT Shab 6.5, 8b. 58 BT Shab 66b. 59 M Shab 2.6 with Hauptman 2010: 91–8. 60 BT Shab 23b. 61 PT Shab 1.3, 3b with Hauptman 2010: 94. 62 Doering 2010: 566–86; Tabory 2006: 560–4. 63 Sivan 2004, passim. 64 Mekhilta de Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai on Ex. 20:8, with Gilat 1985: 2. 65 PT Sot 1.4, 16d. 66 M Shab 9.7; BT Shab 90b; PT Shab 1.3, 3b; BT Sha 12a. 67 M Shab 16.6; PT Shab 16.6; BT 121. 68 BT Ned 37a. 69 M Hag 1.8; T Hag 9.9; Eruv 11.23. 70 BT Shab 150a. 71 For comprehensive overview see Porat 2013. See also Eliav 1995 and the pioneering work of Hirschfeld 1988. 72 Josephus, Ant. 18.36.8; Jensen 2006: 94–5. Tiberias’ size has been estimated between 30 and 60 hectares, with population estimates ranging from 6000 to 15000 or 18600 to 27900. See Reed 2000: 82; Spigel 2012: 314. 73 Josephus, Vita 37.8 with Rodgers 2006. 74 Justus apparently exhorted his co-religionists in Tiberias to join the rebellious Galilee. The city had been demoted by Nero, presumably losing the status of a polis granted to it by the emperor Claudius, Nero’s predecessor (see Sigismund 2007: 316). 75 See the excellent discussion of Schwabe 1949. 76 Levine 1978 and Zellentin 2011: 173–212. 77 Hirschfeld, Gallor 2007; Miller 2013; Zangenberg 2010. 78 BT Sot 45a; Eruv 29a; Kid 20a. 79 Sivan 2008: 23–4 and 309–10 on the Hadrianeum conversion-controversy. 80 Hirschfeld, Galor 2007: 215. 81 Freyne 1980: 101–54, esp. 133–4. 82 Spigel 2012: 220-8, estimates that the so-called Severus’ synagogue of Hammat Tiberias stratum II (third – fifth century) could house 139 and 166 seats, rising to 442 to 764 in its later stratum I (sixth – eighth centuries). The second identifiable synagogue in Hammat (fourth – sixth centuries) could contain 140–179 seats. In Tiberias itself the late ancient synagogue (sixth–eighth centuries) had a seating capacity of 325 to 491 (Spigel, 315). 83 T Shab 13.2; BT Shab 115a, c. 100 ce, with Oppenheimer 2005: 145–55. 84 M Eruv 10.10 with Oppenheimer 2005: 147. 85 BT Yev 114a. See below for the Mishnaic comment on conflagration. 86 For the figure of 13 synagogues, BT Ber 8a. On excavated synagogues, two to date in Tiberias and two in Hammat Tiberias, see Miller 2013: 433. See also Poirier 2010: 40,

Jewish childhood in Roman Galilee   215 on rabbinic control of Tiberiade synagogues. Rosenfeld 2010: 120–6 listing the rabbis linked with Tiberias between the first and the fifth centuries. 87 Perhaps the presence of Meir coincided with the formal unification of Tiberias and Hammath Tiberias, a measure that expanded Sabbath boundaries although the two remained apparently two distinct entities (T Eruv 5.2 vs PT Meg 1.1). See Kimelman 1980. 88 GenR 65.20; PRK 1.5; LamR Pet. 2. 89 The association of the settlement of the Nasi with the alleged arrival of the Sanhedrin, often referred to (Miller 2013: 432; Smallwood 1981: 474, for two such examples), is dismissed by Hezser 1997: 186–91. On the disjunction between the Talmudic ‘Great Sanhedrin of Jerusalem’ and the reality of its apparent absence from Jewish history altogether, see Efron 1987. See also Sivertsev 2002: 19–94. 90 Hirschfeld and Gallor 2007: 227–9 associated the basilica (which they date to the fourth century) with a court presided, it seems, by the patriarch. Miller 2013: 434, prefers late fourth/early fifth and regards the complex as a large urban mansion containing private and public wings. 91 In the early fifth century Tiberias was still home of linguistic experts, like the scholar of Hebrew whom Jerome recruited to verify his own translation of Chronicles, ‘a certain doctor of the Law who was greatly esteemed among the Jews (legis quondam doctorem qui apud Hebraeos admirationi habebatur)’: Praefatio in libro Paraliomenon (iuxta LXX), PL 29.401B, with Jacobs 2003: 88, assuming it refers to a Jew and not to a converted one, as has been asserted by Stemberger 2008: 583. 92 Wright 2015. The bibliography on the Sabbath is fairly extensive. Especially useful is the series of articles written by Israel Gilat, see esp. Gilat 1992a and b. See also Bloch 1980: 107–40. 93 McKay 1994 for a comprehensive overview of primary sources prior to 200 ce. 94 Epist. 121.10. For the date and comments on the letter’s preface, Cain 2009, 188–93, dated to 407 ce. 95 Persius, Sat. 3.103–106. 96 M Shab 1.3. Cf. T Shab 1.12, attributed to Shimon b. Gamaliel, stating that children prepare their chapters [of the Torah] on Sabbath nights by the light of a lamp, without referring to a teacher. 97 Mekhilta de R. Simeon b. Yohai. 98 M Shabbat 18.3; 19; 21.1. On the Sabbath rule forbidding carrying see Jassen 2011. 99 Cf. Hopkins 1993 and Dickey 2012. I am aware that by using the year 300 (grosso modo) I am limited, theoretically, to the Mishnah and Tosefta and a handful of Midrashim. Clearly, however, sayings attributed to early amoraim, primarily in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, are likewise relevant. 100 Hirshman 2009: 49–64. A Talmudic primer on education, most likely of disciples of the sages only. 101 On these questions see Fonrobert and Jaffee 2007 and Strack and Stemberger 1996. See also the articles in Judaism in Late Antiquity 3.1 (1999), 123–232 in a section ‘The debate about “Talmudic history”’. 102 For much of what follows in this section I am indebted to Lebendiger 1916; Gilat 1992b. 103 Moscovitz 2007. 104 T Hag 1.2; BT Sukk 28b. 105 PT Eruv 7.6; Cf. PT MS 4.3; PT Git 5.9; BT Git 64b–65a. See the excellent discussion of this term in Abrams 1998: 130–9. 106 M Nid 6.12; 5.8; 6.2. 107 M Avot 5.21, with the chapter ‘Theorizing Childhood’ in Sivan, forthcoming. Cf. BT Ket 50a.

216  Hagith Sivan 108 BT BM 12b. See PT Peah 4.6 for a slightly different take on the same point, linking paternal right to anything found by their children with their dependence on his maintenance. 109 M. Meg 2; M Meg. 2.4 objects to children reading the Megillah, as does T Meg 2.8, resulting in moving the scene of reading to the synagogue where minors read along with adults, Miller 2006: 284, note 218. 110 Moscovitz 2008, 71ff. for a full discussion. 111 PT Maaserot 4.2 with Moscovitz 2008: 75–6. 112 T Eruv 2.11 vs. M Eruv 3.2, with Moscovitz 2008: 87.

14 Resistance and agency in the everyday life of Late Antique children (third–eighth century ce) Béatrice Caseau

Introduction In the city of Emesa, at the end of Antiquity, a group of joyous young girls were having fun, singing satirical songs, and dancing in the street. Unfortunately for them, a holy fool called Symeon did not approve of this buoyancy, and he cursed them with a squint. Those among the little girls who allowed him to kiss them on the eye were cured, but those who refused in disgust, squinted for the rest of their lives.1 Hagiographical texts, whether saints’ Lives or collections of miracle stories (thaumata, miracula) are full of vivid tales that present little scenes in an urban or rural setting, in a sanctuary, or in a house. Some of these tales involve children. Naturally, it is important to remember that a story such as the one recorded in the Life of Symeon the Fool was written in order to emphasize the power of the saint to make miracles. Symeon is described as one who has the power to see into the future, and God listens to him: he prayed God to make these little girls squint in order to preserve them from a life of debauchery, which he could foresee in their future. Such stories can be analyzed on different levels and should not be taken at face value, but they are nevertheless interesting in the way they present the everyday life of children. From such a tale, we understand that little girls of probably a low social class were free to run around in groups, in the streets of Late Antique Emesa. They gathered in their neighborhood and felt free and secure enough to dance in the streets and sing aloud. They laughed while singing satirical songs. In view of the fact that they could be married from the age of 12– 13 onwards, it is likely that their age group is 6–11 years old. Their lighthearted, buoyant attitude, their implied disrespect for some figure of authority or some institution – we are not told what was mocked in the satire – is the opposite of the demure and bashful deportment valued in Christian literature for girls.2 If the model of the ideal, very reserved, and serious little girl was taught to them, they obviously did not abide by it. Some of them are punished for this resistance and for not foreseeing the saint’s power. Moreover, although the story involves the disfigurement of little girls, which is a grave matter, the narration also includes comical elements, such as the little girls running after the saint in the streets, getting hold of him, the holy fool kissing little girls on their eyes, elements which were meant to entertain and make the audience laugh or smile... This literature

218  Béatrice Caseau typically mixes plausible elements such as groups of little girls playing in the street with improbable elements, the aim of which, besides captivating the audience, is to inspire awe of the saint. One fact is clear in this story, however: most of the little girls have assimilated the religious power of holy men, monks, and clerics alike, to bind, and unbind, to curse, and to heal. They live in the Christian thought world of Late Antiquity, which accords spiritual powers to the saints. Recent studies of childhood have considered the point of view of adults on children, for a good reason: we have very few direct sources from children themselves. Treatises on how to raise a Christian child, and a future saint, were written by authors such as Clement of Alexandria, John Chrysostom, or Jerome with the point of view of adults addressing parents. They reveal how the adult world wished to teach children how to behave in a Christian manner. They agreed with the Didache (written at the end of the first century) that parents had to instruct their children in the fear of God.3 They should also bring their offspring to church for services, explains John Chrysostom, to protect them from the snares of the world, and teach them the value of asceticism.4 The role of parents was not only to educate and socialize children so that they would become fully functioning adults in Late Antique society, but was also (and primarily) to raise saints for eternal life.5 It mattered to Christian parents that their children should have a chance to join the saints in Paradise. This goal generated a strategy to enhance the chances of children by molding their behavior.6 Parents wanted to promote two virtues above all in their children: obedience and piety. Other virtues were also encouraged: an ascetic behavior toward food, a sensible choice of friends, seriousness rather than playfulness, the ability to memorize the psalms. The agenda of adults toward children is clear: they promoted obedience as the cardinal virtue of any child and expected children to show early signs of holiness, by moving away from childish behavior, caprice, and rowdiness. Yet, sources reveal that children did not always follow the model presented to them. Sometimes, they resisted, or ignored the rules of behavior that adults tried to instill in them. In a book devoted to studying the agency and experience of children, let us try to revisit Late Antique sources, looking not so much for the opinion of adults on how to raise a Christian child, or a future saint, as for the reaction of children to the way adults tried to mold them as good Christians. We hardly ever reach the voices of children in our sources, except for few papyri, or school exercises, but it is possible to catch a glimpse of their everyday life through the disapproving discourse of adults mentioning inappropriate childish behavior, through little hagiographical scenes involving obedient and disobedient children, or through sermons condemning adults for behaving like children. With the help of these different sources, we can reconstruct areas of resistance to the ideal model of behavior instilled by adults. Resistance to the Christian rules of holy deportment is one of the areas where we can see children acting for themselves. Concentrating only on naughty children would limit the agency of children to just one aspect. Children could also embrace the values of the adult world and push them further. They could become agents of the religious rites as active participants, develop their own devotions, and go beyond what the adults around them actually wished them to do. This was

Resistance and agency in everyday life   219 another way to take their future in hand and disobey adults. Having assimilated the message of the Gospels, they could decide on their own to invoke a higher authority than that of their parents and follow their Father in heaven rather than their earthly parents. These are areas in which the agency of children manifests itself: resistance to the rules imposed by adults; embracing religion or asceticism in their own way; making life-changing decisions, against their parent’s wishes, but sanctioned by the Church. Examples will be taken from sources ranging from the first to the eighth century.7 In this chapter, the focus will be on three particular topics: the behavior of children during church services; rebellion against the family’s decisions concerning the future of a child; and the relation of children to food in a culture that valued asceticism. If the beginning of childhood is easily defined with birth, the end of childhood is a complex matter.8 Different thresholds can be considered, depending on the subject. The age limit for marriage is defined by puberty, fixed at 12 or 13 for girls and 14 or 15 for boys.9 Roman law and Byzantine law fixed legal majority at the age of 25. However, the Theodosian code admitted that it could be granted at the age of 20, if “any youths possessed of honorable character should wish to govern more advantageously by their own management their paternal savings or their ancestral patrimonies.”10 The imperial constitution considers that “the age of completed youth, the twentieth year, has begun to open for them the door for the entrance upon most stable young manhood.” For young girls, adulthood is reached two years earlier, according to this text: We sanction also that since the age of women outstrips that of men by two years because of an earlier puberty, the interval of time shall be observed also in this case, and they can obtain the rights of legal age when they have passed their eighteenth year, provided that they are recommended by honorable character, intelligence of mind, and an established good reputation. Following this text, childhood, in this article, will be defined broadly and considered as the period of life between birth and adulthood at the age of 18 or 20.

Resistance to the rules imposed by adults: not listening at mass, but playing instead Adults found fault with children in Antiquity, in terms of knowledge, and selfcontrol. Children were seen as incomplete adults, unable to control themselves, and especially their appetite.11 They preferred playing to studying. They enjoyed games more than sermons. Because they lacked judgment, they were also prone to accidents, and their frailty made them susceptible to illnesses. Sources mention these defects either when talking about children, or when shaming adults for behaving like children. Whatever their defects, in the late Roman world, Christian children were also members of the Christian communities and as such, they were expected to attend church services. Children did not always behave as adults expected them to. Some ecclesiastical sources reveal their disapproval of children misbehaving in church.

220  Béatrice Caseau While it is impossible to know what went on exactly in the numerous churches of the Late Antique world, some normative sources, such as the Didascalia of the Apostles,12 or the Canons of the Apostles, reveal how, ideally, the different groups composing a Christian community should be placed inside the church building. These sources from the third century onwards first separate clerics and laypeople, men and women and they also distinguish age groups. In this model, children are located in different areas of the church, depending on their age, and sex.13 We learn from these normative sources that very young children (babies and toddlers) should be placed at the back of the church with their mother. If they were crying, they could leave the church and enter the narthex or the atrium. Some authors such as Jerome prefer babies not to be brought to church, except on rare occasions, such as their baptism. He advises the mother of little Paula to bring her to church only when she becomes grandicula, big enough to stand, and listen for quite a long time.14 This group of very young children was brought to church, however, in households where everybody would go together to attend services. The model Jerome has in mind only worked for wealthy families, whose slaves and servants either were not Christians or were not allowed to attend mass when work had to be done. For older children, their location in the church depended on their sex. Little girls were supposed to stand either with their mother or with consecrated virgins, little boys were placed either with their father or in front of laymen, under the supervision of a deacon. In that case, they formed a separate group of young boys. Their location in front of the crowd allowed them to see and hear the liturgy better than those at the back of the church. Also, it was hoped that some of these little boys would enter the clergy, and this location taught them how members of the clergy proceeded during the liturgy. Eventually, some of these boys knew the liturgy by heart, even the words of the anaphora, consecrating the bread and wine, because they were close enough to hear all the prayers said by the priests, including those said in a low voice. In the Miracles of the Mother of God, we are told the story of a young boy from the monastery of Saint George of Choziba, who was in charge of carrying bread, and mindlessly repeated the words of the anaphora that he had heard so many times; unintentionally, he consecrated the bread.15 In the Pratum spirituale, a group of children from Apamea play at mass and offer the prosphora, repeating exactly the words of the anaphora.16 In some churches where large communities assembled, male children formed a group of singers. Although their age is not given, it is likely that they were recruted among children aged 6 to 13 and formed a group of high-pitched voices. Ini the sixth-century Hagia Sophia cathedral, in Constantinople, these singing children were placed close to the ambo, a raised speaking platform present in many Christian churches.17 Women were not allowed to sing in the Greek churches and in general, the faithful enjoyed hearing the voices of children. Theodoret of Cyrrhus mentions a monk who, when he was young, charmed the community by the sweetness of his voice.18 These children were kept busy during the liturgy and had little time to play, except perhaps during the sermon, which could last almost half an hour or more.19 The length of the sermon has been a matter of discussion among scholars, but we know that Augustine, for example, made them extra long when competing events,

Resistance and agency in everyday life   221 such as pagan festivals, or races, took place.20 A sermon he delivered at Carthage in 404 during the festival of the calends lasted more than two and a half hours.21 Church services could be very long and children were sometimes bored, especially during sermons which were too complex for them to understand. Whether bored or playful, children were sometimes distracted during services and they played, joked, and talked with their friends during mass. In a sermon on fasting attributed to John Chrysostom, the anonymous author mentions that children brought games to church, such as marbles, nuts, and balls. We should keep in mind that not all of the children were baptized at that point in time, and while they were catechumens, they left the church after the sermon and played outside, often in the atrium, while their baptized parents, and siblings remained until the end of mass. It is likely that parents let the children bring games to church for that period of time, when the children were free to run outside, but children did not always resist the temptation to play with them during the services.22 Inside sanctuaries and church atria, children played with marbles, or nuts. We are also told that they drew or scribbled on the walls or on the floor, perhaps a more solitary exercise, unless it was a game board which was drawn. One such game board was found on the steps on the Temple-Church precinct in Aphrodisias (See Figure 14.1). Ch. Roueché explains that the ‘mill game’ was played on this board. Next to the game board, an inscription mentions names: Michael, Zerkounes, and another Michael.23 It is impossible to assert that children (rather than adults) played on that board, but we can very well imagine children playing on the steps, while waiting for their parents. A large number of graffiti inside Late Antique churches have survived, but it is quite impossible to evaluate the ages of their authors. Some of the at times clumsy drawings might have been made by children, but they were certainly not the only culprits.24 Many worshippers wanted to leave their name or a sign of their presence inside religious buildings.25 Chalk or charcoals were probably used by children to draw, while incised inscriptions

Figure 14.1  Game boards, Aphrodisias, Temple-Church precinct (photo: Ch. Roueché).

222  Béatrice Caseau required a blunt instrument and a force that young children would not possess.26 We have probably lost the scribbled traces left by children, but children could play with an already inscribed gameboard, if given the opportunity. The games and the talking of the children created a disruption that could bother clerics and pious worshippers. Some sources complain about it and even threaten dire consequences for parents who could not control their children. The Ethiopic version of the Canons of the Apostles, for example, warns parents that their children’s life could be shortened if they did not behave while attending church services.27 The deacon in charge of supervising these little boys had a lot to do, especially when, after the sermon, catechumens left the church, and their already baptized friends. The age at baptism varied: children could be baptized as early as 40 days after birth28 (earlier, in case of illness), and as late as adulthood. In the fourth century, many adults, even in Christian families, remained catechumens until their thirties29 and some waited until their deathbed to ask for baptism. By the fifth or sixth century, however, the increase in the practice of baptizing children was noticeable, and unbaptized young adults perhaps had to justify why they were not yet baptized, as the Life of Severus of Antioch by Zacharias Rhetor reveals.30 The text explains that it was the custom in Pisidia, at the end of the fifth century, to wait until a person was mature enough to receive baptism, but the context matters in this case, as Severus, an important figure of the monophysite church, was accused of being a pagan during his youth. The opinion that it was better to wait until the end of one’s teens was not so rare in the fifth century, when baptism was still considered the end product of a process of conversion, willingly desired. In the Byzantine world of the sixth to eighth century, it was important to introduce the child to church, but a child could stay a catechumen for a number of years. This means that children often received baptism at some point during childhood or their teens, but not necessarily as babies. When the children were healthy, it seems that parents were not in such a hurry to baptize them. Symeon Stylites the Younger (521–592) was baptized at two, but Severus of Antioch (465–538) and his brothers only as teenagers.31 The lowering of the age of children’s baptism in the early Middle Ages was probably more common in the West, where the Augustinian theology of the original sin condemned unbaptized children to remain at the doors of Paradise, even if they had had no time to sin before dying.32 In the East, most theologians admitted that unbaptized dead infants would not be rejected by God, because it was not their fault, but their parents’ responsibility. Both in the East and in the West, however, adults agreed that disobedient children would not reach Paradise, since they believed that obedience was the most important virtue in a child.

Resistance to the rules imposed by adults: not abiding by parental decisions Children sometimes displayed resistance to parental authority, and adults in charge of educating the children (parents, paedagogus...) used corporal punishment to crush this resistance and enforce their authority.33 When resistance to one’s

Resistance and agency in everyday life   223 parents’ plan was very strong, in areas involving marriage, or a career, the father could threaten to disinherit the child.34 Another way to break resistance was to consider the child’s behavior as inspired by demons, and to subject the child, or more frequently the teenager, to exorcism.35 Parents planned the future of their children by finding an appropriate spouse or by giving the child to a monastic or clerical community. The Life of Saint Sabas by Cyril of Scythopolis shows the little boy entrusted to the care of an uncle, when his father was sent to serve in Egypt and took the child’s mother with him.36 The relations of Sabas (439–532) with his aunt were not good and he ran away to another uncle, and then when the two uncles fought over the inheritance of the child, to a convent. Cyril of Scythopolis (†558) shows the reconciled uncles trying to persuade Sabas to take a wife and to leave the monastic community, in order to manage his properties. By then, however, Sabas had decided to become a monk, and he was able to resist his uncles. It was costly to raise a child, and it is possible that the monastery hoped that Sabas would give the revenues of his properties to the community he had joined. It is the likely reason for the refusal of the hegumen to let him go when, having reached the age of 18 (after 10 years in this community), he decided to see the world and leave for Jerusalem. In Palestine, the monastic communities he tried to enter into, refused to take him. Eventually, he was accepted in the monastery of Theoctistus, after he agreed to give his properties to the community, through the hegumen.37 Money matters run through this text. Sabas seems free to give away his properties, but we hear that his parents were still alive, he got money from them, when he went to Alexandria with another young monk whose parents had died and who went to cash his inheritance. Sabas had given away properties he did not already possess, probably through the writing of a testament. The case of Sabas is interesting, as it shows that many conflicts arose around the inheritance of Sabas, and he used his potential wealth to convince different communities to take him in. We can conclude that the absence of parents gave some leeway to children, who could act on their own, but who were limited by the lack of money and by a difficult bargaining position. Sabas was a boy and had a better chance of deciding for himself than any girl, as we shall see. Girls had very little freedom.38 Consent to being married was, in theory, a requirement for a valid marriage, but in fact, the consent which mattered was that of the girl’s parents, principally of her father. Late Antique law tightened the grip of fathers on their children: their consent was mandatory for a legitimate marriage.39 In the choice of a spouse, young men could refuse a fiancée, but girls did not have the same freedom. The law gave girls no say in the choice of a husband, unless they were widowed. Their father (or their family) chose for them. In the Life of Irene, abbess of Chrysobalanthon, we learn that a headstrong young girl, who was betrothed, had run away to a convent in Constantinople, and then discovered that she would rather be married and tried to escape.40 She had run away from marriage, only to find the restrictions of monastic life even harsher. The Life describes her unhappiness, as she runs to the door of the monastery, screaming at night... Young love is at the center of this story: she is loved by a young man who is described as posessed by the demon because he is so much in love with her, and the young

224  Béatrice Caseau nun is seen as ‘maddened with frantic lust’ because she screams his name and threatens to kill herself if she cannot see him. Passionate young love is not seen positivitely, but is regarded as the work of the devil. It disturbs adult plans for the young. One can assume that the decision to send the young girl to Constantinople was taken by her parents, rather than by herself: Cappadocia is far away from the capital city, and young girls of aristocratic families seldom traveled on their own, without their parents, or servants. It is probable that the young man she loved was not the one chosen for her by her parents. In early Byzantine society, young girls had no power to oppose parental decisions about the choice of a husband. Melania the Younger (†439) had to marry, although she preferred celibacy, but she enjoyed the freedom her wealth could provide for traveling, as Melania the Elder (†410) had done before her.41 Macrina († 379) used the fact that her fiancé had died to refuse another husband, when pressed by her parents to marry. She had aquiesced to her father’s wish, as a good daughter, but would have chosen the life of a consecrated virgin, if she had been given a choice. Of course, saints’ Lives always state that a married female saint would have chosen a celibate life if she had been given the option, because being the spouse of Christ, sponsa Christi, was considered the holiest lifestyle and certainly the only other alternative to married life. The young nun in the Life of Irene is blamed because she declares that she prefers marriage to a man to being the spouse of Christ. In this text, we see how the high-spirited young woman is declared to be possessed and ill because she does not follow the rules of obedient behavior. Eventually, she is not blamed for her revolt; demons and magic are given the blame. In a face-saving event, a magic doll binding the young nun to her frantic and impossible love is found and burned, in order to free her for a life of peace and quiet devotion in the monastic community. Children had very little choice concerning their future. Parents decided for them if they were to be married, to be sent to a convent, or to serve the Church.42 Betrothal could be organized for very young children, as young as seven years of age. This is a limit imposed by Byzantine law, because parents organized the future wedding of their children, sometimes as soon as they were born. The law reminded them that the young had to give their consent and therefore needed to have reached an age where they could speak for themselves. Naturally, even at seven, this was merely a formality. Since the choice of a spouse was made for them, they just had to hope for the best. Boys could refuse their future bride, if she did not meet their expectations, but that was a costly process. Girls could not easily refuse their future husband, unless they could prove dishonorable behavior. If a young betrothed man did not marry after puberty, the fiancée had to wait for two years. After this period, her family could ask him to celebrate the marriage or repay the money given by the girl’s family, who could then organize another marriage for her. Both State and Church made it difficult and costly to break an engagement. The Church even declared as adultery the union with someone who was betrothed to somebody else. The same absence of freedom is noticeable in the case of children whose parents vowed to give them to God.43 Parents’ vows had to be honored, whether, or not the child wanted to enter religious life.44 In the West, there were discussions about the children’s freedom to take another path when reaching adulthood, but young nuns

Resistance and agency in everyday life   225 could scarcely leave, after their inheritance had been given to the convent. For young boys, there was the chance of entering the clergy, but as monks, they were not allowed to marry. Stressed mothers often promised their future child to God, when they had difficulties in conceiving. Worried parents, faced with a child’s illness, could bargain with God, and offer the child in exchange for restored health. All of this bargaining meant that children or even young adults were given to monastic institutions or to the clergy, without any particular inclination for its specific lifestyle. In order to protect children, Basil of Caesarea had agreed to take children inside monastic communities but not as nuns and monks, until they reached the age to make an informed decision for themselves. He considered that young girls should be older than 15 years of age, in order to understand the consequences of their decision to take the veil.45 Only when they had reached that age, would they be considered mature enough. The position of Basil, although enshrined in Byzantine canon law, was abandoned for a different one: the bishops gathered at the council in Trullo in 691–692 allowed children as young as 10 to enter monastic life.46 While some communities refused to take young boys, whose presence could affect the serenity of older monks by their almost feminine appearance, other monasteries took in very young children. Theodoret mentions a little boy who had been given so early in life to a desert monastery that he never learned what farm animals were.47 Orphans were entrusted more frequently than other children to the care of monks or clerics. Euthymios the Great († 477) was three when he was sent to a bishop who was his uncle. Alypios († 640) was the same age when his mother brought him to the bishop of Hadrianoupolis in Phrygia, for the same reason. These children had lost their fathers, and their mothers could not take care of them. We know about them because they became saints.48 Yet, only a small minority of children entered the clergy or monastic communities. In the case of the vast majority of orphans, either family members could take care of them, or else they were sold into slavery or did not survive. This is a rather grim view of Late Antique childhood but children’s lack of agency is patent when the choice of a future is at stake. Yet, then, and now, children could manipulate their surroundings and assert their own will. This is particularly true with regard to the topic of food intake.

Resistance to the rules imposed by adults: children and food When studying the agency of children, their relation to food is particularly interesting. Children were reputed to love sweets and to be unable to control their appetite.49 Indeed, we have stories about children stealing food, or disobeying adult rules, and eating when they were not supposed to. We also find stories of children who, conscious that the adult world valued asceticism, adopted a very strict diet and restricted food intake to a point that worried the adults around them. Refusal of food is as much part of the agency of children as stealing food. We hear of adults pushing children to eat and of children refusing to obey. Control over food intake was indeed a very important part of children’s lives, and while the appetite of children had not changed with the religious conversion of most of Late Antique Roman society to the Christian faith, the new religion had introduced

226  Béatrice Caseau new rules and new values concerning food. The Late Antique and Byzantine food culture mixed recommendations long provided by Greek medicine with ascetic values and specific restrictions linked to the religious calendar.50 The main change came from the added value given to the control of food intake as an important element in an ascetic behavior that was praised and recommended not only for philosophers, but for everyone. Fasting did not play an important role in late Roman traditional cults. Some philosophers adopted a vegetarian diet, but they formed a minority and did not imagine that the crowds of illiterate common people could follow them and exert a similar control over their body. The novelty in the Christian preaching was that ascetic values were taught to everyone. Asceticism started with restricting the intake of food for religious reasons, on a regular basis. Fasting was introduced as a weekly practice for two days every week, and it was also established for longer periods before Easter and other important religious festivals. The religious calendar had a direct impact on the sort of food to be eaten and on the time to eat it. Fasting consisted of limiting the amount of food ingested, in reducing the number of meals and eating only once a day later in the afternoon, and in eliminating certain foods such as meat and sometimes dairy products, which were not to be eaten on fasting days. Children were introduced to fasting early in life, although there were discussions about how early and how much fasting should be imposed on little children. One can say that the adoption of the Christian religion had a direct impact on the everyday life of children, especially if they belonged to the upper classes. For the poor, eating once a day was already a common practice, and the impact of fasting on them was probably less than in the case of the wealthy, who ate a variety of food, including different sorts of meats, on a regular basis. Young children were not invited to the banquets organized by their fathers, but it is likely that they ate some of what was prepared in the kitchens. For the wealthy, the adoption of fasting days and fasting periods altered long-established social practices, and this was more difficult to enforce. Eventually, even the aristocracy changed its food habits and replaced meat with fish or shellfish, during Lent, and other fasting periods. These changes in the diet of the household had an impact on children, who learned to differentiate festive days and fasting days. In Late Antique Christian society, one group had the reputation of fasting more than anyone else: monks and nuns. For them, fasting was a continuous practice, hardly ever interrupted. More precisely, even for monks and nuns, the religious calendar alternated fasting days with festive days. It was extremely important in the eyes of Christian authorities to check that monastic restrictions in the intake of food and the refusal of meat were not a condemnation of God’s Creation, under the influence of Manichees or other dualist heretics. Monks and nuns were taught that in order to resist temptation, they should eat as little as possible and never eat their fill. Sin had entered the world because of a desirable fruit that Eve tasted and gave to Adam, in spite of God’s command never to eat from that tree. Monks should be careful with food. Desert monks competed in long fasting periods, and even if archeobotany reveals more diversity in their food consumption than what hagiographic sources and edifying tales relate, food restrictions were important in all monastic communities.51 Naturally, this too had an impact on children, first

Resistance and agency in everyday life   227 at home, on children destined to be consecrated to God, and then in the monastic community that welcomed them. At home, the diet of a child destined to be consecrated to God should be stricter than that of his or her siblings, explains Jerome, when he writes to Laeta around 400, after she has decided to give her first-born daughter, Paula, to God.52 In this letter, he answers her request for advice about how to raise a holy virgin of God. On food practices, two models came to his mind: Samuel, who was raised in the Temple and drank no wine; and John the Baptist, who ate honey, and grasshoppers in the desert. Neither example is well suited to the lifestyle of an aristocratic little girl living in Rome, but they are meant to show with biblical examples that food intake has to change with religious life. Jerome first recommends keeping the little girl apart, so that she never eats with her parents, siblings, and friends and never sees what they are allowed to taste. Then, Jerome insists on the necessity of accustoming the child to fasting. For little Paula, he lays down a rule that she should never eat her fill. She is not allowed to drink wine, unless it should be important for her health, because wine leads to lust. Jerome knows that ascetics usually renounce eating meat and he has doubts on this question, concerning an aristocratic child. He decides that she should be allowed to eat meat in little quantities, in order to grow up. He offers as a model the Egyptian gymnosophists and the Indian Brahmans who eat only barley, rice, and fruits. Why not apply that to the young virgin of God? He concludes that her food should consist of vegetables, cereals, and, rarely, a little fish. Little Paula, however, should receive enough food to sustain her. She should be able to read, pray, and sing psalms at the end of each meal. Jerome was not a model of moderation. When it comes to fasting for a little child, however, he is careful and sensible. He does not recommend long fasting periods without oil and without fruits for one at such a tender age. He is aware that the goal at which she should aim is a life of privations, not just for a few weeks of Lent, and one should measure the effort in order to be able to sustain it in the long run. He was also perhaps aware of the danger of excessive fasting for the growth of a child. He had been blamed for the death of Blesilla, who adopted extreme ascetic practices after an illness and who died young, much to the dismay of most of the Roman aristocracy, who did not approve of such rigorous ascetic practices.53 It seems that Blesilla, who was a young widow, had adopted religious life with too much enthusiasm, probably under the influence of her mother.54 She had stopped feeding herself properly and did not sleep much. The excess of her mortifications, added to her previous illness weakened her body, and she died very young, perhaps not even 20 years old.55 Blesilla’s example shows that the young sometimes went further than the adults expected of them. Jerome had to write a long letter of consolation to her mother, who felt responsible for introducing ascetic practices to her children. In the East, also, hagiography reveals a case of extreme fasting practiced by a child, comparable to religious anorexia. Symeon Stylites the Younger (521–592) was born in Antioch, in a Christian family. His father was a maker of perfumes. His mother would have wished to be a nun but was forced to marry, and she transmitted a taste for the ascetic life to her child. Saint John the Baptist had appeared to her, and had given his orders about how to feed her child. He was

228  Béatrice Caseau never to eat meat, nor drink wine. He was to be breastfed only on the right breast, then, when weaned, he should be fed only with bread, honey, salt, and water.56 With such a diet, the child was fasting every day. He had to be like a pure vessel, not tainted by what the hagiographer considered impure foods. The child developed his own answer to these restrictions. He stopped being interested in food. He could stay a whole day without any food. In fact, a psychoanalytic reading of the Life could detect an anorexic child in conflict with his mother. After the terrible earthquake which separated him from his mother and caused the death of his father in 526, the child became a burden to his mother and decided to leave home (or was sent away). He found his way to the monastic community of a stylite, which was not too keen on taking care of a child. In order to show the community that he would cost very little, he ate hardly anything. The first week, he ate nothing, then he fed himself with dried beans soaked in water only every three days. He would fast for seven days or even ten days in a row. Eventually, Symeon’s diet was so extreme as to annoy the other monks. Even the stylite John was concerned about Symeon’s rejection of food. He considered the avoidance of food unholy and asked the child to feed himself as the other monks did. Symeon argued with the stylite and explained that food does not pollute the body but has an impact on the mind, creating heaviness, and troubling the soul with passions. Demons, he explained, use food to tempt monks. Symeon’s advice to the monks was: never eat to your fill, and avoid wine, which makes one sleepy, and warms the bodily passions. He warned the monks against food, but he did not ask them to abstain from eating, as he himself did. He did not follow the rules of his community or the fasting periods of the Church of Antioch. He wanted to be alone in his extreme fast, which is why he can be classified with other cases of religious anorexia, although such cases are mostly known in women of later centuries. Since childhood, he had gained control over others around him by refusing food. Since childhood, he had dreamed of being free from the necessity to feed himself, and at the end of his life, according to his hagiographer, Symeon only ate food brought by an angel, a sort of white rice, unknown to humans. He had been granted his childhood dream. If Symeon is an extreme case, other saints also started their career by refusing certain foods. Little Sabas, in the first community to welcome him, in Cappadocia, stopped eating apples after a fight with himself: “Once when he was working in the monastery garden, he was seized with a desire to eat an apple that looked, before the appointed season, ripe, and utterly delicious. Inflamed with desire, he plucked the apple from the tree.” He remembered Adam’s story and trampled on the apple with his feet: “from that moment he imposed a rule on himself not to eat apples till the day of his death.”57 Little Hypatios refused to drink wine,58 while little Theodore of Sykeon rejected meat.59 Theodore is 14 when he decides to leave home and reside in the martyrium of Saint George. His mother sends him bread and chicken, but he refuses to eat any meat and gives it to animals or people passing by. His grandmother, understanding his ascetic resolve, only brings him fruits, and salads.60 In both saints’ Lives, the child, who is in fact a teenager by our standards, takes control of his life by deciding on his own diet. One refuses wine,

Resistance and agency in everyday life   229 the other meat, but both are simply choosing their own path. Hypatios refuses to eat and drink like the clerics he has joined, thereby showing his superior mind; Theodore rejects food from home, unless it fits his idea of an ascetic diet. Not all of the children who were given to monastic communities had Symeon or Theodore’s detached attitude toward food. Pachomius had a fig-tree cut down, because the children of the community used to climb the tree to eat figs secretly.61 Children were hungry in these monasteries. Although Pachomius did not want children to fast as much as adult monks, only a few communities had separate lodgings and kitchens for the children. In one of the Pachomian communities, a young child complained that while Pachomius was away, the cook stopped preparing cooked food because the monks abstained from eating it. Pachomius rebuked the cook and the community for forcing children to follow an adult fast.62 Shenoute, another important monastic superior, considered that children should be fed twice a day. 63 In fact, monastic superiors who admitted children inside monasteries adapted the rules to the needs of children. Basil of Caesarea, for example, asks that children living in a monastic community be given a diet adapted to their age. He is, however, very strict on a few points: no eating outside meals, the child should eat properly, and with moderation. If he or she does not follow these rules, he or she will be punished: no food will be served to the culprit, and he or she will have to watch others eat.64 Monks were in charge of teaching discipline to the children who lived with them, and children risked punishment if they did not obey.

Conclusions When studying the agency of children in Late Antiquity, elements of continuity can be detected in the way the periods of childhood were understood, in the expectations of parents as well. Children had to obey their parents, who decided what their future career or marriage would be. From Roman law to Byzantine law, the legal age to get married is quite similar, with puberty marking the threshold. So it seems that one major change brought by Christianity, apart from learning how to read in the Book of Psalms rather than in Homer or Virgil, was the possibility for children to choose religious celibacy rather than marriage. In fact, however, for the vast majority of children, parents decided for their children if they were to be engaged or given to a convent, and obedience was expected from a child on these major life choices. Children could hear the Gospel verses about choosing God before the family, or about Jesus leaving his parents worried because he stayed behind to do his heavenly Father’s work, after their trip to Jerusalem when he was 12. But if they deduced from these verses that they were free to decide what to do with their life, they were certainly rebuked, and reminded that obedience was the first virtue of a child, who remained in that position until emancipation for boys and marriage for girls. Stories such as Isaac accepting his father’s intention to sacrifice him, or that of Christ accepting his Father’s will, were explicit enough on the virtue of obedience for sons. Very few children could claim that a higher power than their earthly father guided their actions and, yet once they had embraced the religious values of their time, some of them managed to impress the world by their indubitable holiness.65

230  Béatrice Caseau Although children were mainly seen as imperfect adults in Antiquity, in the Christian faith, children were better than adults in the eyes of God because they were imagined innocent and free from passions.66 Children were better equipped than adults to enter Paradise. The Gospel of Matthew records these words of Jesus: “Unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the Kingdom of God” (Matthew 18:3). Their simplicity and humility were praised. Children could be the vector of messages from heaven, because they were ignorant, and would not interfere with the message. Their voices carried sweet sounds to God’s ears, and they sang as a group in liturgical choirs. Adults hoped that God would hear favorably prayers transmitted by children. They have fewer sins, and God listens to their prayers and to their voices more than to the voices of sinful adults, explains Gregory Nazianzen.67

Notes

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

Life of Symeon the Fool 26 (ed. Festugière and Rydén 1974: 91, trans. 146–7). Wilkinson 2015: 14–18. Didache 4.9 (ed. Rordorf and Tuilier 1998: 162). John Chrysostom, C. anom. hom. 11 (ed. Malingrey 1994). Horn 2009a: 293–316. John Chrysostom, Inan. glor. 20–2 (ed. Malingrey 2008: 104–8). I follow the extended periodization of Late Antiquity favored in Bowersock, Brown and Grabar 1999: vii–ix. Laes 2011: 278–80. Digesta 23.2; Evans Grubbs 1995: 141; Leo VI, Novellae 109 (Noailles-Dain and Alphonse 1944: 355); Laiou 1992: 16. Codex Theodosianus 2.17. Bakke 2005, 15–20. The Didascalia Apostolorum in Syriac, XII (ed. Võõbus 1979: 143–4; trans. 130–1). Caseau 2009a, 140–56. Jerome, Epist. 107.7. Anthony of Choziba, Miracles of the Most Holy Mother of God at Choziba 5 (ed. House 1988: 366). John Moschus, Spiritual Meadow 196 (PG 87.3081); Duffy 2004. Paul the Silentiary, Ekphrasis on the ambo 112 (ed. Fayant and Chuvin 1997: 138). Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Hist. relig. 20.2 (ed. Canivet and Leroy-Molinghen 1979: 66). Meredith 1998: 89–104: many sermons lasted around 25 minutes; some are much longer texts, up to three hours, but these are written and reworked versions of sermons; Mayer 1998: 105–37: Children were not the only ones to find sermons too long. In the De mutatione nominum hom. 3 (PG 51.131–2), John Chrysostom begins the homily by saying that some have criticized him for habitually taking too long over his preambles. Olivar 1991. Augustine, Serm. 3 in Dolbeau 2009: 315–44. Rilliet-Maillard 1984: 70–1. Roueché 1989: 244–5 and plate XLIV (p. 217). One of the game boards was found on the floor of the civil basilica, others in the odeon or the theater. Game boards were numerous in Late Antique cities: see ibidem, 111–12 and Roueché 2007. Orlandos 1973 with Huntley 2010 and Huntley in present volume. Jolivet-Lévy 2008: 163–78. Chaniotis 2011: 193; Ch. Roueché, written communication April 2015.

