Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (Routledge Revivals)

Thomas Wiedemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317749110
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

There is little evidence to enable us to reconstruct what it felt like to be a child in the Roman world. We do, however, have ample evidence about the feelings and expectations that adults had for children over the centuries between the end of the Roman republic and late antiquity.

Thomas Wiedemann draws on this evidence to describe a range of attitudes towards children in the classical period, identifying three areas where greater individuality was assigned to children: through political office-holding; through education; and, for Christians, through membership of the Church in baptism. These developments in both pagan and Christian practices reflect wider social changes in the Roman world during the first four centuries of the Christian era.

Of obvious value to classicists, Adults and Children in the Roman Empire, first published in 1989, is also indispensable for anthropologists, and well as those interested in ecclesiastical and social history.

Chapter One

THE CHILD IN THE CLASSICAL CITY

As the Roman empire developed from a collection of city communities in the classical period to the court-centred Christian world of late antiquity, we would expect changes to have taken place in popular, intellectual, and institutional perceptions of childhood and of the place of children in the community. It goes without saying that there will have been much continuity of attitude between these two periods, in both of which elite culture depended upon a peasantry whose existence was itself circumscribed by the climate, the soil, and the seasons.

Traces of any changes might be most apparent in the writings of the elite. A good place to begin our search would be the Reflections or Meditations of the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who ruled the Roman world from AD 161 to 180.¹ It was Marcus’ reign that was acclaimed by Edward Gibbon as the period when – before his own enlightened age – ‘the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous’. As a pre-Christian document, the Reflections is unique. Its format is that of a series of moralising meditations on issues which concerned the emperor, not in his official capacity, but simply as a human being confronting the world; the theme that worries him most is human mortality. The work’s literary format inhibits the development of consistent lines of thought, and the Reflections is more free from theoretical speculation than any other type of Stoic writing. That does not make it more ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’. People may feel as well as think the way they do because that is the conventional way. But such conventions are the very substance of social history. We may be disappointed that the views the emperor sets down in his address whose Greek title is To Himself, are unoriginal, and that he fails to perceive contradictions between the different conventional standpoints he expresses. Classical writing (prose as much as verse) was normally intended not for private reading, but public recitation before a critical audience which expected adherence to the conventions of a genre. Where such philosophical or literary writings were intended for publication, the authors tried to avoid contradicting themselves; Marcus’ Reflections are uniquely valuable precisely because they were not aimed at any audience other than the writer himself, so that contradictory feelings are candidly expressed.

Marcus’ age – like every age – was an age of transition: and some of the contradictions in the Reflections may be explained in terms of that transition from the classical to the late antique world, with a court and a Senate whose members no longer came just from the landed Latin-speaking elite of Italy and the Italian-colonised areas of the west, but also from the Greek-speaking and even Punic-speaking areas of the eastern Mediterranean.² Although the direction in which these tendencies were leading may have been far from obvious to Marcus Aurelius, his world had already travelled a long way from the ‘restored Roman republic’ of Augustus, or even the Latin-speaking Italian state of Vespasian or Trajan, the emperors to whom he looked as his paradigms. On the one hand the Reflections looks back to the traditions of the individual Greek city and of the Roman republic. But at the same time the very facts that Marcus was a Roman emperor who saw himself as having an obligation to serve the universe, and that he needed to express his feelings in a notebook intended only for his own eyes, point forward to the feelings both of belonging to a universal community, and that one was an individual who stood apart from the community of one’s birth, feelings that in late antiquity were to to be articulated so successfully by Christianity. Radical Christians were to go so far as to reject the civic society of this secular world entirely; for Marcus, the moral requirements of membership of the cosmopolis were paramount, but he could never forget that he was a Roman. The question that interests us here is whether Marcus’ Stoicism led him to a view of childhood and of children – including his own childhood, and his own children, four of whom died as youngsters – in any way different from that which had been dominant in the classical world of autonomous citizen-communities.

Stoic cosmopolitanism committed the emperor to the view that all men without exception had the potential to share in the divine reason of the universe. In theory, this might lead him to the view – later universalised by Christian infant baptism – that even the youngest infant’s life was worth as much as that of any adult. On three separate occasions, meditating on death as the great leveller, the emperor expresses just that opinion: ‘What then will be the difference between the most advanced in age, and the one who has died before his time?’; ‘What advantage did those who clung greedily to their lives have over those who died young? … Consider the infinity of future time: what is the difference in that context between a three-day-old child and a man who has lived for three generations?’ ‘The only life which a man has to lose is that which he is living at the moment … this means that he who lives longest and he who dies soonest come off the same.’³

In the face of eternity, then, the child and the adult are equals. Yet if that idea looks forward to late antiquity’s view that children are just younger than, not different from, adults, Marcus Aurelius draws no practical consequences from the theory. There is indeed one point where he reflects upon the fact that all ‘natural’ things are beautiful, and that every stage of human life is ‘natural’. ‘The sensitive eye will recognise that a certain power and beauty belongs to an old woman or an old man, as well as the grace of a youth.’ Yet if the old are, in this sense, the equals of young adults, it did not occur to Marcus to take the further step of saying that childhood had the same natural beauty as adulthood. In his very last ‘Reflection’, he says that five years as a citizen of this great city (the world) are the equal of one hundred. We must understand this precisely: he is not referring to the first five years of a man’s life as a child, but five years exercising the privileges of a citizen of the world-community.⁴

