Roman social history has seen a welcome and dynamic growth in interest in childhood over recent years, with edited volumes, companions and articles devoted to children's experience and ancient notions of childhood. How did children fare alongside adults and other children in everyday life, religious and social activity, labour, education and sexual contexts? With similar areas for the Roman family now considered a staple of ancient history, the time is right for a book-length study of these aspects of life from the perspective of children's involvement, and indeed agency, in them. It is no surprise to see such an endeavour to locate children within Roman society written by L., who has produced some of the most important recent work on Roman children in social and cultural contexts that remain partially obscured by both the nature of the source material and the focus of historians (in particular, his work on disabilities, education and labour in childhood).
Ancient children lived within the constraints of many of the social, economic and political structures which have traditionally been the focus of social histories (as M. Golden has demonstrated to be the case for Greek children, and B. Rawson for Roman children); socio-political structures such as the ephebos, gymnasium and the Roman magistracies, along with their civic obligations, were a means of progression through stages of the life course to majority, adulthood and citizenship. But some of the spheres through which children experienced their day to day lives – slavery, labour, religious institutions, education, local community, the family – were less rigidly defined and organised. If we hope to understand what it meant to be a child in the Roman world, from both child and adult perspectives, then we must explore children's experience through these aspects of life. This is precisely what this book does, and L. brings together an impressively wide range of epigraphic, literary and archaeological source material in order to place children within their demographic, social, economic, religious and cultural contexts.
Of L.'s chief concerns in this book, two stand out. First, in what ways did children's lives differ across the social spectrum of the Roman empire? In a society so preoccupied with social distinctions and status, age was less crucial to involvement in community and wider society than status. Second, by what means were these experiences shaped by what childhood meant to adults in various – social, religious, sexual – contexts? These are important questions to ask and have, in one way or another, been at the heart of many approaches to ancient childhood. The introductory chapter outlines the main aims of the study and eloquently justifies what is a necessarily broad geographic, temporal and evidential scope – 200 b.c.e. to 400 c.e., across the western and eastern provinces (though we are also introduced to material from up to the sixth century c.e.).
The first substantive chapter presents a detailed overview of some demographic and psychosocial ‘realities’ of life in the Roman world, emphasising issues of risk, poor living conditions and psychosocial liminality. It is within this context that we see a good deal of discussion of what the experiences of children, and adult anxieties surrounding them, were most likely to have been, particularly amongst sub-elite groups. Fear of death in infancy and childhood was pervasive, and undoubtedly influenced family size and shape through its impact on marital and reproductive decision-making. Populations across the Roman empire were, as L. explains, young populations, in which children formed up to a third of the total and, more often than not, out-lived their grandparents' generations whilst still minors. This would have impacted substantially on the psychological aspects of growing up in a domestic environment fuelled by particular expectations of marriage, future parenthood, violence and domestic life.
A further four chapters follow, each addressing the place of children within a particular social context: domestic, educational, labour-related and sexual. In Chapter 3, on children's early years, L. offers an array of epigraphic and literary material attesting adult anxieties about childhood mortality, which is testament to the attitudes towards children and the life course we have become accustomed to seeing since B. Rawson's earlier works (in particular Children and Childhood in Roman Italy [2003]). L. takes this now familiar argument of parental affection for children a step further with a well-documented account of relationships between families and their midwives and wet-nurses across the elite of the Roman world, and the philosophers' and physicians' views on early childhood.
Chapter 4 focusses on the nature of education, partly as a function of state and legal frameworks but also with a keen eye on children's likely relationships with their educators, seen through the lens of the respect afforded to the paedagogus, the ludimagister and the grammaticus. The important educational and social relationship between these educators and children of all ages is evident in a range of material – from the gratitude shown in a Nicomedian funerary relief and epitaph referring to Hermes, pedagogue of two young boys whom he had tried to save from earthquake debris (TAM 4, I, 134, = L. p. 120) to the sixth century Hermopolite father who encourages a schoolmaster to beat his son, who should be accustomed to such treatment (SB 5, 7655 = L. p. 141).
Education was available to children of relatively high social standing but the rest entered a world of work, with social position determining the type of labour which defined much of their childhood experience. Whilst children of the upper classes would train in the various magistracies and priesthoods open to them, the children of the lower classes would train in crafts and participate in other manual tasks, the poor primarily in agriculture or mining, and children who were slaves would be subject to trade and their labour enforced from the age of five upwards. The tasks to which children were put, according to the epigraphic and textual material L. collates, range across administrative, political, technical, domestic and entertainment spheres, and yet the Roman jurists, along with the rest of Roman society, had no formal concept of labour, let alone child labour. Attitudes towards the roles of children engaged in work were concerned with social status rather than with age: there was nothing inherently wrong with the concept of children working, but what could have been problematic was the nature of that work and whether it befitted children of a particular status, whether free or slave.
In Chapter 6 we see the culmination of L.'s approach to the psychosocial aspects of adult–child relationships in a discussion of attitudes towards paedophilia and pederasty. Children in the Roman world were exposed to sex from an early age, again primarily in line with their social status. L. argues that the practice of pederasty demonstrates the notion keenly observed throughout that childhood, for the Romans, was a social category and not a psychological one.
L. does a systematic and comprehensive job in bringing together a diverse range of material to explain the nature of childhood experience, and attitudes towards children, across the Roman world. The discussion is thematically structured, but one wonders if the organisation of the first half of the book into sections of the Roman life course tends to limit the degree to which social and regional variation can be explored, along with a more clearly defined examination of relationships within the family – the roles of grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles in day to day childcare, and in the frequent occurrence of fatherlessness or orphanhood. The book's key strengths lie in its detailed and insightful coverage of myriad ways in which Roman children's experiences and relationships with adults were determined, crucially, by social status, age and gender. Children, for the Romans, were important in more ways than traditional accounts of parent–child affection have imagined: though not yet fully integrated into society they were crucial to familial, social and cultural structures which shaped life across the social spectrum of the empire – as L. points out, Outsiders, Within.