Resistance and agency in everyday life   231 27 Canons of the Apostles, can. 53 (Ethiopic version; see Horner 1904: 199). 28 Euchologe Barberini 113 (ed. Parenti and Velkovska 2000: 118). 29 Bakke 2005: 242: Basil of Caesarea was 28, Gregory Nazianzen 30, Augustine 32. See also Horn in this volume, p. 303. 30 Life of Severus of Antioch (ed. Kugener 1907: 11). 31 Life of Symeon Stylite the Younger, 5 (ed. Van den Ven 1962: 7); Life of Severus of Antioch (ed. Kugener 1907: 11). 32 Cramer 1993: 125. 33 Laes 2005. 34 Hübner 2012: 45–67 and 2014: 107. 35 Brown 1981: 106–14; Katajala-Peltomaa 2011: 95–112. 36 Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Saint Sabas 1-2 (ed. Schwartz 1939: 85–8, trans. Price 1991: 94–5). 37 Cyril of Scythopolis, Life of Saint Sabas 8 (ed. Schwartz 1939: 91–2, trans. Price 1991: 100–1). 38 Horn 2009b: 137; Laes and Strubbe 2014: 209–13. 39 Arjava 1998: 147–65. 40 The Life of Irene, abbess of Chrysobalanthon 13 (ed. Rosenqvist 1986: 52–64). 41 Life of Melania the Younger 1 (ed. Gorce 1962: 131); Palladius, Lausiac History 46. 42 Donation of children to monasteries, Papaconstantinou 2002a: 511–26. 43 Caseau 2012: 247–64. 44 Vuolanto 2009. 45 Basil of Caesarea, Reg. fus. tract. 15.4 (PG 31. 956); Caseau 2009b: 21–33. 46 Council of Trullo, can. 40 (ed. Nedungatt and Featherstone 1995: 119–20). 47 Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Hist. relig. 26.4 (ed. Canivet and Leroy-Molinghen 1979: 167). 48 Miller 2003: 268 and 288–9; Kotsifou 2009: 365–71. 49 Caseau 2009: 148–9. 50 Caseau 2015: 3. 51 Harlow and Smith 2001; Täckholm 1961; Smith 2003: 56; Wipszycka 2009: 490. 52 Jerome, Epist. 107. 53 Matthews 2009: 139. 54 Vuolanto 2015: 115. 55 Jerome, Epist. 39; Serrato 1993: 86 and 101. 56 Life of Saint Symeon 3 (ed. Van den Ven 1962: 5). 57 Life of Saint Sabas 3 (ed. Schwartz 1939: 89). 58 Life of Hypatios 2.10 (ed. Bartelink 1971: 80). 59 Life of Theodore of Sykeon 15 (ed. Festugière 1970: 13). 60 Life of Theodore of Sykeon 16 (ed. Festugière 1970: 14). 61 Paralipomènes sur les saints Pachôme et Théodore 28 (trans. Festugière 1982: 89). 62 Paralipomènes sur les saints Pachôme et Théodore 15 (trans. Festugière 1982: 78–9). 63 Layton 2002: 35. 64 Basil of Caesarea, Reg. fus. tract. 15 (PG 31.951–8).  65 Caseau 2009a: 140–56. 66 Kalogeras 2001: 2–19. 67 Gregory Nazianzen, Oratio 16.13 (PG 35.952); Caseau 2005: 15–27.

15 Children in monastic families in Egypt at the end of Antiquity Maria Chiara Giorda

Among the more interesting inhabitants of the monasteries of Byzantine Egypt are, no doubt, the children.1 Children grew up, were educated and became adults within monastic communities. Some were accompanied by their parents, while others were left alone, but – as we will see – the reason for their presence in the monastery is often unclear. For many children, life with the monks offered safety and an improved standard of living, but there are a number of cases which suggest that conditions did not always improve for children, since they were obliged to be workers or slaves of the monks. In this chapter, I will present some studies about the experience of children in the monasteries, focussing on Egypt from the fourth to the mid-eighth centuries, trying to shed light on broader reasons for their presence there; using both literature and documentary texts, I will consider some specific topics, combining hagiographical material and monastic rules and children’s experience in monastic environments in papyri and ostraca.2 First, I will show some cases of children’s presence in monasteries, for a short or long time, for different and not always clear reasons; second, I will focus on rules they were given, because of the opportunities but also the risks that were linked to their presence and finally, I will focus on their activities, the roles they assumed and the tasks they could carry out, first as children and later as adults. The aim is to illustrate the place of children in monastic communities as servants, disciples, and sons (biological and spiritual) of the monastic families.

The monastery as a refuge: children and their new family It is not always clear why children arrived and lived in monasteries. A variety of reasons could account for their presence. First of all, there are the cases of shorter stays in monasteries and visits to ascetics, which sometimes lead to familiarity with the monastic lifestyle. In these cases, children’s first impact with monks is often linked to a healing that had been received, or to a prayer of blessing.3 Others seek spiritual comfort or a speedy recovery from illness. At the beginning of monastic experience in Egypt at the end of the fourth century, in the apophthegms – the collection of the saying of monks dated to the fifth century – we read of children who were brought by their parents because of an illness and were healed by the monks:

Children in monastic families in Egypt   233 Many old men came to see Abba Poemen and one day it happened that a member of Abba Poemen’s family came, who had a child whose face, through the power of the devil, was turned backwards. The father seeing the number of Fathers present, took the child and sat down outside the monastery, weeping. Now, it happened that one of the old men came out and saw him, asked him, ‘Why are you weeping?’ He replied: ‘Ι am related to Abba Poemen, and see the misfortune which has overtaken my child. Though I want to bring him to the old man, we are afraid he does not want to see us. Each time he hears I am here, he has me driven away. But since you are with him, I have dared to come. If you will, Father, have pity on me, take the child inside and pray for him’. So the old man took the child, went inside and behaved with good sense. He did not immediately present him to Abba Poemen, but began with the lesser brethren, and said, ‘Make the sign of the cross over this little child’. Having had him signed by all in turn, he presented him at last to Abba Poemen. Abba Poemen did not want to make the sign of the cross over him, but the others urged him, saying, ‘Do as everyone else has done’. So groaning, he stood up and prayed, saying, ‘God, heal your creature, that he be not attacked by the enemy’. When he had signed him, the child was healed immediately and given back whole to his father.4 In the case of a longer or permanent presence, different reasons are cited for the arrival of children in the monasteries. Some children in monasteries simply followed their parents or family in the choice of a monastic life. There is a significant story about a father who entered a monastery with his son (the only living son among the three he had had). He was told by the abbot to throw his son into the fire, in order to demonstrate his capacity to renounce every relationship: besides the exegetical spiritual implications (the sacrifice of Abraham/Isaac and the monastic renunciation) of this history, his survival means that a new child is now living in the monastery, and the story highlights the possibility that children followed their parents in the new monastic life.5 A different example of the ways in which children end up in the monasteries is the case of a child with his mother who was a nun. Theodora was a ‘woman of the desert’ to whom ten apophthegmata are attributed and whose biography is among the ascetical texts conserved in the Everghetinòs, the classic modern collections of Orthodox spiritual writings.6 Whether the narrative is a true or invented history, it is clear that this narration has been, and still is, a model of female monastic life. Theodora’s narrative is arguably composed of both real and imaginary elements. However, the story, as transmitted, is very interesting. After having abandoned her husband, Theodora decided to ‘transform’ herself into a man in order not to be followed. Wearing a monk’s habit, she became Theodoros in a monastery in Oktokedekaton, near Alexandria. We are told that (s)he lived a life of sacrifice, hard work and prayers until the day (s)he was accused of being the father of an infant abandoned in front of her/his cell.7 Obliged to leave the monastery with the baby, (s)he lived in the desert for years, eating herbs and feeding the child with sheep milk, all the while being the victim of demons’ attacks and temptations. Seven

234  Maria Chiara Giorda years later, she and the child were able to re-enter the monastery, at which point numerous miracles and prodigies occurred. When Theodora/os died two years after his/her return, the abbot of the monastery had a vision of a beautiful woman escorted by a group of angels, apostles, prophets, saints and martyrs. The monks, summoned by screaming children in the monastery, ran towards the dead body and discovered that she was really a woman, as had already been revealed to the abbot. Although the young boy is a secondary element, the story is interesting because it reveals the presence of a child, whose arrival in the monastery is obscure in the text. The story also gives information about the possibility of sexual relationships between monks and nuns: the child found outside the monastery could be even Theodora’s real son or, more probably, was abandoned by a local girl. In either case, he grew up in a monastic context, sharing the life style of a monk/nun. The outcome is the same: children did live in monasteries, and they were fed and brought up by monks. Moreover, in some cases, they were born there. These two cases illustrate the possibility that the presence of children in monastic communities was the direct consequence of a parent’s choice, but in other cases, children appear to have deliberately broken away from their families: some young boys and girls decided to become ascetics, virgins or monks even against the wishes of their parents. In such instances there is a physical break, as the abandonment of the family-home is imposed on adults by young people. Unfortunately, only hagiographical sources signal autonomy from dynamics of the traditional family and broader social expectations: it is not clear if these individuals made positive choices for themselves, as a way of behaviour in real life, or if we are in the presence of a rhetorical strategy.8 Observing the presence of children over a long period of time, and in different monastic contexts, it is clear that children likewise lived among monks in the centuries that followed. A rich and very interesting dossier is that attributed to a monk named Frange (seventh century), who lived in a Theban tomb.9 In this collection of texts, Frange talks about women with children, and young people. Often there are references to relationships between adults and youths or children, although it is not always clear whether they are related by blood or only spiritually.10 This is the case of a ‘mother’ and her (spiritual or blood-related) children, to whom Frange writes. The monk likewise, describes his relationships with children in terms of protection, spiritual guidance and teaching. With better documentation, some sources describe how the absence of a strong family group, difficult social or economic circumstances, and physical or mental illness could all be responsible for the arrival of a child as a welcome or unwelcome guest. The abandonment of newborn infants – and trade of older children – although opposed by the Church and forbidden by both ecclesiastical and imperial law, persisted throughout the Late Antique period, and it has often been argued that in Late Roman Egypt, monasteries provided a means of circulation of children, an alternative to abortion, infanticide and exposure.11 In some cases, children who entered a monastery did so as the human property of other members of the community, because they were donated in order to work for the monastery.12 Once they became adults, they were not free and became subject to other forms of authority.13

Children in monastic families in Egypt   235 Some children were given to the monastery by their parents in order to solve difficult situations – as we read in a number of Lives of Coptic monks. There were likewise a number of different circumstances under which children were donated to Egyptian monasteries. Thanks to the studies dedicated to this topic by Arietta Papaconstantinou, we have rich data about this issue. For example, in both the Life of Matthew the Poor and the Life of Moses the Archimandrite,14 a child is offered or promised to a monastery, and the value of his life corresponds to a specific amount of money. The Life of Matthew the Poor, a Coptic biography of the fifth century, relates that a woman knelt down in front of apa Matthew, begging him: My holy Father, remember me in your prayers so that God may give me a son; if the Lord accepts to be moved by me, I shall bring the fruit he will give me, after I have weaned him, and donate him to your holiness; if it is a boy, I shall donate him to the monastery under your holiness, if it is a girl I shall donate her to the convent of the virgins, so that she may become a nun. So, whatever the Lord may give me thanks to your holy prayers will be a promise to the Lord for every day of its life. The agreement with God went unfulfilled, because the child’s father called a slave merchant who offered ten gold coins for his son. The father offered twelve to apa Matthew instead of his son, but Matthew did not want to negotiate and, after three days of sickness, the child died. Here, the economic aspect of the family/monastic relationship must be underlined: the child is represented by money, he has a value. We also have the case of a child adopted by a monk, Aurelius Silvanus, who will become the heir of his property; although the document does not provide any details about living arrangements nor where it took place, it is very interesting, since the child, Paesis, is to be fed, clothed and educated in a decent way in the monastery.15 Highlighting a practice of donation that continued for centuries, a group of 26 Coptic documents published by Walter Crum attest similar transactions, which date back to the eighth century;16 these contracts are mostly written by fathers (six by both parents, four by widowed mothers) and are addressed to administrators of the Phoibammon monastery. The texts are similar both in style and in content: the father writes the document to the dikaion of the monastery. He testifies to the irrevocable act of donation of this child who, after an illness, is offered to the monastery. The child will be a servant of the monastery, the place where he will be cured. In the future, if he is no longer a servant of the monastery, he will have to donate everything he earns to the monastery, in compliance with what shall be agreed upon with the superior.17 This legal document is signed, sealing the pact between the family, the pater familias and the monastery. While differing with respect to gender, chronological reference and monastic context, each of the texts published by Crum follows a similar model in style and content.18 These cases of children entering the monasteries demonstrate how monasteries were able to assist families (and their children) to overcome religious, economic and social difficulties at a given point in time. Children (both orphans and non-

236  Maria Chiara Giorda orphans) were accepted in monasteries; for some of them, the education they received in monasteries was high-level and gave them the chance of a better life as adults; not all of them were educated to become monks, but we must always pay attention to the difference between entering a monastery and the choice – officialized through a ceremony – of becoming a monk; others were in monasteries to work.19 Sometimes, but not always, two or three of these functions (education/ training for becoming ascetic/apprenticeship and or working) were combined.

Accepting children in monasteries: habits and rules Children in monasteries were both an opportunity and a risk. Although by accepting children, the monastery was performing an act of charity and benevolence, there were other reasons for monasteries to do so, such as increasing the number of persons in the community. Accepting children into the monastery was an act of social and institutional reproduction as well as of charity. Greater manpower might increase the economic power of the monastery. In turn, some parents made financial or other types of donations when they pledged their child to the institution.20 The monastic community had a great responsibility in deciding on the future of such children, who were reshaped by their new family. Monks became ‘parents’ to the children,21 who were socialized into a new identity: they were raised in the monastic way of life and in turn gave their lives to the monastery.22 So, both the family and the monastery benefited from these arrangements: the family, because their child had an increased chance of survival, and the household had one less mouth to feed; the monastery, because they received a new member of the community, and the potential contributions of this individual, whether as a servant or a student, or both. As a result, it is arguable that children helped build the monastic community, in an exchange characterized by physical and spiritual health for both parties. Nevertheless, risks and troubles were an everyday occupation for communities, as we see from the references and the traces of preventive regulations we find in primis in the normative texts. The Pachomian corpus of rules prescribes that novices must renounce their parents23 before being taught the precepts of religious life by other monks. This corpus likewise suggests provision of primary instruction for those who cannot read and write even if we must pay attention because the ignorance, the infancy, the cultural and spiritual illiteracy are not necessarily linked to a child, in sense of a minor. This means that very young novices were able to enter the monasteries, where they receive an education;24 moreover feeding, raising and taking care of children in monasteries was considered a sacred task.25 The most detailed corpus in which the presence of children is regulated is a non-Egyptian source which I will quote because it allows us to observe the evolution of the monastic discipline about infancy and its influence throughout the history of monasticism, not only in the East but also in the West; the ideas of Basil of Caesarea were extremely influental for the later Byzantine ecclesiastical culture.26 According to Basil, the monks were responsible for judging the attitude of those who entered monastic life even when they were extremely young. While

Children in monastic families in Egypt   237 all the orphans who showed up at the monastery were to be accepted, those that still had parents (if they were accompanied to the monastery by them) had to be accepted in the presence of a number of witnesses.27 A second rule refers to a biblical passages (Eph 6:4; Matt 19:14) in commending the presence of teachers among the monks to educate children.28 Basil likewise affirms that divine providence allows that the ‘worst’ can be educated thanks to obedience; according to this wise and mysterious providence, bad children are condemned to serve the wiser and better ones. Accordingly, children live among monks with different duties and different rules.29 In general, in the various monastic rules, age limitations help to determine when one could choose to become a monk.30 Basil insists that only those who decide intentionally to wear the monastic habit can be admitted into the monastery: these individuals must be responsible for their choices and free from any constrictions. The same rule is valid for both males and females: girls should not choose the monastic life before reaching the ‘age of reason’ and becoming responsible for their own decisions (Basil explicitly puts this at 16 or 17 years old).31 It is possible that the focus on age was intended to avoid the violent imposition of the ascetic life on children who were too young to make an informed decision for themselves. Younger people were perhaps likewise more open to outside influence through psychological and physical pressure.32 If the biological age for entering the monastery was not always clearly defined in practice, further confusion was caused by the distinction between physical and spiritual age.33 In particular, we should note the very monastic category of paidaiogeron34 here. Zachary, who appears in the apophthegmata patrum, is one such child. Thanks to his obedience and innocence, he was able to surpass his father, Carion, in humility and silence. We are told that Zachary escaped, along with his father, from Scetis to Thebaid and then back from Thebaid to Scetis. Here, the child, of his own accord, entered a nitre pond from which he emerged disfigured.35 Zachary’s story is a story full of hard choices, a story of a difficult flight from the world, with a very violent conclusion. After his body is physically transformed, Zachary lived in the desert for about 50 years with other famous elderly monks. We are told that he was imbued with the richness of the Spirit, and exemplary obedience and innocence. As he is called a paidaiogeron,36 the desert categories of ‘young’ and ‘elder’ do not correspond to one’s actual age, since a gerōn or abba is not the person who is older, but rather he who has acquired the greatest experience and has progressed the farthest in the ascetic life. It is impossible to determine how much pressure was placed on such children, although we can imagine that the mixture of a powerful spiritual model and traditional parental authority would have strongly affected the thought processes of a young boy. In such cases, the father’s choice influenced the son even if, not long afterwards, the son became a true ‘desert-father’, acting as a model for his natural father. For all these reasons, we must pay close attention when we find a reference to infancy and youth in monasticism. What were the risks of the presence of these children in monasteries? It is important to take promiscuity and sexual temptation into account in considering

238  Maria Chiara Giorda the problems which arose from living together with children: we read in apophthegmata that four monasteries in Scetis became deserted because of children.37 In male – and female – ascetic communities in which adults and children (with no necessary biological bonds) were thrown together in conditions of semiisolation, sexual relations could take place, even if such actions were far from what Christian ethics deemed normal and acceptable.38 Monastic literature places particular – and often negative – emphasis on sexuality and sexual temptation; but although not many details are given, sexual activity and even pederasty appear to have been a possibility in monastic life.39 In other words, although monastic ethics imply strict attitudes towards sex and abstention, it appears that transgression of these rules was not uncommon, and that children could thus be exposed to sexual abuse. Shenoute explicitly condemns female homoerotic relationships and prescribes punishment for women who have established inappropriate relationships with other female nuns. His canons likewise include detailed regulations regarding sex, which explicitly prohibit certain forms of contact with young monks in order to preserve their chastity.40 These include very specific prohibitions against kissing and touching children as well as unsupervised activity with children (such as anointing or bathing them). Children are likewise forbidden to engage in potentially erotic activities with each other. However, such activities – shaving or pulling a thorn out of another boy’s foot, bathing or anointing another youth – are described without reference to the passions.41 What, however, are we to say of the relationship between teacher and disciple, often studied in terms of ‘spiritual direction’, which is often represented by the image of one monk on the shoulder of another?42 Another problem posed by the presence of children in the monastery was the risk of interrupting and disturbing the concentration and silence of the monks.43 A text from the monastic community in Naqlun44 (fifth–sixth century) contains prohibitions against interacting with both children and adolescents: monks cannot speak with a boy (puer and iuvenis), and the possibility of turning familiarity and friendship into homoeroticism is a point of legislation: Do not speak with a iuvenis nor with a puer and do not spend time with him, do not take him with you in order to turn him into a monk, nor take him in as a (spiritual) son before he takes the schema (habit), to avoid becoming the devil.45 Although there is a possibility of confusion between a spiritual and a physical meaning, in the Pachomian corpus, young monks or novices are often called ‘little ones’, a linguistic signal that distinguishes them from ‘older’ monks.46 Because these children live inside the monastery, this could also cause troubles. One text condemns anyone who justifies touching a boy by claiming he is only trying to determine whether the child has come of age.47 Nonetheless, it is clear from Pachomius’ biographies that Theodoret and his brother entered the monastic community at a tender age.48 Despite the prohibitions, there were certainly some children in the monastery. For example, number seven of the Praecepta et Iudicia stipulates:

Children in monastic families in Egypt   239 If a brother is found laughing or happily playing with children (pueri)49 and entertaining friendships with the youths (aetatis infirmae), he will be warned three times to refrain from this sort of familiarity and be reminded of the love and fear of God. If he does not cease this practice, may he be corrected as he deserves by means of severe punishment.50 Elsewhere among these rules, we find references to children murmuring, joking and making noises that disturb the older monks: If there are boys (pueri) in a house given to games and idleness and they would not amend when rebuked, the housemaster shall admonish and rebuke them during 30 days. If he sees them persisting in their depravity without informing the father and they are caught in some sin, he shall himself be punished in their stead according to the sin that has been discovered.51 Likewise, the rules suggest that if children did not obey, they could be corrected by means of severe corporal punishment. For both children and adults, transgression of the strict norms about silence and calm could result in corporal punishment.52 While it is possible to read the fragments of Shenoute’s canons as particularly harsh, this system of discipline was probably widespread in Egypt, thanks to the successful diffusion of Pachomian and Shenutian rules. Beatings and tears signal the violence that male and female ascetics may have been subjected to in monasteries. Such terminology may not only have a sociological meaning in terms of building a community; it also has a theological connation relative to the aim of disciplining and castigating the body of the monk or nun.53 Reconciling prohibitions with the ongoing presence of children in monasteries involves a series of questions. The prohibition may be due to the immaturity of a child, considered too impressionable or as ill prepared to choose a monastic life. In turn, the physical immaturity of children meant that some were not ready for the physical challenges of an ascetic life. Monastic rules demonstrate that there was an irreducible tension between the troubles caused by children, the risks linked to their presence, and the opportunities their presence afforded.

Children in monasteries: being children, becoming adults Children’s arrival in monasteries often meant the interruption of their relationship with parents, as they broke with their families; entering a monastery was often connected to negative and violent changes to their lives and the lives of their families. But once in the new family, they had a new life and a new relationship. In this third part, I concentrate on the activities and the aims of the children who were present in monasteries: they were there for education, for work or with the goal of leading the ascetic life, with various possibilities of combining these aims. It is clear that monasteries functioned as educational facilities54 where children learned to read and write. Their education was based not only on the scriptures, but also on classical learning. In the monastery, children received food and shelter,

240  Maria Chiara Giorda were raised by the monks, instructed to read and write, and educated not only in religious but also in classical literature.55 The learning process that they experienced was similar to that which took place in ‘secular’ schools. In turn, the processes of education played a pivotal role in the reproduction of the monastic order.56 Learning was necessary both for participating in the monastic community and for integrating individual and community identities. In the monastery of Epiphanius, several letters contain salutations addressed to children.57 Other documents refer to children living in the monastery, one of whom is depicted learning the scriptures.58 A ‘children’s cell’ seems to appear in the inscriptions from the apa Jeremiah monastery in Saqqara, but the inscription is very corrupted. This monastic re-use of the ancient necropolis of Memphis included a space intended for children, which can be dated to the mid-seventh century (numbers 314 and 315).59 Such evidence suggests that once children were within the monastic setting, resident monks were responsible for managing their education. A final question that needs to be addressed concerns the kind of adults children would become after growing up in a monastery. As teenagers, children had already begun to learn occupations and to undertake tasks that were essential to everyday monastic life. Caroline Schroeder suggests that aside from the well-defined educational programme laid down for the monasteries founded by Pachomius and his followers,60 children appear to have had few clearly-delineated responsibilities in Egyptian monasteries. To some degree, this leaves children’s everyday lives in monasteries shrouded in mystery. Although Egyptian monastic writers and leaders were interested in welcoming children into their institutions, entry into the monastery did not automatically result in full acceptance into the monastic community.61 This meant that when they became adults, children who had been raised and educated in the monastery could remain in a secular state.62 In some cases, they did not become monks because of their unsuitability as candidates (due to illness, disability or having received diabolical visions).63 However, it is also important to take into consideration the complexity of monastic life. This includes parent–monk and parent–child relationships, and the social, religious and economic life of the monastery. In this regard, whatever their occupation, children continued to belong to the monastery, as confirmed by sources included in the group of eighth-century papyri (734–785) that document donations: ‘No one else may be the child’s lord, outside the monastery, for all the days of his life’.64 This suggests that these children were servants or slaves of the monastery, and we find exactly these expressions in several papyri.65 Since children were donated to the monastery for perpetual servitude, their subservience gave66 the monastery authority over them. This is expressed in terms which derive directly from the semantic range of the teacher–disciple and lord–servant or slave relationship. All these terms (hupotagenomé, exousia, despoteia) refer to authority relationships.67 The children offer the services of their bodies to the monastery. In return, the monastery becomes both teacher and supervisor of the work that they perform with their hands. In the documents surveyed above, the parents are not selling their children in exchange for money,

Children in monastic families in Egypt   241 but rather in exchange for a favour granted by God (healing, for example).68 The monastery is responsible for the children’s nutrition and care, and for ensuring that they have adequate clothing.69 However, once they have learned to perform certain duties, the children are assigned responsibility for jobs: taking water from the wells; maintaining the altar lamps; giving bread to pilgrims; cleaning the monastery cells; and taking the animals out to pasture.70 Each of these tasks needed to be done to ensure that the monastery functioned efficiently.71 To some degree, therefore, the children’s status was that of servants. In fact, one could argue that donated children were the servants of the monastery in the same way as the ‘ancient slaves’.72 Many contracts emphasize the monastery’s ownership of the child’s body, a defining element of the slave condition. In turn, if someone wanted to take the child out of the monastery, he had to pay a price in gold. Some sources designate a price of 30 to 36 pieces, which takes into account the fact that the child was meant to belong to the monastery for his (or her) entire life,73 creating and maintaining a relationship of dependence between children and monasteries. Finally, some children, having grown up, choose to live and work outside the monastery, get married and have children of their own.74 As adults, these children were required to pay the monastery a tax, the demosion.75 Others, who lived in and offered service to monasteries for a period of time, might not only include children who were raised in the monasteries, but also adults who became servants of the monastery at an older age – often after they had received a favour or benefited from a miracle. Documentary texts suggest that even in the Phoibammon monastery, adults performed roles as servants of the monastery. For example, in one text a man defines himself as ‘yours’ in reference to the monks and three other men, one of whom was considered an asset of the monastery.76 Apart from this, lay people, both children and adults, also lived in the monasteries and were employed in various roles. Here, an interesting category is that of the pistoi, the ‘faithful men’ living in a monastery (normally adults) who represent one possible adult life for children in monasteries. In certain cases, this group includes novices,77 but in others, it appears to refer only to adults living in the monasteries, even though they were not monks: this suggests that some of them had grown up as children in the monastery.78 For example, the Life of Samuel of Kalamoun (Naqlun) reports that during the seventh century there were about 120 monks and 200 pistoi.79 As Ewa Wipszycka suggests,80 the expression pistoi appears to refer to lay people living permanently in a monastery, or living outside of it but offering their service to the monastic community: they could be employees, artisans or servants working in the monastery and, without any doubt, they were useful.

Conclusion Children, filii or famuli, were part of the social and economic system as a matter of exchange between different families. The relationships between monasteries and members of families were maintained and preserved, and monks (and nuns) had an economic and also emotional attachment to families, and vice versa.81

242  Maria Chiara Giorda Furthermore, the economic model of the family was adopted in the monasteries – the new oikoi – re-elaborating and transforming the logic of life in the biological family in such a way that the continuity was greater than the differences. From this perspective, in both biological and monastic families the relationship between children and parents (natural or spiritual) was pivotal.82 In the end, the tension between the positive and negative aspects of children’s presence in the monasteries cannot be resolved. Since children brought needs, risks and opportunities with them, they represented a particular occasion for monks and families to institute and maintain a complex relationship. They arrived in monasteries for different reasons, whether brought by their parents, following their parents or because they were orphans, and they remained there, getting an education, learning and doing a job, being formed in the ascetic way of life. The variety of possible reasons for entering and of the styles (not only monastic) of living in a monastery offers an important perspective from which to reflect on the history of children in the course of the history of monasticism. The question of children in monastic communities presents a rich field for further investigation, analysis and exploration, giving us an opportunity to understand how cultural, social, economic and political aspects determined the everyday life of a monastery, and intertwined with its spiritual aspects. Such an investigation has a strategic potential to lead to a radical re-interpretation of the internal and external history of monasticism during its first centuries. The Egyptian monastic family of Late Antiquity led an autonomous and collective life that in many ways conformed to patterns of family life elsewhere in Egypt. Yet, there was one situation in which it was not self-sufficient: the ability to maintain and regenerate itself over time. This problem was solved, at least partially, by absorbing children. As children grew up, they became helpers and servants in the monastery and contributed both to the growth in numbers of monks and nuns within the community, and also to the economic life of the monastery through their work. Monasteries, in turn, helped children to survive extreme situations: abandonment, kidnapping, illness and poor or socially dysfunctional families. They also provided families and their children with the opportunity to attain salvation through monastic intercessions, prayers and liturgies. The monastery, as an authority-figure/pater familias and owner of its children or servants, took away their freedom but also guaranteed them their safety. In other words, there was one less child for the biological family to worry about and one more servant for the monastic family to make use of. This intertwined network of relationships ultimately reshaped the logic of reciprocity into an enduring legacy, effectively fuelled by offerings and exchanges.

Notes 1 For earlier studies on children in Egyptian monasteries, see Schroeder 2009a and b; Giorda 2012; Papaconstantinou 2012a and b; Pudsey 2015. See Moffatt 1986; Talbot 1990; Caseau 2009b and 2012; Vuolanto 2015a and Cojocaru in this volume on children, asceticism and monasticism in Late Antiquity and in the early Byzantine world. 2 See Pudsey 2015: 215–16.

Children in monastic families in Egypt   243 3 For an example, see the childhood of Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who frequently visited holy men, hermits and monks, alone or with his parents (see Vuolanto 2012: 55). 4 AP/G Poemen 7; see also AP/G Sisoes 18. Translation from Greek to English by the author. For citations from the Apophthegmata Patrum, I use the following abbreviations: Alphabetical Series: AP/G (Guy 1993–2005); Anonymous Series: AP/N (Nau 1907– 1913). 5 AP/N 295. 6 The collection was compiled in the eighteenth century by Hieromonk Paul and Macarios of Corinth with Nicodemos the Hagiorite, including material from hagiographies and menologia. See Mortari 1990: 224–5. The first complete translation has appeared recently in 14 volumes (The Evergetinos 1988–2008). See also Papaconstantinou 2004. 7 With regard to the birth of children in monasteries, unfortunately we have only accusations against monks which turn out to be false, or stories of children who were abandoned and may have been the children of a monk or nun. There are no stories of laywomen giving birth in a monastery. 8 Vuolanto 2009, 259–69. See also Pudsey 2015: 225–6. 9 Wipzsycka 2011, 185–7. 10 Ostracon number F 36 (following Boud’hors and Heurtel 2010). The ostraca F 167– 171 discuss a dispute which is very interesting because it is doubtful if they are speaking of children ‘belonging’ to Frange: the editors cannot say if he is the spiritual or the biological father, if he is looking after them, or indeed what kind of relationship they have: Boud’hors and Heurtel 2010: vol. I, 167. 11 Evans Grubbs 2013; Pudsey 2015: 218. For the selling of children, see Vuolanto 2003. 12 See below for the analysis of P.KRU 78–103. On servitude/slavery in ancient monasticism, see Glancy 2002. See Papaconstantinou 2008: 171–84; 2002a and b. See also Kotsifou 2009, 339–40. 13 See Leyser 2000. 14 Vie de Matthieu, 720; Vie de Moïse, 682–3 (both in Amélineau 1895). 15 See P. Lips. I 28 (381 ce), discussed by Schroeder 2009a: 321–2. 16 P. KRU 78–103 (734–785 ce), with Biedenkopf-Zienher 2001; Papaconstantinou 2002a and b: 83–105; Richter 2002; Schaten 1996. In the case of Egypt, it is interesting to note the links between this practice of donation to the monasteries and the hierodule services: it is the equivalent in Christian terms of the Egyptian hierodule services during the Ptolemaic and Roman periods for those who donated themselves to their gods and temples. This has been proposed by Thissen 1986, quoted by Richter 2005: 248–9. 17 Pudsey 2015: 221. 18 See Biedenkopf-Zienher 2001 and the above-mentioned articles by Richter, on how the texts proceed according to the style of purchase or sale documents: Richter 2002: 240 and 243, n. 18. 19 See also: Kotsifou 2009: 352; Larsen 2008; Larsen 2013. Pudsey 2015: 222 and 229 focusing on the monastery of Epiphanius. In a later source (tenth century) we read of an eight-year period (Synaxarium, PO III 431) or of an informal path whose length might have varied according to the candidates (Synaxarium, PO III 284; III 443; XI, 684). 20 Peters 2003: 293–5. For a summary of the various economic, social and religious explanations, see Papaconstantinou 2002a: 516–21. I believe that the economic factors at work here should not be limited only to the donations of the eighth century, but also to earlier and later periods. No doubt, the particularly harsh period under Arab domain played a major role, but I do not believe that we should attribute the increase of abandonments/donations to monasteries to the relative tightening of the fiscal situation. 21 Vuolanto 2015a: 69–79. 22 Shared practice, knowledge and experience, interactions between leaders and followers and relationships between individual and communal identities are the core of the constructions of communities of practice: Wenger 1998.

244  Maria Chiara Giorda 23 Praeceptum 49: this fracture with the family is a ‘topos’ we read in different praecepta: monks must be ready to avoid contacts with their families (Praeceptum 47, 53, 55, 56, 57, 113, 143). For the corpus attributed to Pachomius, see Boon 1932. 24 Praeceptum 139. 25 Schroeder 2009: 322–3. 26 De Vogüé 1985. 27 Basil, Reg. fus. tract. 15.1. 28 Basil, Reg. brev. tract. 292. 29 Basil, De spiritu sancto 20.51. 30 Age restrictions for monastic life were not the same for all monasteries: Canon 40 of the Trullo council (691) forbids children under10 to take vows; these differences obviously reflect different positions with regard to the presence of children in the monasteries: Greenfield 2009: 258. 31 Basilius, epist. 199, can. 18. Besides Basil, see the position of Augustine (epist. 262.8) and Leo the Great (epist. 167. 14–15). 32 On this: Bromley and Melton 2002; Kelemen and Rosset 2001. Kelemen and Rottman 2012. 33 Pudsey 2015: 225; 228. 34 Gnilka 1972. 35 AP/G Carion 2. 36 The puer-senex topos is very common in monastic literature (the scriptural basis is Luke 2:39.52): see Caseau 2009a. 37 See also the proverb attributed to Isaac of Celle: AP/G Isaac Cellules, 5 concerning the ruin of Scetis caused by the children. Macarius talks about the presence of children as a reason to take one’s cloak and run away, since they bring desolation and temptation: AP/G Macarios 5; see also AP/G Johannes Kolobos 4. 38 See Vita Antonii 74.3 for the disputation with Greek philosophers about the sexual abuse of children. For a good approach to the use and the development of paidophthoria during the first Christian centuries, see Martens 2009: 227–54. Also Rousseau 1972: 135–44 about potential sexual temptations caused by children in monastic communities. 39 Laes 2009a. 40 Schroeder 2007: 68–81. 41 Schroeder 2009b: 333–47, in particular 341. See also Krawiec 2002 and Layton 2007. 42 See e.g. AP/G Isaac Cellules 2. Giorda 2006. On minors living in the monasteries affiliated with Shenoute and Pachomius, see Crislip 2005: 134–5. On the ambiguity of physical contact with children, see Chapter 5 by Christian Laes in this volume. 43 In monastic literature, even demons can take on the looks of children to tempt the monks, disturbing their tranquillity. Children disturbing the monks’ peace: see e.g. AP/N 338. Greenfield 2009: 260–1. Parents’ desire to exploit their children’s monastic choice must also have served to deter monasteries from accepting children: Greenfield 2009: 269–71. 44 For critical edition see Breydy 1996: 395–403. 45 Breydy 1996: 395–403, rule 4. 46 Regulae 33. 47 Schroeder 2009a: 324 and Schroeder 2009b: 341, citing Shenoute, Letter 1, Canon 1, XC 7-8, an unpublished manuscript (Vienna K 9101R/V). 48 Shenoute too was destined since childhood to become a monk: the motif of a monastic holiness recognised since the most tender age returns several times in monastic hagiographical literature. 49 It is useful here to quote the Latin version of Jerome, in order to reflect on the possible diffusion of words/concepts and their transfer in different contexts: the child is puer; the youths are those of an immature age (aetas infirma). Accordingly, the term is puer, which is used twice in the Benedictine Rule (rules 30 and 37), corresponding to the

Children in monastic families in Egypt   245

50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58

59

60 61 62

63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Greek pais. In Pachomian rules we also find the word rudis to indicate novices who enter the monastery: Praeceptum 1.49. It is not clear if this refers to age or (only) to the lack of experience, a kind of (monastic) illiteracy. Praecepta atque Iudicia 7. Praecepta atque Iudicia 13. See also, e.g. Praecepta et Instituta 18: He shall not be overcome by the words of a child. Giorda 2009: 95–113. See Schroeder 2007: 17–18. Cf. the expression ‘iuniorum schola’ in John Cassian, Conlationes 17.16. On this topic, see Cribiore 1996; Cribiore 2001; Larsen 2008; Larsen 2013. See also the critical discussion by Bucking 2007 and Bucking 2011. There is an ongoing debate about whether there were structured schools in monasteries, but many sources refer to a master/adult – disciple/child/youth system and the presence of children in the monasteries receiving a kind of training cannot be called into question: see Larsen forthcoming on the ‘pedagogical resonance’ and the educational practice of monasteries. I refer here to the French sociologist Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu 1996. See Larsen 2008. On the monastery of Epiphanius, see Pudsey 2015: 226–32. P. Mon. Epiph. 318, 337, 448, 477. P. Mon. Epiph. 140 for the child who is educated by means of the holy texts, following the instructions of a monk. Other examples of children can be found in P. Mon. Epiph. 179; 209; 326; 546; in P. Mon. Epiph. 697, there is a (spiritual?) son of a man who also has another son. Thompson 1912. For the inscriptions, which come from cell 1717, see Excavations at Saqqara, 1908–9, 1909–10: 97–8 for the texts, and p. 24 for the description of the room. See also the references to other texts with similar phrases at Excavations at Saqqara 1907–1908: 43, n. 1. Schroeder 2009a: 317–38, in particular 330 and 338. Vuolanto 2009: 257, referring in particular to Western monasticism (i.e. children in the monastery of Lérins). The parent-monastery conflict concerning the destiny of a child donated or sent to a monastery for education remains in the forefront: whether he became a monk or not, the monastery claimed rights of property on that child. For a perspective on the conflict among the parties involved, see Papaconstantinou 2008. Novella 3.41 of Justinian states that no one can remove a son from the monastery where the latter has chosen the monastic life. Richter 2005: 260–1. P. KRU 81.26. P. KRU 98.7; 82.16; 97.19; 81.27. Papaconstantinou 2002b: 92–3. We can also refer to the analogy between slave and child: Golden 1985: 91–104. P. KRU 78.34; 82.20; 92.14; 93.14. P. KRU 78.25; 79.59; 91.27; 97.20; 78.26. See Papaconstantinou 2002b: 92–102 concerning the status of children as oblates. P. KRU 87; 90; 103. See Richter 2005: 244, footnote 21, where he lists the tasks assigned to the children (P.KRU 93.32–34; 92.14; 79.47; 80.38). P. KRU 80.39; 95.18; 101.7; 87.19. P. KRU 98.7. Codex Iustinianii 7.7.1. For prices in this period see Morrisson and Cheynet 2002: 847. P. KRU 89.42; 96.79. P. KRU 81.21; 92.19; 99.13. See also Richter 2005: 245, n. 23 and 24. Concerning the demosion, see n. 48 and 49 to chapter III.

