The first edition of G.’s book on children in Greek antiquity claimed an important place in the scholarship in the 1990s, when there was significantly less bibliography and no full book-length treatment on the subject. This second edition should maintain the book's status as a full and careful treatment of childhood in classical Athens. It serves as an example of social history written without obscuring complexity for the sake of consensus and conveyed in an accessible and lively style that gives the book personality.
The book is structured around what children did (Chapters 2–3) and the relationships they had (Chapters 4–6) inside and outside the household. Investigating these activities and relationships, the book travels through key themes of family life and social history, for example, dowries, marriage, care-giving and education. In this second edition, G. incorporates new scholarship on the representation of children in tragedy and art, and adds a welcome new conclusion on changes in ancient childhood over time. Also new are an increased focus on individual agency (of children and parents) and the inclusion of more archaeological evidence.
The evidence employed remains primarily textual. G. is open about the limitations of the evidence and frequently careful about the conclusions that can be drawn, and he freely admits where he makes inference. Yet, he is still able to do much of interest. For example, he approaches the social history of children and the family through tragedy, a challenging and interestingly fruitful venture. G. also employs anthropological and historical analogies to good effect, especially in a sensitive and thorough treatment of infant mortality and exposure. The discussion is usefully non-polemical, approaching the evidence and scholarship from several angles, from the economic to the emotional.
The addition of archaeological evidence in this edition is both useful and necessary, and a good attempt has been made to recognise changes in the field. G. is sceptical of certain uses of archaeology and is rightly dubious about finding direct correspondence between historical events and the material record. The archaeological evidence could, however, be better integrated as evidence and embedded into the critical analysis. Domestic architecture appears more as a revised setting for the textual sources than as a source of evidence for family life itself (as it does in, e.g., L. Nevett, Domestic Space in Classical Antiquity [2010], or several chapters in R. Westgate, N. Fisher and J. Whitley [edd.], Building Communities [2007]). Built hearths, for example, are very rarely found in classical houses (despite their importance in textual sources as household focal points), which must interestingly complicate our understanding of family rituals such as the amphidromeia. Although G. questions using the funerary record to suggest changes in status and attitudes towards children, he seems to miss a fundamental challenge to applying burial evidence to such questions: what remains and what has been excavated do not and cannot directly represent an even sample of a whole living population. However, that a great many adults and children were buried in ways not evident in the archaeological record could itself be suggestive of status and/or change.
Throughout, G. strikes a fine balance between individual choice and collective whole picture. The sources should not be used, according to G., to impose patterns that obscure complexity (p. 19); therefore, he does not proscribe or find ancient consensus where there is none to be found, for example, in the stages of childhood, which are very inconsistent across the sources, even within communities. Instead, the book embraces this lack of consensus as revealing varying individual, local and familial habits that should not be ironed out by scholarship. G.’s book reminds us, therefore, that complexity and inconsistency are important as indicators of the individual choices and actions that make up a collective whole.