Stoic equality did not extend to those who only imperfectly shared in the rational order of nature. For all that he deeply loved his wife and children, it did not occur to Marcus that women and children were included. Their spirits are simply insufficiently human. When he is worried about being dominated by the less rational element in his soul, he asks himself: ‘Whose soul inhabits me at the moment? Is it a little child’s, a youngster’s (MEIPAKIOY), a woman’s, a tyrant’s, that of a beast of burden or of a wild animal?’ What is the soul of an evil man? ‘A black, feminine heart; the heart of a wild beast, a beast of the field, that of a child, lazy and unreliable, stupid and deceitful; the heart of a tyrant.’⁵

The child occurs in association with animals, women, and tyrants – all four symbolise behaviour opposed to that of the adult male citizen. This conventional pattern was entirely appropriate to the classical city-state ruled by the adult male hoplites and legionaries who fought its battles. Marcus does not question the ideal of the community of formally equal adult male citizens. He does not question the stock theme of Greek philosophy and rhetoric that the tyrant has no place in a just political, and therefore human, society. In the same way, it never occurs to him that children have a place in human society. The man who does not follow the precepts of philosophy is no better than a child. Politics are just ‘the arguments of children and their games’; the unphilosophical who concern themselves only with achieving honour and status in this life are ‘like puppies fighting, or children who love quarrelling, who laugh at one moment and then cry the next’. Marcus shares the beliefs held by philosophers six or seven centuries before him that those adults who do not think philosophically must be dismissed as irrational, like children: he cites Heraclitus’ criticism of men who rely blindly on traditional beliefs as ‘like children obeying their parents’, and similarly Socrates’ dictum that the beliefs of the average man were like ‘Lamiae’, the story-time witches used to scare children. What is appropriate to children is not appropriate to the rational adult. In none of these passages is there any interest in children as being different from adults; the concept of childhood occurs only so that adults who fail to live up to the dictates of reason can be condemned. It is adults who share in reason, and hence can act as nature intended them to act – for instance, by accepting the naturalness of dying: ‘If anyone is scared of a work of nature, that is the mark of a child.’⁶

It is not surprising, then, that Marcus Aurelius should have been unable to see childhood from a child’s point of view. There are odd references to the things that happened to children: they are all described from the viewpoint of parent or adult. Children are born, children fall ill, and children die. As far as Marcus’ interests go, the important thing about a child is that it is a gift from the divine intelligence. When a child falls ill, the philosopher must accept his child’s illness as a natural event, while the average unphilosophical parent will pray that his sick child will not die: ‘Where another man prays, “Spare me the loss of my little child”, you should rather pray, “May I have no fear of losing him”’. One of Marcus’ purposes in writing the Reflections was to come to terms with his own fears and experiences; it is not reprehensible that he was concerned with how the death of his children affected himself. Nevertheless there is no hint that he felt that premature death was regrettable because it was a tragedy for the children. When he thinks of his dead children, he quotes Homer’s Iliad (6, 147 f.):

Like leaves which the wind blows to the ground,

Such are the generations of men.

He twice cites a fragment from Euripides’ Antiope:

If I and my pair of children are forgotten by the gods,

Then even this must have a reason.

He finds solace in a story told about Epictetus:

Epictetus once said that when you kiss your child, you should say to yourself, ‘Perhaps it will be dead in the morning’. ‘Words of ill-omen’, they told him. Not ill-omened, but referring to a process of nature. Otherwise it would also be ill-omened to speak of the corn being harvested.

For Marcus, his children are like the corn crop: one of the conventional ways in which classical Greeks and Romans had been used to perceiving their children.⁷

For the ancients more than for modern westerners, child mortality was a fact that required coming to terms with. It is significant that it is one of the few contexts in which Marcus feels that children need to be meditated upon. One of the others is the role of a child’s paedagogus, ‘childminder’. (There are no references to formal schools in the Reflections; the ΣXΩΛH of 11, 18.18 is not a classroom, but a public disputation.) Marcus takes it for granted that children hate authority, and that the normal way of teaching is by forcing the child to learn against his will. The student of philosophy must be quite different in his approach: ‘If practice falls short of precept, return to the attack after each failure … love that to which you return, and do not return to philosophy as though it were a paedagogus.’ The paedagogus’ tongue symbolises criticism (Athenian Old Comedy shares ‘the paedagogus’ freedom of speech’). When the paedagogus is away, one can breathe freely again. Here too Marcus is expressing commonplace views about the relationship between teacher and child that were normally if not universally taken for granted in antiquity.⁸

Not only was Marcus uninterested in seeing the world through the eyes of a child: more surprisingly, he seems to have had little interest in his own childhood. Leaving aside the first, introductory, book of the Reflections, the one possible indication of what his own childhood was like is a reference to the earth as not just his father and mother, but his father, mother, and nurse: at death, he will ‘sink down upon that from which my father derived the seed, my mother the blood, and my nurse the milk that formed me’ – indicative of one major difference between the experiences of children (not just those of the elite) in the ancient world and our own.⁹

In Book 1, there is a list of individuals to whom Marcus gives thanks for making him the person he has turned out to be. Very little emerges about his childhood. He mentions the virtues he learnt from his grandfather, father and, mother. His great-grandfather was responsible for ha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 THE CHILD IN THE CLASSICAL CITY
• 2 IMPERIAL CHILDREN IN BIOGRAPHY AND PANEGYRIC
• 3 THE EVIDENCE OF PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN LETTERS
• 4 CITIZENSHIP AND OFFICE HOLDING
• 5 LEARNING FOR ADULT LIFE
• 6 EQUAL IN THE SIGHT OF GOD
• Bibliography
• Index