246  Maria Chiara Giorda 76 See: O. Brit. Mus. Copt. 35 and 21 (eighth century). The presence of laypersons is well attested for this monastery: see text 77 (BP 12497). The term also recurs in epist. 84.15, the only other example in all the texts from Thebes. 77 P. KRU 65 and 75: pistos is used in the will of Jacob, in reference to Victor his disciple at the monastery of Phoibammon, and in another will referring to Elias, to whom the direction of the laura is entrusted, together with the monk Jacob. 78 See the inscription in the Phoibammon monastery which mentions a pistos: Winlock and Crum 1926: 9. 79 Vita Samuelis 9 (Alcock 1983). 80 The most complete study of monastic pistoi to date is Wipszycka 2009: 381–3. 81 See also Kotsifou 2009: 372–3. 82 Vuolanto 2015: 215–20.

16 Everyday lives of children in ninth-century Byzantine monasteries Oana Maria Cojocaru

Introduction The presence of children in monastic settings is well attested in the medieval monasteries of the Byzantine Empire. Information about the monastic children has come down to us especially from the hagiographical texts. Some of these biographies tell of parents who pledged their offspring to monasteries as a sign of gratitude for their birth or survival in early childhood. Other accounts record cases of children who joined a monastic community together with the entire family; others were entrusted to specific monasteries or convents in which a family member, most often an uncle or an aunt, already lived. Finally, orphaned or abandoned children were sheltered in monasteries or convents where they were brought up and educated. The amount of information provided by the Byzantine sources has been employed in various studies dealing with children in a late antique and medieval monastic context.1 Especially in the past two decades, scholars have focused on children in Byzantine monasteries. Among these, Nikos Kalogeras should be specifically mentioned; his study of childhood education gives us glimpses of the children’s educational programme in the schools attached to monasteries.2 Monastic education has also been touched upon by Timothy Miller, whose study provides significant insights into the role played by the monasteries in the upbringing of orphaned children.3 Another important contribution is Richard Greenfield’s examination of monastic leaders’ divergent views about the presence of minors in monasteries. In spite of the canonical legislation which allowed children to enter a monastery at the age of 10, many monastic leaders, as Greenfield has shown, prohibited their presence in these communities, because of the potential sexual temptation the youngsters posed to the monks.4 Most recently, Despoina Ariantzi has discussed the reasons for children’s entry into monastic communities, which was based primarily on the parental decision.5 Although children were an integral part of these communities, little research has been done on their actual life, responsibilities and functions in monasteries. I aim to redress the balance here, by focusing on the daily routines and activities that framed their lives inside the walls of the monasteries. Since we know that discipline, obedience, fasting, liturgical duties and manual labour were central aspects that defined the lives of monks and nuns, the question is how the rigours

248  Oana Maria Cojocaru of the monastic routine might have been experienced by a child novice. What roles were ascribed to boys and girls living in monasteries? After all, what was it like to be a child in such an austere environment? Some of these questions are genuinely impossible to answer, for the simple reason that we lack first-hand testimonies by children who entered monasteries. We do not know what they thought of this way of life or how they felt in certain circumstances. Their lives in monasteries are, at most, framed in a few sentences written by male adult authors. Moreover, the fact that this analysis concerns people who lived in a distant past, in a different culture with different societal values and attitudes than those we share in our modern society, makes the task of unveiling children’s lives in monastic contexts a rather hazardous business. One possible solution to these challenges would be to reconstruct an ordinary day in the life of a monastic community with the focus on the children who performed the usual activities that structured the life of the community. Such an approach was used by Reidar Aasgaard in his recent article.6 By collating pieces of evidence related to children in Late Antiquity, Aasgaard has construed a story that, as he argues, can be considered plausible. His analysis of the physical surrounding of a city with various places and objects seen through the eyes of a child offers us a way of grasping the experiences of people from the past. By patching together various pieces of information related to children in monastic context, I have constructed two accounts of a monastic day with a girl and a boy as the main protagonists living in two different monastic communities in the ninth century. The sources used in this study are primarily the hagiographical accounts of the ninth century that record episodes from the novitiate of the saints-to-be and the monastic charters of the middle Byzantine period that regulated the lives of the monks and nuns. I complement the information regarding the monastic activities ascribed to children by drawing on other hagiographical texts from later centuries. The case studies will be presented in the form of a story with the spotlight on the children’s actions, which are arranged in a coherent and ordered manner that lines up daily events of their lives. Such an approach requires a detailed description of the actions of the two children which aims at bringing the reader closer to the contemporary everyday life. The method I use in this article is valuable because it can reveal something of what the life of a child in a monastic community may have looked like during an ordinary day.7 Using this approach in assessing the life of a child living in a certain context would open up new grounds in the field of research into children and childhood, especially with respect to children’s daily lives and agency. The actions of these two children will be described within a coenobitic community, the most representative monastic system in which children were accepted to live.8 My decision to describe a girl and a boy stems from the need to understand in what ways their lives would differ within the monastic setting. However, gender is not the only changing factor I take into consideration for my case studies. Other relevant elements are the social background of the children, their age, the reason why they were entrusted by their families to a monastic community, and the geographical area in which the monasteries were situated.

Children in Byzantine monastries   249 The girl will be presented as living in an urban convent in the capital of the empire, whereas the boy will be placed in a monastery in the countryside. Although the ninth-century sources describe boys and young men living in both urban and rural monastic communities, I have decided to present the boy as a member of a rural monastic community. My decision about the girl was based on the finding that female monasticism in the middle Byzantine period tended to be an urban phenomenon.9 These two children never existed, but for practical reasons I shall name the girl Theodora and the boy Georgios. These names were widely used throughout Byzantine history. Theodora was one of the most popular names in Byzantium, and was borne by several Byzantine empresses and saints. Saint George (Georgios in Greek) was often celebrated in Byzantine peasant names.10 Finally, it has to be pointed out that there are no invented facts in the stories of these two children. All the details I used in sketching this one day in the life of each child are based on the information provided by the sources, and are discussed in the footnotes and in the analytical section of the chapter, after the stories.

The first case: Theodora Theodora was born in Constantinople into a wealthy family four years after the restoration of the icons – in 847 – the year when the patriarch Ignatios was appointed by the empress mother Theodora to succeed Methodios.11 Before having Theodora, her parents lost four other children, who died in infancy. Struck by this tragedy, they promised that if God would grant them a child who would survive the first years of childhood, they would entrust the child to a monastery to become a servant of God.12 Fulfilling the promise made to God, when Theodora reached the age of 10, the parents brought her to a convent in the city, where her mother’s sister is one of the nuns.13 She has already spent almost a year in the convent. In this community there are also some other girls of a similar age, two of whom have lived with the nuns since they lost their parents in infancy.14 The community numbers 24 nuns, plus four young girls.15 We follow Theodora through a Wednesday in which we see her in different circumstances – in church when she participates with the nuns at the offices, at work, and while she receives instruction, in the refectory and in the dormitory. I have decided not to describe the actions of Theodora on a Sunday, since we would then not have a clear enough picture of her activities. On the Lord’s Day, the monastic community’s members were not allowed to work. They would celebrate this day through liturgy attendance and prayers and psalms chanted all day. *** Every morning, the sound of the semantron16 wakes up the sisters who sleep in the dormitory. The room is big enough to accommodate all the nuns and the girls who live in the convent. The beds are arranged in such a way that the nuns can see each other.17 As a novice who is undergoing instruction to become a nun later on, Theodora gets up as early as the other nuns to take part in the office of

250  Oana Maria Cojocaru orthros.18 She puts on her tunic quickly, and goes to church.19 As she approaches the narthex where the service will be held, she makes the sign of the cross.20 The narthex is quite dark and cold, since the sun has not yet risen. A cool morning breeze penetrates the room through an open window, making Theodora shudder briefly. The smell of the incense and the smoke from the candles gradually fill the narthex while Theodora listens carefully to the psalms sung by one of the nuns, the ecclesiarchissa.21 She already knows many of these psalms, because she has heard them many times since she entered the monastery. The nun sings the psalms slowly, so Theodora can follow the words easily.22 From time to time, the girl glances at the wall where the Virgin is depicted alongside Jesus on the throne.23 She notices how the candles burning in front of the icon flicker and create dancing shadows on the mantle of Jesus. The nuns start a series of genuflections and she immediately follows their example. While she genuflects, she touches the cold and rough ground with her knee, hands and forehead.24 The matins have finished already and another office begins, the office of the first hour.25 Theodora has followed the nuns who have moved into the central part of the church, and now she is attentive to the prayers recited by the priest, while at the same time watching the ecclesiarchissa who is standing in the front of the sanctuary. When the ecclesiarchissa kneels, all the other nuns must kneel simultaneously. When she gets up, everyone does the same.26 Theodora hears one of the nuns reading the catechesis. After this, the priest recites the prayer that ends the office.27 She leaves the church, making the sign of the cross again, and then enters the dormitory where she will work for a while. She is learning to weave, and her aunt is showing her a new technique on the loom. While she works, another nun is reading aloud from Scripture.28 Theodora remains in the dormitory until the semantron calls the nuns to church for the Holy Liturgy. By then, the nuns have also prayed the third liturgical hour, in which other psalms have been chanted. Now, in the daylight, Theodora can see clearly the pictures on the walls; various biblical scenes with Jesus, Mary and other saints have become visible. During the liturgy, Theodora sings together with the nuns.29 She is attentive to the story read by the priest from the Gospel. After the reading is over, the priest explains its message to the nuns. When the nuns start to recite: ‘We believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth’ she immediately recognizes the Creed. She knows it by heart, for she used to recite it when she lived in the city and attended every Sunday office at the local church with her parents. The Holy Liturgy is about to end, and Theodora and the other nuns chant the Lord’s Prayer. At the end of the liturgy she receives Holy Communion and the priest anoints her forehead with myron.30 The service is over now and Theodora waits in the narthex with the nuns to hear the sound of the semantron that will announce lunch.31 She follows the priest and the nuns to the refectory. The trapeza is a very large room, almost as large as the church building. Theodora sits down where the abbess has decided to place her. She sits next to another girl and in front of her aunt. While Theodora eats the bean soup, she listens to a nun reading from scripture.32 The girl beside Theodora is whispering something in the ear of another girl, but the nun who supervises

Children in Byzantine monastries   251 the sisters at table observes the two girls and punishes them. They must leave the refectory before having eaten the meal.33 After Theodora has eaten the two courses served today and drunk water,34 she awaits the permission of the abbess to leave the refectory. The time for lessons has come. The lessons take place in a separate cell.35 A nun has been appointed to teach the girls to read the scriptures and to write. When Theodora arrived at the monastery, she already knew most of the letters of the alphabet. Her mother showed her the letters and often told her stories from the Bible.36 Now the girl is able to reproduce all the letters, and she forms words and simple sentences with them. The lessons in the convent consist mainly in learning to read from the psalms and copying them out, so that Theodora will be able to read them in the church after she makes her vows.37 After the lessons, Theodora goes to the dormitory where the nuns are working.38 She is instructed by her aunt on how to spin wool with a spindle to make fibres that will be used for making clothes.39 It has been a long day for Theodora. She woke up early in the morning, she participated at the offices, she had lessons and she worked all the afternoon. Now evening has come and she is tired. After dinner in the refectory, she recites a thanksgiving prayer before going to bed. The next three days will be as tiring as this one, but on Sunday she will have the chance to rest more. Sunday is an important day for Theodora, for she will see her mother again. The last visit from her mother was when she fell ill and the abbess let her stay overnight in the convent. 40

The second case: Georgios As Theodora falls asleep we leave her story aside to focus on another child who lives in a monastery in the countryside. Georgios, a 14-year-old boy from a village in Asia Minor, was born in a peasant family in the first half of the ninth century.41 He and his three siblings, an elder brother and two sisters, lost their father when Georgios was 11 years old. This led the mother to seek advice from the local priest about what to do to ease the family’s precarious situation. The boy was hard-working, as everyone in the village knew, for he often helped his father with shepherding the flocks or working on the land.42 She asked the priest for a monastery that would accept the boy in the community.43 While the elder boy would take over the tasks of his late father,44 Georgios would be sent to live with the monks. The priest directed him to a monastery whose abbot he knew, located two villages away. The community is quite small, with only 11 monks and Georgios.45 Three years have passed since Georgios walked through the doors of the monastery that offered him a new home and a new family. Now the boy is 14 years old and his brother is already married, while the sisters entered a local convent. We shall follow Georgios this time through a Friday at the most representative points of time. Whereas the first case study has pointed out the moments in which a child is present in church according to the liturgical duties prescribed for the monastic communities, the second case will focus more on work activities than on participation in the church services. We shall see him for a short while in church during the Holy Liturgy, at work and in his cell. The case of Georgios will not be

252  Oana Maria Cojocaru presented in the same way as Theodora’s, by focusing on the daily schedule, but instead by concentrating on the places where Georgios spends his time. *** As in any monastery, the members of the community where Georgios lives have gathered in the church to celebrate the Holy Liturgy. The office is about to end, for the monks are reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Georgios stays somewhere in the back of the church, according to the dispositions of the abbot who has assigned each monk a certain place in the church. Since he is only a novice, he is not allowed to stay in the same place with other monks who are more experienced than him.46 When the Divine Liturgy is nearly over, Georgios stays in line to receive Holy Communion. He approaches the sanctuary, making the sign of the cross, and receives the consecrated bread.47 The office is now over, but Georgios remains in the church to pray in front of the icon of Christ the Pantokrator.48 He prays for his family, and especially for his late father and his widowed mother. After he has finished the prayer he gets up and lights a candle, and he looks once again at the icon and kisses it. It seems that Jesus is looking into his eyes and is blessing him.49 Georgios leaves the church and goes to the kitchen. He was appointed by the abbot of the monastery to help the cook.50 One of his tasks is to fetch water from a well outside the monastery each morning.51 The boy takes two empty water jars in his hands and departs quickly. He has to be back soon, for the cook needs to prepare the meals for lunch. He must not be late, otherwise the superior would probably punish him. He was punished several times by the abbot for breaking the rules of the monastery. Once, both Georgios and the cook were punished because the food was not salty enough. They had to do 20 full prostrations.52 However, that punishment was not so very harsh: once, he broke a plate in the kitchen and he had to do 300 prostrations.53 While he walks on the road to the well, he is watching the birds flying in the sky. As a shepherd boy back home, he used to catch birds with birdlime.54 Now there is no more time for such things or playing with nuts;55 he has important tasks to do. He runs to the well, fills the jars with water and returns to the monastery. He must wash the vegetables that are to be prepared for lunch. Georgios arranges the plates, the cutlery and the wine cups on the table. Soon the semantron will be struck to call the brothers to the refectory. The monks have arrived in the trapeza singing a psalm. After the priest has blessed the food, the brothers start to eat. Georgios must wait until they have finished; he will then eat together with the cook and the monks who could not attend the first sitting.56 But now he is walking around the table serving the brothers, while he listens to the reading about the struggles of St. Antony the Great to overcome the impure thoughts and the carnal desires stirred up by the devil.57 The story makes a strong impression on him. At least he is not the only one who struggles to chase away these thoughts that sometimes come to his mind. He knows he must pray a lot to make them go away. Everybody has eaten already and put the dirty plates and spoons in a basket. Georgios has eaten too, and now he is washing the plates carefully, lest he break

Children in Byzantine monastries   253 any of them and be punished. After he finishes cleaning everything, he goes to his cell to rest for a short while, because he has some more work to do. The monastery has a garden in which the monks cultivate all kind of vegetables. When he was a little boy, Georgios used to help his father with working the land at home. He thus knows how to look after plants, and the abbot has assigned him the task of working in the garden. While other monks who are literate are reading in their cells, Georgios spends the time until evening gardening.58 This is one of his main tasks during the week, but on Sundays, after the celebration of the Holy Liturgy, he learns to read from the Saints’ Lives. While he was living at home with his parents, he did not learn the letters, as some other children from his village did.59 He had to work with his father and older brother, to have enough resources to feed the entire family. He did not have time to go to the church school where the local priest taught the children to read and write. Georgios started to learn the letters after he arrived at the monastery, with a monk in charge of the boy’s religious education.60 Since then, he has made good progress in reading, although he still has some difficulties. Nevertheless, with the help of the monk who was appointed to teach him to read, Georgios learned many things.61 Some weeks ago he started to read from the life of St. Arsenios. He has learned about the saint’s practice of standing with his hands extended to the east, beginning at sunset and ceasing from standing only when the rising sun shed its light on his face.62 After several hours of working in the garden, Georgios is called by the abbot who wants to talk to him about something very important. He leaves everything and goes to the abbot who is praying in his cell. After asking Georgios about the garden the abbot said: You know my child, this monastic path is not an easy one. It is narrow and difficult and those who choose it will suffer hunger, and thirst and nakedness. You must know that there are many traps of the enemy and you must prepare to face them one by one. The time has come for you to take the vow, but you must be sure that this is the right way for you. You must forget your mother and your brother and sisters, and love God above all things. So you must reflect carefully on what I just told you, and if you consider you are ready for this path, then after the Holy Liturgy on the feast of Pentecost you will be counted among the athletes of God.63 The abbot has told Georgios many times about what life in the monastery would mean, but this is the first time that he tells the boy when he will be tonsured. After Georgios receives the abbot’s blessing, he goes to his own cell. The evening has come. Georgios has already prepared the table in the refectory for the evening meal; he has eaten a light snack and cleaned the pots. After the customary prayers of thanksgiving, Georgios goes to bed in his cell. He makes the sign of the cross and says the Lord’s Prayer. He falls asleep with the abbot’s words in his mind. He is ready to become a monk.

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Living conditions and children’s activities in Byzantine monasteries Before discussing children’s everyday experiences in monastic contexts, we need to understand what reasons motivated the Byzantines to entrust their children to monasteries. As I have mentioned, some families entrusted their offspring to a community where a family relative already lived, while other children entered a monastery together with the entire family.64 Sometimes, a harsh financial situation in the family determined the parents to entrust their children to a monastic community where they would receive a better care.65 However, in many such cases, at least one child remained in the family to assure its continuation through marriage. The Byzantine mentality saw having a child as the fulfilment of marriage. Children were expected to continue the lineage, to inherit the family properties and to provide support in old age.66 Not having children was perceived as a great misfortune and a shame, and many distressed families affected by sterility ultimately promised to offer any future child to God in thanksgiving for the miraculous birth. Other families offered their offspring to God as a sign of gratitude for their survival in early childhood. In both cases, the child represented the sacrifice through which the family would gain spiritual benefits in the afterlife, which were considered more important than any earthly advantage. We find this motivation in the hagiographies of the ninth century.67 On an ideological level, these children represented the spiritual investments of the parents that would guarantee the continuation of the family in eternity.68 I return now to the questions asked in the introduction. How might a child novice have experienced the rigours of the monastic routine? My detailed description of an ordinary day of two children who entered monastic life gives us a more concrete idea of children’s experiences in monasteries. The case studies represent the stories of many children who entered monastic life and whose dayto-day activities and experiences are brought into view. What was a novice expected to do in a monastic community? As these two case studies illustrate, once a child was accepted into a monastic community, he or she had to learn the rules and routines of the monastery. Life in the monastery was not easy, and they had to be prepared to endure the rigours of such a lifestyle. Praying, fasting and chanting psalms formed part of their monastic training. In monastic communities, time was measured in hours of prayers. As the stories of Theodora and Georgios underline, daily life in monasteries revolved around the church services, private worship and manual labour. According to Robert Taft, the daily horarium of prayers in Byzantine monasteries included a cycle of eight hours.69 The liturgical day started at sunset with vespers, followed by compline (after dinner), the midnight office, the orthros at sunrise, prime, terce and sext until noon, and finally none in the afternoon. Admittedly, we do not have direct evidence about children’s participation at every church office, but we know from the vita of Paul the Younger of Latros that the novices participated in night vigils.70 Children’s religious education involved not only memorizing parts of the scriptures or learning to read and write, but also participating in church offices. It is therefore very likely that a child novice would at least have to take part in the

Children in Byzantine monastries   255 majority of the liturgical hours.71 It is difficult to assess how much time this daily horarium took in total, but it appears that the members of monastic communities devoted several hours a day to performing the monastic hours. Apart from attending the church offices, all nuns and monks, including the novices, were expected to work.72 In some monasteries there was a clear distinction between those monks and nuns who were required to attend the church services and others who were in charge of various menial tasks.73 However, as the story of Georgios shows, the novices had to perform tasks such as fetching water and working in the kitchen. Some novices are described in the hagiographical writings as taking care of the sacred vessels and liturgical cloths, but unfortunately the sources do not specify how old the novices were when they were in charge of these tasks. Certainly, the living conditions and some of the work performed by the monks and nuns could vary depending on the geographical area. Many monasteries in the countryside did not have a water source nearby, so those who were in charge of carrying water had to walk a considerable distance to obtain the necessary provisions. In contrast to countryside monasteries, large urban monasteries were equipped with water cisterns which improved the living conditions of the community. A monastic community in the countryside could ensure the necessary supplies by cultivating their own vegetables. According to Alice-Mary Talbot, the garden chores were usually assigned to novices and young monks. Their low status in the monastic hierarchy is indicated also by their illiteracy.74 It is also highly likely that children were involved in gardening. We know from the vita of Luke of Steiris that as a young hermit he cultivated all kinds of vegetables in a small garden.75 Girls’ tasks in the nunneries were primarily the same as those performed at home – spinning, weaving and embroidery. An episode from the vita of Theodora of Thessalonike records the saint working together with her young daughter in the same cell, doing handiwork.76 In general, the main duties of the nuns were basic housekeeping activities and handwork, but in some convents they were also involved in agricultural activities.77 Discipline and obedience were central aspects in the educational programme of the novices. The rules of the monasteries had to be followed without exception. Any violation of the rules could bring punishments, either physical or in the form of private admonitions, deprivation of food and the obligation to perform a certain number of prostrations. The Stoudite rule banned punishment with the whip, which was considered ‘unacceptable by the fathers, though suitable in the secular world’.78 However, some references about corporal punishments of child novices are provided by the hagiographies. For instance, as a young novice, Paul of Latros was slapped by his spiritual father because he fell asleep during the night vigil. Lazaros of Galesion was punished by his uncle Elias because the boy used to take from the monk’s belongings and give it to the poor. Another time, the same monk Elias chastised the boy with blows because he secretly slipped out from the monastery with the intention of going to Jerusalem.79 An ascetic discipline meant the renunciation of the body’s needs; such an idea is reflected in the strict dietary regimen of the monks and nuns. Their diet was restricted to vegetables on fast days. Although Basil the Great recommended in his

256  Oana Maria Cojocaru long rule that children must have an appropriate regimen, both in terms of sleep and diet, there is no indication in the hagiographical sources that his recommendations were followed in the Byzantine monasteries who accommodated children within their walls. The children’s greatest pleasure was certainly to eat fruit. The vita of Luke of Steiris tells us that as a child, the saint used to refrain from eating fruit, ‘the most delightful food’.80 That children yearned to eat fruit is clear from an anecdote recorded in the vita of Nikon the Metanoeite. A young boy from the monastery of saint Nikon ‘was quite gluttonous and always indulging his gullet’. When he saw the fruits in the marketplace, the desire to eat ‘the most pleasing food for children’ was so great that he could not stop himself from stealing money from a monk to buy what he craved for.81 It was not easy for a young person to control the desires of the body. An anecdote from the vita of Athanasios of Athos narrates how some monks, most probably novices, were punished by Athanasios because they could not refrain from eating delicacies. We learn that on the feast day of St. Athanasios of Alexandria, the cook had prepared a special menu that included honey pies. Athanasios was extremely irritated and threw the food onto the floor. Some brothers who were sitting at a table in the back of the refectory could not resist the temptation to eat such delicacies, even though this meant that they had to pick them up from the floor. Athanasios punished the brothers by expelling them from the community.82 Although in a coenobitic monastery all the members were supposed to be equal, the monastic charters illustrate a different picture of everyday life. There are some typika from the late Byzantine period that suggest a different treatment of the nuns in terms of diet. They were not allowed to look around the table to see what had been served to others.83 The inequalities in the diet of the monks and nuns are also suggested in a satirical poem by a former monk, Hilarion Ptochopromodos, who complained that while the abbot and his friends enjoyed a special diet with all kind of delicacies, the junior monks were served with food and wine of very poor quality.84 Since the novices occupied the lowest echelon in the monastic hierarchy, one may wonder whether children received different treatment with regard to the food. The same principle of the rejection of the body is reflected in the personal hygiene of the monks, although it is difficult to have a clear picture of the daily habits of the members of the monastic communities. There is no indication in the sources about very basic hygiene like washing the hands before eating, or washing the face at the beginning of the day. When we bear in mind that in the secular context there was a remarkable decline after the sixth century in the use of the public baths, it is not surprising that bathing was not at all habitual in the everyday lives of monks and nuns.85 Here, bathing was seen more as a medical remedy for sick and aged individuals. The frequency of bathing could vary from monastery to monastery. In the monastery of Evergetis, the healthy monks were allowed to bathe only three times a year, whereas at Pantokrator, this was allowed twice a month, except during the Lenten fast when it was completely prohibited; during other fasts, the monks could bathe only once a month. The typikon of

Children in Byzantine monastries   257 Kecharitomene allowed healthy nuns to bathe once a month, whereas the ill ones could bathe as often as the doctor prescribed.86 The social background of children’s families may have been a key factor that influenced everyday life in monasteries. Although there was no requirement for payment for entry into monastic life, the hagiographical literature reports cases of individuals who brought with them their share of inheritance, or a dowry or donated a certain amount of money to the community. Children from wealthy families could bring with them larger properties and gifts than others from a lowly social background.87 We may presume that the economic power of the family who entrusted their children to a monastery could have played an important role in the treatment of children inside the walls. Moreover, the choice of a specific monastery, which was often made depending on the presence of a relative in the community, could suggest a potentially privileged life the child would enjoy there. The imperial monastic foundation documents make clear that those belonging to aristocratic families could enjoy special privileges such as a better dietary regimen.88 And although the ideal was that embarking upon the monastic life meant the renunciation of all familial ties, in reality things were different. Although some of the typika discouraged contacts with relatives, other monastic charters such as the typika of the monastery of Kecharitomene in Constantinople and of the Monastery of the Mother of God Petritzonitissa in Backovo allowed the nuns and monks to be visited by the relatives.89 Also, as I have already mentioned, Byzantine hagiography gives examples of children who were entrusted to monasteries where an aunt or an uncle had already taken vows.90 Certainly, children’s lives in monasteries could differ depending on a variety of factors. The size of the monastery or convent, the geographical environment and their financial power to support the members undoubtedly also determined the way in which children lived. A small monastic community could accommodate few if any children, while a monastery like Stoudios in Constantinople, which by 807 already had 700 monks, could provide facilities for more children who wanted to enter monastic life.91 Nicholas of Stoudios, while still a child, was placed in the school of the monastery to learn the letters and everything pertaining to the monastic life. There he enjoyed the company of other children who were instructed with the intention of later becoming monks.92 The text does not make any reference to other activities children would enjoy in the monastic school of Stoudios, but we learn from the vita of Peter of Argos that the monastic school where Peter received education allowed boys to play games.93 As the stories of Theodora and Georgios illustrate, children had their own space inside the monasteries, although this was rather an extension of the adults’ milieu. In general, the monasteries had individual cells for their members, but some sources also indicate the use of a common dormitory in convents. Children also spent considerable time in the classroom. Whereas such a classroom could have been part of a school attached to the monastery, but not inside its walls, as with the school at Stoudios, it is very likely that small monasteries that accepted children would have used at most a cell within their walls. Moreover, in the refectory each member of the community was assigned to sit in a particular place,

258  Oana Maria Cojocaru without having the opportunity to choose where to sit. In some monasteries, the junior monks could be put alongside the older ones so that their behaviour could be supervised, but in others, the seating arrangement was hierarchical.94 These two case studies not only depict monastic life, but also provide new insights into how children may have experienced this lifestyle. The harsh conditions in a monastery were certainly perceived differently by children, although the sources are silent in this respect. How hard would it have been for a child to stay attentive to the readings for a long period of time, or to perform the required rituals in the same strict manner? How did they experience the monastic rigours, given that they were physically and emotionally more vulnerable, more sensitive to external factors, and physically less strong than adults? The idea of what monastic life means is best illustrated in the discourse of the abbot in the story of Georgios. Such a lifestyle is not an easy one and requires both physical and mental self-control. The terms such as hunger, thirst and nakedness are biblical metaphors which depict the ascetic ideal that must be achieved through the rejection of the basic needs of the body. And precisely because of these rigours of the monastic lifestyle, that children younger than 10 were not, in principle, to be accepted into monasteries to become monks and nuns. Further studies on child servants in monasteries would supplement the picture of children’s lives in monastic contexts and enrich our knowledge of what it was like to be a child in Byzantium.

Conclusions The monastic world was, by and large, a space shaped in accord with the spiritual needs of the adults who constituted the majority of the nuns and monks. The community functioned as a social group in which each of its members was expected to act and behave according to the norms and customs of the group. Once a child was accepted as a novice, he or she had to adapt to its rules and to follow the necessary steps to become a full member of the monastic community. The events described in the case studies provide insights into how children acted in various circumstances of everyday life. Their experiences are reflected in the habitual activities they performed, such as the religious rituals or work activities. Moreover, their agency is expressed in the way in which they interacted with the environment and with the other members of the community. In this respect, agency is not only what children do as such, but also what they choose (not) to do. Their choices to act in a certain way in a given situation, such as following the rules imposed on them or disobeying the orders, are influenced by the adults who frame the world in which children live.95 These stories also illustrate another feature of the monastic life – entry to the monastery seems to be an abrupt transition from childhood to adulthood. Breaking with the family, leaving behind worldly things, and enduring the rigours of asceticism convey the expectations of Byzantine religious authors regarding the ideal Christian lifestyle. For those children who enter monastic life, the small pleasures of childhood seem to disappear, at least in the sources, although, as the stories suggest, that may not be entirely true.

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Notes 1 For earlier studies on children in Byzantine monasteries, see Patlagean 1973 and Moffatt 1986. For recent contributions to the phenomenon of asceticism and monasticism in Late Antiquity, see Schroeder 2009a, Caseau 2012 and Vuolanto 2015a. For child servants in Egyptian monasteries, see Papaconstantinou 2002a and b and Giorda in this volume. 2 Kalogeras 2000: 145–55. 3 Miller 2003: 113–23. 4 Greenfield 2009. Canon 40 of the Council of Trullo (692) stipulates that those who want to embrace the monastic life must have reached the age of ten; see Council in Trullo 40, Nedungatt and Featherstone 1995: 119–21. 5 Ariantzi 2012: 271–98. 6 Aasgaard 2015, esp. 160–7. For other studies with a similar methodology, see Sivan in this volume and Laes and Vuolanto in this volume, p. 2. 7 There has been an increasing effort in social history to reconstruct the life experiences of ordinary people. On the new methodological approaches used by historians, see Burke 2001a, especially Sharpe 2001 on history from below; Levi 2001 on ‘microhistory’ and Burke 2001b on ‘history of events’. 8 For a brief overview of the differences between the eremitic, coenobitic and lavriotic monasticism, see McGuckin, 2008; Papachryssanthou 1973; Talbot 1987. On monastic life in convents and monasteries, see Talbot 1985 and Morris 1995. 9 There are several explanations for why the nuns are found in the sources mainly in the urban centres: for instance, Alice Mary Talbot argues that the monastic communities on the holy mountains prohibited or discouraged the presence of convents close to the male monasteries. Moreover, there was a clear concern regarding women’s safety in isolated areas, hence the absence of convents in the isolated countryside. Another explanation would be the preference of the monastic founders for building or renovating urban convents, see Talbot 1985: 2–4. For Byzantine countryside nunneries in the late Byzantine period, see Gerstel and Talbot 2006. 10 On the use of the name Theodora, see Kazhdan 1991a and Laiou 1977: 109; on the use of the name George, see Kazhdan and Patterson Sevcenko 1991b and Laiou 1977: 109. 11 The empress Theodora summoned a council under the patriarch Methodios, who restored the veneration of the icons on 10 March 843. 12 A similar case is described in Translations and Miracles of Theodora of Thessalonike 13 (ed. Kurtz 1902: 44). Many hagiographical accounts describe the practice of entrusting children to monastic communities, most of them referring to cases in which distressed parents promised to offer their future offspring to God, as a sign of gratitude for their birth. See for instance Life of Peter of Atroa 2 (ed. Laurent 1956: 69); Life of Michael the Synkellos 2 (trans. Cunningham 1991: 46); Life of George of Amastris 4 (ed. Vasil’evskij 1893: 7). On oblation, see Doran 1994. On infant mortality, see Congourdeau 1993 and Talbot 2009. 13 On the age limitation imposed by the canonists, see note 4. The practice of choosing a monastic community in which a family’s relative resided is attested by the hagiographical literature: Life of Nicholas of Stoudios 3 (PG 105.869); Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 9 (ed. Kurtz 1902: 5); Life of Lazaros of Galesion 3 (AASS Nov III: 510), to name but a few; on this practice, see Talbot 1990. 14 On orphans, see Miller 2003. 15 According to Leo VI, Novel 14 (PG 107.452), the minimum number of monks or nuns permitted in a monastery was three. Depending on its size, in general a convent in the final centuries of Byzantium could house as few as 24 or as many as 100 nuns. For instance, the typikon of the Constantinopolitan convent Theotokos Kecharitomene (twelfth century) made provisions for 24 nuns plus two girls who were to be raised

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

by the nuns, Kecharitomene 5 (BMFD 4.671). For an overview of the number of nuns residing in convents in the period from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, see Talbot 1985: 20. The semantron was a piece of iron, bronze or wood that was struck with a hammer to summon the monks and the nuns to the church services or to the refectory. On the semantron and its use, see Talbot 1991. Kecharitomene 6 (BMFD 2.671). Another source that suggests that the nuns slept in a communal dormitory is Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 31 (ed. Kurtz 1902: 18). Orthros (or matins in the West) was the morning service of the church. We have no information regarding basic bodily care at the beginning of the day. For personal hygiene in monasteries, see the discussion in the analytical section. The tunic was the basic dress article of the Byzantines, either for men or women, laymen or monastics. However, there is no mention in the sources of any particular garment of the novices. On monastic dress, see Ball 2009–2010. The office of matins was officiated in the narthex, Kecharitomene 39 (BMFD 2.689). On the liturgy of the hours, see Taft 1986, esp. 75–92, 191–210 and 273–96. On the role of the narthex in the liturgical ritual, see Marinis 2014: 64–75. The ecclesiarchissa had to take care of the church, to ask and receive the necessary materials for the daily liturgy, and to conduct the choir nuns, Kecharitomene 20 (BMFD 2.681). The ecclesiarchissa should sing the psalms slowly so everybody could follow the words without stumbling and could complete the words of the psalms by themselves, Kecharitomene 20 (BMFD 2.681). In many Byzantine churches, the narthex iconography contains pictures of the Virgin and Christ, see Kalopissi-Verti 2006. Genuflection was a common gesture of worship in Byzantium. In monasteries, full prostrations were required, Kecharitomene 32 (BMFD 2.686). This office followed immediately after the end of matins, Kecharitomene 32 (BMFD 2.686). Kecharitomene 32 (BMFD 2.686); Neilos Damilas 10 (BMFD 4.1473). The word ‘catechesis’ means instruction. In early Christianity, the new converts were instructed in the faith before being baptized. After the sixth century, when infant baptism became a widespread practice, the pre-baptismal catechesis was abandoned. However the catechetical orations were retained in the religious office. On baptism in early Christianity, see Ferguson 2009. Kecharitomene 32 (BMFD 2.687). Children are described in the Byzantine sources as taking an active part in the office by singing the religious hymns; see e.g. Psellos, Styliane (ed. Kaldellis 2006: 122). On the divine liturgy in Byzantium, see Taft 1995. It is unclear from the sources whether there was also a breakfast. The typika speaks about lunch and supper, but no reference is made to the first meal in the morning. In Christian tradition, Wednesday is a day of fasting. One of the most common meals on fast days was beans, served either boiled or in soup. On monastic diet, see Talbot 2007. The monastic charters prohibited the nuns from speaking while at table. They had to be quiet and to listen to the prayers read by one of the nuns. Kecharitomene 40–41 (BMFD 2.689–690); Lips 29 (BMFD 3.1274); Bebaia Elpis 86 (BMFD 4.1548). Usually, the primary drink was wine diluted with water. However, on fasting days the wine was normally prohibited, cf. Talbot 2007: 114. In general, the monastic institutions did not allow children to be educated inside the monastery. Nevertheless, some children did receive education inside the monasteries or nunneries, cf. Greenfield 2009: 273–4. Education had a very strongly religious character. Children learned to read and write from religious texts. On education, see Kalogeras 2000. The vitae provide examples of girls who were instructed at home by

Children in Byzantine monastries   261 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

57

their mothers: Life of Athansia of Aegina 3 (ed. Carras 1984: 212); Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 5 (ed. Kurtz 1902: 3). Mothers played a major role in girls’ education. On the role of the parents in the process of instruction, see Kalogeras 2005. Children who entered a monastery had to spend several years before taking the vow. In the meantime, they were instructed in church matters and everything related to monastic life. The eastern church law set the age of tonsure at 16 or 17, see Basil of Cesarea, Reg. fus. tract. 15 (PG 31:.953); Leo VI, Novel VI (PG 107.440). In general, the nuns had to perform housekeeping duties and handwork, such as spinning, weaving and embroidery. In some convents, the nuns did manual labor in the garden and vineyard, cf. Talbot 1985: 11–12. Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 41 (ed. Kurtz 1902: 24). The convents accepted the visits of female relatives of the nuns once or twice a year. A nun’s mother could stay overnight if her daughter was sick, Kecharitomene 17 (BMFD 2.679). There are several examples of saints from a lowly social background: St. Ioannikios, Nicholas of Stoudios, David, Symeon and George of Lesbos. Life of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos 4 (ed. van den Gheyn 1899: 214); other examples from later centuries are found in Life of Paul the Younger of Latros 3 (ed. Delahaye 1913: 23); Life of Luke of Steiris 4 (ed. Connors and Connors 1994: 10). Not all the monasteries accepted children among the brethren, because of the fear of sexual temptations, see Greenfield 2009. Boys were expected to continue the lineage of the family and to provide financial support for parents in their old age, Ariantzi 2012: 241–2. The number of the monks in ninth-century monasteries is uncertain. I have chosen as a model the monasteries of the Savior and of the Theotokos on Mount Galesion (eleventh century), each of which had 12 monks, see Talbot 1985: 19. Pantelleria 1 (BMFD 1.62). On the Eucharist and its theological meaning, see Meyendorff 1974: 201–11, Perczel, Forrai and Geréby 2005. The image of Christ the Pantokrator is depicted in the half-dome of the apse, on the nave vault, or on the proskynetarion of the templon, see Kalopissi-Verti 2006: 107–22. The oldest surviving icon of Christ the Pantokrator dates to sixth or seventh century, and is in the monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai. The icon gives a fully frontal depiction of Jesus making the sign of blessing with the right hand and holding in the left hand a thick Gospel book. On Byzantine icons, see Maguire 1996 and Cormack 2007. Kissing an icon played a very important role in worship. Through touching it, the worshiper came in contact with the person depicted on the icon, cf. James 2011, 9–10. The monastic typika emphasize that the superior assigns various tasks to each member of the community. Life of Stephen the Younger 13 (ed. Auzépy 1996: 105); Life of Luke of Steiris 35 (ed. Connors and Connors 1994: 56). Theodore of Stoudios, Poenae monasteriales 43 (PG 99.1738). Theodore of Stoudios, Poenae monasteriales 40 and 46 (PG 99.1738–1739). Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 50 (ed. Kurtz 1902: 29). On games, see Pitarakis 2009, esp. 238–40. Depending on the size of the monastery and the number of the monks or nuns, there could even be three sittings. For the second sitting, see Kosmosoteira 24 (BMFD 2.812); a third sitting is mentioned in Life of Lazaros of Galesion 109 (AASS Nov. III: 542). Antony the Great is one of the greatest founders of monastic life. On the saint’s carnal desires, see Athanasios, Life of Antony 11–12. The task of serving the monks at table is recorded in Life of Phantinos the Younger 6 (ed. Follieri 1993: 408).

