Children in Antiquity is one of the most recent additions to Routledge’s Rewriting Antiquity series, whose volumes ‘highlight the latest research, current developments and innovative approaches, situating this with existing scholarship’. This handbook precisely meets the ambitious expectations programmatically declared by the publisher, and readers should be extremely grateful to the publisher, editors and authors for their effort. The volume is dedicated to Mark Golden, ‘a pioneer of childhood studies in classical antiquity’ as well as to ‘beloved children and the other special young people’, underlining the difficulty in defining non-adult and, Iwould also add, adult people.
Following an introduction by the editors, the volume is structured thematically in five sections: What Is a Child?; Daily Life; Religion and Ritual; Death; and Bioarchaeology. The first four sections each contain nine to ten chapters, while the last only has three. Each section is organized chronologically, starting with Pharaonic Egypt, followed by Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece, Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Italy, Archaic and Classical Greece, Etruscan Italy, the Hellenistic World, Graeco-Roman Egypt, Rome and ending with Late Antiquity and Byzantium. The introduction outlines the volume’s aims, structure and themes.
The first section shows how definitions and perceptions of childhood changed across time and space. The second section represents an important effort to go beyond the ‘etic’ description of childhood made by adults and to try to catch some ‘emic’ details of how ancient children themselves experienced childhood. Iwas personally very glad to find a section specifically dedicated to religion and ritual: these were extremely significant aspects of ancient daily life, and children had a role, not only passive but also active, in the community’s religion. The centrality of children to ancient religion shows that they were considered important not only for their family but also for their entire society. The fourth section deals with the most debated theme in scholarship on childhood in the ancient world: premature deaths, for which we have plentiful archaeological evidence. The last (but not least interesting) section effectively shows how promising and fruitful the dialogue between humanities and natural sciences can be. Recognizing and exploring children’s agency is doubtless one of the most innovative aspects of the volume.
I will now focus on some chapters about ancient Greece. Each section contains three chapters on Greece: one on Greek (Greek, Aegean, Mycenean) prehistory, one on archaic and classical Greece and one on the Hellenistic period. Therefore, in total there are nine chapters on ancient Greek history in the volume, plus a chapter in the bioarchaeology section, which deals with the bioarchaeology of children in Graeco-Roman antiquity.
In the first part, to answer the problematic question of what a child is, Anne P. Chapin investigates definitions of childhood and children in Aegean prehistory, while Lesley A. Beaumont, one of the editors, tries to compare how childhood was experienced in archaic and classical Athens and Sparta. Mark Golden investigates the experiences and treatment of children in Hellenistic Greece. Concerning daily life experience, Susan Langdon examines how sociopolitical change influenced the social value of children in Greece between the Bronze and Early Iron Ages. Robert Garland focusses on children’s socialization in archaic and classical Greece, while Christian Laes (one of the major scholars in the field, editor of the volume on disability in the same series: Disability in Antiquity (2017)) adopts a comparative perspective to examine different aspects of childhood in Hellenistic Asia, Greece, Macedon and Egypt. As far as religious agency is concerned, Ute Günkel-Maschek scrutinizes children’s roles in non-funerary religious practice in the Bronze Age Aegean, while Matthew Dillon, another editor of the volume, and Olympia Bobou focus on children’s active and passive roles in Greek religion in the Archaic and Classical periods and in the Hellenistic period, respectively. In the part on premature death (and, consequently, on adults’ grief), Chrysanthi Gallou examines the treatment of children in death in Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece; Vicky Vlachou in archaic and classical Greece; and Nikolas Dimakis in the Hellenistic world. Iwould like to emphasize that this section, like the previous one, is of pivotal significance in highlighting the importance of children in the ancient world. When trying to recover ancient reactions to premature death, it is dangerous to use funerary sources as a means of obtaining ‘universal’ data. People in the ancient world had individual responses to loss, which were dictated by multiple factors that are difficult to apprehend. In Dimakis’ words ‘the degree of consolation and changing value (measured in terms of gender, age, and status) placed on children in the Hellenistic period is not necessarily an accurate indicator of his/her chances of being buried and commemorated. It is well worth remarking that the decisions to bury or commemorate were by no means simple material calculations’ (514). Finally, Kathryn E. Marklein and Sherry C. Fox examine how childhood was defined and how children were treated in the Eastern Mediterranean in the Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods based on bioarchaeological research.
Let me note, to conclude, that there is no entry ‘mother’ in the final index. While many entries in the index do hint at motherhood (for example, women, kourotrophic motifs), the word ‘mother’ is not present. This is puzzling, since there is an entry for ‘father’. It is always somehow difficult for me to separate the concept of childhood from that of mothering; but, of course, this is not a handbook about mothers.
This volume is simultaneously informative and innovative, multidisciplinary and cross-cultural. It should be welcomed both by specialists and those who are more generally interested in deepening their knowledge of children in antiquity. We should all hope for more handbooks in this challenging series that dares to ‘rewrite ancient history’.
