Childhood in Ancient Rome was a very different prospect to the experience of being a child today. Although children at this time existed in a patriarchal society – so most of what we see of children is from the perspective of adult males – material and documentary evidence remains to tell us something about how they were thought of and treated in the Roman World.
Babies and Infanticide
For many Roman writers, childhood was divided into two parts: birth to seven years old, and age seven to fourteen. These stages were linked to dental development and astronomy.
From the perspective of Roman Laws (both under the Republic and later in the Empire), the child was the property of his or her father (pater familias) and could not become a recognised person accepted into the family unless and until he decreed it. It was common practice to place the newborn in front of the father in the atrium of the house - here, he could decide whether to accept or reject the child. If a child was rejected from the family under the power of the father (pater potestas), then s/he may have been killed using exposure or alternatively sold into slavery, as slaves were a vital part of the Roman economic system. Unwanted children were often exposed in places where they could be found by other adults, so rejection from their family may not necessarily have resulted in the death of the child.
Despite this apparent indifference towards children, tradition in the Roman world appears to have been against it for the most part. For example, Romulus is thought to have decreed that the first-born child should invariably be raised. Numa, too, is thought to have made a law penalizing exposure or infanticide except when the child is deformed. In Augustus' time, the ius trium liberorum must have discouraged such practices. It was not until the time of Hadrian that a father was banished for putting his child to death for the first time. Roman law also concerned children insomuch as it made abortion illegal – although it was seen as a crime against the father (who would want children as heirs) rather than against the mother or child.
Whatever tradition decreed about the non-brutal treatment of children, it appears that in some parts of the Roman world, infanticide was tolerated. Indeed, Pliny the Elder even defended it on the basis of the need to reduce population size, arguing that the child did not possess a soul until the age of teething. This observation is supported by archaeological evidence from British cemeteries and settlements dating from the time of the Roman occupation.
In a 1993 survey of burials on such sites, it was found that Roman infants showed a strong tendency to have died at age 38 to 40 weeks, the gestational age corresponding to a newborn full-term baby. In contrast, another survey conducted on the medieval cemetery of Wharram Percy (Yorkshire), found a much flatter age distribution with no strong peak. When these results were compared with modern data, it was found that the medieval cemetery produced similar results to those expected for a population with a mixture of stillbirths and natural deaths in the immediate post-natal period, but the Roman burials did not. Instead, the Roman infants resembled the modern distribution of gestational ages of total live births; this might be expected if infanticide was being practiced, given that it would occur at or soon after birth, and being practiced in sufficient regularity to exert a dominant effect upon the age distribution. The data produced the same results for the Roman infants for both cemetery and settlement sites (about half of the 164 children studied fell into each group), suggesting that not all victims of infanticide then were denied regular burial and that there may even have been an element of regret or guilt on behalf of the parents.
Funerary Monuments to Children
Children may also be visible in a funerary context in other ways, by having their death commemorated on a memorial. Marking the death of a child was not a common event in the Roman world – one survey of over 13,500 funerary monuments showed that just 6.3% (2727 memorials) were dedicated to children, and of these less than a third (856 memorials) marked the child’s age. However, as the addition of an age to the funerary memorial was not a universal practice, the decision to include a number specifying age was a deliberate act on behalf of the commemorator, perhaps in the case of a child to be remembered as an individual who died without obtaining adulthood.
The same study also used this material evidence to demonstrate that children below the age of one year were hardly ever commemorated (which supports documentary evidence for a law recommending that no ritual mourning be allowed for the death of a child aged under 12 months), and that boys were more likely to have a memorial than girls, at a ratio of 1.8 males to 1 female.
The Vindolanda Tablets
It is also possible to identify children through a remarkable series of writing tablets found at the Roman fort of Vindolanda in Northumberland. The tablets appeared to have been thrown out of the fort in some periodic clearout and have been preserved in the waterlogged conditions of the local soil, where conditions were sufficiently favourable to allow some of the writing still upon the tablets to be deciphered. Although Vindolanda had a predominantly military presence in the area, there was also an associated vicus or civilian settlement at the fort, and so women and children would have been present throughout the Roman occupation there. Although it cannot be expected that all of the vast array of personnel at Vindolanda will be represented in the texts, children do appear in them, if only incidentally.
At the praetorium (officer’s quarters), a prefect by the name of Flavius Cerialis and his wife Sulpicia Lepidina certainly had children with them, as evidenced by the find of a child’s footwear in this region of the fort, and of a tablet that appears to have been used for a writing exercise by a childish hand. In addition to this, tablet 21 (a private letter to Sulpicia Lepidina from her sister) mentions “my Aeulius and my little son send him their greetings” again suggesting the presence of children in a military context (if not Vindolanda), and that the child is worthy of mention in the letter alongside his father. Another tablet (number 20, a letter to the fort prefect) is a request to the officer for tunics for “the boys”. Although there is little explicit evidence for children in the writing tablets, there is still the reminder of the wider meaning and coherence of the Roman familia in these finds.
Other Material Evidence of Roman Children
Another form of material evidence for the activities of children in Roman times is one more easily identifiable to the modern eye – that of toys. Although not a common find, some Roman children did play with them before they became old enough to either contribute to family work or to be married. Examples found include a lead camel made in Egypt, glass and pottery marbles, dolls (sometimes made in the likeness of a god or goddess) and may also have played with board games for which counters have been excavated, although such sophisticated playthings could have been the preserve of the adult world. The Roman word for play (ludus) also meant “school” – an indication of the superficial nature of teachers of the time. Although many children across the Roman world were taught either in school or at home, it is unfortunate that none of the material culture of education is likely to have survived, given its delicate and organic nature.
There is further material evidence for children in the Roman period from across the Empire in images that have survived (although these are clearly biased towards the children of those rich enough to have artwork, carvings and tombstones made for them). In the archaeological work carried out on the Italian city of Herculaneum, for example, a frieze depicting a school scene of a child undergoing katomismos (the beating of a child whilst held across the shoulders of a fellow pupil) has been found.
In Pompeii, children have been seen on some of the preserved wall paintings, such as the banquet scene in house V.2.4, where they are shown helping their parents to entertain guests. Roman children were occasionally portrayed on public monuments, sometimes even as patrons and magistrates, suggesting their status was not mitigated because of their youth. Children have also been seen depicted on the arch of Trajan in Rome, and more unusually, on coins. The production of an heir was considered of such great importance to wealthy Roman men that the Emperor was not unknown to celebrate an Imperial birth by minting a special commemorative coin – Tiberius did just this when he became the father of twin sons, which was considered to be an especially fortunate sign.
Leaving Childhood
Fourteen was seen by many as the age at which a child entered adulthood, although the final decision on whether a boy could be considered a man lay with his father, so in reality he could become a legal man between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. Fourteen was also the age at which a boy could marry; for a girl the age was twelve.
Sources
Bowman, A.K. (1994). Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier – Vindolanda and its people. London: British Museum Press
Dixon, S. (2001). The ‘Other’ Romans and their Family Values in S. Dixon (ed.) Childhood, Class and Kin the Roman World. London and New York: Routledge
Gardner, J.F. and Wiedemann, T. (1991). The Roman Household – A Sourcebook. London and New York: Routledge
Harlow, M. et al (2007). Past, Present and Future in the Study of Roman Childhood in S. Crawford and G. Shepherd (eds.) Children, Childhood and Society. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports
Sharon Brookshaw - Freelance writer, university research administrator and PhD in archaeology/museum studies.
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