262  Oana Maria Cojocaru 58 The importance of reading is stressed by Theodore of Stoudios in the rule for the monastery of Stoudios, see Stoudios 26 (BMFD 1.108). However, not all the monks were literate; the illiterate monks were assigned to work on the monasteries’ properties, Talbot 2002: 59. 59 Children from a lowly social background are described in several hagiographical accounts of the ninth century as receiving elementary education, e.g. Life of David, Symeon and George of Lesbos, 4 (ed. van den Gheyn 1899: 214); Life of Nicholas of Stoudios (PG 105.868). In general, the elementary level of education was acquired in the local schools, where the priest taught the children the basics. For an overview of children’s education in Byzantium see Kalogeras 2000. 60 Life of Ioannikios, 9 (AASS, Nov. II: 388). 61 The education of novices was assigned to an experienced monk who was to teach them to read and write, Kalogeras 2012: 168–70. 62 St. Arsenios the Great (354–445) was a famous Egyptian hermit. A similar episode is recorded in Life of Irene of Chrysobalanton 5 (ed. Rosenqvist 1986: 16). 63 In hagiographical accounts this is a typical address by the abbots to novices before their tonsure, see Life of Stephen the Younger 12 (ed. Auzépy 1996: 103–4) and Life of Phantinos the Younger 5 (ed. Follieri 1993: 406). 64 Cases of children who joined a monastic community where an aunt or an uncle had taken the vow can be found in Life of Theodora of Thessalonike, Life of Nicholas of Stoudios and Life of Lazaros of Galesion, see note 13. For cases of children who followed their parents to monasteries, see Life of Peter of Argos 5 (ed. Kyrialopoulos 1976: 234); Life of Peter of Atroa 44 (ed. Laurent 1956: 159). 65 See for instance Life of Paul of the Younger of Latros 3 (ed. Delahaye 1913: 105) 66 Ariantzi 2012: 51. 67 For example Life of Theodora of Thessalonike; Life of George of Amastris. 68 On family strategies for continuity in Late Antiquity, see Vuolanto 2015a: 215–24. 69 See note 20. 70 Life of Paul the Younger of Latros, 6 (ed. Delahaye 1913: 107). 71 Kalogeras 2000: 148–9; according to the Pachomian rule, children were to receive instruction from a monk during the third, sixth and ninth hours, Laes 2009a: 130. 72 BMFD 1.xxvi. 73 See for instance Pantokrator 19 (BMFD 2.749), where a number of monks were in charge of performing the liturgical services, while others were cooks, bakers, bath attendants and gardeners; also at Bebaia Elpis there were two categories of nuns, ‘church’ nuns and ‘laboring’ nuns. On daily life in women’s monastic communities, see also Galatarioutou 1988, Garland 2013. 74 Talbot 2002: 59. 75 Life of Luke of Steiris 19 (ed. Connors and Connors 1994: 30). 76 Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 28 (ed. Kurtz 1902: 17). 77 Talbot 1985: 12. 78 Stoudios 25 (BMFD 1.108). 79 Life of Paul the Younger of Latros, 6 (ed. Delahaye 1913: 107); Life of Lazaros of Galesion 3–4 (AASS Nov.III: 510). On punishments of children in Egyptian monasteries, see Laes 2009a: 124–5. 80 Life of Luke of Steiris 3 (ed. Connors and Connors 1994: 7–8). 81 Life of Nikon 75 (ed. Sullivan 1987: 258). 82 Life of Athanasios of Athos B, 50 (ed. Noret 1982: 186–7). 83 Bebaia Elpis 86 (BMFD 4.1548). 84 For a detailed description of the food of the superiors and junior monks, see Talbot 2007: 118. 85 Karpozilos, Johnson, Kazhdan and Browning 1991. 86 Evergetis 9 (BMFD 2.460); Pantokrator 15 (BMFD 1.748); Kecharitomene 7 (BMFD 2.653).

Children in Byzantine monastries   263 87 Cf. Michael the Synkellos and Theodora of Thessalonike. On monastic donations and patronage, see Morris 1995: 120–42; on monastic recruits from wealthy families, see Hatlie 2007: 280–9. 88 Kecharitomene 4 (BMFD 2.670). 89 Kecharitomene 17 (BMFD 2.679–680); Pakourianos 8 (BMFD 2.504). 90 See n. 65. 91 Hatlie 2007: 322. 92 Life of Nicholas of Stoudios (PG 105.872). 93 Life of Peter of Argos 4–5 (ed. Kyriakopoulos 1976: 236). On monastic schools for orphans, see also Miller 2003: 127–32. 94 Talbot 2007: 113. 95 On children’s agency and choosing to obey, see also Vuolanto in this volume, p. 16– 18.

Part IV

A cruel world Accidents, disability, and death

17 Children’s accidents in the Roman empire The medical eye on 500 years of mishaps in injured children Lutz Alexander Graumann Introduction Accidents with injuries to children happen every day and everywhere. Lucky parents do not see their children injured, or, in case of accident, only with harmless injuries, and no long-term complications. In developed countries, great progress has been achieved in accident prevention and there is widespread public awareness, in the light of the unceasing emergence of new dangers through trendy sports for young people, such as trampolines, wakeboards, and bouldering. “Reckless youth” is not just a phrase: their tendency to take risks is biologically determined.1 The medical team (physicians, nurses) is never limited to medical care of the child alone. What they do is related to the entire family complex of the child and to the immediate environment, e.g., kindergarten, and school, as well as to the bureaucratic needs of modern health insurance companies. Nowadays, the medical staff is trained to focus far more on the specific psychological needs of the individual child in direct relation to accidents. The medical expert is involved in front-line prevention, emergency treatment including sufficient pain therapy from the outset, mid-term, and long-term follow-up, which includes the individual, sometimes fatefully bad prognosis.2 As both a medical historian and a pediatric traumatologist (and as a father), I myself have often wondered what might have happened to the individual child in Antiquity when an accident occurred. What is known about the personal experience, the suffering, and the pains? What was the physical and the posttraumatic psychological outcome? How could the social framework (family, friends, household, and society) have reacted? What about the individual prognosis? And, of course, what is known about the treatment options either by ordinary laymen or by ancient physicians?3

Method, material, and limitations In this study, when speaking of the child and childhood generally in Antiquity, I have in mind children from the newborn period up to adolescents at the age of 14. This is the same age group I treat as a pediatric surgeon today. But ancient childhood was of course very different from childhood today. It was considerably

268  Lutz Alexander Graumann shorter and harsher, without strict age thresholds.4 My sources include all kinds of written evidence, scattered through the extant ancient literature, inscriptions, paintings, and statuettes, in addition to some palaeopathological evidence. Here, I will focus mainly on written sources from the Imperial Roman age and Late Antiquity. There is, of course, no extant textbook, or manual of pediatric traumatology from Antiquity. This was not an issue in ancient medicine. Christian Laes, focusing exhaustively on the written evidence, has already said much about ancient children’s accidents before, but with less emphasis on the medical aspects.5 My intention here is to interpret ancient children’s trauma with the eye of the medical expert. However, medical interpretation should be done only with caution. For instance, there is still a widespread opinion that it is much easier to do retrospective diagnosis of a joint dislocation or a bone fracture than of infectious diseases in Antiquity, which are methodologically far more complex. I personally doubt that alleged easiness, especially in the case of children. Let me now briefly discuss three premises: anthropological constancy, physical trauma in children as an everyday event in human history, and the reliability of the ancient sources. First, there is the paradigm of the constant physical entity of humans. Despite many changing variables (nutrition, education, cultural rites of passage, institutions, religion), mankind as a biological entity has not changed very much in the past three millennia. And this should also be true of ancient children (the long durée of childhood).6 This obviously also includes children’s general behavior toward risk-taking (boys more than girls) and physical trauma (crying, demanding help, retreating, and shock). Second, physical trauma as the consequence of an accident and as an acute, unpredictable, single, unrepeated event was a part of daily life in the ancient past too.7 Children were, and are always, at risk of suffering all kinds of injuries. For physicians, trauma is a hard medical fact with clear, undeniable pathological-anatomical consequences. Both patterns and the outcome of injury now and then may be comparable. Accidents in childhood show us a biological truth.8 Third, the reliability of the ancient sources must be questioned to some extent. It should never be forgotten that many of the extant written sources are artificial. Many epigrams on children’s deeds and deaths are “Kunstprosa”, artificial prose. Many statues, votive offerings, and steles show children in conventional iconography (classic poses with pets, smiling etc.), corresponding to, or reflecting, a “conventional” reality in their time.9 I will therefore draw on them as tiny pieces of the huge broken object that I am trying to reconstruct. We must bear in mind the statistical bias: most of the reports come from epitaphs10 or short poems reporting bizarre, strange accidents with 100 percent fatal outcomes, 100 percent mortality.11 This means that we should remember that most accidents without a fatal outcome remain silent, unreported, and hidden. The same is true of the unreported life-long morbidity: lameness, handicaps, and aesthetic deformities. Palaeopathological evidence could be trusted a little more as a true and not artificial source, but it too has limitations. There are only very few surviving samples of children with fresh bone fractures, because children have less bone, and more cartilage material, and suffer more often soft-tissue damage. Moreover, their fractures heal faster and reconstitute totally (invisible fracture); this is not true

Children’s accidents in the Roman empire   269 of adults.12 The same holds true for adults with healed former pediatric fractures. These are not easy to diagnose, and the samples are too disparate. It is often challenging to determine the correct age of bone material itself.13 In addition, taphonomic factors (post-mortem, burial, excavational plastic bone deformation) obscure many true fractures in children.14

Children’s accidents: mishaps, missteps, and misfortunes In modern Germany, about 15 percent of all children younger than 15 years of age (about 1.6 million) get injured every year, with fewer than 0.5 percent (about 100 children) losing their life in traffic accidents.15 In Graeco-Roman Antiquity, there was surely a much higher frequency; the short-term and mid-term outcome was very probably far more often fatal. The exact number of children’s accidents and fatality in Antiquity will remain unknown; at most, an approximate speculation is possible. In my overview of ancient children’s accidents, I begin in the reverse order with some modern medical classification. The trained physician always has the panoply of emergency medicine at his disposal. Following the basic order and content of some modern manuals on pediatric emergency medicine, I will first establish a categorization for ancient children’s accidents.16 Of course, one cannot simply take a medical manual in one’s left hand and all the ancient sources in one’s right hand, then begin to fit them together. I prefer here a simplified, abbreviated classification, a tentative selection of accidents: foreign body ingestion and aspiration; wounds; bone fracture and joint dislocation; head trauma; blunt body trauma; stings and bites; and drowning.17 Medical praxis with regard to children’s accidents shows that there is nothing impossible or unthinkable here. The unpredictable cannot be excluded.18 Potential accidents lurk everywhere. In hospitals, this phenomenon is known as “Pleiten, Pech und Pannen”, the “mishaps, missteps, and misfortunes” of injured children in an infinitely dangerous environment. Foreign body ingestion and aspiration Today, foreign body ingestion and aspiration is a well-known global phenomenon, especially ingestion during the specific age period between six months and four years (the exploratory age).19 There can be negative short-term, but also long-term consequences.20 I believe that long-term consequences could not be realized and detected in Antiquity, because it was not possible to differentiate foreign body ingestion or aspiration from other causes at that time without modern radiology, endoscopy, or sophisticated post-mortem forensic autopsy. Here are three cases, all with daily fruits (pear, peach, grape) as lethal agents. The first and most famous example of foreign body aspiration is the tragic story of young Drusus from the Imperial family: about 20 ce, Claudius’ and Urgulanilla’s son died in Pompeii, choked by a pear which he had tossed into the air in a game, and caught in his mouth.21 There are two similar reports: the child of Theognostos died by choking on a peach stone, and Sarapion, the son of Herodotus in Smyrna, was choked by a grape when he was three years old.22 In the early seventh-century Miracles of

270  Lutz Alexander Graumann Saint Cyrus and John, two strange foreign body ingestions in somewhat older children are reported: a venomous snake egg and lizards.23 The most common, rarely complicating foreign body ingestion today is coin ingestion, which is unreported from Antiquity.24 Today, the most serious types in children are button battery and caustic agent ingestions, as well as peanut aspiration. Wounds External wounds, typically skin lesions, are ubiquitous, and can occur everywhere on the surface of the human body. Generally, it seems that most everyday wounds were too banal to be reported in ancient writings. The medical writer Galen of Pergamum in the second century ce describes two simple, minor wounds. Both children, probably aged between seven and 12, were stabbed with an ordinary everyday utility, a pencil (stylus) for writing purposes. This may have happened while they were pupils in school.25 The first case concerns a child with a selfinflicted stab wound caused by a pencil in his lower arm, with a lesion of a not precisely identified nerve; he died on the eighth day after the accident with some spasms (wound infection, perhaps tetanus).26 The second child was wounded by another pencil, inflicted by himself or by a classmate, in or around one of his eyes (ocular or periorbital injury); this wound healed without further treatment.27 The stylus was an ordinary school tool with one sharp end (to incise letters); as these two cases clearly show, it had the potential to cause accidents to pupils.28 Only a few other wounds are described explicitly and individually. One little girl in Roman Egypt survived the collapse of her house with only a few cuts and similar wounds to her shoulder, hip, and knee.29 Another two-year-old boy got hurt in an animal trap, maybe in his feet.30 Today, cuts to the hands, feet, and face happen to children of all ages, and are very often caused by falling through glass doors and windows.31 Bone fractures and joint dislocations Nowadays about 10 percent of all injuries in children are bone fractures, mostly occurring as single trauma.32 There are good medical descriptions of common and even rare pediatric fractures, including their complications. Depending on the etiological mechanism (hit, fall, specific sport injuries) and age-specific body development, both specific bone fractures, and joint dislocations with their own epidemiology can be expected.33 As a rule of thumb, every age period has its own pattern of both mechanism and bone or joint damage: upper leg bone fractures in children up to 10 years of age, fractures around the elbow between three and seven years of age (falling from a height, e.g., a tree, chute, or climbing frame), upper and lower arm fractures between 11 and 14 years of age (a quick fall, using the arms as protection), fractures around the knee and the foot in children older than 10 years of age, dislocations of joints (shoulder, elbow, ankle) in children older than 12 years of age.34 There are some reports of specific bone injuries in ancient children. In first- or second-century Roman Egypt, a little slave girl named Peina was injured on the

Children’s accidents in the Roman empire   271 way to school: her body, and especially her right hand, was hit by a mule and crushed (tissue and bone damage), and withered. Obviously, she subsequently died.35 In the Digest, we find the case of a slave boy who suffered a leg bone fracture, probably of the lower leg, during a ball game.36 In first-century Rome, at the Lusus troiae, the Trojan Games with ritual horse-riding scenes performed by elite boys, Aeserninus, the grandson of Asinius Pollio, fell from his horse, and broke his leg, again very probably the lower leg. During the same event, another boy, Gaius Nonius Asprenas, was also injured (not further specified) when falling from his horse.37 The physician Galen mentions treating infants for dislocated thigh bones, but is very unspecific about details.38 The encyclopaedist Celsus observes generally that joint dislocations occur in children more often than in more robust adults after accidents that weaken or even rupture joint ligaments.39 Head trauma Head injuries in children in Antiquity with a fatal outcome are reported frequently. The most famous case is that of the grandson of the politician Decimus Maximus Ausonius, Pastor, in 350 ce who was killed as a young lad (vita brevis) by a falling roof tile that was unintentionally thrown by a roofer and hit his head, perhaps while he was playing near a house under construction or where the roof was being repaired.40 Another bizarre, but not improbable story concerns a boy who is struck dead by a high stele that lands on his head just while he is laying a wreath on the tomb of his stepmother.41 In the fables of Aesop, there is the story of a baby whose anxious mother places him for safety in a big box; once, when opening the box, the child lifted his head, and the bar of the box (‘korax’) hit him so hard on the head that he died.42 The ‘Sayings of the Desert Fathers’ (Apophthegmata patrum) includes the miraculous story about a young monastic novice who was kicked so hard on his head by his master that he soon became unconscious, and presumably died; but a little later, after many prayers, he re-emerged healthy, in the company of Saint Gelasius.43 Throwing stones could also be harmful: at Bakchias (Arsinoites) in Roman Egypt, Satyrus, the son of Aurelius Ammonius, was accidentally hit on his head and injured by a stone thrown from a distance.44 Galen reports head bone infection (osteomyelitis) as a frequent complication in head injuries in children.45 Today, blunt head trauma (mild, moderate, or severe) occurs more often in very young children because of their disproportioned body size (more head than torso) and their as yet insufficient strength in the arms (undeveloped adverse-effects reflex).46 Blunt body trauma by fall, blow, hit, and traffic accident There are several ancient reports of children of different ages falling from varying heights. An epigram from the first-century bce or ce tells the story of the two-yearold slave child Corax, who fell from a low ladder on his head and broke his neck. Corax fell because he lost his balance on the ladder by stretching out his arms in a childish gesture of greeting when his master was approaching.47 Another child in Smyrna, the eleven-year-old Dionysius, the son of Apollonius, fell from a tree,

272  Lutz Alexander Graumann broke his neck, and crushed his head. His end was bloody and violent.48 From fifth-century Palestine, a miracle is reported: stones and water from a collapsing reservoir fell on the boy Auxentius, apprentice of the plasterer Mamas (a young child at work). He fell from a cliff about 50 feet high down into the courtyard where Saint Sabas was buried. He survived this occupational accident.49 Another classic, reiterated theme is the fall of children from upper rooms. In Senepta in Roman Egypt in 182 ce, an eight-year-old slave boy was in the upper floor of a house, where at this moment some kind of music festival was going on. The inquisitive boy leaned too far over the railing, fell out of the window to the ground, and died.50 The Apostle Paul himself is reported to have revived the young child Eutychus in Troas: while Paulus was teaching and talking interminably, this boy felt asleep sitting at a window in the third floor of the same house, fell out of the window and lay dead on the ground.51 There is another apocryphal Christian story about the young Jesus, then five, or six years old, who was playing with children in an upstairs room. One child named Zeno fell out of the room to the ground and died. When Zeno’s parents blamed Jesus for this, Jesus revived the child briefly, and was absolved of blame by Zeno.52 In fifth-century Alexandria in Egypt, the daughter of the deacon John, a baby named Maria, was left unguarded by her mother near an open window and fell out of it from great height to the ground with a cracking noise. Realizing what had happened, the mother took the silent and obviously dead child to the sanctuary of Saint Cyrus and John, where the baby miraculously regained its life.53 Today, the fall of children from the third floor of a modern house normally results in death because of multiple trauma; this can be survived only if the affected child is lucky enough to land on soft ground. Another risk to ancient children was a fall from the shoulders of an adult.54 A papyrus from first-century Roman Egyptian Talei reports that a child was carried on the shoulder of Papontos (his father?). This man was involved in a hefty discussion with another adult; in the mêlée, the child fell from his shoulder on to the floor and suffered life-threatening injuries.55 Hits and blows against the relatively small-surfaced and less protected (less muscle, less fat) abdominal wall of children without visible wounds are no seldom occurrence, accounting today for up to 5 percent of all injuries. But sometimes they can have a dangerous and fatal outcome, depending on the level of impact from outside hidden, serious intra-abdominal lesions: lacerated spleen, liver, kidneys, pancreas, bowel, and vascular structures, with single organ trauma, or multiple trauma. Blunt torso trauma may or may not be accompanied by intra-abdominal injury.56 Galen describes a child who was kicked by a mule in his belly: the child deteriorated from day to day, and finally died on the fourth day after the blunt trauma.57 Another case in Galen concerns the injury to the son of Piso in 204 ce. Once again, it was in the ritual Trojan Games that this boy was injured in the belly (a contusion of the abdominal wall) in an accident while riding a horse. The abdominal wound soon began to suppurate. The father, although not himself a physician, assisted the therapy of his son and forbade the doctors to do extensive abdominal wall surgery. Finally, he involved Galen in the treatment, and the outcome was good.58 At this point it is culturally interesting to indicate some striking differences to today. In Graeco-Roman Antiquity, it was the

Children’s accidents in the Roman empire   273 male child who was connected to horses, and of course the male child who fell from the horse. Galen himself (like Plato long before him) advised giving permission to seven-year-old boys to go on horseback.59 It was the elite adolescent male with a possible future military career who owned his own horse.60 Today, it is the horseloving girl, collectively rooted in the paradigmatic novel Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, who gets injured by falling from her horse. Although traffic had a lower priority than today,61 there are reports of some traffic accidents with injuries to children on Roman roads. For the children of poor Roman urban families, the dangerous, narrow streets may have been the only real playground, for some, they were also the place where they earned their living, even as children.62 In second-century Mysia, the six-year-old Heleius, the son of Publius Naevius Maximus, was kicked to death by a horse on the road.63 Around 18 ce, the father of the future Emperor Nero, Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus, while returning to Rome, killed a small boy by running him over with his chariot in a village on the Appian Way.64 In the fourth century, Augustine writes about a little boy playing in a courtyard who almost died in a traffic accident involving a yoke of oxen.65 In the town Interamnae, some miles north of Rome, an eightyear-old boy was crushed to death by the tire of a carriage.66 In first-century Ostia, a young child playing on the ground was run over and killed by a shying yoke of oxen.67 In the Digest, we read the debate about a traffic accident with several wagons drawn by mules on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, where a slave boy was run over and killed.68 Today, it is mostly pre-school, and younger school children who get injured in city traffic as pedestrians, because of their as yet inadequate behavior, e.g., the quick and sudden crossing of streets, and simply because of their body height: they are overlooked by car drivers.69 Stings and bites: ictus et morsus In the case of animal bites, one thinks today immediately of injuries from man’s best friend, the dog. This was not unknown in Antiquity, too. Everybody knows the famous ‘cave canem’ (‘beware of the dog’) mosaic in Pompeii, and children were often depicted with pet dogs.70 Surprisingly, the dog-bite (vulnus morsum canis) is mentioned only very rarely in ancient written sources. A book on dreams merely states that “if a man dreams that he has been bitten by a dog this comes true exactly as he has seen.”71 One of the only ancient case-stories involving children is from the fourth century: a boy becoming mad after he is bitten by a rabid dog.72 Injuries by other animals, especially mules, are sometimes reported (see above). The poet Martial writes about two boys who were killed by a lion while tidying up the arena.73 An epigram tells the sad story of the lost child of Thyrsis, who was grabbed and carried off by a wolf.74 One popular tale is about the baby Hermonax who was not being looked after. He crawled toward a beehive that was full of sweet honey, and was then stung to death by the “bitter” bees.75 The most often cited topos about stings and bites involving ancient children is that of snakes and scorpions. The overall incidence of snake bites was probably less frequent than people feared. Bites, especially in Roman Egypt (but not so

274  Lutz Alexander Graumann much in Southern Europe), would indeed have often been fatal.76 From the firstcentury (Rome?), there is the report of a boy who has survived the bite of a snake, perhaps because he drank vinegar.77 An inscription from Perusia tells the story of the twelve-year-old slave boy Latro, who passed away seven days after being bitten by a snake.78 The apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas relates that Jesus’ brother James is bitten on his hand by a poisonous snake. He is healed by the young Jesus when he is on the point of death.79 Early Christian writings mention the vulnerability of children, especially to domestic perils such as snakes and other reptiles.80 After snakes, scorpions were the most feared invertebrates in Antiquity.81 The sting of a poisonous scorpion could kill a grown man. We are told that it was a typical injury to workers in second-century Roman Egypt.82 A second- or third-century Egyptian epitaph from Hermopolis Magna describes the death of a seven-year-old girl after a scorpion stung her foot.83 In Christian literature, Jesus himself relates the topos of snakes and scorpions to children.84 Drowning and near-drowning The ‘Dreambook’ of Artemidorus of Dalkis (second century ce) reports a dream about a child who fell into a river and drowned.85 Human environmental changes, especially wells, entail risks to young children. From second-century Smyrna, we have a story about a little girl who fell into a well and drowned. Her mother, completely veiled, then entered the local temple, threw away all her clothing, and finally ran off lamenting loudly.86 A three-year-old child in first-century Notion, although accompanied by his maternal uncle, fell during his morning washing procedure into the well and drowned.87 Another toddler, the three-year-old Archianax, fell into a well, confused by his own mirror image in the well’s water and died, despite the first aid administered by his mother.88 An inscription from Rome reports that the eight-year-old Fortunatus drowned in the pool in the Baths of the god Mars.89 As today, of course, people drowned at sea: a baby was snatched away by the wind from the ship’s side into the water and drowned; an almost twelve-year-old girl, Iulia Secunda, died together with her mother while traveling by ship in the Spanish Gulf of Leon.90 One child fell into a river, but survived thanks to the help of some passers-by (near-drowning).91 Today, drowning is the main cause of death in children aged from two to five years, accounting for approximately three deaths per 100,000 each year. If professional help cannot be reached within 30 minutes, the outcomes are poor. Since most incidents occur well away from trained medical help, the most effective way to reduce mortality is through preventive programs, mostly swimming courses for children.92 Ancient children practiced swimming as a leisure activity, at least in coastal regions.93

The outcome of children’s accidents, with some psychological considerations Life-long impairments due to injuries in childhood have been already reported in the Old Testament.94 Today, many injured children can be saved from death, and even

Children’s accidents in the Roman empire   275 from long-term complications and life-long handicaps, so that children’s accidents are isolated life-events with no physical consequences at all.95 In Antiquity, the medical and institutional possibilities were very limited or simply non-existent, and quick professional help in case of injury was not to be expected. There are no exact statistical numbers of ancient children’s accidents, morbidity, and fatality. It is possible only to get some glimpses from accounts that are scattered through extant writings. Apart from death, ancient sources report severe consequences such as life-long handicaps, physical deformities, impaired growth, and incontinence.96 The bodies of trauma survivors, especially growing children, in Antiquity would have displayed multiple traces of trauma and associated pain. Celsus writes accurately that unreplaced joint dislocations after accidents in children result in lesser growth of the affected limb.97 He states that, depending on the site, and the character of the accident, the function of the affected limb is more or less impaired and thereby wasting. This seems to reflect a common observation in GraecoRoman society at his time.98 The same applies to his statement that too much new bone formation (callus) can be observed especially in the dislocated or fractured bones of the elbow joint (treated or untreated), resulting in impaired flexion ability.99 Bone fractures and joint dislocations in ancient children often caused permanent physical deformities, impaired function, and life-long handicaps.100 Galen explicitly describes several cases of children of different ages who suffered from urinary and stool incontinence after accidents due to frost or being hit on their vertebral column with spinal lesions (spinal cord injuries).101 These children were not only physically but also socially handicapped for life. The life plans of such children were thwarted: they could not inherit the trade, the profession and the household of their parents, or perhaps only to a lesser degree. Some of them would have to live on the street as beggars, becoming social outsiders. That was a major disaster and tragedy both for the individual and for the family. For children, every accident and injury is an important life-event, with which they have to cope not only physically but also psychologically. Today, it is generally held that in case of injury, every child is suffering an extraordinary, exceptional life situation (‘child in crisis’).102 Injury suddenly takes the modern child out of domestic safety into the thoroughly alien environment of medical care: emergency ambulance, shock-room, or hospital ward.103 In psychological terms, the child experiences an acute stress reaction.104 Unfortunately, we almost never have information about ancient children’s reaction and their individual perspective on injury. There is no report that shows ancient children’s immediate trauma experience through their own eyes. Only isolated statements of ancient adults have been preserved which show persistent horror and fear due to life events in their youth.105 We are thus dependent on speculation using anthropological models to discern what ancient children might have experienced in trauma. The primary (psycho-somatical) reactions in children are the feeling of helplessness, guilt, and anger. Today, children with an intense feeling of helplessness are more at risk of developing long-term psychological alterations (depressive, fearful, solitary behavior), known as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).106 I must leave open here the question of the kinds of psychological coping strategies (cognitive,

276  Lutz Alexander Graumann behavioral) that were available to an ancient child in case of anaccident, and what role age, gender, ethnicity, and social rank may have played, since this remains too speculative in the absence of the child’s own view of events. But I would maintain that accidents were a part of every ancient child’s socialization process. Young survivors of severe accidents, as well as unaffected witnesses of the same age group, suffered psychologically a key life event that resulted in early insight into their own liminal existence, in precocious aging both psychologically and physically, but perhaps also negatively in a numbness with regard to empathy. For ancient parents, the sudden loss of children due to unforeseen accidents (mors repentina) was an even more cruel fate. Epitaphs were surely one important tangible coping strategy for the consolation of the ancient household. In Late Antiquity, the Christian church offered some kind of merciful religious consolation for the bereaved, too.107 Some psychological reactions by parents, especially mothers, must have been so exceptional that they were written down in epigrams like that of the mother of three deceased and buried children who put her fourth child alive on the pyre with the words: “I shall gain mourning with less trouble.”108

Prevention and therapy of children‘s accidents in Antiquity Caring for a child means constant parental worries, including all kind of injury preventive measures.109 There are astonishingly many ancient prevention-like statements, or at least, I have interpreted them as such. Again, I use modern terminology to group different kinds of preventions. Primary prevention (firstline prevention) means preventing exposure to known dangerous situations at all.110 Recent examples are the wearing of helmets to lower concussion risk, using seatbelts in cars, or the early learning of swimming. There are many traces of specific prevention rules in ancient daily life (common sense prevention culture) relating to the safety of children from an early age. The poet Juvenal advises one to watch out for items falling from roofs which could harm one’s head.111 In the Idylls of Theocritus, the mother leaves her crying child at home behind safely closed doors to prevent any injury and the explicit possibility of a life-long handicap if it is on the outdoor pavement, for example through a horse bite.112 To prevent dogs from biting, they were leashed.113 The New Testament mentions closing the door at night and even sleep with the children together in one room, or in the same bed.114 A drastic, but brave deed to prevent the fall of her child from the roof is reported once: the mother turned the attention of her baby to herself by showing it her breast.115 Even the early teaching of common wisdom about certain dangerous places in nature was practiced in Antiquity, e.g., the aphorism: “under every stone there waits a scorpion.”116 Despite the lack of institutionalized prevention agencies in Antiquity, lawgivers took individual measures: after the accidents to several elite boys, Emperor Augustus prohibited their participation in the Trojan Games.117 Moreover, primary religious prevention played an important role in ancient life. There were innumerous apotropaic devices and gestures, the prophylactic wearing of textual or pictorial amulets (bullae in boys, lunulae in girls), necklaces, spells, and good-luck charms both in the pagan and in the

Children’s accidents in the Roman empire   277 Christian world.118 Amulets, spells, and prophetic prayers were popular especially in cases of bites by snakes and scorpions.119 Jesus and his apostles claimed to have the ability to extinguish the dangers of snakes and scorpions (personified as demons) just by trampling upon them.120 Secondary prevention means post-accidental acute or emergency physical and psychological help. Leaving professional psychological measures aside,121 there were some popular and some medical treatment methods in Antiquity.122 In cases of the ingestion of foreign bodies, the ingestion of hairy caterpillars and induced vomiting were the preferred ancient methods.123 Bone fractures and joint dislocations in children could be manipulated in warm water, fastened to a piece of wood, and wrapped with small bandages.124 Lighter antidotes, especially for children, could be applied against poisonous snake bites.125 Galen describes the case of a slave whose finger was bitten by a snake in Alexandria around 155 ce. He survived thanks to self-ligation and then the complete amputation of his finger.126 Children who fell into wells were sometimes actively rescued and saved from drowning.127 Even Jesus himself mentioned first aid for children who had fallen into wells.128 Finally, there was obviously more trust in protective divine powers than in the abilities of “earthly doctors.”129

Conclusions and outlook The spectrum of pediatric trauma in Antiquity was obviously quite broad. Today, trauma is the leading cause of death and disability in children. Apart from the probably high death toll caused by infections, accidents to ancient children posed a much higher threat, albeit with unequal risk profile (e.g. fewer velocity injuries than today). For all children and adolescents being part of the violent ancient Graeco-Roman societies was a complex affair.130 Of all the interactions in ancient society, injuries played a major role in every young person while growing up. Pliny spoke of the ‘unhappy’ triad of fatalities in man: deadly unforeseen tiny life events like a snake bite, choking on a stone, or on hair in milk, which reminds us in an exemplary manner of our fragility (fragilitas humanae).131 This is true above all of ancient children: their general deficiency and immaturity compared to the ideal male adult account for their frailty.132 Children are generally more vulnerable to the threatening environment and need protection: physically, psychologically, legally, and economically. Not all ancient children could expect to reach adulthood, at least with an intact body and mind. But as they grew up, children themselves learned at an early age about the fragility of their existence. This includes of course all those children who only witnessed accidents with injuries to other children of their age group. In my view, trauma experience was an important part in the ancient formation of identity of those who were up, and was one of the key life-events in the ancient Graeco-Roman life course. There are reports of very strange deaths by accidents, but there are also obviously reiterated patterns of classical ancient environmental accidents: being struck by pack animals, stung by scorpions, and bitten by snakes, falling from a height, and falling into artificial wells. Thus, it is possible to identify some constant patterns in

278  Lutz Alexander Graumann children’s trauma in Antiquity. Nevertheless, the extant sources are too selective to allow any comparative statistical analysis of ancient children’s accidents. The extant reports are only the peak of the iceberg of ancient accidents. I close this chapter with one prime example from palaeopathology. In a necropolis from Roman Egypt, the mummy of a twelve-year-old boy with several tokens of trauma (poly-trauma) was excavated and analyzed: severe crushed skull fracture, thigh bone fracture, and multiple rib fracture on the left side.133 Very probably, this child had a fall from great height and suffered, apart from the still visible bone lesions, thoracic blow with lung contusion, abdominal blunt trauma with liver and spleen laceration, and open brain damage. This makes it possible to speculate about the individual consequences in that case (micro-history in action): we can imagine the horror of the accident scene, the swift dying process of this child with multi-organ failure within minutes, with no proper medical help available.134 The maimed corpse of this very dear child was mummified. This case accords best with the cases discussed above, where children fell from high houses.135 With these vignettes of individual ancient children in accidents, we can do no more than scratch on the surface of what was really going on in Antiquity. Too many possible variables in daily life remain hidden from view today. Moreover, the extant material sources are very limited. More than once, bizarre, colorful, and extraordinary events are reported. Thus, the history of children’s accidents in Antiquity is a more or less silent history of unreported and under-reported daily events. Any comparison with today’s accidents in children is further complicated by the fact that even today, patterns and trends in injuries to young persons are changing at least annually.136 Nevertheless, it is possible to reflect medically on the course of any trauma in ancient children by comparison with trauma outcomes that are known today. The ancient environment was in no way healthier or safer than today. On the contrary, it can be described as more rural, harsher, with more wild beasts, and with much fewer individual and public preventive measures. It was thus considerably more dangerous for the young child, who set out to explore the world, and who was physically abused from a very early age (child labor). The losses of young lives due to accidents in every Graeco-Roman generation must have been high. This leads to the ever-lasting global theme of mankind, the bio-psychological integrity and health of every future generation. From a modern perspective, this should have been a major task on all levels of ancient societies, too. Up to now, I have referred only to single cases of accidents, but the perspective can be broadened to mass accidents of ancient children: e.g., the case of more than 20 children in Egyptian Terenuthis in Roman Egypt who met a sudden death in 179 ce through accident (building collapse, shipwreck, or fire) makes one wonder nowadays about the impact of such a disaster on that community.137 The Apostle Paul wrote: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.”138 But his original thoughts as a child remain unspoken. The same is true of ancient children in accidents. In most of the stories, the child who is affected stays silent and passive. Most children do not really lament, express their feelings and pains, or display their own actions after the injury.139 Exceptionally, children cry for help,140 but sometimes also in protest (at

Children’s accidents in the Roman empire   279 being left at home).141 Crying itself sometimes expressed pain in Antiquity. From a modern perspective, pain might be one characteristic feature of ancient daily life, but the experience of individual bodily pain is mediated by normative physical and cultural limitations.142 There are as yet too few scientific studies of ancient pain with all its facets, particularly of the pain of injured ancient children.143 As I investigated the growing literature on children’s misfortunes in Antiquity, I encountered several (pseudo-)medical interpretations that are nonsense, or, at least, less likely in my view. One example may suffice to demonstrate such perils: In the seventh-century Miracles of Saint Artemios, we find the story of a child falling out of bed; afterwards his abdominal wall is bursting, and an “enterocele” with “testicles resting over his stomach” has developed.144 This is medically impossible. I would rather suggest that this child had in fact congenital inguinal hernia and/or hydrocele with pre-existing undescended, i.e. not scrotally located testicles, which came to the mother’s attention only after his fall.145 The topic of children’s accidents in Antiquity is becoming a vast field for further historical inquiries. Exemplary cases of trauma events in both skeletal remains and written reports should be analyzed on an interdisciplinary basis with a careful close reading and additional medical interpretation to offer a broad scope for each individual case. It is above all this kind of micro-history that counteracts, in a small but good way, the fact that each unluckily injured ancient child has been forgotten: it gives the child its life back in this virtual manner.

Acknowledgments I am grateful to Reidar Aasgard, Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto for their kind invitation, their encouragement, and all their input. Special thanks to Antonio Ricciardetto, Liège, for his suggestions at the beginning of this project.

Notes 1 Tymula et al. 2012. 2 General overview in Dietz el al. 2011: 3–20. On public prevention measures for children, see www.safekids.org; in Germany: www.kindersicherheit.de. 3 There are many boring contributions about technical advances since “crude” Antiquity (‘success history’), about adult traumatology, and about pediatric traumatology since its emergence only in the nineteenth century, often leaving Antiquity like a book of seven seals. Representative: Berger 2001, Graziati 2009. 4 Laes 2011a: 221; 281. Generally, I use “Antiquity” to mean the whole ancient GraecoRoman world. 5 Laes 2002a; 2002b; 2004a; 2007. I have profited extensively from the preliminary epigraphical study by Adda Gunella (Gunella 1995). 6 Laurence 2008. Lewis 2007: 163: “although the mechanisms behind skeletal injuries may have changed over time, the nature of paediatric bone and its reaction to trauma has not”. 7 Aufderheide and Rodríguez-Martín 1998: 19; Roberts and Manchester 2005: 84. 8 For a broad scientific explanation, see Beaty and Kasser 2001. 9 Ancient pictorial representations of children depict not childhood’s life but rather a certain “view of childhood”, while ancient biographical texts (not really surprisingly) tend rather to be hagiographic self-promotion; Vuolanto 2013a: 581.

280  Lutz Alexander Graumann 10 For the city of Rome, only 6 percent of all inscriptions in CIL VI relate to children under 14 years of age; McWilliam 2001: 75–9; Laes 2004a: 165. 11 Lattimore 1942: 144: “On the whole, the manner of death is not stated unless it was thought to be unusual, or to have some special circumstance to make it more pathetic, or to comfort the survivors”. See also Laes 2002a: 370–1. 12 Roberts and Manchester 2005: 94; Lewis 2007: 163. 13 Lewis 2007: 59. Her general conclusion is striking: “Despite the wealth of evidence for trauma in adult individuals in the archaeological record, the evidence of trauma in children is very limited”; Lewis 2007: 169. 14 Lewis 2007: 172. Generally, on difficulties in bioarchaeological identification, categorization, interpretation, and terminology of palaeopathological material from Classical and Roman times, see Fox 2012. 15 Dietz et al. 2011: 10. Medical progress can be seen from the fact that, 50 years ago, more than three thousand children died in Germany every year from accidental injuries with more than 50 percent dying in traffic accidents; Gädeke 1974. 16 Selbst and Cronan 2001; Beaty and Kasser 2001; Crain and Gershel 2003; Dietz et al. 2011. 17 I have left out topics such as intoxications, burns and frosts, genito-urological injuries and child abuse (including murder) because of limited space. Almost 70 years ago, Richard Lattimore presented a similar, but rather unmedical order (‘accidental deaths’): Lattimore 1942: 144. On ancient children in natural disasters, I refer to Charlier 2009: 191–246; and Toner 2013. 18 One of my medical teachers once told me that if you think, as an experienced physician, that you know and have seen all possible traumas in children you will certainly err. Relativizing the “unexpected” accident in children, I am inclined to agree with Galen (who was a former court physician in his sixties when he wrote this in Rome): “But experience is indeed a teacher of the unexpected [in medicine]”; Galen, Ind. 83 (Nutton 2013: 98). 19 Graumann, Linke and Berger 2003/2004; Dietz et al. 2011: 478. 20 Severe long-term complications can be foreign body impaction in the gastrointestinal tract with sudden or slow-onset bowel obstruction, death in ileus, or peritonitis. 21 Suetonius, Claudius 27.1. Probably, both the choking and the sudden autonomous nervous system reaction (vagal nerve reaction, shock) led to the fatal end. 22 Anthol. Pal. 9.483 (date unknown); Merkelbach and Stauber 1998, 542, no. 05/01/58 with Merkelbach 1984 and Schlegelmilch 2009: 89 (T11). 23 Sophronius, Mir. 34 (twelve-year-old Callinicus, in Fernandez-Marcos 1975), Mir. 44 (twelve-year-old Anna, in Fernandez-Marcos 1975); Gascou 2006: 117–21, 158–61; Holman 2009: 161; and 2015: 253. Both theological healing stories have a rhetorical intention. 24 It could have been possible due to the very ancient Athenian custom of carrying small coins in their mouths, as reported en passant by Aristophanes, Av. 503. 25 In Rome, pupils appear to have begun school at the age of seven, graduating to the grammarian’s instruction at about 12 and to the study of rhetoric around 15; Parca 2013: 474. 26 Galen, Comp. Med. Gen. 3.2 (13.605–607 Kühn). In Galen’s view, the child died because of the wrong treatment by an “empirical” doctor; Hummel 1999: 281; Mattern 2008: 194 (case 261). The retrospective diagnosis of tetanus has to be handled with caution; see my discussion of this medical diagnosis in ancient case-stories in Graumann 2002. 27 Galen, Caus. Symp. 1.2 (7.100 Kühn). Hummel 1999: 31 and 163. Mattern 2008: 178 (case 66); 240, n. 26. 28 Bloomer 2013: 455. 29 P.Oxy. I 52 (325 ce). This report was written by four treating public physicians; Laes 2004a: 161 (no. 18).

