This is an ambitious and impressive work, representing the first full-length treatment of infancy (defined by C. as the first year of life) in the ancient world. Birth and infancy in Classical Antiquity is a developing field, as C. notes in the introduction (p. 3), and this is a welcome addition.
C.’s book is partly a reaction against the continuing tendency in scholarship to overlook or dismiss the position of the infant or very young child in the Roman family, an approach that has been heavily influenced by the elite attitudes found in the literary sources. To counteract this, C. intentionally does not engage with the literary sources that discuss infant death until her final chapter, concentrating instead on the evidence for infancy found in epigraphy, iconography, archaeology and material culture. Her work spans the full breadth of the Roman empire in both time and space, from the fourth century bc to the fourth century ad and in all regions where evidence has survived. Throughout, C. distinguishes between foetus (less than 36 weeks’ gestation), perinate (around birth, aged 39 to 40 weeks’ gestation), newborn (birth to one month old) and infant (up until the first birthday). Such subtle treatment has not been a common approach to infants previously (indeed, her analysis is hampered in places by archaeological reports which identify all skeletal remains of children under six as infans I) and adds an extra layer of nuance to her argument.
Following the introduction, which sets out the aims and parameters of her study, Chapter 2 explores the position of infants in pre-Roman Mediterranean societies from about the eighth century bc. This encompasses both infant burial (sites and grave goods) and depictions of pregnancy, childbirth and infants in pre-Roman art. The general sense, as one might expect, is of diverse traditions and approaches.
Chapter 3, ‘Mother and Child: Pregnancy, Birth, and Health’, examines the risky prospect of childbirth in the Roman world through skeletal studies and medical treatises. The dangers of labour are well known in the literary sources (e.g. Plin. Ep. 4.21), but here C. focuses on the archaeological and epigraphic evidence for miscarriages, stillbirths and the death of mother and/or baby in childbirth. Bioarchaeological evidence reiterates that ‘infancy and earliest childhood were very high-risk periods of life’ (p. 69) and offers insights into the weaning process. The chapter concludes by discussing appeals to divine protection that were made for these most-fragile family members, including the votive offerings shaped like swaddled babies common to central Italy in the middle Republic and Gaul during the Principate.
The next chapter, ‘The Material Culture of Infancy’, is a catalogue of artefacts associated with infancy and earliest childhood, often arising from a funerary context. Clothing, blankets, cribs and cradles, pets and toys are all treated. Of particular interest here are the spouted vessels that C. identifies as feeding bottles and the protective jewellery found in burial sites, often, but not always, associated with children who had reached that milestone first birthday.
Chapter 5, ‘Picturing Infants and Families in Roman Art’, sets out the iconographic evidence for earliest childhood. At times this chapter feels disconnected from the rest of the book: some of the images discussed depict older children, not infants; others show mythological or quasi-historical figures, like Romulus and Remus. The connections between the public presentation of such figures and C.’s overall argument concerning the position of the infant in the family are not always clear. The latter part of the chapter, which considers images of family life and the socialisation of the young child found on marble sarcophagi, is a better fit.
In Chapters 6 and 7 C. turns her attention to infant burials and the treatment of the infant body in death. Here she is very much in her element, and the evidence is examined and contextualised with skill and grace. Particularly convincing is her treatment of the archaeological evidence (or lack thereof) for infanticide and/or exposure. As in Chapter 2, the reader is struck by the diversity of experiences and traditions. It is hard not to be affected by the descriptions of the care afforded these tiny bodies by their grieving families. C. establishes beyond doubt that infants were deemed worthy of proper burial and funerary rituals; some even received special treatment based on their age. Some grave goods found in infant burials, such as food offerings a baby would have been unable to eat, likely evoked the loss of the older child or adult whom the infant would have become.
This theme of unfinished lives emerges again in Chapter 8, ‘Funerary Commemoration of Infants’, where C. examines epitaphs and funerary images. Much of this is familiar ground to scholars of the Roman family, such as the very precise age at death often found on the epitaphs of young children, but C. weaves new threads into the discussion. C.’s intriguing hypothesis of a Syrian connection with a Pannonian funerary monument (pp. 224–9) is a reminder of the challenges inherent in trying to identify ‘Roman’ habits in the provinces.
In the final chapter, ‘Integrated Perspectives on Roman Infancy’, which also serves as the volume's conclusion, C. turns at last to one particular set of influential Roman texts – those that were ‘written primarily in response to infant death’ (p. 238), like Plutarch's Consolation to his Wife – and reassesses them in light of what the burial evidence and material culture have shown. As she demonstrates, mourning is not to be confused with sorrow and grief, ‘as both are normal human reactions to the death of someone very young; instead, [these texts] are statements about finding a measured and controlled way of publicly expressing loss’ (p. 242). Rather than intimating that the inhabitants of the Roman empire did not form attachments to their infants or were resigned to their inevitable loss, these texts instead reflect an idealised public face of mourning, one which would have resonated only with the highest echelons of the social elite in Rome itself, if at all. The wealth of evidence that C. has amassed here lays to rest once and for all the question asked 30 years ago (M. Golden, G&R 35 [1988], 152–63). Many inhabitants of the Roman empire cared very much when their children died, including the youngest ones.
The text is accompanied by many illustrations (both photographs and line drawings), maps marking the named sites and an appendix with tables of the infant burials from eight sites. The bibliography is extensive. An index locorum would have been a useful addition as C. makes good use of written texts throughout the book, even though they are not its focus.
There are times when the sudden shifts in chronology and geography can become disorienting, and it is not always easy to determine whether C. sees the evidence as reflecting Roman influence, continuing local traditions or some combination of the two. This is perhaps inevitable in a work of such ambitious scale and certainly does not detract from the book's important and manifold contributions to scholarship. C. has taken a veritable mountain of evidence and produced an engaging and erudite monograph, which will be of interest to all scholars of childhood and the family, not just those of the ancient world. There is no excuse now to privilege the literary sources when C. has made the material culture, epigraphic, archaeological and iconographic evidence so accessible. Her book will surely become a foundational work in the field.