Children’s accidents in the Roman empire   281 30 Vettius Valens, Anth. 7.5 (284.12–285.3 Kroll), 161 ce. This child was very sick with convulsions before and after that accident, and finally died aged 33 months; Laes 2002a: 373; 2004a: 166; 2011a: 90. 31 Waas 2009: 65–6; 75. 32 Waas 2009: 69. The causes are complex, but we can simplify by speaking of the lower biomechanical stability of bones in younger children, but also of their more uncontrolled, riskier physical activity. 33 Injuries in the upper and lower extremities, and the skull are common in children, but injuries in the vertebral column, the thorax, the ribs, and the pelvis are much less common than in adults. 34 Younger children usually suffer some kind of bone damage; Waas 2009: 73–4. As they get older, there is a higher mobility and an increased action frame, e.g. the fall of the baby from the diaper changing table, the fall of the toddler from the loft or the climbing frame, and the fall of the pupil from a horse or a tree; Waas 2009: 62. 35 P.Oxy. L 3555. Nachtergael 1988: 41–3 (t.12); Laes 2007: 53 (M7). 36 Digesta 9.2.52.4 (Alfenus); Davis 2014: 66. 37 Suetonius, Augustus 43.6–7. Rawson 2003a: 321; Gourevitch 2010: 289. After these incidents, the princeps Augustus prohibited young boys from the Roman elite from taking part in these Games. On the Trojan Games in Rome with children as active agents see Weeber 1974; and McWilliam 2013: 281. 38 Galen, Hipp. Art. 4.40 (18A.735–6 Kühn). Mattern 2008: 240, n. 29. In this field, there is a medical error in Galen that is repeatedly cited uncritically: he states in one passage that the treatment of dislocations of the clavicle bone with bandages is most easy in young children and infants. This is in fact medically obscure, because dislocations of the clavicle bone or joints are not seen in young children, but may be confused with the typically frequent bone fracture of the clavicle in this age group which can simply be mistaken (even by the great physician Galen) for a dislocation, because of their similar outer appearance. This fracture heals naturally by itself in the young, normally without any complications. Today, a bandage is used only to minimize the fracture pain by reducing the movement range in the shoulders; Galen, Hipp. Art. 1.61 (18A.401 Kühn); Hummel 1999: 285; Boudon-Millot 2012: 230. 39 Celsus, Med. 8.11.3. Medical knowledge of today holds that exactly the opposite is true. I believe that many ancient physicians were not able to distinguish clearly joint dislocations from bone fractures in children. 40 Ausonius, Par. 11.9–12; Dräger 2012: 105; 476–7 (commentary). Laes 2004a: 153–4. This story is comparable to CIL III 2083 = CLE 1060, which reports the death of the eleven-year-old P. Papirius Proculus from Salona who died in Rome in the same way as Pastor (tegula prolapsa); Laes 2004a: 161 (no. 5). 41 Anthol. Pal. 9.67 (author and date unknown). Another cruel story (first century bc or ce) about a child’s accidental decapitation is found in Anthol. Pal. 7.542 (Flaccus) = Anthol. Pal. 9.56 (Philippus of Thessalonica) = Vérilhac I, 99 (152–3) = Anthol. Lat. 709 (I, 159–60 Riese): in wintertime a boy was skating on the frozen River Hebros (=River Maritsa in Bulgaria). He fell through the ice, and the hard ice decapitated him; Laes 2004a:167–8. 42 Aesop 162 (The Child and the Crow). 43 Apophthegmata patrum, Gelasius 3 (Schweitzer 2012, no. 178); Leyerle 2013: 566. In modern medical terms, this was not a miracle, but some mild or moderate type of brain concussion with temporary loss of consciousness and, of course, a case of child maltreatment. On the brutal daily reality for many ancient apprentices in childhood, compare Laes 2011a: 193, with another exemplary case in Digesta 9.2.5.3 (a shoemaker knocked out a boy’s eye); see also Charlier 2009: 300–1, and Gourevitch 2011a: 51 on the physical consequences of child labor. 44 P.Fouad I 29 (Sept.6th, 224); Nachtergael 1988: 46–8 (t.15); the stone was thrown out of a quarreling crowd of people at a fountain site. The age and outcome are not

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59

60 61 62 63 64

reported. In the second century bc on Rhodes, another boy of 14 years died when a (big?) stone crushed his head; Peek GV I, 1248 = Vérilhac I, 92 (142–4); Vérilhac II, 55 (108); Laes 2004a: 160 (no. 4). Galen, Caus. Morb. 11 (7.38 Kühn). Hummel 1999: 31; 283. Several case-stories of complicated head injuries in children are already reported in the Hippocratic Epidemics (fifth to fourth century bc); Laes 2004a: 160, n.17; Dean-Jones 2013: 121– 2. Waas 2009: 68. Severe blunt head trauma often causes death in infants even today, compare the shaken baby syndrome in child abuse; Waas 2009: 74. Anthol. Pal. 7.632 (Diodorus) = Goetze 1974: 30–5 (No.5) = Vérilhac I, 89 (139); Laes 2004a: 157–8 (no. 1). Why such a young child, with predictably weak body control, is standing unguarded on a ladder, remains veiled from the modern reader. The breaking of the neck in a two-year-old boy by a fall is medically very unusual; I would rather suggest that this child died from severe blunt head trauma with a cerebral haemorrhage. Peek GV I, 874 = Vérilhac I, 61 = Petzl 1982: 223 (no. 522); second century ce or first century bc. Vérilhac II, 56 (109); Laes 2004a: 157–8 (no. 3). Cyril of Scythopolis, Vita Sabae 82; Leyerle 2013: 563. P.Oxy. III 475, l. 13–25; Drexhage 1986: 23–4; Laes 2004a: 161 (no. 17), 164; Laes 2007: 50 (M1). Acts 20:9-12. Reanimation was performed by putting his arms around the boy. Infancy Gospel of Thomas 9 (ed. Burke 2010); Davis 2014: 102–3. Sophronius, Mir. 11.2–4 (Fernandez-Marcos 1975); Gascou 2006: 52–3; Holman 2009: 162. Medically, this immediate miraculous survival of the baby girl does not exclude any mid- or long-term internal body damages which are not reported. We often hear of small children being carried on the shoulders e.g. John Moschus, Pratum spirituale 24; Prudentius, Contra Symmachus 1.208 ([parvus] mox umeri positus nutricis). Children are depicted on the shoulder of men: e.g. on the arch of Trajan at Beneventum (114-118 ce; alimenta relief panel, DAI 29.479), and on the Boscoreale cup from the first century, in the Louvre. P.Mich. V 230 (48 ce); Laes 2004a: 161 (no. 20), 164; Laes 2007: 51 (M3); Bryen 2013: 59–65. The outcome is not reported. Waas 2009: 77; Dietz et al. 2011: 155. One probable case of open, fatal abdominal trauma can be found in AE 1922: 48, from Solentia (Dalmatia): while feeding a cow, a young boy is struck by its horn and killed; Laes 2004a: 157–8 (no. 15). Galen, Diff. Resp. 3.12 (7.956–7 Kühn); Hummel 1999: 218. Galen, Ther. Pis. 1 (14.212–14 Kühn); Hummel 1999: 218; 261. Mattern 2008: 194 (case 266). This abdominal wall lesion may have been a traumatic peritoneal, or rather abdominal fascial rupture. The successful treatment consisted of a small incision and repeated wound dressings with Galen’s super-drug theriac. Galen, De san. tuenda 1.8 (6.38 Kühn) and 2.9 (6.140 Kühn); Plato, Rep. 467e; Laes 2011a: 198. In Roman Egypt, there was even the possibility that children could fall from camels. The local people allowed their children to ride on camels because of the peaceful conduct of these animals; Aesop 195. Paulinus of Pella, Euch. 143; Vuolanto 2013a: 587. Van Tilburg 2007: 167. Rawson 2003a: 211; Leyerle 2013: 563 (citing nocturnal street games of the young people in Augustine, Conf. 2.4 and 3.3). On the narrowness of Roman streets with only one-way traffic: van Tilburg 2007: 31; Gourevitch 2012: 128. Peek GV I, 1994a = Vérilhac I, 94 (145–47) = Frisch 1983: 37–41 (no 52); Vérilhac II, 57 (109–10); Laes 2004a: 161 (no. 10). Suetonius, Nero 5.1; van Tilburg 2007a: 123. It has been speculated that this accident led to the law under Emperor Claudius that restricted vehicle use in Rome and other

Children’s accidents in the Roman empire   283 65

66

67 68

69 70 71 72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Italian cities (Lex Iulia Municipalis, 42 ce); Suetonius, Claudius 25.2; van Tilburg 2007: 132–4. Augustinus, Civ. dei 22.8 (countryside of Audurus, near Hippo Regius); Bradley 2005: 75, n. 9. The boy miraculously survived: the mother took the child, who was jerking immediately after the accident, to the memorial shrine of the Christian martyr Saint Stephen and laid him down there; he returned to life without any sign of injury. Medically, I would interpret this case as follows: the child was shocked and mute immediately after the contact with the yoke of oxen (acute stress reaction), and regained his senses as early as on the site of Saint Stephen. I am very grateful to Cornelis van Tilburg for drawing my attention to this case. CIL XI 4311 = CLE 457. Laes 2004a: 161 (no.13); Laes 2007: 50 (M2). This is comparable to the accident of the three-year-old Plutus, at Kamiros, first century bc, who is run over and killed by a heavily laden carriage; the child himself had released the brake; Peek GV I, 1625 = Vérilhac I, 93 (144–5); Vérilhac II, 57 (109); Laes 2004a: 157–8 (no.2); Laes 2007: 51 (M4). CIL XIV 1808 = CLE 1059 (Q. Volusius Sp. f. Lem. Anthus). Geist no. 520; Laes 2002b: 6; 2004a: 161 (no.14). Digesta 9.2.52.2 (Alfenus); van Tilburg 2007: 122. A traffic accident in some broader sense is reported in CIL VI 29436 = CLE 1159 = ILS 8524: the thirteen-year-old Ummidia was crushed to death in a stampede (compressi examine turbae) during a festival (Agon Capitolinus) on the Capitoline Hill; Laes 2002a: 369; Laes 2004a: 162 (no. 31). Waas 2009: 65. CIL VI 11864. On pet-keeping by Roman children in general, see Bradley 1998. On dog bites today, see Crain and Gershel 2003: 664–6; Dietz et al. 2011: 505–6. Artemidorus, Oneir. 4.1; trans. R. J. White. In one passage of Galen’s Character Traits (‘Peri êthôn’, surviving only in an Arabic summary), book I, we read that the ‘dog sometimes wounds him [=his master, the hunter]’; Davies 2013: 140, l. 22-23. Hist. monach. 22.3; Leyerle 2013: 563, n. 3. The report ends with the healing of this boy by the Egyptian monk Ammoun. I believe that it remains very unclear whether the disease of this child really was rabies (transmitted by the dog). Rabies was in fact untreatable in Antiquity. Today, the most common complication of dog bites is wound infection. Martial, Ep. 2.75; Laes 2011a: 196. Anthol. Pal. 9.423 (Theocritus, date unknown). Anthol. Pal. 9.302 (Antipater) = Anthol. Pal. 9.548 (Bianor). Lang 2013: 5–6, especially n. 13 (snakes and scorpions). Celsus, Med. 5.27.4. CIL XI 2056 = ILS 8521. See also Geist no. 514. Infancy Gospel of Thomas 15 (ed. Burke 2010); Davis 2014: 203. Another famous snake bite happened to Paul on Malta, when he was bitten in his right hand; he survived miraculously: Acts 28:1–6; Prudentius, Contra Symm.1 Praef 20.79. Chrysostom, Exp.in Ps. 116; Leyerle 2013: 563. Beavis 1988: 21. Alongside snakes and scorpions, spiders (phalangia) were the most feared; Beavis 1988: 55. Anthol. Pal. 7.578 (Agathias): a terrible scorpion kills the strong lion-hunter Panoepeus by a sting in his heel. Scorpion stings in Roman Egypt: Lang 2013:16. See also Beavis 1988: 21–34, and Kitchell 2014: 165–6 (s.v. scorpion). Peek GV I, 738 = Vérilhac I, 83 (130–1); Vérilhac II, 55 (108). Bernand 1999: 168–9 (no. 76): necropolis of Touna el-Gebel. Luke 11:11–13: ‘[Jesus asks:] Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asked for an egg, will give a scorpion?’ Comparable to this is the fable of Boy and Scorpion in Aesop 199. Artemidorus, Oneir. 5.22.

284  Lutz Alexander Graumann 86 [Polemon], Phys. 68 (Förster 1.1284). 87 Peek GV I, 1159 = Vérilhac I, 101 (154–6); Vérilhac II, 59 (113–5); Laes 2004a: 161 (no. 16). 88 Anthol. Pal. 7.170 (Poseidippus or Callimachus; third century) = Goetze 1974: 17–21 (no. 2) = Vérilhac I, 100 (153–4); Laes 2004a: 161 (no.15). His mother seems to have tried some kind of “reanimation”: “His mother dragged him all dripping from the water, asking herself if any life was left in him”, transl. W.R. Paton. 89 CIL VI 16740 = ILS 8518; Geist no. 505; Laes 2002b: 6; Laes 2004a: 162 (no. 30). Another boy, aged three and a half, drowned in the Abruzzi town Teate Marrucinorum in a pool (in piscina); CIL IX 6318 = CLE 1643; Laes 2004a: 162 (no.29); Gourevitch 2011a: 89. 90 Anthol. Pal. 7.303 (Antipater of Sidon; second century) = Goetze 1974: 22–6 (no. 3) = Vérilhac I, 98 (152). CIL VI 20674 (150-165 ce) = Kleiner 1987: 253–6 (no. 113); Huskinson 2011. 91 Aesop 211 (Child bathing). Another inscription describes the drowning of the nineyear-old Marcus Ulpius Firmus, an alumnus, probably in the Tiber; CIL VI 29195; Laes 2002b: 6; Laes 2004a: 162 (no.27); Laes 2007: 52 (M6). 92 Kieboom et al. 2015. In Germany, twenty children were drowned in 2014; see: www. dlrg.de/presse/pm-ertrinkungsstatistik.html. 93 In this context, there are several ancient stories about dolphins as swimming companions and rescuers of drowning boys, for example in Hippo Diarrhytus: Pliny the Elder, NH 9.26; Pliny, Epist. 9.33; Pache 2004: 178–9. 94 With the very early case of Mephibosheth who limped, in 2 Sam. 4:4: “Now Saul’s son Jonathan had a son who was crippled in both feet. He was five years old when the news about Saul and Jonathan arrived from Jezreel. His nurse picked him up and fled, but in her haste to get away, he fell and became lame”. 95 Today, the medical progress in developed societies has reached such a high standard that it is increasingly the medical caregiver himself who is blamed morally and legally if complications arise during the treatment, even if these complications are idiopathic or a matter of chance. In lesser physical complications, the medical focus has shifted to the psychological implications of each accident in childhood. 96 Discussed in detail in Laes 2014a: 164–81. Written data can be verified by palaeopathology. Lewis 2007: 173 and 183: “It is clear that, as today, children suffered from epiphyseal fractures, traumatic shortening of the limb and neurological injuries”. 97 Celsus, Med. 8.11.4. He also notices that there is wasting of the muscles nearest to the joint dislocation; Celsus, Med. 8.11.5. 98 Celsus, Med. 8.11.6. 99 Celsus, Med. 8.16.4. 100 Bradley 2005: 74. 101 Galen, Loc. Aff. 1.6 (8.64 Kühn); Hummel 1999: 271. 102 I borrow this term (“individual in crisis”) from Toner 2013: 129. 103 Dietz et al. 2011: 3. Compare Bryen 2013: 52 on Roman Egypt: “the experience of personal violation […] challenges the boundaries of the self and causes those boundaries”. 104 Landolt 2012: 33–6.The injured child in Augustine’s story may have experienced an acute stress reaction; see above, fnote 65. 105 Theocritus Idyll 15, 58–59: “[Praxinoa tells:] Ever since I was a girl, two things have frightened me more than anything else, a horrid chilly snake and a horse”; trans. J.M. Edmonds. This is called “bugbears of childhood” (“Schreckbilder der Kindheit”) by Schlegelmilch 2009: 149, n. 301. Compare White 2008: 365: “Grown-ups see themselves, their experience, their world, and their futures through what the child sparks off in them”. 106 Landolt et al. 2003; Landolt 2012: 88.

Children’s accidents in the Roman empire   285 107 Leyerle 2013: 564; Holman 2015. Before Christianity, there were of course many pagan religious coping strategies, including local and Panhellenic ritual games in honor of children who had died accidentally; see Pache 2004. 108 Anthol. Pal. 9.390 (Menecrates of Smyrna). 109 Artemidorus, Oneir. I 15; Anthol. Pal. 9.446.6 (Iulianus Aigypticus): “the childless are quit of fear”; transl. W.R. Paton. Even today approximately 30 percent of children’s accidents are preventable; Waas 2009: 78. 110 Landolt 2012: 101. The modern parental extreme is called the “helicopter parent”, who monitors the safety of the offspring every single second around the clock. 111 Juvenal, Sat. 3.268–272. 112 Theocritus, Idyll 15.40–43. 113 Apophthegmata patrum, anonymous collection N 573 (Schweitzer 2011, no.1573). Indeed, the well-known cave canem mosaic depicts a savage dog leashed. 114 Luke 11:7: “The door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed”. 115 Anthol. Pal. 9.114 (Parmenion): “one fount of milk twice bestowed life”; trans. W.R. Paton. Already in the Old Testament (Deut. 22:8) there is the architectural tip to prevent any bodily harm by falling from the roof: “When thou buildest a new house, then thou shalt make a parapet for thy roof, that thou bring not blood upon thy house, if any man fall from thence”. 116 Sophocles, fr. 37 (ed. Radt); Scholia in Nicander, Theriaca 18c; Praxilla, fr. 4; Aristophanes, Thesm. 529–530; Athenaeus, Deipn. 15, 695d; Zenobius, 6.20; Diogenianus 8.59; Beavis 1988: 28 (wrongly cites Sophocles, fr. 138). On snakes, compare Virgil, Ecl. 3.93: “boys, beware of the cold snake lurking in the grass”. 117 Suetonius, Augustus 43.2. Compare the Lex Iulia Municipalis in note 64, above. 118 Dasen 2003; Bradley 2005: 89–90; Leyerle 2013: 560. E.g., wearing the bill of a woodpecker was believed to protect one from stings; Pliny the Elder, NH 29.92. 119 Beavis 1988: 31. Tod 1939: 58–9, cites the magic spell in Pap.Graec.Mag. II, 190–1, no. 3 = P.Oslo I 21, no. 5 (fourth–sixth century ce): “Preserve this house […] from dreadful pain and bite of scorpion and of snake for the name of God most High”. 120 Luke 10:19; Cyril of Scythopolis, Vita Sabae 12; 95.20 (the devil takes the form of snakes and scorpions); Hist. Monach. 20.12 (Abba Didymus trod on snakes and scorpions with his bare feet); Apophthegmata patrum, Paulus 1 (Schweitzer 2012, no. 791): Abba Paulus was renowned for tearing snakes apart. At an earlier date, we have the prophecy in Isa 11:8 (Of the Realm of the Messiah): “The infant will play near the cobra’s den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest”; Kunz-Lübcke 2007: 223. Nevertheless, Paul warns that this Christian ability should not be overstressed: 1 Cor 10:9: “Let us not test the Lord, as some of them tested, and perished by the serpents”. 121 Landolt 2012: 107–8. Of course, without professional help (medical and/or psychological), the traumatized child is stabilized psychologically only by self-help and help from its own social network; Landolt 2012: 102–3; Toner 2013: 47. 122 In general, ancient medical treatment options were limited; interventional (=surgical) and non-interventional (=conservative) approaches were not strictly separated; Gourevitch 2011a: 175. 123 Pliny the Elder, NH 30.139; Bradley 2005: 86. Aetius 4.16 (Corpus Medicorum Graecorum 8.1.366, 18–21); Hummel 1999: 243. Today, the treatment by vomiting is outdated because of the excessive risk of aspiration. 124 Galen, Hipp. Off. Med. 2.21 (18B.773 Kühn); Paulus Nicaeus 104 (193–4 Ieraci Bio); Hummel 1999: 285. 125 Pliny the Elder, NH 24.46. 126 Galen, Loc. Aff. 3.11 (8.197 Kühn). 127 Marcus Diaconus, Vita Porphyri Gazae 80–83: three boys, aged from six to seven years, were rescued from the deep well in a basket. Vita S. Symeonis Stylites Minoris 149 (I 135 = II 159, Van den Ven 1962/1970) tells about a child fallen into a very

286  Lutz Alexander Graumann deep well and rescued by roping it up. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Hist.Relig. 2.17 (ca. 440 ce) reports of another seven-year-old boy drawn up from a well. For more details on healing and saving of children in Theodoret, see Horn 2015. 128 Luke 14:5: “[Jesus asked the Pharisees] If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?” 129 Bradley 2005: 90, citing as authority Petronius, Sat. 42.5: medicus enim nihil aliud est quam animi consolatio. See also Gourevitch 2012: 129. 130 Laes 2011a: 146. 131 Pliny the Elder, NH 7.44. 132 Bradley 2005: 90. As Susan Holman (2015: 255) states: “a child’s survival in Antiquity was often a miracle against the odds”. 133 Mummy AL 25.1.12, Aïn el-Labakha necropolis, Roman Egypt; Dunand and Lichtenberg 2012: 345–6. 134 Medically, this injury would be associated even today with a fatal outcome. Beaty and Kasser 2001: 76, clearly state: “The coexistence of a femoral fracture and a head injury indicates substantial high-energy trauma and has a more guarded prognosis than does either of these injuries alone”. 135 This is especially true in case of P.Oxy. III 475; see above, footnote 50. 136 Waas 2009: 71. 137 The “Série Kappa” of funerary steles from the necropolis of Terenuthis, Kom Abou Billou, commemorates more than fifty individuals, predominantly women and children, who all died on November 8 in 179; see Bingen 1987 and for further references Bingen 1996. Generally on disasters see Toner 2013. 138 1 Cor 13:11; Leyerle 2013: 570. 139 A rare exception, though from an adult’s perspective, may be found in Galen’s Character traits, book I, on children’s characters: “We also see some children rescue others from difficulties, and others push others in dangerous places, poke their eyes out or choke them” (Davies 2013: 143, 20–2). 140 Aesop 211. See above, footnote 91. 141 Theocritus, Idyl. 15.41. 142 On differences between modern and Roman pain in disabilities, see Graham 2013: 257–8. 143 Elm 2009. Two stories from the sixth century present impaired children lamenting in public because of pain in their feet; Gregory of Tours, VM 2.46; 3.58; Laes 2011b: 47. I guess that a truly pain-free lifetime was not possible at all in ancient injured children. Pain endurance was a common part of children’s life. Today, it is a medical rule that fast and effective pain-therapy prevents and reduces long-term psychological disorders due to trauma in children (life-long fear, depression, dissociation, PTSD, behavioral problems); Landolt 2012: 113. 144 Miracles of St. Artemios 28 (Crisafulli and Nesbitt 1997: 154); Holman 2009: 167. 145 This phenomenon of selective perception is not infrequent in daily medical practice today: parents examine their children after injuries more exactly and relate their new findings to the next logical cause, the injury. For other (ancient) medical errors see above, notes 38 and 39.

18 Listening for the voices of two disabled girls in early Christian literature Anna Rebecca Solevåg

Introduction In early Christian literature there are not that many stories about children with disabilities. The few we encounter are mostly in connection with healing narratives relating the miracles of Jesus and other leading figures of the early Church, such as apostles, martyrs and saints. According to Susan Holman, the sick child was a liminal entity in Antiquity, hence, ‘they rarely appear in the ancient text until they either die or experience a “miraculous” healing judged worthy of male narrative’.1 This article is an attempt to listen for the voices of two unnamed girls that we meet in early Christian healing narratives, the Syrophoenician girl in the gospel of Mark (Mark 7:24–30) and Peter’s daughter in the Act of Peter (Cod. Berol. 8502.4). These two girls are multiply disadvantaged, due to age, gender and disability and in the stories they are silent. Yet, these stories may teach us something about children’s experiences in Antiquity, and I will also discuss the possibility of hearing their voices. I use insights from intersectionality in my analysis. In particular, I draw on Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, who argues that the role of the male householder (kyrios in Greek, pater familias in Latin) and his relations to his wife, children and slaves are important for understanding the intersecting power structures of Antiquity. Therefore, gender, age/generation and social status were important identity markers in Greco-Roman society. Schüssler Fiorenza has introduced the terms kyriarchy/kyriarchal/kyriocentric, in order to underscore ‘that domination is not simply a matter of patriarchal, gender-based dualism but of more comprehensive, interlocking, hierarchically ordered structures of discrimination’.2 Ideas about ability and disability also operated within this kyriarchal logic. Ancient Greece and Rome were cultures that revered the strong, unblemished body and it was the young, able-bodied, upper-class male of Roman or Greek descent that came closest to the idealized norm of bodily perfection.3 Conversely, illness was often connected to weakness.4 The Greek term astheneia (ἀσθένεια) means both ‘want of strength, weakness’ and ‘disease, sickness’.5 Over the past decade or so, influence from Child Studies and Disability Studies has brought further insight and new perspectives to the study of disabled and sick children in Antiquity.6 Both fields are concerned in particular with a ‘perspective

288  Anna Rebecca Solevåg from below’, looking at structures of oppression and discrimination, and working to integrate scholarship and activism.7 Julie Faith Parker encourages biblical scholars to use the term ‘childist’ for academic studies of children ‘that positively emphasizes children’s active role in shaping culture’, arguing that the term ‘helps us recognize children as agents in culture and in literature’.8 In a book on disabled characters in the New Testament gospels, Louise J. Lawrence argues that a disability studies approach to ancient literary characters should recast disabled characters as ‘individuals capable of employing strategies to destabilize the stigma imposed upon them and tactical performers who can subversively achieve their social goals’.9 These suggestions resonate with the goals of this volume, which is to look for children’s experience and agency. I will first briefly present the two narratives. The bulk of this chapter will explore what we may glean from these narratives about the ‘everyday life’ of girls with disabilities in the ancient world: I will look at the meaning-making that surrounds their disabilities, and I will consider their place in the household (particularly their relationships with their parents) and beyond. Last, but not least, I will point to spaces in the narratives where it is possible to imagine these girls’ voices.

The Syrophoenician girl and Peter’s daughter The story about the healing of the Syrophoenician girl is found in the gospel of Mark.10 In Mark 7:24–30 a Syrophoenician woman (i.e. from the coastal area around the city of Tyre, north of Palestine) approaches Jesus and pleads for her little daughter who is at home ‘possessed by an unclean spirit’.11 Jesus’ answer is enigmatic: ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs’.12 The mother, however, will not take no for an answer and replies that even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs. Her answer persuades Jesus to heal the daughter in absentia: ‘For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter’, Jesus replies.13 What is unusual about this healing narrative compared to others in the gospels is that the person who is healed, the daughter, is quite peripheral in the narration of the story.14 The focus is on the verbal exchange between Jesus and the mother. The daughter is the topic of Jesus and the woman’s conversation, but Jesus never meets her. Although the woman speaks, the daughter does not – the girl is silent throughout the narrative. The reader receives very little information about her. We are not informed how the demon manifested itself in the girl, only that the woman came home and found the girl lying on the bed and the demon gone. The story about the apostle Peter’s ‘lame’ daughter is found in a Coptic manuscript as a separate text unit titled (at the end) The Act of Peter (AP).15 Many scholars argue that this text unit belongs to the lost beginning of the apocryphal Acts of Peter,16 a Greek work from the late second or early third century ce.17 The story about Peter’s daughter starts at a gathering on a Sunday. Peter, who is known and sought for his healing abilities, is asked why he has not healed his own daughter, who is paralyzed. ‘It is apparent to God alone why her body is not healthy’,18 is Peter’s answer, but he adds, ‘God was not weak or unable’.19 To prove this point, Peter heals his daughter. In front of the crowds, he asks her to

Listening for the voices of two disabled girls  289 rise and walk towards him and, to the amazement of all those present, she does so. But then he bids her to return to her place, for, as he says, ‘this is beneficial for you and for me’.20 The girl walks back to her place and immediately becomes paralyzed again. The crowd laments and protests against this turn of events, but Peter has an explanation. The reason she is ‘lame’ is that when she was 10, she became so beautiful that she was a stumbling-block to many men. One man in particular, Ptolemy, was so smitten after seeing the girl bathing that he wanted to marry her. The parents turned down his marriage offer, because the mother was not persuaded.21 ‘He sent for her many times, he could not cease [...]’, the narrator tells us.22 Unfortunately, the following part of the story is obscure, because two pages are missing from the manuscript. After the lacuna, Ptolemy (or his slaves) returns the girl to outside her parents’ house, Peter and his wife find their daughter there and discover that she is paralyzed. ‘We picked her up, praising the Lord who had saved his servant from defilement [and] pollution and [destruction],’ Peter recalls.23 Apparently, Ptolemy must have abducted the girl, probably intending to make her his by force, yet somehow had his plans thwarted by the girl becoming paralyzed. There is a hint about this event later in the text, when a divine voice speaks to Ptolemy in a vision: ‘God did not give his vessels for corruption and pollution. But it was necessary for you, since you believed in me, that you not defile my virgin, whom you should recognize as your sister’.24 Ptolemy regrets his actions, crying so much that he becomes blind. He is healed by Peter, and at his death leaves a portion of land to Peter’s daughter, which Peter sells, giving the money to the poor. From both a childist perspective and a disability perspective, these stories are unpleasant and problematic. These children seem to be passive victims of the decisions that are made by the adults around them. Their parents make choices on their behalf and never stop to ask the children what they want. As Holman noted, sick children appear in the text insofar as they shed light on the male heroes of the narrative, and these two narratives clearly focus on the powerful abilities to heal (and un-heal) by Jesus and Peter. Disability activists and scholars have pointed to the extremely problematic heritage of the healing stories in the Christian tradition. These narratives have supported a theology that connected disability with sin and justified suffering as God’s will.25 Sharon Betcher calls it ‘the terror of the miracle tradition’ and argues that, ‘these stories performatively engender the objectification of persons living with disabilities’.26 These two girls probably never existed. Although there may be a historical encounter between Jesus and a Syrophoenician woman behind Mark’s narrative account, it is impossible to know to what extent Mark is true to the historical event. The story about Peter’s daughter is in all likelihood completely fictional. Therefore, these stories do not tell us about the real experiences of girls who were perceived as demon-possessed or labelled as paralyzed. What these stories can tell us, however, is how, when and possibly why early Christian narratives are concerned with children with disabilities. What kind of experiences led to the construction of such narratives? In what follows, I will try to unmask the cultural and literary scripts that operate in the narratives, but also explore the possibility of hearing counter-narratives and more subversive voices.

290  Anna Rebecca Solevåg

Giving meaning to illness The girls’ disabilities are at the centre of both of these narratives. Disability scholars David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, have pointed out that disability often functions as ‘narrative prosthesis’ in literature. Disability engenders narrative because difference requires an explanation: ‘the very need for a story is called into being when something has gone amiss with the known world – the tale seeks to comprehend that which has stepped out of line’.27 The healing of the Syrophoenician daughter is a typical example of the use of disability as ‘narrative prosthesis’. Jesus’ miraculous healing dissolves the ‘problem’ and sets the world right again. The story of Peter’s daughter also functions as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder put it – that disability demands a story, it demands an explanation. Here, the daughter’s disability is a ‘problem’ for some of Peter’s followers, who question the apostle’s ability to perform miracles and hence to represent an almighty God. Peter’s answer underlines the power, but also the inscrutability of God: ‘It is apparent to God alone why her body is not healthy. Know, then, that God is not weak or unable to give his gift to my daughter’.28 What can we say about these girls’ illnesses or disabilities? How are they configured within their own cultural framework, and what kinds of explanations for the ‘problem’ of difference do these narratives offer? The Syrophoenician daughter’s illness is first called an ‘unclean spirit’ (πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον, Mark 7:25) and subsequently referred to as ‘the demon’ (τὸ δαιμόνιον, Mark 7:26; 29; 30). The belief that demon-possession could cause illness and impairment was widespread in Jewish as well as other ancient Mediterranean cultures.29 It is important to be aware that the ancient category of demonpossession does not equal our modern label of mental illness. Without attempting any retrospective diagnosis, it is clear that the symptoms displayed by the demonpossessed characters in the canonical gospels alone, point to a range of possible illnesses and disabilities, including blindness, deafness, cerebral palsy, epilepsy and various learning disabilities and mental disabilities.30 The demon-possessed in the gospels seem to be aligned with the forces of Satan31 and often behave in a hostile fashion towards Jesus.32 This is in line with ancient Jewish ideas that connected demon-possession to unclean or evil forces.33 Hence, to be labelled as demonpossessed would be stigmatizing in ancient Palestine. Perhaps this is the reason the mother has left the girl at home. Is she ashamed of her daughter’s condition and does not take her out? From other gospel stories we know that parents could be blamed for their children’s illnesses. In John 9:2, the disciples ask Jesus about a man who was born blind: ‘Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ However, as noted in the introduction, focusing solely on social stigmatization tends to lose sight of the subversive interpretations a person with a disability and/ or their family may give to a certain non-normative bodily state.34 Although the Syrophoenician mother seems to agree with Jesus that her daughter is demonpossessed and in need of healing, she turns around the very hostile saying by Jesus that the children should be fed first, then the dogs. I argue that the saying holds an extra layer of meaning in that ‘dogs’ is not only a metaphor for the Syrophoenician ethnic group, pitted against the children, i.e. the Jews.35 ‘Dog’

Listening for the voices of two disabled girls  291 also plays on the cultural perception of the girl’s illness. The term ‘dog’ was used metaphorically as a pejorative epithet in Greco-Roman as well as Jewish culture.36 Dogs were associated with voracious appetites, they were scavengers, defiled that which was holy, aroused fear and were shameless.37 However, dog-like traits could also be portrayed in positive terms, for example to denote tenacity and loyalty in people who functioned as guardians.38 The demon-possessed characters in the New Testament are often described with animal-like features. First, their speech is aberrant in a variety of ways: some are mute, others scream uncontrollably and others again speak out of place.39 When a demon-possessed person speaks (or screams) it is the demon that speaks, not the possessed person. Hence, healing from demon-possession is quite literally a re-acquiring of voice.40 In addition to their voice, demon-possessed characters in the gospels also have other dog-like traits. They seem to be narratively constructed on the edges of society, sometimes residing outside the village, among the tombs and so on.41 The Gerasene demoniac in Mark 5 even needs to be chained, because he is superhumanly strong. If these resemblances between dogs and the demon-possessed reverberate in the dialogue between Jesus and the Syrophoenician mother, it becomes even clearer that the mother is reinterpreting her daughter’s illness as something less hostile and more integrated, even useful for society, than Jesus initially does. The image the mother conjures up, of the dogs under the table, eating the crumbs that the children spill, depicts a happy symbiosis of children and dogs, rather than a scarcity of resources that pits one group against the other. Keith Bradley has shown that it was quite common for children in Antiquity to keep dogs as pets.42 The mother’s reply seems to have more of a pet relationship between dogs and children in mind. The Syrophoenician daughter’s ‘diagnosis’ of demon-possession, seems culturally alien from a modern, biomedical point of view. Peter’s daughter’s illness, may at first glance appear more familiar, but the cultural consequences of being ‘lame’ were quite different in Antiquity. Peter’s daughter is referred to as paralyzed [sēq] and ‘crippled’ [essosht], and she is lying in a corner.43 Later in the story we learn that her paralysis has affected one whole side of her body and that she is ‘dried up’ (shooue).44 The category of ‘lameness’ was a common one in Antiquity, but it has fussy borders, ranging from a slight limp to someone who could not walk at all.45 Although the issue of mobility (and hence earning an income) must have been a challenge for poorer parts of the population (see e.g. John 5:1–9), slaves were probably routinely used for the transportation needs of mobility-impaired people. Plutarch mentions a ‘lame’ engineer of siege-engines who was employed by Pericles. The engineer acquired the nickname Periphoretus because he was carried everywhere on a litter (φορεῖον).46 In the kyriarchal economy of the Roman Empire, a virgin was a prospective wife, and in this story we see Peter’s daughter framed in precisely this manner: she is a beautiful virgin who receives marriage offers. Her paralysis seems to have put an end to this. Is it because her disability has rendered her ‘unmarriageable’? As argued above, mobility may not have been much of an issue if you were well-todo. According to Martha L. Rose, ‘lameness’ in ancient Greece was an aesthetic matter rather than a matter of physical disability. Symmetry was highly valued as an important aspect of beauty for both men and women. Asymmetry would

292  Anna Rebecca Solevåg devalue a bride, but not everyone could afford to consider aesthetics. As Rose argues, for a woman, the primary role was childbearing and child rearing, and a missing or less functional limb did not take away the potential to fulfil that role.47 That Peter is put on the spot and asked why he has not healed his daughter, probably reveals an ‘everyday life’ experience. Although Christians heard the healing narratives from the gospels and believed in a powerful God, it must have been a common experience that children and adults with disabilities in their believing communities were not healed. The story of Peter’s daughter negotiates this conflict in their belief system. Peter’s explanation reveals a theological effort to explain and give a positive meaning to his daughter’s situation. Although the abduction incident happened when the girl was 10, Peter also recalls a vision he had at the time of the girl’s birth in which God predicts that she will ‘wound many souls if her body remains healthy’.48 Essentially, Peter claims that his daughter’s situation is good and that it is wanted by God. He maintains that God is powerful, and argues that God saved her from an even worse fate, from ‘defilement and pollution’ – that is, sexual dishonour. In this text, virginity is a more important bodily asset than the ability to walk. Although the text preserves a positive interpretation of Peter’s daughter’s illness, it reveals a kyriarchal bias: it is the daughter who needs to carry the burden of being a temptress in her body for the rest of her life. Ptolemy, the abductor, on the other hand, is healed from blindness by Peter when he repents his sinful action of lusting after the girl, even though it was his eyes, seeing the girl bathing, that led to lust, kidnapping and (possibly) sexual abuse. In both the narratives I have presented, there are cultural constraints that frame these children’s disabilities in a certain way. The parent characters in the narratives, Peter and his wife and the Syrophoenician woman, nonetheless seem to reframe the children’s situation, casting their disabilities in a more positive light.

The (somewhat) privileged position of a daughter I would like to explore further the relationships between these children and their families and wider communities. What would it have been like to be a female disabled child in the kyriarchal world of the Roman Empire? Although a girl’s position was subordinate in relation to parents, and usually less powerful visà-vis a brother, it was far superior to any slaves in the household.49 A girl born with a deformity or disability was at risk of being exposed to die, as were boys, but as Rose argues, infanticide was not a standard practice for babies born with a malformation.50 If a daughter acquired a disability through injury or illness, it would change the dynamics of the family situation, but in a variety of ways, depending on the social perception of her illness, her need for care, the family’s economic situation, etc. As noted above, a disabled girl in a household with slaves could probably depend on them for extra care, transport and any other needs. Peter acts as a powerful pater familias in the Act of Peter, making decisions on behalf of his daughter. He commands her to walk and to lie down again, and later in the narrative he also makes the decision to give his daughter’s money to the poor. But his wife is also present in the story and seems to have been the one who

Listening for the voices of two disabled girls  293 makes the decision not to let their daughter marry when she receives the marriage proposal at age 10. Perhaps we see here a glimpse of mothers who tried to hold back when their daughters received marriage proposals at too early an age? Peter claims that the daughter’s paralysis is ‘beneficial’ not only for the daughter, but for himself as well.51 In what way is the daughter’s situation beneficial to Peter? It was shameful for the whole family if a daughter was sexually violated. It was the male head of the household, the kyrios, who was responsible for keeping wife, children and slaves under control, and for protecting the sexual honour of women in his family. God’s ‘rescue operation’ spares Peter the shame that would have befallen him if his daughter had been raped. The story of Verginia, told by Livy, has clear similarities to that of Peter’s daughter.52 According to Livy, the statesman Verginius killed his own daughter in a desperate attempt to prevent her from being abducted and raped.53 In contrast to Peter, there is no Syrophoenician father present in the story as Mark tells it. It is not necessary to assume that this is a household with no father – the explanation could be literary or narratological. Yet widowhood was common, due to the typical age difference between husband and wife,54 and the Syrophoenician mother may be understood as a widow and thus the head of her household. Scholars who have studied this text disagree on whether the Syrophoenician should be read as a woman in dire need, desperately pleading to Jesus for help, or a wealthy Greek-speaking woman from urban Tyre, whose social class is above Jesus, a rural Jew of the working class.55 The girls seem to be the only children of their households. The narratives say nothing about siblings or other children with whom they might have had a relationship. The Syrophoenician girl is a child, and like Jairus’ daughter in Mark 5:21–43 she is referred to as θυγάτριον, the diminutive of θυγάτηρ, daughter. Jairus’ daughter is 12, and we may assume that the Syrophoenician girl is not older. She is later referred to as παιδίον, which means little or young child.56 In fact, these two diminutives correlate with a third one in the narrative. The term both Jesus and the woman use for dog, is κυνάριον, the diminutive of κύων. For girls, childhood ended with puberty, the onset of which was considered to occur between the ages of 12 and 14.57 We meet Peter’s daughter both before and after puberty. We do not know how old Peter’s daughter is when the healing and un-healing occurs, but she is older than 10, since that is her age when she became paralysed. She is referred to as a beautiful virgin, so she seems to be fairly young still. Female sexuality is more clearly an issue in this story than the other one. The daughter has been seen naked and found attractive by Ptolemy, and around the lacuna we see the contours of a story about (attempted) rape. This part of the story raises questions about the vulnerability to sexual violence that girls with disabilities presumably were exposed to. Although the daughter’s paralysis somehow rescues the girl from rape in our story, it does not seem like a likely scenario. Statistics from the UN show that women and girls with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to physical abuse such as rape and domestic violence worldwide.58 Since this is a cross-cultural phenomenon today, it is likely that women with disabilities were victims of violence also in Antiquity.

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The household and beyond The parental household seems to be the primary space of these girls, which may not have been very different from the situation of most girls in Antiquity whose virginity mattered. Note that there are no siblings in these narratives: they seem to be the ‘only child’ of their parents. Probably due to literary constraints, we are presented with a more condensed family situation than the typical ancient household, which had siblings, slaves, and family members outside the ‘nuclear family’. Older siblings, as well as extended family and slaves, must have routinely served as the caregivers of disabled children in Antiquity.59 The Syrophoenician girl is at home – we do not know whether she is alone or in someone’s care – while the mother seeks Jesus’ help. The reason for her domestic confinement is not made clear: is she hidden away or is she too ill to come with her mother? The only thing we learn is the state in which she is found when the mother returns: she is lying on the bed, with the demon gone (Mark 7:30). As noted, Mark tells us only about the mother and the daughter of the Syrophoenician household. If there were slaves, siblings or other family members to care for the demon-possessed girl, they are left out of the story. The mother’s positive spin on children’s relation to dogs, however, hints at domestic animals’ role in the household as playmates and guardians for children. This relationship to dogs may well have been part of a common experience for children in Antiquity, whether able-bodied or disabled.60 Perhaps Mark intentionally constructs this family as one that seems vulnerable, consisting of only mother and disabled daughter, in order to highlight Jesus’ compassion for them. Although unwilling to help initially, Jesus does heal her and thus appears, together with his itinerant disciples, to represent a community that cares for this family’s wellbeing. Peter’s daughter remains at home in her father’s house even though she is clearly of marriageable age (after all, she has already received one marriage proposal). Marriage does not seem to be an option any longer: she will remain under his patria potestas and go on living in her father’s household for the rest of her life. This daughter, however, is also depicted outside the household. She is present at the Sunday gathering. It is unclear whether this takes place outside, in the public space of the city, or inside, in the semi-private space of a house-church. Either way, the girl is there, and this presupposes that a decision has been made (by the girl herself or by Peter and his wife) to bring her and include her in a setting of communal worship. Although this seems to be a safe space – she is there with her father, and the crowds seem to be very sympathetic towards her – it is also the girl’s presence in a public setting that has rendered the girl vulnerable. It was at a public bath house that she was seen by Ptolemy for the first time, and after the abduction she is left outside her parents’ house, unable to move. It has been noted that in ancient myths, virgins are vulnerable to rape when they are outside the family house, and thus away from their father’s protection.61 Peter’s daughter, then, is publically more visible and present than the Syrophoenician daughter, but also more vulnerable because of this. According to Peter, the kidnapping happened when the girl was 10. That Ptolemy seeks to marry a prepubertal girl, is probably intended to provoke the

Listening for the voices of two disabled girls  295 reader and show how much Ptolemy is driven by sexual lust. He is a wealthy man and a member of the Christian community, so he is presumably a good prospective husband for the (only?) daughter of the leader of the community, but his timing is wrong. The narrative plot of the kidnapping bears resemblance to what was known in Antiquity as abduction marriage, raptus.62 A raptus involved the abduction of an unmarried girl by a man who had not made a formal betrothal agreement with her. The assumption that the union had been consummated would then force the consent of the girl’s parents to marriage.63 Hence, the hoped-for result of a raptus scheme was that the abductor would marry his victim. Ptolemy does not complete the raptus scheme of offering to marry the girl, although it is clear that this was his original intent. As noted, a woman with some sort of mobility impairment may well have been able to perform the expected duties of a matrona, caring for the household and bearing children. However, it is clear from the narrative that marriage is not an option after the paralysis; the daughter remains unmarried because of this episode. And she is still called a virgin. The logic of the raptus scenario is that the girl does not necessarily have to be raped. Her reputation is ruined simply by the possibility that she is no longer a virgin.64 In this story, Peter is quite insistent that the daughter was ‘saved from violation and defilement’. Paralysis becomes the foregrounded reason for the girl’s unmarried state, concealing and/or denying the fact that the raptus scheme was successful.

Girls with agency and voice? Up to this point, I have tried to offer glimpses of the everyday life of children with disabilities through a discussion of the framing and reframing of their illnesses, their positions and relationships in the household as daughters, and their participation in wider communities of interaction. But can we hear their voices? Is it possible to say anything about the choices and actions that young girls with the experience of having non-normative bodies would make? The narratives do not include their voices, the girl’s remain silent on the pages of the text. Nevertheless, I argue that both these narratives have a space in the narrative where the girls’ own voice can be imagined by the reader and even becomes decisive for the truth claims of the story. In both stories, the parents are absent when the healing/un-healing occurs: the Syrophoenician mother is with Jesus when the daughter is healed, and Peter’s daughter is paralysed for the first time when she is away from home, having been abducted by Ptolemy. When the Syrophoenician mother returns and finds her daughter on the bed, how does she know that the girl is healed? Although she is silent in the text, to be freed from the demon means that she can speak. How can Peter and his wife know what happened at Ptolemy’s house? Both narratives seem to rely on the girls’ voices, that they would recount their experience to their parents. These stories can be considered ‘true stories’ only if the reader imagines that the girls themselves told their parents what had happened to them. Child studies and disability studies encourage us to look not only for constraints but also for subversive potential. To me, the narrative possibility that the girls told their own stories to their parents opens up a space to think of girls

296  Anna Rebecca Solevåg with disabilities as ‘tactical performers who can subversively achieve their social goals’65 and as ‘active in shaping culture’.66 The Syrophoenician girl regains her own voice when she claims that the demon is gone. Peter’s daughter shapes the story of her life by shifting the conversation from disability to virginity. In Chapter 2 of this volume, Ville Vuolanto points out that agency occurs not only when a choice is made contrary to expectation, but also if one chooses to act in accordance with cultural norms. Perhaps there is, then, agency in Peter’s daughter’s actions when she willingly does her father’s bidding, rises from her place in the corner of the room and goes back to lie down there. Maybe it is our own cultural assumptions that makes it counterintuitive to think that a girl may choose to stay under her father’s authority and to stay unhealed. From a Christian conviction about the superiority of virginity, which was growing in popularity at this time, the choice to stay unmarried was considered the ‘better’ choice. Moreover, a young girl in Antiquity, observing the harsh realities of marriage and childbearing, may not have found it so attractive to be in a submissive, perhaps abusive marriage, suffer the pain of childbirth and the toll on the body of multiple pregnancies to bear children who may not grow up. Perhaps Peter’s daughter is content in her community of believers, and perhaps, this community gives her a space not only to be cared for but also to do service. In the New Testament she could find inspiration from foremothers like Prisca, who taught new converts (Acts 18:26), and Tabitha, who sewed garments for the needy in the community (Acts 9:32–43).

Conclusion What glimpses of everyday life for disabled girls have these short stories offered us? First, the narratives, focused as they are on the girls’ disabilities, revealed the constraints of the social understanding of the girls’ ailments. To be demonpossessed was particularly stigmatizing in Jewish and Christian circles because demons were perceived to be aligned with the devil. For a young girl with some form of mobility impairment, marriage prospects may have been scarce. However, I have tried to show that these negative societal understandings are countered by the more positive interpretations of the girls’ conditions, voiced by the parent characters in the narratives. Second, I have argued that the household provided these girls with support and a safe space. The relationships to parents seem to have been the most important, and I have noted the powerful position of the kyriarchal father in Act of Peter for good and for ill. The parents are the primary caretakers and they stand up for them publicly to defend the positive meaning that they give to their daughters’ life stories. Third, I have also pointed to a wider web of relationships that these literary characters seem to have. We catch glimpses of interaction between disabled children and domestic animals, with slaves and with fellow Christians. Finally, I have argued that childist and disability perspectives encourage us to take an imaginative leap: even if there is no textual evidence about the agency of these two girls, we should allow for and actively imagine the possibility that children with disabilities were capable of employing strategies that destabilized

Listening for the voices of two disabled girls  297 stigma and were active in shaping culture. By approaching these texts from a perspective of experience and agency, we can observe the complexity and point to some of the nuances. By letting go of an able-bodied assumption that to live with a disability in Antiquity must necessarily have been only about hardship and stigmatization, it is possible also to hear the counter-narratives within these early Christian stories. What do we hear when we listen for the voices of these girls? Although they are silent girls in the narratives, I have argued that the most important truth claims in each story – that the demon-possessed Syrophoenician girl was healed; and that Peter’s daughter was not ‘defiled’ – hinges on the girls’ own voices. To narrate one’s own life story is a basic need, for children as well as for adults, for people with disabilities as well as for the temporarily able-bodied. Everyone deserves the chance to tell their story and have someone listen to it.

Notes 1 Holman 2009: 144–5. 2 Schüssler Fiorenza 1999: ix. For intersectionality, see Aasgaard in the present volume, p. 321. 3 As we see e.g. in Aristotle Pol., 1252–1260. 4 Stiker 1999: 43; Albl 2007: 146. 5 Liddell, Scott and Jones 1996, s.v. 6 Parker 2013; Betsworth 2015; Rose 2003; Laes 2011b. 7 Laes, Goodey and Rose 2013: 4–5. 8 Parker 2013: 16–17. 9 Lawrence 2013: 2. 10 Mark was written about 65–70 ce. Provenance is unknown, but evidence suggests either Rome or the Greek-speaking East. Collins 2007: 8–14. 11 Mark 7:25. All English Bible quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version. 12 Mark 7:27. 13 Mark 7:29. 14 Ringe 2001: 87. Betsworth argues to the contrary: although the daughter is off-stage, the focus is quite clearly on the girl. See Betsworth 2010: 130–1. 15 The Coptic text with translations into English is published in Parrott 1979. 16 See e.g. Schneemelcher 1991: 278–9; Klauck 2008: 106–7. 17 Klauck suggests c. 200, Bremmer dates it between 180–200. Klauck 2008: 84; Bremmer 1998: 18. 18 AP 129:10–12. All English quotations from The Act of Peter (AP) are from Parrott 1979. References are to pages and lines in the Coptic manuscript, Berolinensis (Cod. Berol.) 8502. AP is the last of four manuscripts in the little codex, and covers pages 128–41. Pages 133–4 are missing from the manuscript. 19 AP 129: 14–15. 20 AP 131: 4–5. 21 AP 132: 8–18. 22 AP 132: 18–19. 23 AP 135: 10–13. 24 AP 137: 2–9. 25 Eiesland 1994: 74; Belser and Morrison 2011: 154. 26 Betcher 2013: 165. 27 Mitchell and Snyder 2001: 53. 28 AP 129:10–15. 29 Wainwright 2006: 126; Avalos 1999: 62–3.

298  Anna Rebecca Solevåg 30 “A demoniac who was mute” (Matt 9:32), “a demoniac who was blind and mute” (Matt 12:22), a demoniac who needs to be kept in chains, “always howling and bruising himself with stones” (Mark 5:5), a boy with a spirit who has fits: “he fell on the ground and rolled about, foaming at the mouth” (Mark 9:20). 31 Jesus is himself accused of being possessed by Beelzebul, the ruler of demons, i.e. Satan, Mark 3:22–27. 32 See e.g. Mark 1:24–26; 5:7. 33 Avalos 1999: 63. 34 Cf. Lawrence 2013: 3. I argue elsewhere that when Jesus is accused of being possessed by Beelzebul, the ruler of demons (Mark 3:22–27), Jesus’ family offers an alternative “diagnosis” which is less stigmatizing, namely madness. In the Greek medical tradition, being “out of one’s mind” was considered a physical illness that could be healed with food and rest. See Solevåg 2014. 35 The ethnic reference becomes explicit in Matthew, see Matt 15:21–28. 36 Nanos 2009; Cadwallader 2005; Ringe 2001: 90. 37 Nanos 2009: 458–9. 38 Nanos 2009: 457. 39 For examples of aberrant speech, see e.g. Matt 9:32; 12:22; Mark 1.26; 5:5; 9:17. 40 See e.g. Mark 5:6–10. 41 See e.g. Mark 5:3. 42 Bradley 1998. 43 AP 129:4–5. 44 AP 135:7–9. Cf. Matt 12:10/Luke 6:6, where Jesus heals a man with a shriveled (ξηρός) hand. 45 Rose 2003: 13. 46 Plutarch, Pericles 27.3–4. Inscriptional evidence from the Asclepian cult tells of suppliants carried to the shrine by servants. See Edelstein and Edelstein 1998: 236–7. I have argued elsewhere that the paralytic man in Mark 2:1–10 is carried by his slaves, not his friends. See Solevåg 2013. 47 Rose 2003: 46–7. However, drawing on ancient medical writings, Meghan Henning has offered the intriguing interpretation that Peter’s daughter’s paralysis may have been understood as a sign of barrenness. See Henning 2015. 48 AP 132: 2–4. 49 For slavery in Antiquity, see e.g. Bradley 1994; Glancy 2002; Harrill 2006; Harper 2011. 50 Rose 2003: 47–8. 51 AP 132: 5; 14. 52 As Klauck also notes. Klauck 2008: 107. 53 Livy, Ab urbe cond. 3.44–48. 54 Women typically married younger than men, and an age difference of ten years was not uncommon. D’Ambra, 2007: 4. 55 The feminist New Testament scholar Sharon Ringe embodies this diversity in her own scholarly development – in an essay from the 1980s she argued that the woman was a poor widow, while in a later essay she vouches for the woman’s affluent status. See Ringe 2001. 56 Liddell, Scott and Jones 1996, s.v. 57 Horn and Martens 2009: 18. 58 According to the United Nations, women and girls with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to physical abuse such as rape and domestic violence worldwide. See the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Diasabilities, online at www.un.org/ disabilities/convention/facts.shtml. 59 Rose 2003: 27. 60 See Bradley 1998. 61 Deacy 1997: 44–5.

Listening for the voices of two disabled girls  299 62 63 64 65 66

Dixon 2001a: 51–2. Evans Grubbs 1989: 61. Evans Grubbs 1989: 62. Lawrence 2013: 2. Parker 2013: 17.

19 Children and the experience of death in Late Antiquity and the Byzantine world Cornelia Horn

Introduction Studies in the ancient history of childhood have already examined the material, art historical, epigraphical, and literary evidence that allows us access to aspects of the impact of the loss of life when it affected children in Antiquity.1 The data has been explored in order to obtain insights for instance into the demographics of the classical world or the role of the age of the deceased on the development of burial customs and commemorative practices. Thus far, scholars have paid attention in particular to the evidence that is available for the classical periods of ancient Greece and Rome. This contribution refocuses our investigation to the late antique and Byzantine periods in the Mediterranean world and especially its eastern regions and beyond.2 With no greater intent than to glean some nuggets of relevant evidence, this chapter considers primarily the roughly one thousand years that extend from Late Antiquity to the middle and late Byzantine times. In understanding the significance of child mortality in Antiquity we are faced with indirect data, as children’s understanding of the death of their peers and of adults in their surroundings is not supported by direct evidence. Still, it is possible to examine a few sources that reveal how others, in particular, adult relatives, related to, and experienced the death of a child. This chapter considers what late antique and Byzantine sources reveal about two fundamental aspects of the broader topic of the intertwining of childhood and death. First, it analyzes the representations of a subset of situations in which infants or young children died, examining what such evidence might reveal about the adults’ perceptions of such situations and, to the extent possible, also what a child’s view of death may have been. The second focus of the present chapter is to address children’s experiences of the deaths of others in the world around them, particularly of those with whom the children were connected in more intimate ways, be they parents, siblings, friends, or peers, or of models held up for imitation, either from the secular realm or from the world of religious tradition and practice. The present chapter is primarily interested in examining sources that deal with infants and younger children, approximately up to the age of seven, even if it is not possible to restrict the lens exclusively to those of the youngest age.

Childen and the experience of death  301

The death of infants Throughout the ancient world, the survival of children into adulthood was a significant concern for parents.3 Survival rates for newborns were particularly low: only half of all newborn children lived to see their fifth birthday.4 Some rather conservative estimates place the rate of death for newborns at about 28 deaths per hundred births.5 Concomitant to the deaths of children was the mortality rate for mothers during or shortly after parturition. The phenomenon of childhood mortality crossed all class, ethnic, and gender boundaries. It shaped the view of childhood itself as liminal, vulnerable, dependent, and, in some ways, as lying on the fringe of human existence.6 Reasons for the premature death of infants are identified in ancient texts as well as in modern scholarly literature. According to Gregory of Nyssa, infants died prematurely through being subjected to exposure, stifling, or disease.7 Hagiographical literature presents numerous glimpses into the perceptions of gender and family roles in response to the not infrequent occurrences of failed pregnancies and both infant and maternal mortality. The Coptic Life of the sixthcentury Abba Aaron, a monk at Philae in Egypt, recounts that through Aaron’s miraculous agency a mother survived her child’s delivery only to deliver a stillborn child, who was vivified in turn through a second miracle worked through contact between the dead baby’s corpse and soil from Abba Aaron’s doorstep. In this account, the child’s father sought out the holy man with full confidence in his divine power to preserve and restore life.8 Expectations pertaining to the relative importance of a child’s survival here differed along the lines of gender and variations in generational layers within a family. The mother’s parents were grieved that their grandchild was stillborn, yet their daughter had to remind them of the danger to her own life that the delivery had caused her.9 With the depiction of the father’s strenuous efforts to have his son brought to life, this vignette illustrates the considerable energy which parents might expend when trying to ensure that their offspring would survive so that their family would be able to continue on into the future. Additional stories in Abba Aaron’s Life feature the topos of a father imploring the saint successfully in order to restore the life of their ‘only child’ who had fallen dead. This characterization bespeaks the societal significance of the child as the successor of the father’s line and the hope of most married men in procuring labor for the family economy and support in old age.10 The gendering of children’s roles in the late antique family means that boys were held as being of greater importance for both the status and economic potential of the father. Thus, it is no surprise that, in all of the accounts, Abba Aaron is asked to work his grace on newborn boys. I have not yet discovered a comparable story in any ancient source that tells of a father’s heart-wrenching pleas for the reanimation of a stillborn girl. Among Christians, the stages in the early life of a child in the ancient world, that is, birth, baptism, and for many children also death and burial, were the central events that were ritualized, leading to, and defining the social completion of the young person. Among a wider range of social groups, experiences of death often

302  Cornelia Horn cumulated in the participation in rituals accompanying the burial of members of the local community. Some studies of Byzantine childhood have considered the impact of social and ritual practices upon, or in relation to infants’ deaths. These are reflected especially in burial customs for young children that are in evidence for the middle and late Byzantine periods on the basis of archaeological data.11 Prayer accompanied and surrounded the life of a Christian child up to the moment of death. One of the first instances of a child’s exposure to prayer was on the occasion of its parents’ prayer at its birth. The Apology of Aristides from the first half of the second century preserves evidence that “when a child has been born to one of [the Christians], they give thanks to God.” Yet also in the case of the death of a child, prayer accompanied the child’s passing away. Aristides informed his readers that “if... [the child] happens to die in childhood,” which is not limited to the time immediately following birth, “[the parents] give thanks to God the more, as for one who has passed through the world without sins.”12 While one might see the reference to thanksgiving as an allusion to baptism, this is not a necessary explanation. One may quite as well understand the two occurrences of thanksgiving in this text as an illustration of the parents’ prayer of thanksgiving for their child, one in gratitude for receiving the child from God’s hands, and the other as a prayer of gratitude that the child returned directly into God’s hand, given that no sin separated her or him from God. In Late Antiquity, Christian parents not infrequently delayed the baptism of their children. In later centuries, the timeframe for when to baptize children became more strongly regulated. In the Byzantine world, children were to be baptized on the fortieth day after birth, on the same day at which the mother who had survived childbirth was undergoing official purification and was being readmitted into the church.13 If there was a risk of death for the newly born child, baptism could be administered already on the eighth day.14 Following birth, infants in Late Antiquity were nursed typically either by their own mothers or by nurses. Although this was a practice that was intimate, nourishing and providing care and protection, nursing was not without risks for the life of the infant. Nursing babies might die prematurely because of their mother’s bad health, the nurse’s neglectful treatment of the child, or harmful environmental conditions that might include polluted air or natural causes such as disease.15 Civil and Canon law, including the Justinian Code, turned their attention to regulating against not only infanticide by abandonment or exposure, but also against voluntary neglect and refusal to nurse resulting in death.16 Historians of early childhood have paid considerable attention to questions of children’s premature death and their risk of being exposed right after birth.17 In the Greco-Roman household, one immediate threat to an infant’s life rested in a father’s right to exercise his patria potestas, that is, his legal authority as the male head of a given household. This right included the power over the life and death of his children (ius vitae ac necis).18 Such power was most relevant when deciding whether or not to accept a newborn child into the family. Although this authority was real, a father’s decision to kill his children, especially beyond the immediate post-partum period, was of rare occurrence in Late Antiquity and thereafter.

Childen and the experience of death  303 Although infanticide and abortion occurred in the ancient world, some Greco-Romans, Jews, and Christians condemned such practices. Deprecation of infanticide is found in the Jewish authors Josephus,19 Ps.-Phocylides,20 in the Sibylline Oracles,21 and in Philo.22 The latter gave a particularly gruesome description in his comments on Exodus 21:22, which discuss the penalties for feticide. Voices like these make it clear that the rejection of such forms of violence against children leading to their death reflected a wider current in Jewish opinion.23 Christian authors who opposed infanticide include Tertullian (ca. 150–220), who knew of laws forbidding the killing of infants.24 Despite his general aversion to marriage and offspring, which he expressed for instance in his Exhortation to Chastity – when speaking of “men [who] have to be forced by law to father a family, because no man in his right sense would ever care to have children” – Tertullian still commented that such a man, who would “cause [his] wife to conceive,” then faced the question of what to do next. When evaluating whether he might “interrupt her pregnancy by the use of drugs,” Tertullian was clear “that we have no more right to murder a baby before birth than after it.”25 Two early councils of the Christian church, at Elvira (306) and at Ancyra (314), discussed the issues of abortion and infanticide directly.26 Canon 63 at the Council of Elvira stated that a baptized Christian who aborted a child or committed infanticide would permanently be excluded from receiving communion, while Canon 68 held that a catechumen who caused the death of her child could receive baptism only at the end of her life. What we find in response to possible actions of abortion and infanticide in these canons were not simply criticisms of behavior that was external to the Christian community, but penalties that were to be applied to such actions within an expanding Christian environment. Independent of its size, sensitivities were developing that recognized the problem of the intended deaths of children as one that affected Christianity from within. Yet the church was not the only site of beginning legislation against infanticide. In the fourth century, Christian emperors began to promulgate legislation against both the exposure of children and infanticide.27 Emperors Valentinian, Valens, and Gratian imposed legal penalties for infanticide, with a law of 374 requiring the death penalty.28

Children’s death and accusations against pagans The concern about children’s death in the ancient world was joined frequently with worries about special hardships which children suffered before dying. One polemical theme which captures aspects of this phenomenon is the articulation of the belief that pagans, unbelievers, or Christian heretics ritually sacrificed children in their gatherings. Such accusations are not rare in the literature. Non-Christians might be accused of practicing magic and sacrilegious rites, of killing children in the midst of the celebrations of their mysteries, and of eating human flesh, including the flesh of those children they had just killed. When articulating such criticisms, ancient authors readily built on biblical models that were available to them, for instance the judgment against the Canaanites found in Wisdom 12:3–6, which claims that the former inhabitants of the Promised Land had committed “detestable practices

304  Cornelia Horn … works of sorcery and unholy rites” that included “their merciless slaughter of children, and their sacrificial feasting on human flesh and blood,” and insisted that divine punishment on ‘these parents who murder helpless lives’ was imminent. Early Christian biblical commentators developed further such ideas of charging the ‘other’ with accusations of killing children in ritual settings. In his Commentary on the Gospel of John, dated to around 400, Theodore of Mopsuestia expounded on John 16:2 and presumed that practices of the Borborians, characterized by modern scholarship as a gnostic, libertarian sect, were the grounds for which both Jews and pagans persecuted Christians. The pagans, in particular, received the impression that it was not only a law of the Christian church to marry one’s own mother, but also to eat one’s own children.29 Such accusations were passed on and persisted for hundreds of years. Around 850, Ishodad of Merv, at the time bishop of Hadatha on the eastern bank of the Tigris, repeated almost the same accusations.30 The first time one encounters the accusation that Christian heretics sacrificed children ritually in the context of their own Eucharistic celebrations would appear to be in the catechetical writings of Cyril of Jerusalem. In 348, Cyril accused the Montanists of ritually murdering children, cutting them up, and eating them.31 Other fourth-century authors readily repeated such accusations.32 Augustine and Epiphanius both accused Montanists of pricking children with bronze needles and collecting their blood.33 Modern historians understand these accusations to refer to the ritual tattooing of children rather than phlebotomy.34 Yet as a polemical stab directed at ancient audiences the accusation implied that heretics attempted to kill children, not merely decorate them. Emmanouela Grypeou has rightly recognized the cliché of the accusation of slaughtering a child as a Eucharistic offering in heresiological polemic in subsequent centuries. She has called attention to the fact that for different kinds of Christian believers, who interpreted the Eucharist that is being celebrated at the altar on earth as a mystical representation of the true Eucharist celebrated in heaven, the connection between the Eucharistic sacrifice and the sacrifice of a child’s body was not a foreign idea.35 In some literary and artistic evidence, one finds expressions of the thought that contemporaneous with the celebration of the Eucharist on earth the angels in heaven slaughtered a child as they were confecting the true heavenly Eucharist.36 For the Christian imagination, the experience of the death of a child, and not that of any child, but that of Jesus imagined as still being a child, rendered into one shocking symbol the joining of the two central Christian mysteries of God becoming human and of the sacrifice on the cross, as remembered in the Eucharist. There is no evidence on which to assess how such ideas were presented to children in the Christian audiences if they were presented at all. To the extent that children participated in liturgies alongside their parents or other adults, messages of the slaughtering of Christ as a child may have reached young ears and may have created a sense of identification or of horror among them. Yet the thought that death could affect children, Christ included, was already familiar to Christian children, both from everyday life and through their knowledge of biblical stories. Of particular relevance here was the story and the liturgical celebration of the feast of the death of the children of Bethlehem.37

Childen and the experience of death  305 For the project of writing the history of childhood, this set of evidence indicates that polemical and also more widely liturgical evocations of images of children suffering violence at the hands of presumed opponents worked with emotional perceptions of children. Yet it also functioned as carriers of theological ideas and built on an understanding of the child as the perfect embodiment of innocence, who in her, or his involuntary death suffered the greatest injustice. The extent to which this may have contributed to triggering violent actions of retribution among adults against the presumed perpetrators against such innocent children, has to remain the subject of a separate inquiry.

Commemorating children Antiquity celebrated the remembrance of adult lives after their demise and children were commemorated through burial as well. There is significant evidence that is preserved for children’s mortality in epitaph inscriptions. This data includes the ages at which children who had died, including children from lower classes, were commemorated with a durable monument. Among this evidence are inscriptions for the deaths of young slaves who were child actors and dancers who died at five, nine, 10, 11, or 12 years of age.38 This epigraphical evidence also witnesses to the emotional bond and the loss parents felt at the deaths of their children.39 Data connected with children’s burial sites and relevant funeral practices provides important windows on social customs that are prevalent in their respective societies. In the Byzantine world the evidence of Greek and Syriac sources from the early Byzantine period, as well as that derived from bio-archaeological data that is available from sites dating to the middle and later Byzantine times, indicate that the funerary rites and mortuary practices at the burials of adults and minors were similar but not identical.40 Typically, the dead body was washed, perfumed, and wrapped in burial clothes. There is evidence that some children were dressed in outfits they had worn during life. However, it was more common that the burial clothes were made of white linen resembling a swaddling cloth, both in the cases of adults and those of children.41 Following this, the corpse was dressed, and decorated. Next it was laid out for viewing, normally with the head pointing west and the face toward the east, the direction from which the return of Christ at the day of the resurrection was expected. Quite shortly after death, though at times after two or three days had passed by, the funeral took place. For that purpose, the body was transferred from the person’s home to the church. The singing of odes and psalms for the deceased began. The selection of psalms differed, depending on the status and age of the one who had passed away. Different psalms were selected for laypersons, priests, or monks. Children were commemorated with their own set of psalms. From the church building, the corpse was transported to the cemetery and buried. Evidence from middle Byzantine cemeteries shows that in the cases of infants, parents often placed offerings of jewelry or toys in their son’s or daughter’s tomb, likely as tokens of their affection and appreciation, perhaps also in order to express their wish for the children’s protection in the afterlife.

306  Cornelia Horn Given the influence of theological ideas on Byzantine society, whether or not a person was baptized did have an impact on where that person could be buried. Those who had not yet received baptism were excluded from churchsponsored rites. This attitude could affect infants and younger children who had died prematurely and without baptism.42 It is possible that religious and cultural features like this one constitute an explanation for why at some excavation sites archaeologists discovered noteworthy concentrations of the remains of deceased children at times in specialized zones within a given cemetery or in areas outside of the cemetery grounds.43 Frequently, the corpses of minors were inhumed together with those of one or several adults. This cultural practice points to perceptions of close relationships between parents and children and of the strong importance of the family and extended families in children’s lives as well as in their experiences of death; in Byzantium, the family was the most powerful and formative institution in society.44

The afterlives of children and pastoral care for those who stayed behind Views of children’s fate in the afterlife differed, depending on how authors thought about the level of children’s involvement with and subjection to the corruption and sinful life of the world. Syriac poetry from the fourth century envisioned that children who had passed away would receive punishment for their sins by taking up their place next to their parents in Gehenna. A sermon ascribed to Ephraem the Syrian (d. 373 ce), but more likely the work of a poet of his school, describes the horrendous sufferings sinners must endure in the afterlife. In Gehenna, each person’s body will breathe fire and set her or his neighbor aflame. Young and old will be affected alike. Mother and father will be locked into the tiniest, most narrow spaces right next to their children, stumbling upon them, and tripping over them. Parents and children will lose their minds and in their frenzy bite one another, ‘the mother biting her beloved little ones and the father his sons.’45 In this description of the terrors of Gehenna, the motif of cannibalistic meals recurs as well, with claims of the father eating his son, and the mother her beloved children. The poet expanded in particular on the cruelty of the image of the mother consuming the flesh of her offspring. Here the author built on the biblical narrative of two Kings 6:2629, a passage from the story of Ben-Hadad’s siege of Samaria, which mentions that the famine became so great that in their despair mothers forced one another to supply their sons to be cooked and eaten, all the while cheating one another in the process. The Syriac-speaking poet envisioned that just as the women of Samaria boiled their own children, so too in the desperation of being in Gehenna, even formerly tender, and well-disposed mothers will eat their own sons and daughters.46 Without neglecting the need to work through sadness and mourning among those left behind at the death of a child, late antique Christian authors also were able to create more positive visions of children’s existence beyond their death. Several treatises and sermons by early Christian authors reveal the pain parents suffered when their children died unexpectedly as well as the strategies pastors

Childen and the experience of death  307 employed when trying to offer them spiritual guidance in such difficult situations. Examples of consolatory texts that were delivered orally at the death of young children in Greek and Syriac still have considerable value for modern audiences. Representative of this genre in Christian Late Antiquity are works by Gregory of Nyssa and Jacob of Sarugh.47 Consolatory homilies or letters on the death of children frequently mention the physical beauty and goodness of children. One prominent example is one of Gregory of Nyssa’s funerary homilies. Delivered in 385, Gregory commemorated the death of Pulcheria, the seven-year-old daughter of Emperor Theodosius I and Empress Flacilla, who herself had just passed away.48 Attempting to console the father and the crowds of mourners who had gathered at the Church of the Apostles in Constantinople, Gregory drew on a rich array of images that emphasized the little girl’s beauty,49 one which in the case of children was apparently not gendered. Speaking of Abraham’s young son Isaac, Gregory noted how the boy grew like a young sprout and developed into a gorgeous lad so that his parents delighted at the sweet sight of his youthful beauty.50 Yet Pulcheria stands at the center of this homily. While the girl had still been alive, she had been a shining light for her parents. Now the whole city was deprived of a most precious ornament. Gregory compared the little girl to “a young dove,” who had been raised in the imperial nest. With her colorful feathers she “had just learned how to fly” when death snatched her away, Envy having torn her from her parents’ home. Gregory also spoke of the child’s beauty by evoking the image of the “flower bud” which had not fully opened up to shine brightly, but had been promising to do so. Despite “her small size and imperfection, she was surpassing everything else by the glow she exuded.” For Gregory, the proof of the girl’s perfection and excellence rested in what was to be expected from her for the future. One of the contexts in which Gregory situated his funeral sermon on Pulcheria was the commemoration of a devastating earthquake that had destroyed much of the city in the previous year. In comparing the girl’s death to the impact of that earthquake, for Gregory her death had shattered nature’s own building, namely the little girl, who, as he formulated explicitly, “was radiant in beauty and surpassing everything else in her charm and grace.”51 Appropriate to her imperial rank, at her funeral young Pulcheria was carried on a golden bier. Yet at her funeral, as Gregory remarked, all gold seemed to have lost its natural brilliance. The glow of precious stones, garments woven with gold, the glittering of silver, and all the beauty of the light exuded by wax candles had disappeared and turned dark with mourning and sadness. These natural beauties died away, giving expression to the loss of the bright shine of little Pulcheria’s eyes, which had been veiled when death closed the lids of her eyes and darkened the bright redness of her lips.52 When she was dead, the beauty of her body was no longer visible. Nevertheless, the beauty of her soul continued, as Gregory said, especially since it now shone in the festal assembly in heaven.53 Having possessed beauty already on this earth, the little girl would become all the more beautiful in her new home in heaven, since “the eye that sees God is beautiful” and “the mouth that adorns itself with praise of God is lovely.” Moving smoothly from a discussion

308  Cornelia Horn of aspects of the girl’s earthly beauties, Gregory redirected his audience’s attention to a definition of the sources of real, lasting beauty that death could not take away. One notices that Gregory never mentioned baptism in this sermon as a necessary source of cleansing before the child could shine in eternal beauty. Instead, he took recourse to Psalm 8:2, “From the lips of infants and children you have ordained praise” to express God’s unconditional acceptance of little ones. For Gregory, hands that had never committed wrongdoing were beautiful. Beautiful also were the feet that did not walk on the path of wickedness. The beauty of the soul did not come from outward adornment; rather, beauty shone in a soul that was simple and innocent. For Gregory, beauty was a consequence and natural outgrowth of the child’s innocence. Yet the child simply possessed this innocence by virtue of being a child, not as the result of having been baptized. Indeed, Gregory emphasized that the beauty of the little girl’s soul had no attachments whatsoever for which she would have had to appear at court or in front of a judge.54 Given this inner beauty and goodness, she needed to fear neither Hell nor judgment, for there was nothing that would have caused her to have a guilty conscience. Having left behind the burden of corruptibility of the body, little Pulcheria could simply continue to grow in simplicity and purity in God’s presence. To her parents, Gregory presented Sarah, Abraham, and Job as Scriptural exemplars of those who had persisted and excelled in their faith even in the face of the death of their children.55 Syriac literature has preserved a marvelous witness to the pastoral concerns of early Syriac-speaking theologians ministering to parents who had lost a child prematurely. From the pen of the sixth-century Syrian Orthodox poet and author Jacob of Sarugh an extensive corpus of 763 metrical sermons has been preserved. One sermon, memra 189, is entitled “On children who pass away.”56 This text is distinguished by a confident tone of rejoicing and amazement at the victory young children gained through their death. Instead of recommending to mourn the children’s early departure from life, the author invited parents and those concerned to celebrate the death of infants as a victory “without contest” and “without battle” against temptations, sin, and vices,57 a marvelous victory obtained without the pain, anxiety, and suffering that normally accompanied growing up and enduring life through to death at a more advanced age. Like Gregory of Nyssa, Jacob presented and developed the child’s intrinsic beauty as an important theme that characterized and determined the child’s eschatological future. The child, who had died at a young age, was able to gain right away a place in God’s kingdom, or rather, as it is expressed in the Syriac context, a place at the heavenly banquet table.58 For Jacob, the intrinsic beauty with which God created every human being and which the child, who had died young, was able to keep untainted, was the guarantee of the child’s eternal salvation. Yet even more so, children who died young were able to claim a place alongside adult Christians of the highest spiritual ranks at the heavenly feast. In the opening lines, Jacob emphasized that the infant who had died had gained the crown of victory, the same crown ascribed to martyrs, without having to fight the righteous contest. What others had to achieve through hard labor in their struggles on earth, be these spiritual athletes and their feats of righteousness, or

Childen and the experience of death  309 virgins who had overcome struggles against sexual desires, or saints with their contests, or ascetics practicing fasting, the child had achieved simply through the original, God-created beauty she or he was able to preserve in his or her short life before death. Thus, the child who died prematurely was fully equal to any of these saints and ascetics and had attained the same status they had been able to gain. Jacob captured the idea of the beauty of the child’s life with images that were typical for spiritual discourse in Syriac. He compared the young child that had died to a pearl, which during its short life had come up from the waves of the sea, but that now, in all its beauty, was placed in the crown of the king at the heavenly banquet.59 Other images with which Jacob expressed the child’s beauty are shared with Greek rhetoric. Among these is the image of the child as a blossom, a little bud not yet having opened up to full bloom.60 The theme of the child’s beauty permeates the whole memra and is foundational for its message. The young child who has died is marked with great beauty which has no need of any addition. This beauty is grounded in the fact that the child is able, until it sins, to preserve “the beauty that is in the nature of creation.” The important biblical context for Jacob’s perspective here was God’s acts of creating the world and judging it to be “very good as soon as he had created it.” In Jacob’s imagination, “Adam, a child one day old, inherited the garden, though he had not persisted in the work of righteousness.” The decisive point of this verse was not that Adam was cast out of the garden, but rather that he inherited it right from the start. Jacob extended this idea, drawing the parallel to the fate of the infant who passed away at a young age, and wondered how one could “disagree concerning the child, who died while young, that he should not inherit [Paradise].”61 It was clear for Jacob that as long as children were and remained virtuous, that is, did not sin, when they departed from the world they were “not debtors to the bill which Eve wrote.”62 At the outset of creation, when Adam was in the garden, he had been brought into Paradise without any labor he would have had to perform first. Thus, no labors could earn him access to the garden and its blessings. Yet Adam’s beauty became marked when “Eve entered and made a mark on his great beauty,” as Jacob formulated the circumstances of the Fall.63 As a consequence, it became necessary “to heal the mark with the work of virtue.” Children who died young were not subject to any such requirement of having to have their beauty be cleansed of any stain. Through their beauty, which was, and remained unstained and without blemishes, they simply inherited the garden. Despite understanding children as essentially free from sin, Jacob assumed that these innocents had been baptized. He described the children he had in mind, for instance, as having “been clothed in light-filled baptism, virtuous, victorious, full of light.”64 In the same context, Jacob also spoke of Christ as the bridegroom in relation to the children and said that the children were “not lacking the glorious robe,” with which “the bridegroom of light, who guides the virtuous [ones]” “has clothed them.” The images of the “light-filled baptism” and the “glorious robe” indicated clearly that these children had already received baptism. Jacob’s memra then was not concerned immediately with how to console Christian parents whose children had died as infants before receiving baptism, but rather with how to console

310  Cornelia Horn parents, family members, and friends who faced the simple fact that their beloved children had died at a young age, before they could live a long and fulfilled life. Jacob’s memra had placed children who died young at least on a par with martyrs, who through hard, and long fights and struggles had earned a place at the heavenly banquet. For the Syrian imagination, the conceptualizations of the death of children and martyrdom went hand-in-hand. Syriac literature is especially rich in martyrdom stories of young children, although one does find a few cases of children, who suffered martyrdom, and whose martyrdom was the subject of a passio, not merely as an accompanying narrative in the passio of an adult figure, across the spectrum of languages that were in use to represent the early Christian world. In some instances, hagiographical topoi obscure social reality. There are cases of the martyrdom of two- or three-year-old children who spoke with boldness to their persecutors and endured beatings, burnings, and boiling without succumbing to death immediately. Although such stories do feature children as agents, these accounts appear to have been composed to express theological nuances rather than to recount events in full accord with historical accuracy.65

Witnessing the death of a family member: children’s and parents’ perspectives In early Christian martyrdom accounts of children, one notes a range of different reactions of the children’s parents to their offspring’s violent death. In some instances, the parents were non-Christians whereas their young children wanted to convert to Christianity. In such cases, the parents themselves appear in the role of persecutor of their own children. The Georgian Martyrdom of the Children of Kola constitutes one remarkable early case of this hagiographical constellation. Local Georgian tradition preserves the memory of the late fourth-century ce martyrdom of a group of nine children from a village in the Kola valley, in the area of modern-day Göle, in north-eastern Turkey. Based on a tenth-century manuscript from Mount Athos, Nicolai Marr first published the brief account of their martyrdom, which may have been composed in the fifth century, in 1903.66 As the story goes, there were nine pagan boys who used to play with Christian children from the village. Yet they realized that they could not join their little friends when they went away to go to Church for prayer. Affection for their fellow playmates motivated the pagan boys, ages seven to nine, to request to become Christians themselves. They received instruction and were baptized at night. Yet with baptism also came a change in the boys’ family allegiance, since from then on they stayed with the families of their Christian friends. When the boys’ parents learned what had happened, they ‘forcibly dragged the children from the Christians’ houses’ and ‘beat them black and blue.’ The parents tried to force their sons to eat food sacrificed to idols and tried to bribe them to do so by promising them bright-colored clothes, to no avail. Out of their wits, the parents went to the local governor, who declared that since the children were their sons, the parents “had the right to do what [they] like[d] with them.” Thus, on “the day of the supreme sacrifice of the holy martyrs,” as the hagiographer recounted, the

Childen and the experience of death  311 parents threw their young children into a deep hole and without “pity for their own offspring” ,“smote the [children’s] heads and broke open their skulls,” while many of the people joined them in stoning the children. Here persecution and the death of children originated within the family and affected members of the family at the same time.67 The agency of children in determining their own religious allegiance, even onto death, was confronted with the counter-agency of parents who determined that they ought to retain control over their children’s fate. Other sources from the Greek and Syriac realm allow one to distinguish two prominent attitudes in the case of Christian parents being confronted with their children’s death through martyrdom. Parents either tried to hide their children from the potential exposure to martyrdom, as in the case of Origen of Alexandria, whose mother took away his clothes in order to discourage him from following his father’s example, or, as for instance in the Martyrdom of Sophia and Her Three Daughters, parents strongly encouraged their offspring to suffer martyrdom, sometimes assuming that the children would be killed together with the parents themselves.68 Some martyrdom accounts offer the reader a precious few glimpses at children’s experiences of and reactions to the deaths of others. In the Martyrdom of Sophia and Her Three Daughters, Elpis and Agapē first witnessed how their sister Pistis suffered martyrdom through being roasted. Having cheered on Pistis to endure until the end, her two sisters then suffered martyrdom themselves.69 In other narratives, one encounters as a traditional literary motif the depiction of attempts on the part of the bystanders to move a martyr to detract from the path she or he has chosen. The Martyrdom of Irenaeus of Sirmium presents its audience with this theme in a long, emotional passage, in which the martyr’s children begged their father to “have pity on [himself] and on [them].” Irenaeus’ wife, relatives, servants, friends, and neighbors likewise shed tears and implored the martyr to change his mind, yet to no effect.70 In this case, relatively young children shared in the emotional reaction of the martyr’s adult kin and friends on equal terms. In 1927 Alphonse Mingana edited and published a Life of John the Baptist that is extant in one recension in two Karshuni manuscripts, that is, in manuscripts written in the Arabic language, but using Syriac characters.71 Through the lens of this late ancient apocryphal text, the reader gains a rare insight into a reality of children’s life that does not readily come into focus in other sources we have been able to examine. This Karshuni Life of John the Baptist includes an episode that features little John’s experience of the death of his mother Elizabeth.72 It also articulates observations on the part of those encountering the child concerning the impact of the child’s reaction to the loss of his mother. Little John and Elizabeth had spent five years living together in the desert when “the pious and blessed old mother Elizabeth passed away.” The text comments on John sitting and “weeping over her.” The main reason for the child’s tears, according to the text, was the fact that the young boy, who was only seven and a half years old, “did not know how to shroud her and bury her.” That the child may also have shed tears because he mourned in grief over his mother’s death does not seem to have been relevant for this particular author. Other evidence, available in hagiographies that arose in Egyptian contexts, documents that authors sometimes

312  Cornelia Horn chose to present the reaction of a child or youth to her or his parent’s death as one of crying bitterly and as continuing to do so for a longer period of time.73 Yet in the case of John the Baptist’s story, the text merely highlighted the boy’s helplessness and lack of experience in how to conduct a burial. Before the story continued with an illustration of precisely that kind of ritual for the little boy John, an endearing scene depicted Jesus who, watching from afar how “His kinsman John [was] sitting and weeping near his mother”, “began to weep for a long time.” When Mary asked her son why he was shedding tears, Jesus told her that he cried because the “beloved John” had been “left... an orphan.” This comment speaks to the solidarity among boys of roughly the same age, in which one child showed his concern for his friend being left without the company of his parents and being completely alone. As the story continued, little Jesus, Mary, and Salome rode on a cloud and came to visit John in the desert, intending “to attend to the business of the burial of the blessed Elizabeth.” Jesus and Mary extended their care and love toward John by embracing him. Then Mary and Salome washed Elizabeth’s body. Moved by her contact with the dead body of John’s mother, Mary took a hold of John “and wept over him.” The archangels Michael and Gabriel came and dug the grave, while the two priests, John’s father Zachariah and Simeon, shrouded Elizabeth’s body and “sang for a long time over it.” With Mary and Salome acting in the roles of the mourning women, the two priests prayed over Elizabeth’s body, buried it, and “seal[ed] the grave with the sign of the cross.” For seven days, Mary and Jesus stayed with John to “console[] him at the death of his mother.” They also “taught him how to live in the desert.” In this apocryphal tale, Mary’s character was particularly concerned about leaving young John behind in the desert all by himself. For her, this was not advisable, especially since John was still “very young” and “an orphan without anyone.” Yet Jesus tried to assure her that Gabriel was appointed to protect John and “grant him power from heaven.” Moreover, John’s father Zachariah, although he was already dead and had only returned to life to assist with the burial of his wife, likewise was ordered to “inquire about [John].” Moreover, Jesus promised to “render the water of this spring of water [in the desert] as sweet and delicious to him as the milk he sucked from his mother.” Jesus insisted, against his mother, that he had “t[aken] care of [John] in his childhood [already]” and that he “love[d] him more than all the world.” In addition, Jesus granted that “Elizabeth his mother … [would] constantly visit him and comfort him, as if she [were] not dead at all”. Yet despite all these promises, when Jesus and Mary left on their cloud, John looked at them and wept, and Mart Mary wept also bitterly over him, and continued to be concerned that John would live alone in the desert. As a mother, Mary sensed that it was a tragedy that had befallen little John, who had lost both his mother and his father and who was left behind alone as an orphan. Mary’s assessment of the situation may reflect more clearly the experience and knowledge of adult females and seems more real-to-life than the omniscient reassurances of her divine male child.

Childen and the experience of death  313

Conclusions When examining the topic of children and the experience of death in ancient sources, it is quite difficult to find direct evidence for children’s own experiences of and articulations of their concerns about death. In some of the literature on martyrdom and in apocryphal stories that were composed, not merely for education, but also for entertainment, we encounter references to how children related to the deaths of others, especially of close relatives. They mourned the death of their loved ones with tears and experienced grief. Given their dependency on adult protection and care, a feeling of helplessness and of exposure to the unknown and unaccustomed colored their experience here, even if adult authors reinterpreted their reactions, as in the case of little John the Baptist, as a concern about lack of knowledge about how ritually to deal with the dead corpse of a parent. The narrative concerning John the Baptist features a child experiencing a lack of empowerment to show agency in the face of his mother’s death. Yet that narrative is not deprived of a sense that children can function as agents in the face of death. In contrast to the helpless young John, little Jesus is shown to be filled with a drive to assist his young cousin, comfort him, and help him overcome his grief. A reader may presume that a child could indeed show agency in the face of death, as long as the emotional bond between the dead person and the child was not too close. Such an evaluation of the evidence, of course, leaves out the theological dimension of reading a story of Jesus as a supernaturally empowered child, whose example as a divine child would not be representative of the average experience of a human child. It also leaves out insights one could bring to the text from one’s own life’s experience. Some may ask whether children in the ancient world who saw the parents of their playmates die and thus leave their friends as orphans were afraid of and thus refrained from investing emotionally into the relationships with their own parents.74 When approaching the question of the emotional bond between children and their parents in the face of death from this angle, it is helpful to remember that some children do indeed withdraw from relationships when they witness death. Yet others, when confronted with the death of a loved one in their wider context of reference, are prompted all the more by the fear of losing their own father or mother to become even more closely attached to their parent(s) and develop emotional bonds of great depth and stability. Children’s agency in the face of death that is featured in other ancient stories, especially martyrdom accounts, is not a specific child-centered agency, but rather the agency of a bystander at a martyr’s suffering or the agency of a martyr — child, or adult — who through her or his confession of faith controlled the approach or avoidance of death. Ancient martyrdom stories of children feature accounts of both girls and boys who were violently killed or volunteered to be killed for their faith. Thus far, the consideration of the evidence has not led to the identification of a particular preference based on gender in the development of this sub-genre of ancient Christian martyrdom literature. The question as to why martyrdom accounts of children seem to have been produced or preserved and

314  Cornelia Horn passed on in considerably greater quantity in the Eastern Roman empire and in Christian Oriental languages, remains an open question. The evidence pertaining to the experience of children’s death in these ancient sources suggests that the concern with featuring parents’ efforts to fight for the life of a dying child, or for the revivification of a child who had died, placed greater emphasis on the importance of the survival of boys. It was through boys and the families they would found as adults that ancient parents, particularly fathers, expected to continue their lines into the future. In contrast, the female voice, primarily that of the mother who had survived her child’s delivery, or who knew about the threats to life from other experiences, is presented as the more sensitive voice and may appear to be the more realistic voice in our ancient sources. Nevertheless, it is the female voice recorded or shaped through the words of a male author. It is not to be excluded then that the texts in question do reflect gendered expectations. If men as authors were able to place themselves, at least on the literary level, in the shoes of mothers and were able to articulate the emotional pain mothers felt at the death of their children, in their roles as fathers, such male authors may have been capable of feeling pain at the death of their children as well. Some ancient authors may have been prompted more readily to compose poetry consoling parents who mourned their children if the child in question enjoyed special social status. Yet on balancing the evidence of Greek and Syriac sources, one has to acknowledge that status on its own was not a decisive factor for the production of such texts. Broader pastoral and theological concerns motivated ecclesiastical authors to write respective texts that addressed the experiences of parents from varied, wider social backgrounds. Tiny voices on the theme of children and death taken from the mouths of children themselves or reflecting children’s own experiences are indeed only very hard to come by. As far as comments on the death of children are concerned that are accessible through ancient sources, clearly the most prominent data is available for studies that approach the topic from the perspective of the parents’ perception of and reaction to their children’s death.

Acknowledgment The research and writing of this article for publication was supported through a Heisenberg Fellowship (GZ HO 5221/1-1), for which the author wishes to express her gratitude to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG).

Notes 1 See for example Carroll 2011; Evans Grubbs 2013; Huskinson 1996 and 2005; Kreiger 2013; Laes 2011a; Mander 2012a and b; McWilliam 2001; Norman 2002 and 2003; Parkin 2013; Rawson 2003a; Scott 1999; and Stevens 2013. 2 See already Talbot 2009. 3 Baun 1994; Talbot 2009; and Tritsaroli and Valentin 2008. 4 Rautman 2006: 8.

Childen and the experience of death  315 5 According to Garnsey 1991: 51–2, “28 percent of those born alive, or 280 out of 1,000 children, died in the course of the first year, and around 50 percent died before the age of ten.” Golden 1988: 155 suggests that the number might be closer to 30 or 40 percent. On demographics in the Roman world, see also Pilkington 2013; Woods 2007; and Scheidel 2001. Barbiera 2012 considers the possibility of a disproportional mortality rate among girls in medieval Italy. 6 Horn and Martens 2009. 7 Congourdeau 1993: 164. 8 See Life of Abba Aaron (Budge 1915: 479–81 and 488–9 [Coptic] and 994–6 and 1004 [English]; for a more recent English translation, see Vivian 1996). For a discussion of the Coptic Life of Aaron, see Dijkstra 2005: 97–112. 9 See also Lascaratos, Lazaris, and Kreatsas 2002. 10 See the stories of the Nubian’s son, who was dragged by a crocodile into the river, and of the fisherman’s little son, who fell out of the boat into the water while they were fishing, in Life of Abba Aaron (Budge 1915: 476–8 [Coptic] and 991–3 [English]). 11 Tritsaroli and Valentin 2008. 12 Aristides, Apology 15.9. 13 Tritsaroli and Valentin 2008: 95. 14 Congourdeau 1993: 168. 15 Tritsaroli and Valentin 2008: 95. 16 Congourdeau 1993: 163–4; and Tritsaroli and Valentin 2008: 95. 17 Laes 2014b; Evans Grubbs 2011; Vuolanto 2011; Shaw 2001; Baun 1994; Harris 1994. 18 Lacey 1986: 133–5; Arjava 1998: 153; Gardner 1998: 269, emphasizing the rarity of the actual execution of the vitae necisque potestas; and Westbrook 1999: 208–9. See also Liston and Rotreff 2013: 76. 19 Against Apion 2.202. 20 Sentences, 184. 21 Sibylline Oracles 3.765–76 (ed. Geffcken 1902: 87). 22 Spec. 3.110–119. 23 Tacitus, Hist. 5.5.3 did not condemn the practice, but reported on the Jewish rejection of infanticide. See also Kleijwegt 2004: 902–3. 24 Ad nationes 1.15.3. 25 Tertullian, Exhortation to Chastity 12.5 (trans. William P. Le Saint 1951). 26 See also Horn and Martens 2009: 225–6; and Bakke 2005: 129–130. For a discussion of the documents of Elvira, see Meigne 1975: 361–87; and Laeuchli 1972. 27 Harris 1994: 19. 28 Codex Theodosianus 9.14.1; Harris 1994: 19–22; and Mans 1997: 93. 29 Theodore of Mopsuestia, Commentary on the Gospel of John (ed. and tr. Vosté 1940: 289–90 [Syriac] and 207 [Latin]). See also Thome 2008: 384–5; Grypeou 2005: 164–5. 30 Ishodad of Merv, Commentary on John bk. 15 (ed. Gibson 1911: vol. III, ‫ ܚܨܩ‬and 198; trans. vol. I, 270). See also Grypeou 2005: 165. 31 Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechectical Lectures 16.8 (ed. PG 33.929–930; trans. by Members of the English Church 1849: 206) speaks of “cutting the throats of wretched little children, and chopping them up into horrid food, for the purposes of their socalled mysteries.” 32 See Grypeou 2005: 165. 33 Epiphanius, Panarion 48.15; Augustine, De Haer. 26 and 27. See Grypeou 2005: 165. 34 Elm 1996: 422; see also Trevett 1995: 258–69. 35 Grypeou 2005: 165–6. 36 See for instance Apophthegmata Patrum 175 (ed. Chaîne 1960: 40–1 [Coptic] and 118–19 [French]); and Athanasius, The Conflict of Severus, Patriarch of Antioch (ed.

316  Cornelia Horn

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

and trans. Goodspeed and Crum 1907: 701 [133]). For references to iconographical material, which is of a later date, see Felmy 1979; Walter 1981: II B 909–13; Grypeou 2005: 166; and Grolimund 1981. France 1979; Mans 1997; Hayward 1994; Barkhuizen 2007. Bradley 1991: 115; Horn and Martens 2009: 25. Rawson 2003b. Tritsaroli and Valentin 2008: 96. For earlier practices, see Carroll 2012. Tritsaroli and Valentin 2008: 96. Tritsaroli and Valentin 2008: 104. Tritsaroli and Valentin 2008: 106–8. Ephraem the Syrian, Sermones II.171–172 (ed. and tr. Beck 1970: 44 [Syriac] and 58 [German]). Ephraem the Syrian, Sermones II.182–184 (ed. and tr. Beck 1970: 44 [Syriac] & 58 [German]). On cannibalistic acts of parents committed against their children, see the discussion of the case of Mary bat Eleazar in Horn 2011: 252–4. For consolation literature addressing parents in later centuries in the Byzantine world, see for instance Talbot 2009: 294–8. Shanzer 2009 examines concerns about the afterlife of the unborn, who passed away, as an earlier stage to late ancient Christian discussions of the fate of unbaptized children after death. Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio consolatoria in Pulcheriam (ed. Spira 1967: 461–72). See Gantz 1999: 19. Gantz 1999: 32–49 reprints Spira’s text, accompanied by her translation into German. Gregory of Nyssa was concerned with the theme of beauty elsewhere. The occurrence of this theme in other authors’ homilies on children’s death may suggest that the topos was customary when writing consolation literature at the passing away of the young and was not due here to Gregory’s specific theological and literary interests. Spira 1976: 468. See Spira 1976: 461–2. See Spira 1976: 464. See Spira 1976: 466. See Spira 1976: 461. See Spira 1976: 467–72. An edition of the Syriac text is available in Bedjan 1910: 804–16. An English translation is in preparation. For some discussion, see now Doerfler 2011. Bedjan 1910: 804. Bedjan 1910: 812. Bedjan 1910: 805. Bedjan 1910: 804. Praises of a person’s beauty played a significant role in ancient funerary inscriptions, where they served the heroization of the dead. See Wypustek 2013. Bedjan 1910: 808. Bedjan 1910: 809. Bedjan 1910: 807. Bedjan 1910: 809. See for instance Horn 2006 and 2016. The Georgian text, accompanied by a Russian translation, can be found in Marr 1903: 55–61. For the Georgian text, see also Abuladze 1963: 183–5. For an English translation see Lang 1956: 40–3. For the citations, see the English translation in Lang 1956: 42–3. For a fuller discussion of the Martyrdom of the Children of Kola in the context of early Georgian literature on children, see Horn 2007. Horn and Martens 2009: 243–4 and 248. Martyrdom of Sophia and Her Three Daughters (trans. Smith Lewis 1900: 176 and 180). The text offers a detailed description of Elpis and Agape’s sufferings as well.

Childen and the experience of death  317

70 71

72 73

74

The manuscript evidence, upon which Smith Lewis based her edition and translation, consists of a palimpsest manuscript from Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai that preserves a text dated to 778 ce and two manuscripts preserved at the British Library, of which the first, MS BL Add. 17,204, dates to the fifth century, and the second, MS BL Add. 14,645, dates to the tenth century. Martyrdom of Irenaeus of Sirmium 3.1–2 (ed. and trans. Musurillo 1972: 296–7). One of the manuscripts dates to 1527 ce (MS Mingana 22), the other to c. 1750 ce (MS Mingana 183). Mingana hypothesized that MS M 22 was written for an Egyptian Christian audience, whereas MS M 183 showed signs that Syriac Christians were its intended recipients. For the text’s edition and translation, see Mingana 1927. For further discussion of the text and its content, see Horn and Martens 2009: 327–30. Mingana 1927: 242–5. The Life of Abba Aaron (ed. and tr. Budge 1915: 478–9 [Coptic] & 994 [English]) offers evidence from the Coptic tradition that late ancient Christian literature in Egyptian contexts at times chose to describe the reaction of a son, whom the text identified as a youth, without specifying his age, as crying bitterly when he witnessed that his father had fallen down from a palm tree and was lying on the ground “like one of the dead”. See Vuolanto in this volume, pp. 13–14.

20 How close can we get to ancient childhood? Methodological achievements and new advances Reidar Aasgaard The aim of this book is to explore what it meant to be a child in the Roman and Late Antique world from the first century bce to the ninth century ce.1 In the preceding chapters, experts from a variety of fields of research on Antiquity have, each from their angle, made forays toward this aim. In the following, I shall discuss the results of these methodological expeditions into areas and sources both well and little known. What advances have been made? What challenges still remain? And is there potential for pushing these approaches further? I will do this in three steps, which hopefully can supplement one another. First, I reflect on what I consider some of the important methodological viewpoints and outcomes of the present volume. On the basis of this, I go on to ask what ‘getting close’ or ‘closer’ to ancient childhood may mean, and to what extent such a project is viable. Finally, I discuss some means that may help us to take matters even further.

How much closer have we got to ancient childhood? Childhood studies, and research on historical childhood as a branch of this tree, have been developing rapidly and flourishing during the last decade or so, with children as subjects and their own agency and experiences being among the most recent focuses of interest.2 With its basis in childhood studies, the present book has used insights already gained by a ‘children’ perspective on the historical material – I shall return to this at the end of this section. In the first two chapters of this book, Laes and Vuolanto have pointed to the special challenges that we are confronted with in studying children in the ancient world: the limited amount of sources, the social and geographical imbalance of the material preserved, and not least the fact that children at the time would not themselves be in a position to raise their voices. Nonetheless, the chapters in this volume have indicated that there are ways to deal with the challenges. In fact, a number of the studies have shown that one can within individual disciplines gain new insights simply by reading ‘old’ sources with an eye to children and childhood, while using the traditional tools of social history and classical studies (Bloomer, Giorda, Laes, Toner and Vössing), as well as by addressing ‘new’ source material in similar ways (Caseau, Horn, Pudsey and Vuolanto). It is in many cases not so much a matter of devising new methodological tools, but of adopting a new perspective: that of children and childhood.3

How close can we get to ancient childhood?  319 However, a distinctive mark of many, or indeed most, of the contributions in the volume is that they – in different ways and to differing degrees – make use of insights from a broad range of disciplines: they practise interdisciplinarity. It has become clear that such an approach is fruitful here. Several examples within and across chapters show that piecing together material from various areas, such as texts and archaeological finds, can contribute to our knowledge of children’s lives in the Roman world. In the case of childhood, however, an interdisciplinary approach is not only useful, but also a necessity, since children have left so little evidence themselves, whether written or other – in this, they are very much in the same position as other groups, such as women and slaves. Thus, if we are to ‘get closer to ancient childhood’, special attention should be paid to nonwritten sources, as exemplified by the chapters on children’s clothing (Harlow), toys (Dolansky) and local space (Laurence). Even this can be a challenge, given the general scarcity of all kinds of testimonies to children’s lives. Instead of problematizing this, however, it can in fact also be seen as a potential, since it generates awareness of the importance of non-written sources, which have too often been neglected by scholars of ancient history: they have lost out in the competition with the relatively much more abundant textual remains. Doing interdisciplinary research is obviously a demanding exercise, since the scholarly investigation of ancient history has over the years become very specialized, even within childhood studies. It has become a challenge for individual scholars to keep up with this, although several contributions in the present volume succeed in integrating insights from various areas of research. There is always a risk of becoming superficially multidisciplinary rather than genuinely interdisciplinary: that is to say, of making experts from different disciplines contribute to a topic without really conversing and informing each others’ way of thinking and results. To avoid this, close and continued collaboration among scholars from various disciplines is required. Others must judge the extent to which this book succeeds in this. Interdisciplinarity has also turned out to be relevant and valuable in more immediate ways for the study of ancient childhood. This refers to how children in some specific respects usually differ from adults, especially in size, bodily and mental development and – to a certain extent – strength.4 Such aspects come to the fore in contributions as different as the chapters on children’s accidents (Graumann), on their clothing (Harlow) and on affective body language (Laes). Since children were in the early stages of human physiological development, they were in some respects more vulnerable than adults: some injuries or illnesses could make it impossible for them to develop adult faculties such as the abilities to walk and to procreate. And as for clothing, since children often (and more commonly than adults) walked barefoot, this would also – at least to some extent – limit the places where they could stay. Accordingly, the chapter on Pompeii draws attention to the importance of bodily height and the difference it made when the world was observed from a lower level than that of adults (Laurence). The same becomes very clear in the chapter on Roman graffiti, which also offers evidence of children’s own activities (Huntley).

320  Reidar Aasgaard These observations show that dealing with ancient children and childhood implies a ‘from below’ perspective in more than one sense. Both chapters open modern viewers’ eyes to the importance of interpreting epigraphical material – and by extension other kinds of sources – with the factor of age in mind. By taking recent research on children’s development into consideration, the graffiti chapter also draws attention to the benefits that can be gained from modern developmental psychology: there is no reason to think that what appear to be mental features of early life stages shared across cultures of our own times should not also hold good of earlier historical periods such as Antiquity. Also in other chapters, we are made aware of the conditions set by space: children would have specific limitations on how far and where they could go. This, however, was pre-conditioned not only by the length of their legs, but also by their social status, family roles, gender and age: such factors also regulated where they were allowed to go or stay (Cojocaru, Pudsey and Vuolanto, Sivan). At the same time, however, the small size of children did not only limit them. It also enabled them to get access to places where adults could not go, spaces that could even serve as their own, protected reserve. In children, therefore, size is not to be seen merely as a limitation. In many instances, it can also be an advantage.5 Taken together, these examples make it clear that an interdisciplinarity that goes beyond the more established alliance between the humanities and the social sciences, and also includes modern medicine, cognitive sciences and even geography and architecture, has much to contribute to the study of childhood in history (see also Vuolanto and Mackey). Several disciplines which are not represented here can also contribute much to interdisciplinary research on ancient childhood, for instance, art history and the more recently developed field of bioarchaeology.6 Some contributions in the volume also make use of more specialized approaches that have developed within the discipline of history. One such approach is microhistory, the study of a well-defined small unit such as a village or a household.7 When coupled with interdisciplinarity, microhistory has an obvious advantage: it makes possible a more holistic approach to the study of ancient children. When applied to childhood, microhistory prompts us to address all the aspects that were relevant to a child’s everyday life, the whole range from nutrition and bodily functions to social interaction and religious beliefs. Interdisciplinarity supplies us with the different kinds of materials needed to build up a scenario that, historically speaking, can be sufficiently plausible and representative. Indeed, the coupling of microhistory with interdisciplinarity can be particularly rewarding for us, given that, generally speaking, children are more stationary than adults. The descriptions of Jewish childhood in Tiberias (Sivan), of childhood in Byzantine monasteries (Cojocaru) and of the role of uncles and aunts in the city of Oxyrhynchos (Pudsey and Vuolanto) serve to illustrate such an approach.8 Several of the chapters are strongly indebted to well-established ideologycritical approaches, such as feminist/gender studies, disability studies and – although to a limited extent – postcolonial studies (see Dolansky and Solevåg). But as the contributions show, the focus on childhood adds a new dimension to

How close can we get to ancient childhood?  321 such ideology-critical research on the ancient sources, viz. the factor of age. By simply reading the ancient sources, both those that have been little studied and those that have been thoroughly investigated, through the lens of childhood, new things come to light, things that may serve to refine the methodology of these approaches and contribute to new insights within these areas of study. Since children could constitute up to half of the population in ancient societies – they were nearly omnipresent and a considerable number – the study of childhood can be important not only for the understanding of the children themselves and their families and households, but also of ancient society as a whole. In its methodology, the modern discipline of childhood studies is closely related to the ideology-critical approaches mentioned above, and the insights gained in this volume accord well with those already made in other sectors of the field of childhood studies. In addition to this, the focus on children’s own agency and experiences also contributes fresh insights to research. The chapters dealing with children at leisure, play, school and work all demonstrate that children were not only objects and passive participants in society. They were also subjects acting, influencing and interpreting the world in their own right and their own ways (e.g. Dolansky, Mackey and Toner, Vössing). From this angle, it makes a great deal of sense to ask questions such as: to what extent did children in the ancient world love their parents (Laes and Vuolanto, Horn)? Did children sometimes stand up to adults (e.g. Caseau, Mackey and Toner)?9 More generally, were children, whether girls or boys, by virtue of being children allotted a different or even greater flexibility of conduct than grown-ups, who would be restricted by various cultural codes, such as those of honour and shame? A newcomer as a methodological approach to the ancient material is intersectionality, which is most expressly and systematically employed in the chapter on disabled girls in early Christian sources (Solevåg).10 Intersectionality, which merges a number of the approaches above, states that there is a basic set of factors that contribute strongly to shaping the lives of humans: in particular, social status, class, gender, ethnicity, health and age. Intersectionality insists that all these factors need to be taken into consideration, since the lives of human beings will largely depend on how these factors are configured in each instance. Thus, age – and consequently childhood, as a stage of life – is a factor that must receive attention on an equal footing with other factors. At the same time, age is only one factor among several, and can be balanced and even outclassed by other factors. For example, in the hierarchical societies of the ancient world, social differences could turn out to be more important than differences in age.

Is it possible to get even closer to ancient childhood? So far, I have reflected upon whether and how the studies in this volume, individually and as a whole, have brought us closer to ancient childhood. My answer has been in the affirmative. Now, however, I am going to problematize this, with particular regard to two issues. First, as the intersectional approach has made clear, it will be highly misleading to speak of children or childhood as an unequivocal or uniform matter. Children’s lives in the ancient world seem to have been just as diverse as

322  Reidar Aasgaard those of adults, depending on factors such as health, gender, status, geography, architecture, culture, economy, ethnicity, climate, technological level and historical circumstances. This variety is also reflected in the preceding chapters, which have treated geographical areas as diverse as Italy, Egypt and Palestine, distinct religious traditions such as Roman cults, Judaism and Christianity, and material from various social levels and from historical periods ranging from the first century bce to the ninth century ce. In a book of this kind, it is possible to deal only with fragments of a big jigsaw puzzle, from which very many pieces are missing, particularly in the case of children. Focusing on fragments has its advantages: it allows close-up looks at children’s lives. But it also has its costs, not least reductionism: many aspects will be left out, consciously and unconsciously. Nevertheless, such variety should not be overemphasized – there is a risk of pressing the idea of plurality too far, and in ways that make it difficult or nearly impossible for scholars to make any affirmations about children’s lives. As I have noted, childhood as a stage of life has some characteristics that transcend time and place, not least factors related to medicine, biology and psychology. And the ancient Mediterranean world itself was also distinguished by features which crossed regional borders and social boundaries, and which to a considerable extent could be called cross-cultural. Central elements of this were a general subsistence economy with a few urban centres and a large majority of the population living in rural, agriculture-based areas; fairly similar family patterns; marked social hierarchies, conventional perceptions of gender, and a widespread set of moral codes, often epitomized in the term ‘virtue’ – all elements that would have a great impact on children’s lives.11 Thus, without disregarding the variety of life in the ancient world, the chapters should be taken as circumstantial evidence of more than the immediate contexts with which they deal. They are not concerned with special or unique occurrences, but with matters that would be recognizable in other contexts, and may be representative of larger patterns in the everyday lives of children in the ancient world. Clearly, this needs to be investigated further, through similar studies from other regions of the Roman Empire or from other periods of Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, in order to trace similarities and differences, continuities and changes. Second, what does ‘get closer to’ mean? Many would reject the whole idea of getting closer to someone at such a distance in time and culture, especially where children are concerned; others will react with scepticism or reservations. This is understandable, since there are good reasons for such views: a basic tenet in critical historical research is not to establish links or similarities in space or time which cannot be plausibly defended. Alarm bells ought to sound if we assume that we can understand or explain persons, actions or events in such a distant past: the social context, ancient modes of thinking and later historical developments need a close and critical consideration, as do our own modern and/or personal preconceptions. Indeed, general human experience tells us to beware: when we so often misunderstand people whom we think we know well, we should not readily believe that we can understand people who lived almost two millennia ago.

How close can we get to ancient childhood?  323 In spite of these caveats, I nevertheless think that it is possible to question the position that we have ‘little or no access to ancient childhood’. Considerable nuances are necessary here. First, however, I must briefly address some other, more general matters. ‘Getting closer to’ does not mean getting at what it ‘really’ was like to be a child in the ancient world. It is not a project of historical positivism, but of plausibility: the aim is to get as close as possible to what may plausibly have been the case. This involves degrees of probability.12 Second, the sources, particularly the written ones, very often deal more with ideas and/or ideals than with social or material facts. Getting behind or beyond the literary level is difficult in more than one respect. Although it is clear that there often are tensions and even discrepancies between idea(l)s and realities, there is no necessary antithesis between the two. They should be seen as interacting, with the idea(l)s also being part of reality, and having an impact on social and material conditions.13 For example, the idea of children as liminal beings with a special affinity with the divine world, led to them being assigned particular religious tasks, such as mediators of oracles.14 Third, we also need to be attentive to the methodological challenge that is often called the ‘etic’ versus the ‘emic’, the former being shorthand for an external observer’s view of a social group, the latter for a view from the perspective of a subject within the group.15 For a group such as children, even children in a distant past, the etic perspective is relatively unproblematic. The emic is, however, much more challenging: is it possible for a modern, adult scholar to observe such a group from the inside? Obviously, one cannot go back in time as well as in age. Even here, however, an insider perspective is viable, at least in some respects. It is, for example, possible to adjust to children’s level – to their height! – and see what an ancient city and its inhabitants may have looked like from their perspective. Thus, while we should bear the etic/emic distinction in mind, one does not exclude the other: we can have some access to the emic too.16 Fourth, and finally, this leads us to a related distinction, which has sometimes been blurred in scholarship: we should bear in mind the difference between seeing something from children’s perspective and seeing something from the perspective of the children themselves (the two need not be mutually exclusive, however). The former can refer to the material world, e.g. viewing something from children’s height, but also to values, to what (we think!) is in the interest of children. The latter suggests a further step into the realm of the children, viz., being able to observe, experience and/or assess in ways that are similar to what the children themselves do. And as with the etic/emic distinction, the latter is less accessible than the former. Now we can turn to the question of ‘getting closer’ to the lives of children in the ancient world. What does this expression imply? What nuances may it hold? One helpful way is to visualize it as a multi-level process (e.g. like peeling an onion layer by layer), in which we distinguish different kinds of – and possibly degrees of – closeness, and reflect within each of these levels on the matter of getting closer.17 By nuancing in this way, we may see more clearly both the problems and the potentials within each level and of the matter as a whole. Here, I can only briefly address these levels, in an exploratory attempt to indicate paths for ‘getting

324  Reidar Aasgaard closer’. Similar attempts have been made in some of the contributions above; here, I try to collect, order and develop them more systematically. Level 1: Children’s physical environment. Since children and adults to a large degree shared habitats, we are probably as well-informed about this as we are in the case of grown-ups in the ancient world. In the case of children, we must pay particular attention to aspects such as height, accessibility and range of movement. But provided that those are taken into consideration, we may make use of all kinds of insights from archaeology, architecture, geography, climatology etc. This supplies us with a wealth of information on children’s world. Level 2: Children’s social environment. Social relations within families and households in Antiquity, as well as society in general, have been much studied. This includes the relationships and hierarchies of which children were a part, for example with their responsibility for providing security for parents in their old age. Assuming that the age factor is taken into consideration, we have considerable knowledge also of these aspects of children’s life, e.g. about the consequences of the high mortality rate of parents, and the effects of changes in families throughout the life cycle (adoptions, remarriages etc.). Level 3: Children’s ideological environment. Much attention has been paid to this too in research on Antiquity, covering questions such as religious and philosophical beliefs, cultural codes, gender perceptions and moral systems – all elements which heavily shaped the lives of adults and, consequently, also of children. On this level, however, we should be particularly attentive to the differences that age may have made. For example, did adults’ expectations about the behaviour of children differ in any respect from what adults expected of grown-ups? And could gender be differently configured in the case of girls and boys than in that of adult women and men – for instance in what they were allowed to participate in or do? Considering the large amount of sources available and the research already done on the ancient world, we seem well equipped for further study on the part of Levels 1–3. Research on ancient childhood at these levels has focused strongly on children as objects, children observed from the outside, for example in the study of their living conditions or their social functions in the family. This kind of research has mainly taken a ‘children’s perspective’ (cf. above). Level 4: Children’s actions. Here we try to get closer by taking a step toward seeing matters from the children’s own perspective. This situates us on the threshold between the two perspectives. The term ‘actions’ includes the concepts of agency and of experience, and several contributions in this volume have visited this boundary line (see especially Vuolanto).18 We can observe some of the actions of children etically, whereas other actions belong within the emic. Etically, we know quite a bit about children’s agency: what tasks they performed, such as work, their roles, for example as the ‘future’ of the family, and also about what they experienced, both everyday events and the deaths of close relatives. Emically, however, we have much less material to go on: how did they perceive or feel about this? In any case, given the large number of children and the less regulated character of life in the ancient world, we can infer that they both did and

How close can we get to ancient childhood?  325 experienced much that escaped adult attention. This would have taken place on the terms of the children themselves. We may perhaps even speak of a children’s ‘culture’ in the ancient world, although very much of it was and is inaccessible to adult observers.19 We can draw here on findings in modern research into children’s activities, particularly in anthropological research on societies that have structural similarities with the ancient world. If we are sufficiently alert to the risks, there is little reason to question the applicability of such analogical thinking. Level 5: Children’s bodies. With this, we take a step further, from the visible effects of children’s physical activities to their ‘external’ source: their bodies. Here, we should also include clothing, adornments and other accoutrements that were closely related to their bodies. Such objects would probably have been very important for them, since they often were the only things that could be called their own or that could signal their identity. Far less is preserved of bodily or other remains of children than of adults, but there is a certain amount of material, thanks above all to archaeological findings (clothing, burial practices, etc.). And the amount of evidence is growing, not least due to the discipline of bioarchaeology, which enables us to study physical remains of children, for example with attention to nutrition and illnesses.20 Again, we can also draw on modern research into the physiological development of children, e.g. of their organs, their senses, or even their brain: although the children we focus on lived between one and two millennia ago, the development of their bodies differed very little from that of children nowadays. In some domains, we may even be on safer ground as concerns children, since we know that some functions do not develop before a relatively fixed age, such as certain abilities of thinking or some gender-specific traits. Level 6: Children’s minds. This is clearly the most challenging step, since we are not only dealing with the visible side of children in the ancient world, but with their inner being: their thoughts, motivations, reasoning, feelings and beliefs, matters of which we have very limited evidence from the children themselves – indeed, one could be tempted to say that we have next to nothing. Still, there are ways in which we can venture even into this land. Claims that have been made in the name of critical, reticent scholarship about the impassable divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ have sometimes been overstated. First, we do in fact have some examples of material from children’s own hands, such as school exercises, letters and graffiti (Bloomer, Vuolanto, Huntley). Second, we should not exaggerate the uniqueness of children’s minds: as human beings, they are likely to have had very much in common with adults, not only by nature, but also through having been strongly influenced in social and psychological terms by adults, for example the parents and their thinking, character and emotional traits. The fact that children would have shared many similar features with adults does not mean that we know less about the children per se. On the contrary, it means that we can know more, since so much of what we know about adults is also to be found in children. To look primarily or exclusively for what is unique to children is in fact to belittle them. Rather, our aim is to give an adequate account of the mixture of intellectual, psychological and other elements that ‘made up’ children’s minds. This too is a difficult venture, but it describes our task more accurately.

326  Reidar Aasgaard Finally, there is also another way in which taking the adult mind into consideration can help us get closer to the children of the ancient world. Once again, this is through analogy. In spite of the obvious difficulty of seeing into the minds of people from a distant past, the richness of our sources means that there are some figures whom we can get to know very well, and understand them as well as we can know our own contemporaries. Examples of such persons are Plutarch, Cicero and Augustine, figures whom classical scholars have a long tradition of ‘understanding’. Although they were special in some respects, they were surely representative of adult human beings at the time, and at the same time very little different from modern human beings in their mental abilities. If we as adults are able to know and even recognize psychological features shared with adults in a distant past, it is, by analogy, very likely that the same applies to understanding children. There is no reason to think that our understanding of the children of the past should be poorer than our understanding of the adults, despite the paucity of sources that give access to the minds of ancient children. These arguments do not bridge the ‘mind gap’ caused by distance in time and in stages of age, but they narrow it down and make it less discouraging. Once again, the aim is to press the matter as far as possible, while remaining within the limits of responsible scholarship.

Some tools for getting closer to ancient childhood In the previous section, the focus was on how to approach children and their lives by means of areas, or ‘levels’, of their existence. In this section, I shall look at more substantial aspects of children’s lives, and ask how we can get access to elements that give testimony to their world and activities. I shall do this by developing specific criteria that may be of help in getting closer to the children.21 It is important to point out that in working out these criteria I am particularly indebted to modern research on the historical Jesus.22 The aim of historical Jesus research is, simply put, to detect those elements – sayings, acts, events, etc. – that can be traced back to the Jesus of history himself. This research, which is central in the study of the New Testament and has gone through several stages (often called quests), is carried out with the tools of ordinary historical research. In addition, however, specific criteria have developed over time, enabling scholars to get ‘behind’ the picture of Jesus in the earliest Christian writings, especially the New Testament gospels.23 Since children constitute a challenge and a situation that are very similar to the Jesus of history, these criteria can be adapted to inquire into their lives. I shall sketch seven such tools, or criteria, which help us to get access to the life and culture of children.24 These are developed on the basis of two criteria in particular: the criterion of double dissimilarity and the criterion of historical plausibility. The criterion of double dissimilarity states that if an element in the gospels, for instance a Jesus saying, is in tension or conflict with the interests of the early Christians and also with contemporary Jewish culture, then this element is likely to be authentic to the Jesus of history – and correspondingly, to children as opposed to adults. This criterion focuses on what may have been unique to Jesus, but the

How close can we get to ancient childhood?  327 criterion of historical plausibility relates to what can in all probability be deduced from the context in which he lived. Thus, by taking into consideration what we know about his social, cultural and historical contexts, we may infer what is likely to be correct in the gospels’ descriptions of him. Correspondingly, what is attested as conventional, common or everyday – whether for adults or children – can be taken to be plausible for children, even if we do not have specific testimony to it. To employ these criteria in getting closer to the children does not imply that we have direct access to the children themselves. We still need to interpret what the findings could mean for the children. Criterion 1: Children as originators. This is a fairly straightforward criterion: Material that clearly, or very likely, has children as authors or originators should be seen as reflecting their life and culture. An example is the third-century letter from the schoolboy Thonis to his father, one of the very few that has been attributed to a child.25 Here, the boy – writing in his own hand – describes his situation and frustrations, complaining that: I have written five times and you wrote back only once, never mentioning your health nor have you come to visit. Though you promised me, saying ‘I am coming’, you have not come to find out whether the teacher pays attention to me or not. Almost every day he himself inquires about you, saying, ‘Is he not coming yet?’ and I always say, ‘Yes’. Thus, make sure to come to me as soon as possible so that he may teach me, as he is willing to do. If you had come together with me, I should have received my instruction long ago … Come quickly to us, then, before he leaves for Upper Egypt. I send greetings to everybody in the family … Other examples are school exercises, toys and graffiti. Although such material can be pre-shaped or pre-formulated by grown-ups or mirror adult concerns, it should be regarded as genuine products of children, not only as their imitation of adults. After all, very little created by humans can be said to be authentic to an individual or to a specific group. One should not demand more originality from children than from grown-ups.26 Criterion 2: Attestation by adults. Material which sources affirm as pertaining to or being directed at children should be seen as belonging to their life and culture. This tool is very important, since it deals with explicit reports from adults about material directed at children, often without a particular rhetorical or other agenda on the part of the grown-ups. There are many such references in the ancient sources, from different periods. One example is the rhetorician Quintilian’s (ad35– 95) mention of fables as part of children’s narrative repertoire: ‘Let them learn then to tell Aesop’s fables, which follow on directly from their nurses’ stories, in pure and unpretentious language; then let them achieve the same slender elegance in a written version’.27 There is also a large degree of chronological continuity in the kinds of material mentioned, whether literary, mythological or anecdotal. Such broad and mutually independent attestation also strengthens the plausibility of this having been part of children’s life and culture.28

328  Reidar Aasgaard Criterion 3: Embarrassment of adults. The third criterion is partly related to the second: Things that grown-ups explicitly distance themselves from as inconsistent with or shameful for their own age stage should be regarded as reflecting children’s life and culture. Thus, when sources speak condescendingly of behaviour or other aspects of life as ‘childish’ or the like, what they refer to generally should be seen as related to children’s life and culture. An example of this is bishop John Chrysostom’s Address on vainglory and the right way for parents to bring up their children (ca. ce 400). In this pamphlet, he refers to stories that clearly belong to the category of fairytales, such as can be recognised from much later historical periods.29 He advises against children hearing ‘frivolous and old wives’ tales: “This youth kissed that maiden. The king’s son and the younger daughter have done this”. Do not let them hear these stories’.30 Instead, Chrysostom recommends that children be told stories ‘with no elaboration’, conveying ‘nothing that is untrue but only what is related in the Scriptures’.31 Such comments should of course be interpreted critically, since they may reflect adult prejudices about what is typical of children and childhood. Nevertheless, precisely because they describe such elements negatively, they are usually highly valuable as pointers to elements that formed part of – and also served to shape – children’s world. Criterion 4: Non-elite material. In the quest for material related to children’s life and culture, special attention should be paid to non-elite sources. Sources from popular contexts are probably less likely than material in elite sources to be moulded after specific literary models or ideals. They are also more likely to be closer to the world of children, for instance by reflecting a relatively low level of education. Some of what has been taken for non-elite – and implicitly as adult non-elite – material should be studied with particular attention to the factor of age. Texts that have often been broadly labelled as ‘non-elite’, ‘popular’ or ‘common people’ should perhaps be classified more precisely as belonging to ‘children/ childhood’ material. Instances of this kind of material are some of the tales hinted at in the Satyrica of Petronius (c. 27–66 ce). In the dinner party described in this novel, the nouveau riche host portrays himself as ‘the man who was once a frog, and is now king’, and at another point in the party he says of another upstart that ‘after he had stolen the goblin’s cap, he found the (goblin’s) treasure’.32 Clearly, the author presupposes that both of these fairytale allusions would be immediately familiar to the readers of the novel. Most likely, these are stories that the figures in the novel and its readers knew from their non-adult period of life. Criterion 5: Reflections of children’s everyday world. Sources that depict a world that resembles the everyday world as it can have been experienced by children should be studied with particular attention to children’s life and culture. An episode from the apocryphal Infancy Gospel of Thomas (IGT, mid-second century), an imaginary story about Jesus’ childhood, illustrates this.33 The episode, in which the boy Zeno is subject to a fatal accident, vividly reproduces an everyday setting of children in a Mediterranean village milieu. We are presented with a situation in which Jesus is playing with other children on a roof, which – typically of houses in such an area – is flat and easily accessible by stairs on the outside. The story goes like this (IGT 9):

How close can we get to ancient childhood?  329 And again, many days later, Jesus was playing with some other children on the roof of an upstairs room. And one of the children fell and died. When the other children saw this, they went off to their houses. And they left Jesus alone. Then the parents of the dead child came and accused Jesus, saying: ‘You pushed our child down’. But Jesus said: ‘I didn’t push him down’. And as they were in a rage and shouting, Jesus went down from the roof, stood beside the body, and cried out in a loud voice saying: ‘Zeno, Zeno (for this was his name), stand up and say if I pushed you down’. And he stood up and said: ‘No, Lord’. This surely reflects a setting and an event that were highly characteristic of children’s activities in the ancient world.34 Criterion 6: Reflections of children’s interests. Material that is of limited or little relevance for adults, or that makes more sense from the perspective of children, should be regarded as potentially mirroring children’s life and culture. This is related to the previous point, but focuses on what is likely to have appealed more to the interests, thoughts and feelings of children than to those of grown-ups. The Zeno episode can illustrate this criterion too. As has been shown above, illnesses, accidents and untimely deaths were common phenomena in children’s life, and children would find such events completely recognisable.35 Such incidents would, of course, also be familiar to adults (cf. also Zeno’s parents), but the focus of the episode is clearly on the children and their interaction. Criterion 7: Attitudes that are critical or negative in relation to adults. Sources that speak critically of adults or present them negatively may genuinely reflect children’s life and culture. This is valid even if the sources are authored by adults – we should not presuppose that grown-ups at that time were unable to take such a perspective, or that they were not able to recall such memories from their own childhood.36 One illustration is Augustine of Hippo’s account in Confessions (ca. ce 400) of his early school days, and how he was punished by the teachers for playing and having fun, instead of doing his homework ‘we were punished by adults who nonetheless did the same themselves. But whereas the frivolous pursuits of grownup people are called “business”, children are punished for behaving in the same fashion, and no one is sorry for either the children or the adults’.37

Final reflections In this volume, a number of scholars involved in childhood studies have dealt with various aspects of children’s lives in Roman times. Each chapter deserves to be read as an independent contribution to the field that throws light – and possibly new light – on their specific material. The essays also indicate that there is a need for further research within the areas covered and with the methodologies applied, but clearly also within other fields and with other tools. At the same time, as a collection with a common main concern, the chapters give a broad and varied picture of ancient childhood, the sum of which may well be greater than the individual parts. I have dealt here with the challenges and potentials of getting closer to the children of the ancient world and explored ways of achieving this. Much of what

330  Reidar Aasgaard I have suggested will obviously be very much open to critique. Hopefully, it will serve as an invitation to discussion and encourage further development. The reflections may also be relevant to research on children and childhood in other historical periods and places. During the last decades, research on various historically marginalized groups has grown and blossomed, very often driven by a ‘from below’ perspective, and this has been very fruitful. Feminist studies, with a gender approach to history, is a prime example. The present book is part of the same wave, but within a field of its own, that of childhood studies. It is a testimony to ongoing historical research which aims at taking the perspective of children, and at doing this in its own way: through a childist approach.38

Acknowledgements I especially want to thank my colleague Ville Vuolanto (IFIKK, University of Oslo) for very supportive and constructive responses and stimulating discussions during my work on this chapter. I also want to thank Hilde Brekke Møller (Norwegian School of Theology, Oslo) for valuable input on the last section of the chapter.

Notes 1 In the following, I use the words ‘Roman’ and ‘Roman world’ in a broad sense as also covering the Greek world during the Roman rule and the early Byzantine period. 2 For a recent survey of the history of research on children in the Roman world, see Vuolanto 2014. 3 Even if this change may be due to theoretical developments on other fields. See Vuolanto in this volume on modern childhood studies and the shift of perspective toward children’s agency and childhood cultures. 4 There has, however, been no explicit focus on children’s limited range of movement; but see Aasgaard 2015: 164. 5 See also Aasgaard 2015, esp. 159. It should also be noted, however, that children could be harshly exploited because of their small size, for example as workers in mines.. 6 See e.g. Bourbou and Garvie-Lok 2009: 65–83. 7 On microhistory, see Burke 2001 (also on ‘history from below’, oral history and female history). 8 See also Laes and Vuolanto on ‘faction’ in this volume, p. 2. 9 See Aasgaard 2009a: 79–85, 138–48, for an example of this. 10 On intersectionality, see Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013. 11 On this, see e.g. chapters in Peachin 2011. 12 On the idea of plausibility, see below, also Theissen and Winter 2002; Aasgaard 2015. I am very well aware of the discussions about the concept of ‘history’, and of history as ‘construction’, ‘reconstruction’, etc., but I find it unnecessary to discuss this topic in greater detail here. 13 Here, for example, metaphors from social life (such as the Roman emperor being called ‘father’) contribute to the shaping of attitudes: they are ‘metaphors we live by’, see Lakoff and Johnson 1989; Aasgaard 2004, esp. ch. 3. 14 See Mackey in this volume; also e.g. Vuolanto 2010 and Bakke 2005: 251–9. 15 See Headland, Pike and Harris 1990 (esp. ch. 2 and 3); Aasgaard 2015: 136–7. For a brief presentation and examples, see Parker 2001, esp. 317–24.

How close can we get to ancient childhood?  331 16 See Cojocaru, Huntley and Laurence in this volume; also Aasgaard 2015. 17 I admit that there is a risk here of implicitly assuming a specific anthropology in which something (‘mind’) is depicted as closer to the ‘core’ of the person, or is even identified with this ‘core’. This is not the intention here, and even the difference and the sequence of the levels are not self-evident. In general, the levels are categorized somewhat unpretentiously in keeping with the presumed degree of difficulty of getting at them (depending on the kinds and amount of sources etc.). Other metaphors than ‘onion’ may also be equally serviceable. 18 See especially Vuolanto in this volume. 19 Aasgaard 2009a, ch. 12; 2009b. 20 Cf. e.g. Bourbou and Garvie-Lok 2009: 65–83. 21 For a brief preliminary sketch of what follows in this section, see Aasgaard 2009b: 25–6. The criteria relate primarily to written sources. 22 Central elements in my scholarly background are biblical studies and ancient social history. 23 The criteria are quite diverse and sometimes lead to different and even conflicting results. This means that they are applied with caution and are continuously up for debate. See Theissen and Winter 2002 for a broad presentation and discussion; also Porter 2000. 24 The expression ‘life and culture’ is used here in a broad sense, of elements that relate to one or more of the ‘levels’ presented in the previous section. For a discussion of this, see Aasgaard 2009b: 2–16. 25 SB III 6262. The text is translated and discussed in Cribiore 2001: 112. See also Vuolanto in this volume. 26 For examples, see Bloomer, Dolansky and Huntley in this volume; also Cribiore 2001; Aasgaard 2009b. 27 Quintilian, Inst. 1.9.2. 28 This is in keeping with the criterion of ‘multiple attestation’ in historical Jesus research. The greater the number of independent witnesses that can bear witness to a specific event, the more likely it is to have taken place. 29 Cf. Anderson 2000. 30 John Chrysostom, Inan. glor. 38–39. 31 John Chrysostom, Inan. glor. 39–46. 32 Petronius, Sat. 38.8 and 77.6 (trans. by M.S. Smith). See Anderson 2000: 1–2. 33 For more detailed analyses of this episode, see Aasgaard 2009a: 100–2; 162; 205–7. For the text, Burke 2010. 34 Another interesting example is in the late second-century Christian apologist Minucius Felix’s Octavius, in which he vividly describes a group of boys on a beach throwing sherds out into the sea (Oct. 3.5–6). 35 See Graumann, Horn and Solevåg in the present volume. For other examples, see Aasgaard 2009a: 73–85; 2009b: 11–12. 36 Against e.g. Burke 2012, also Burke 2010. 37 Augustine, Conf. 1.9.15. For other examples, see e.g. Aasgaard 2009a: 143–6. 38 See Parker 2013: 11–18 for some very important reflections on ‘childism’ and ‘childist interpretation’, with references. See also Aasgaard 2006.

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Index

Aaron, Abba 301 abandonment of children 233–4, 242, 247, 302 abuse of children 70, 111, 238, 278, 292, 293 accidents 267–79, 328–9 adolescence, adolescents 66, 100, 228, 238, 267, 273, 277; see also puberty affection: of children towards their peers 310; familial 13, 15, 61, 63, 79, 88, 305; gestures of 66–9, 72, 126; of teachers towards their pupils 161 afterlife 204, 254, 305–6; see also continuity age limits 5, 70–1, 212, 219, 237, 259 n.4, 267 agency of children: definition of 16–18; theory of 4, 12–13, 117–18; see also children’s culture agricultural tasks: gardening 228, 251, 253, 255; seasonal farming 81, 82; shepherding 87, 150, 241, 251, 252 alcohol and children 34, 41 n.40, 227, 228; see also wine alphabets 27, 38, 202, 251, 253 altars 32–3, 38, 39, 62, 184, 304; altar height 34–6; altar lamp 241 amulets 204, 206, 276–7; see also bulla anger 169, 170, 275 animals: depiction of 129–30, 132, 148–51; domestic 29, 149, 294, 296; interaction with 125–6, 129, 147; see also by different species anorexia 227, 228 Antinoopolis 50–1, 53, 56, 121 Antioch 14, 227, 228 apocrypha: Acts of Peter 288; Infancy Gospel of Thomas 274, 328; Karshuni Life of John the Baptist 311–12

apophthegmata 232–3, 237–8, 271 apprenticeship 81–2, 84, 86–7, 100, 130, 145, 159, 272 Ara Pacis, friezes of 36, 44–5, 61, 64 Aramaic 202, 209 archaeobotanics 226 archaeology 27, 30, 36, 38, 49–54, 117–18, 119, 121, 131–2, 137–8, 139–40, 144–5, 148, 150, 151, 198, 208, 302, 306, 324, 325 Ariès, Philippe 2, 6, 11, 12, 43, 56 Artemidorus 100, 116, 122, 130, 274 asceticism 107, 218, 219, 225–6, 227, 228–9, 238, 255, 258, 309 atrium 29, 35, 36–7, 116, 144–5, 149, 220, 221 Augustine of Hippo: childhood of 15, 106–7, 112, 174, 179, 181, 182–4, 329; on games 108; on kissing 67, 69; sermons of 220–1, 273, 304 aunts 6, 87–90, 223, 247, 250, 251, 257; as guardians of children 84–7; relationship with children 88–90 authority 113, 162, 217; imperial authority 109; monastic authority 234, 240, 242; parental authority 222, 237, 296, 302–3; religious authority 16, 18, 219 autobiography 11, 15; see also Augustine of Hippo, childhood of baby talk 181 ball play 47, 103, 111, 119–20, 124, 125, 129, 271 baptism 220, 222, 301–3, 306, 308, 309, 310 Barbie doll 120–1 bars, height of bars 27, 33–4, 38, 39 Basil of Caesarea 110, 225, 229, 236–7, 255–6

384 Index basilica 200, 209 baths, bathing 28, 102, 106, 146–7, 150, 238, 256–7, 289, 292, 294; Tiberias baths 199–204, 206, 208 beating, see corporal punishment beds, of children 137, 276, 279, 291, 294, 295; in monasteries 249, 253 belts 43, 47, 49, 50, 53–4, 55, 203 betrothal 6, 204, 207, 211, 224, 295 Bible 203, 207, 210, 251 bioarchaeology 320, 325 birds 119, 126, 129, 200, 252; as pets 148–9 biting 128, 276, 306 board games 104, 221–2 body, of a child 28, 31–8, 49, 53, 56, 125, 271, 273, 304 bone fractures, see fractures Bradley, Keith 145, 148, 291 bread 14, 18, 36, 101, 203, 205; consecrated bread 220, 252 breastfeeding 6, 60, 63–6; see also nursing brothers, see siblings building, by children 105–6 bulla 45, 276; see also amulets burials, of children 50, 138, 301–2, 305–6 Byzantium 222, 224, 247, 249, 258, 302; Byzantine culture and mentality 226, 236, 254, 305, 306; Byzantine law 219, 224, 225, 229 Caesarea Maritima 201 calculator 159, 160, 165 n.34 camels 282 n.59 camilli, camillae 186–7 candles 206, 210, 250, 252, 307 canon law 225, 247, 302, 303 capillati 157, 159, 160–1 caring, child-care 50, 52, 56, 65–6, 81, 84–6, 87, 88, 90, 167, 223, 225, 236, 241, 254, 292, 294, 296, 302, 312 Carmen Saeculare 191–2 carrying, by children 36, 205, 220, 252, 255 catechism 192, 193, 221, 222, 250, 260 n.27 Cato the Younger 169 cats 126 census declarations 81, 83, 88 chariots, chariot play 47, 103, 108, 110, 121, 122, 123, 209, 273 charms 119, 276 chastity 71, 238; Exortation to chastity 303 cheating 105, 106–7

child bearing 202, 292, 295, 296 child-care, see caring child, definitions of 5–6, 12, 13–14, 212, 219 child labour, see work, done by children child magistrates 101 child safety 29, 146, 232, 242, 271, 276–7 childhood as metaphor 1, 3, 79, 107–8, 109–10, 113 childhood mortality 3, 72, 300, 301, 305 childhood studies 56, 117–18, 218, 247, 318, 319, 321, 329–30; historiography of 2–4, 11–13 childism/childist perspective 288, 289, 296, 330 children’s culture 2, 4, 6, 12, 13, 14, 22, 104, 113, 123, 138–9, 180, 219–22, 288, 295–6, 324–5, 327–9; see also board games; drawing, by children; graffiti; play; ludi choirs of children, see singing choking 269, 277 Christianity, influence of 3, 7, 22 n.8, 107–8, 110, 113, 229 church 60, 111, 219, 224, 228, 234, 276, 287, 303; church attendence by children 219–22, 250, 252, 254–5 Cicero, M. Tullius 62, 68, 167, 174, 179, 187–8, 189, 326 circulation of children 234 circumcision 203, 210 cisterns, cistern height 29, 109, 200, 255 class-mate 181, 270 class-room 103, 181, 199, 257 clavi 50, 52 cleaning 137, 241, 253 cloaks 43, 44, 46, 47, 55 clothing, of children 6, 28, 43–57, 205, 241, 319, 325; see also belts; cloaks; coats; mantles; shoes; toga; tunics coats 43; see also Gallic coat cohabitation 72, 83–4 commemoration, see memory commerce 36–7, 167 Communion, see Eucharist conflicts, see family conflicts consolatory literature 62–3, 306–7 Constantinople 2, 220, 223, 224, 249, 257, 307 continuity 11, 63, 79, 229, 327; of family 2, 84, 86, 89, 242; see also afterlife cooking, by children 145 corporal punishment 156, 158, 160, 168–9, 170–4, 222, 239, 255, 310

Index  385 Crepereia Tryphaena 1, 7 crepundia 119, 133 n.9 crying 119, 220, 268, 276, 279, 312 curriculum 166–7, 169–74 dancing, by children 217, 305 deacon 220, 222, 272 death, of children 50, 52, 62, 63, 67, 109, 122, 227, 272, 273, 274, 277, 278, 300–11, 314 death, of parents 62, 72, 81, 84–5, 86, 87, 89, 249, 311–12 decoration: in atrium 144; of garments 49–52, 56 decurions 30, 39 deer 148, 149 deliciae -children 160 deMause, Lloyd 12 demography 12, 14, 30, 60, 64, 72, 80–1, 88–9, 214 n.72, 300, 321 demons 110–11, 204, 223, 224, 228, 233, 277, 296; see also unclean spirits developmental psychology 27, 139, 140–1, 143, 320 devil 108, 224, 233, 238, 252, 296 diapers 45 dice 100, 104, 105, 116, 119, 122 diet, see eating; fasting Dinocrates, brother of Perpetua 109 disability 240, 277, 287–97, 320, 321 discipline 71, 159, 173, 202, 229, 239, 247, 255 discipuli 77 n.97, 175 n.2 disease, see illness Distichs of Cato (Disticha Catonis) 173 divorce 72, 211 dogs 119, 276, 288; as metaphors 290–1; as pets 68, 126–7, 129, 147–8, 273, 294; terminology of 293 dolls 3, 101, 102, 116, 119–21, 131, 132, 137, 138–9, 224 dolphins 284 n.93 domestic animals, see animals domestic violence 60, 88, 293 drawing, by children 132, 140–4, 148, 221; see also graffiti dreams, interpretation of dreams 109, 116, 122, 273, 274 dress, see clothing of children drinking, by children 38, 41 n.40, 227, 228–9 drowning 269, 274, 277 eating, by children 20, 110, 200, 206, 207,

225–9, 250–1, 252, 253, 256, 310 education 38, 99–100, 160, 167–8, 169–74; elementary 170, 207, 251, 262 n.59; monastic 236–7, 239–40, 253, 254, 257, 260 n.35 Egypt, Roman: 5, 19, 79, 80, 83, 86, 87, 88, 91, 145, 234, 270, 271, 272, 273–4, 278; embracing in 60, 62–3, 66–7, 312 Emesa 217 emic/etic 323–4 emotions 17, 18, 20–1, 62–3, 105, 125, 128, 156, 183–4, 252, 311, 312, 314; see also affection; fear; love environments of children 6, 14, 29–30, 31–8, 72, 79, 80, 84, 86, 89, 90, 103, 137, 199–207, 232, 258, 267, 278, 324 epikrisis 5, 81, 82, 84, 87, 88, 89 epiphany 192 equestrian figures, see toy horses erotics 69, 238 eruv 205, 212 etic, see emic/etic Eucharist 250, 252, 303–4 exorcism, see demons experience of space 31, 33–6, 39 experience, definition of 16–17 experience, of childhood 7, 12, 13, 15, 16, 21–22, 131, 162, 166–7, 209 exposure, see abandonment of children fables, see storytelling faction 2, 8 falling children 29, 146, 270–3, 279 family conflicts 81, 83, 85, 88, 223 family cult 20, 184 family relationships 80–90, 223, 292–3 family strategies 79, 85, 87–9, 223–5, 234–6, 254 family structure 87–8 fasting 7, 221, 226–8, 247, 254, 309 fathers, fatherhood 102, 106, 109, 167, 172, 222–4, 294–6, 302, 314 fear 17, 30, 70, 102, 113, 128, 180, 275, 308; of animals 149, 273–4, 291; of God 218, 239; of punishments 169, 170, 172–4 feeding bottles 3 fertility 64 festivals 124, 155–6; music festivals 272; pagan festivals 221; religious festivals 226 fighting, by children 1, 47, 124, 126 finger prints, of children 139, 151 n.14 food, see eating; bread

386 Index fractures 268–71, 275, 277, 278 friendship, friends 1, 66–7, 69–70, 105, 106–07, 110, 207, 238, 239, 310 fullers 137 funerals 71, 139; funeral practices 305–7; funeral sermons 207, 307 funerary monuments 30, 46–8, 61, 116, 122–30, 148, 167 Galen 101, 122, 270–3, 275, 277 Gallic coat 48–9, 53–4 gambling 33, 101, 103–5 games, see board games; ludi; play garden 141, 148, 149, 228, 253, 255, 309 gaze 35, 124, 125, 182; of a child 28, 31 gender 6, 12, 17, 21, 28, 47–8, 54–6, 61, 70–1, 118–33, 138, 248, 287, 313, 314, 320, 321, 325, 330; gender bias 29; gender differences 47, 100, 102–3, 128; gender roles 17, 255, 301; gender stereotypes 128, 131; limits of 70–1; perceptions of 301, 322, 324 gestures 36, 65–73, 108, 124–5, 182–4, 205, 271, 276 gladiators 101, 102–3, 106, 108, 110 graffiti 7, 35, 37, 137–51, 221, 319–20, 325, 327 grammar teaching 171–2 grandparents 3, 64, 69; grandmothers 86, 228; grandfathers 81, 83, 85, 204 grave monuments, see funerary monuments greeting 19–20, 66, 67, 69, 83, 88, 144–5, 271, 327 Gregory of Naziansus 230 Gregory of Nyssa 301, 307–8 guardians, guardianship 81–9, 291, 294 hagiography: Byzantine 247, 248, 254–7; Coptic 301; Georgian 310; of Late Antique 217, 227–8, 232, 235; Syriac 311–12 hairstyles, of children 45–7, 50, 122, 125, 159, 206 head trauma 269, 271 healing 204, 232, 241, 288–93 health 12, 17, 19–20, 28, 30, 68, 155, 160, 161, 203, 222, 225, 227, 236, 256–7, 292, 321, 327; see also illness; healing Hebrew 202, 209, 210 height of children 27, 31–3 Herculaneum 36, 116, 125, 137–8, 140, 143–4, 148, 150–1 Herod Antipas 199, 200, 208

holiday 155–9, 162 Homo Sapiens 180 hood 49, 51, 53, 56 hoops 47, 101, 122, 124 horses 101, 148–9, 205, 273; horse bite 276; horse riding 122, 271, 272; see also toy horses household 20, 35–6, 38, 44, 55, 64, 69, 81, 83–6, 88, 89, 105, 144, 149, 150, 160, 161, 202, 206, 210, 226, 236, 275, 292–6, 302, 320, 321, 324 housekeeping 255, 261 n.38 houses 29–30, 33, 35–7, 85, 116, 131–2, 138, 144–6, 149, 150, 270, 271, 272, 278, 289, 328–9; see also household hugging, see embracing hunting 148–9 iconography 3, 44–9, 55, 56, 61–2, 66, 148, 167, 268 icons 249, 250, 252 identity: formation of 19, 35, 102–3, 108, 118, 120, 128, 132, 170, 236, 277; individual 17, 167, 325; Jewish 198, 200; non-Roman 45; Roman 35, 38; sense of 187 illiteracy 236, 255 illness 8, 219, 222, 225, 227, 232, 234, 235, 240, 242, 256, 287, 290–2, 295, 319, 325, 329; see also mental illness imagined scenarios 2, 198–207, 248–53 imitative learning 181–4 in-law relationships 81, 88 infancy 1, 54, 101, 182–3 , 211, 236, 237, 249 infanticide 234, 292, 302–3 ingestion 269–70, 277 inheritance 81, 84–5, 88, 223, 225, 257, 275 injury 267–9, 292, 319 innocence of children 129, 161, 237, 305, 308 instructed learning 181, 189–93 intentionality 180, 182–6, 188–9, 193 interdisciplinarity 3, 319–20 intersectionality 287–8, 321 intimacy 19, 65–6, 69 Jacob of Sarugh 307, 308–10 Jesus as a child 229, 272, 274, 312, 313, 328–9 jewelry 120, 122, 305 Jewish culture 290, 291, 326 Jewish law 204, 208, 211; see also Torah

Index  387 John the Baptist as a child 311–13 John Chrysostom 101, 108, 110, 172, 218, 221, 328 joking, by children 221, 239 Karanis 121, 131–2 Khirbet Qazone 50, 51, 53, 55 kidnapping 242, 292, 294–5 kinship vocabulary 82–3, 91 n.9 kissing 6, 60, 61, 63, 67–9, 71, 72, 205, 217, 328; prohibition against 238 kitchens and children 145, 146, 226, 229, 252, 255 knucklebones 100, 101, 103–5, 116–17, 119, 125–6, 128 kyriarchè 287, 291–2, 296 lameness 268, 291 language learning 181–3 Lararia, height of 35–6 lares 33, 35–6 law, see canon law; Jewish law; Roman law leisure 99–113, 123, 150, 274 Les Martres-de-Veyre 49, 53–4 letter-writing 19–21, 23 n.36, 66, 81, 83, 88, 227, 240, 327 life course 11, 21, 56, 277 lighting 190, 135 n.26, 197 n.93 literacy 38–9, 100, 167, 202 liturgy 220, 249, 250, 251–2, 253 lizards 148, 270 looms 49, 52, 56, 84, 250; loom weights 144–5 love 57, 69, 70, 72, 171–2, 223–4; parental love 12, 14, 63, 66; of God 239, 253 ludi 101, 107 Lucius Cornelius Statius 47, 65 magistrates, see child magistrates mantles 43, 44, 50 market 36, 150, 156, 200, 204, 208, 210, 256 marriage, marriage patterns: 5–6, 56, 61, 71, 87–8, 219, 223–4, 229, 289, 292–3, 294–5 martyrdom, of children 310–11, 313–14 mass, see liturgy mater familias 43 material culture 28, 33, 117, 131, 132, 137, 138, 139–40, 198; see also dress; drawing; toys maternal line 80–3, 85, 87–90 meat 149, 150, 205, 226–9

medical literature 28 memory, commemoration 166–74 menorah 202 mental illness 111, 234, 290 methodology 5, 13–14, 138, 143, 248, 268, 318–30; see also agency, theory of; interdisciplinarity; microhistory microhistory 248, 278, 279, 320 minores, minors 80–1, 83–8, 212, 236, 247, 305, 306 miracles 204, 217, 220, 234, 272, 279, 287, 290, 301 mobility 31; mobility impairment 291, 295, 296; social mobility 104–5 monasteries 225, 229, 232–42; 247–58; as educational facilities 236, 239–40; giving a child to monastery 224–5, 234–6, 254–5, 257; see also Pachomian monasticism; Phoibammon monastery; Stoudios monastery monastic rules 236–9, 252, 254–5, 258 monastic vow 225, 237, 251, 253, 257 monks 19, 210, 218, 225, 232–4, 237, 240– 2, 251–3, 255–8; clothing of 53; diet of 226, 228–9, 255–6; as spiritual parents 236, 253; temptations of 69, 238, 247 mother, motherhood 64–6, 80, 120, 205, 211, 225, 235, 292–3, 301–2, 314 mourning 63, 139, 276, 306–7, 312 movement 28, 30, 47, 49, 102, 120, 142, 182, 324 mules 147, 273 music, see singing myths 65, 89–90, 122, 294 naming 204, 249 narrativisation 15, 16, 19, 22, 290, 295–6 natural disaster 64, 203, 274, 278, 280 n. 17 neighbourhood 27–38, 159, 203, 205 nephew 79–90, 167 New Testament Studies 3, 288, 326 niece 79–90 noise, by children 220, 221–2, 239 notarius 157, 159–60 novices 236, 238, 244, 248, 249, 252, 254–8, 271 Numerius Popidius Celsinus 29–30 numerology 5, 28 nuns 224–5, 226, 234, 238, 241, 242, 247, 249–51, 255–8 nursing, nurses 1, 63–6, 181, 183, 184, 193, 302, 327 nuts 47–8, 103–6, 116, 120, 124–5, 221, 252

388 Index old age security 2, 254, 301, 324 orphans 3, 13, 81, 84, 85, 86, 225, 235–6, 237, 242, 247, 312, 313 otium 99–100 Oxyrhynchos 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 89, 90, 320 Pachomian monasticism 236–40 paedagogium 1, 160 paedagogus 107, 159–61, 222 paidaiogeron, see puer senex paideia 99–100, 172 pain, see suffering palaeopathology 268, 278 Pantokrator: Christ 252, 261, n.48; monastery of 256 paralysis 291–3, 295 parents 3, 13–15, 20, 27–8, 30, 44, 47, 55, 61, 64–7, 69–70, 72–3, 79–90, 100–2, 107, 112, 130, 138–9, 162, 167–8, 186, 190, 193, 205, 207, 218–25, 227–29, 232–40, 242, 247, 249, 250, 253, 254, 267, 272, 275–6, 288–96, 300–14, 321, 324, 325, 329 participatory learning 181, 184–9 Pascoli, Giovanni 1–2, 7 pater familias 29, 43, 72, 106, 242, 287, 292 paternal line 82, 86, 87 patriarch 200, 202, 209, 249 Paul the Younger 254 pederasty 72, 238 pediatrics 267–9, 277 peers 13, 20, 116, 119, 123, 126, 132, 145, 147, 151, 181, 187, 300; peer pressure 105–7; see also friendship performative childhood 14 performative knowledge 179–80, 188–9 Peter’s daughter (in Act of Peter) 287–9, 291–7 Petronius 328 pets 116, 123, 125, 129–30, 148–50, 151, 268, 291 Phoibammon monastery 235, 241 pietas 185, 188–9 pigs 119, 149–50 play, games 47, 99–112, 116–33, 170, 187, 219–22, 239, 257; see also board games; chariots; dice; dolls; knucklebones; nuts; role-play; street play; toys playmate 1, 112, 125 , 129, 294, 310, 313; see also peers Poemen, Abba 233

Pompeii 2, 27–39, 137–51, 269, 273, 319 portraits 43, 53, 55, 129 possession, see demons postcolonial studies 320 pottery 43, 119, 139 Praedia Julia Felix, frieze of 36–8 praying, prayer, by children 20, 183–4, 192, 212, 220, 227, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254 prevention of accidents 267, 276–7 progymnasmata 169 prostitution 33, 108, 122 puberty 5, 6, 28, 70–1, 211, 219, 224, 229, 293 puer senex 237, 244 n.36 Pulcheria, a young princess 307–8 punishment, see corporal punishment Quintilian, M. Fabius 63, 168, 170, 173, 174, 181–3, 184, 189, 327 rabbis 199, 200, 204, 205, 206, 207, 209, 210; rabbi Akiva 201; rabbi Assi 202; rabbi Hoshaya 206; rabbi Yohanan 201, 202, 209, 212; rabbi Meir 206–07, 209; rabbi Samuel 202; rabbi Shimon 206; rabbi Simon bar Yochai 208 racing 102, 121, 122 rape 89, 293, 294–5 rattles 101, 116, 119 Rawson, Beryl 3, 4, 179 recycling 51, 52, 53, 55 religious participation 184–9, 193, 218–19, 254–5, 302; see also rituals religious learning 179, 181–4, 189–93, 240, 254 remembrance, see memory resistance 217–29 rhetorics 15, 20, 54, 71, 88, 110, 234, 309 riders 121–2 ritual 35, 36, 64, 101, 104, 111, 156, 168, 185–9, 191, 192, 271, 303–4, 312 rituals, religious 28, 118, 201, 202, 204, 250, 252, 258, 301–2 role-models 70, 89, 102, 103 role-play 101, 138–9 Roman law 3, 5, 68, 85, 219, 223, 229, 234, 276, 302, 303 rooms, house room 35–6, 39, 116, 132, 144–6, 149, 272, 276, 328 Sabas, a Syrian monk 223, 228 Sabbath 198–212 sacrifice 32, 185, 233, 254, 310; of

Index  389 children 229, 233, 303–4 safety, see child safety salutation in letter 19–20, 66, 81, 88, 90, 240 San Mauro di Romagna 1, 2 sandals, see shoes Sanhedrin 200 sarcophagi 1, 43, 47–9, 54, 65, 102, 103–4, 119–20, 122, 124–6, 128–9, 132, 172 Saturnalia 156 schooling 7, 38, 100, 102, 158, 160, 162, 166–74; see also education schoolmaster, see teacher scorpions 273–4, 277 Seneca, L. Annaeus 62 sentimental leap 62, 63 Sepphoris 201 sermons 3, 110, 207, 218, 219, 220–1, 222, 306; funeral 307–9 servants 70, 311, 160, 220, 224, 232; children as 235–6, 240–1 service, see liturgy sexuality and children 45, 70–2, 292–3 sheep 149, 150, 233 ships and children 274, 278 shoes of children 45, 49, 53, 54, 206 shrines 27, 30, 34, 35–6, 38, 144 siblings 80, 82, 83, 85–6, 88–9, 129, 147, 151, 221, 227, 251, 294, 300; Christian siblings 107 singing, by children 110, 113, 189–93, 217, 220, 227, 250 sisters, see siblings slave children 2, 3, 36, 62–3, 88, 100, 117, 123, 129–30, 137, 271 – 2, 273, 274, 277, 305; education of 160–1; in monasteries 232, 240–1 smell 35, 200–1, 203, 205, 208, 250 snakes 270, 273–4, 277 snorting 61 social cognition 82, 93 social interactionism 14, 17–18, 31, 39, 320 socialisation 12, 14, 17, 79, 117, 118, 128, 139, 141, 180, 181, 193, 276 space, see environment of children; experience of space speech of children 181–4; see also baby talk spells 276–7 spinning 49, 52, 255 spinning tops 119, 132 sporting 267; see also ball play, swimming

statue bases, height of 33–4 status, social 6, 56, 72, 87, 104–5, 137, 161, 287, 301, 314, 320, 321 stealing 106–7, 225, 256 stereotypes, ethnic 290–1 stings 269, 273–4 stockings 53–4 stola 56 stones, throwing of, see throwing stones storytelling, stories 18–19, 65, 112, 271, 327 Stoudios monastery 257 street play 103 students 70, 166–75, 189 suffering 109, 156, 171–4, 267, 275, 278–9, 289, 296, 305–6, 308, 313–14 swaddling 47, 49, 54, 56, 305 swimming, by children 274 Symeon Stylites the Younger 222, 227–8 Symeon the Fool 217 synagogue 199, 200, 202, 205–10 Syrophoenician girl (in Mark) 287–97 teacher, schoolmaster 20, 66, 69, 70, 72, 113, 131, 155–62 , 168–71, 173–4, 189, 199–200, 202, 210–11, 237, 238, 240, 327, 329 teaching 37, 110, 138, 156, 159–62, 166–7, 169–72, 181, 183–4, 189–93, 202, 207, 218, 229, 234, 251, 253, 272, 276, 327 teenagers 1, 6, 11, 13, 16, 19, 30, 63, 70, 84, 85, 86, 100, 130, 145, 219, 222, 223, 227, 228, 240, 251, 256, 293, 295–6 ; see also puberty Ten Commandments 203, 205, 206, 210, 211, 212 Theodora, a female hermit 233, 234 Theodore of Sykeon 228–9 Theodoret of Cyrrhus 11, 14–15, 16, 18, 19, 110, 111, 220, 225 Theon, an Egyptian boy 11, 19–21, 87 throwing stones 102, 106, 271 Tiberias 7, 198–201, 203–6, 208–10, 320 toddlers, see infancy toga 36, 37, 43, 44–7, 49, 56, 61 toga praetexta, see toga toga virilis 5, 31, 36, 47, 56 tombstones, see funerary monuments Torah 199, 200, 202, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212 touching, touch 6, 28, 33, 34–5, 36, 60, 61–2, 66–7, 72, 73, 238, 250 toy horses 121–3, 149

390 Index toys 1, 3, 7, 88, 102, 112, 116, 118–22, 123, 129–30, 131, 132, 138, 305, 319, 327; see also chariots; dolls; hoops; spinning tops traffic 30, 149, 273 traffic accidents 269, 271–3 training, professional 100, 130, 159; see also apprenticeship Trajan’s column 45, 46 trauma, psychological 173, 174, 267, 275, 276, 277 traumatology 267, 268 Trojan Games 271, 272, 276 tunics 43–57, 125, 250 Tyre 288, 293 uncles 1, 6, 67, 79–90, 130, 205, 225, 247, 274, 320; as guardians of children 81, 83–6, 223; relationship with children 81, 88–90, 255 unclean spirits 288, 290 values, interiorisation of 72–3, 167, 183, 187, 229 vegetables 205, 212, 227, 252, 253, 255 Verginia 293 veterans 48, 61 Vindonissa 116, 125 violence 4, 7, 89, 108, 303, 305; in monasteries 239; in school 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 211; sexual 89, 293; see also corporal punishment virginity 71, 292, 294, 296 vows 5–6, 183, 224, 251, 253, 257; see also monastic vow vulnerability of children 45, 56, 128, 258, 274, 277, 293, 294, 301, 319

walking 30, 66, 71, 181, 184, 186, 187, 190, 199, 201, 203, 206, 252, 255, 289, 292, 319 washing: food products and dishes 252; in funerary rites 305, 312; as hygiene practice 256, 274; in Judaic tradition 201, 203, 204; in textiles treatment 49, 50 water and children, see baths; cisterns; drowning; swimming; waterfountains; wells water-fountains 27, 30, 33, 34, 38, 39 wax, playing with 119, 130–1 weakness 113, 161–2, 227, 287 weaving 44, 50, 52, 55, 56, 86, 250, 255 week 14, 156, 198, 200, 204, 206, 226, 227, 228, 253 weight 28 wells 241, 252, 274, 277 wet-nursing, see breastfeeding; nursing wheel 121, 122, 129, 130, 132 wills, see inheritance wine 185, 204, 206, 207, 227, 228–9, 252, 256; see also alcohol and children work, done by children 36, 81, 82, 86–7, 99–101, 137, 145–6, 147, 150, 203, 205, 207, 228, 234–5, 236, 240–2, 250, 251, 252–3, 255, 272; see also agricultural tasks; apprenticeship; weaving wounds 269, 270, 272 writing, by children 19–20, 66, 68, 166, 170, 173, 251, 327 youth 1, 31, 70, 108, 110, 112–13, 147, 219, 222, 234, 237–9, 267, 275, 293, 312, 328