Video Transcript: Children

We've talked about marriage and family. And now we're going to focus in this segment on  children. And we've already said some things about children, we'll recap some of that and do  more interesting little sculpture here, it's part of a funerary monument that depicts a number  of children, doing children's kinds of things, you know, fighting each other and playing games  with each other very normal kind of thing. And this was on the sarcophagus of a child who  died. So children are investments for the future. And they are, I think, for anybody,  particularly in this kind of culture, in which, as we said, death is everywhere. And the survival  of your children is, cannot at all be taken for granted. And we have a close up here on this,  this screenshot of one of those groups of people from that very tall funerary monument that I  said, you're going to be seeing seeing more of. And we know from the inscription below, that  both the man and the woman here are freed people, freedman, and freedwoman, of someone  named Lukeous Firmeous, we'll talk about slaves and freed in the next segment. And his  original name is Principus. And her's is Apolonia. So now they are, they are freedpersons. And  they have the, they keep their own personal names, but then they use the then they Firmeous is the name of the their former master owner. And they have a little daughter's  name is Lesmeah. And she also died. Little child is in the mother's hand, I hope you can see that  this little face that's just popping up there. So this is an image of a nuclear family. And they  the parents seem to be of a certain age, they don't seem to be really that young. But they  they had this little daughter. So that's the that's the depiction. So that's three Latins words  down there. And we've talked about potestas. Already. That's the, that's the power of the  male head of the household over everybody else. I alluded to the reality of to tutela, but I  didn't actually explain what it was before. Tutela is the custom of putting an adult woman and  children as well, under the authority of a male agent. So particularly for administration of  property, for buying and selling of property. And in Roman law, that was a custom and it was  the custom in Egyptian law as well. And many of these legal systems that women were not  actually legal adults, they were they were considered legal minors, who were not capable of  making their own decisions. And this is part of this whole family structure, you see where all  kinds of decisions particularly about property, and about people, children and marriage, are  expected to be made, not alone, but within the context of the broader context of their family,  the good of their family. But of course, there's a double standard here, because the male who  has potestus, us can go ahead and do whatever he wants, on his own decision, everybody  else has to be under his authority for it. Now, I said earlier, quite a bit earlier, I think that this  this whole idea of adult women, being under male authority in questions of property was by  the New Testament period was not taken terribly seriously. And the way we know this is again, part of Augustus' marriage legislation. He wanted to encourage Roman citizen women to have more children. And so he said, If a freeborn Roman citizen woman would have three children  who survived to the age of one. Now that tells you something too, about child mortality, who  survived the age of one, she could be freed from tutela. So she didn't have to have the  approval of her male guardian to buy or sell property, she could do it on her own. So that tells you that it wasn't taken terribly seriously by that time. The other image or the Rather, the  other term here is my mancipio. And that has to do with emancipation. Now, in some systems  that practice slavery among them, in the United States, the word emancipation means the  freeing of slaves. That is not what it means here, their word for freeing of slaves of  manumissio. Manumission. And we'll talk about that later. emancipation is the freedom of  other subordinate members of the family from the power of potestas, of their of the father  figure. So when the father died, everybody in the family was emancipated. They, they  acquired their own legal autonomy the men did, and the women make increasingly more so  and did and, and when, when boys attained the age of about 18, to 20, there was a kind of a  relative stage of emancipation that they also had. So so that that's about not the freeing  slaves, but the freeing of subordinates, legal subordinates, free people, from the power of the  male head of the household. Now, it's also been as his you know, with with average life  expectancies, that for the most part, because people just didn't live that long. For the most  part, when children became adults, when they got into the, let's say, the 20s, it's likely the  father was already dead. So in many cases, they perhaps did not have to wait until the father  dead, died because he had already died. So that's all part of that structure. Some collections 

of children's toys, you see little wagons, dolls, animals. At one point, there's, there's a bird up  there with on wheels, that could be pulled. These are part of a collection that used to be in  the archaeological museum at Ephesus, the I took these pictures years ago, the last times  that I've been there, they have not been on display anymore, but I think they are really, it's  really helpful to see how they did produce toys that that children could play with. So  something about education and, and socialization of children. I had already talked about when we talked about literacy, the levels of education, and boys, who is from families who could  afford going to school, and learning how to read and write to, to be prepared to take their role in the world in whatever system their family was in. And I should say this, very few people  probably ever left the situation in which their family was, except in the case of trauma of  disturbance, war breakup of everything. But in in ordinary life. People simply lived in the same circles for generations, and children inherited their their fathers, their family's property, their  family, their father's business, whatever it was, and, and simply continued in the same way.  There was very little rupture, other than as I said, with war, famine, whatever the you know,  the the catastrophic things. There was very little social change. Somebody just deciding to go  off and start a business in another city or something like that. Very little events, as far as we  know. There certainly was a lot of as I've said, massive immigration into Rome that's looking  for work. And that would be mostly unskilled labor. So, so a lot of movement, a lot of social  movements, but not a lot of sort of starting over as an adventure. Only when necessary. Now,  men, boys Were, for the most part, socialized to be leaders in whatever way they could,  particularly in the upper classes, to be leaders and to, to protect and continue the family and  continue the the honor of the family. And women, girls were socialized to, not to be leaders,  but to be to prepare for marriage, to know how to run a household, do whatever household  things needed to be done. And households were centers of production, as well as  consumption. And that's perhaps an important thing to say as well. And that is still true in  many cultures, that the, the household produces whatever it can of things that it needs. And  you might remember in the book of Proverbs, the last chapter, chapter 31, is this wonderful  meditation on the, the woman householder, who prepares for everything and she's she sees  to it that they, they do their weaving, and they they do their gardening, and they're, it's an  interesting description of the kinds of things that go on in a fairly wealthy household and, and  the things that are actually manufactured within the household itself. So girls are taught all of  this in appropriate to their social level, either to do these things, or to learn how to teach  somebody else to do it. But for all of the kinds of skills that a girl is expected to do in a  household. And I want to say something here about the question of honor and shame. There's been a lot of studies on this. And it comes out of anthropology, the anthropological study of  Mediterranean cultures, as honor shame cultures. And what that means is that the  predominant social values are not success, or achievement or efficiency or well, but rather  honor that that maintaining family honor, the reputation, the public reputation of the family,  don't shame the family, don't do something that is going to bring shame on the family, but  rather to everybody must preserve the the public reputation for honor of the family. And if  something does happen if a member of the family does something that violates public  acceptability, it brings shame on the family, and the whole family is affected, and it can be  affected for more than one generation. Now, how do males preserve honor by being valiant  and honorable and honest and esteemed for their character? And at the same time, of course, being successful in what they do? How do women preserve that honor, by their sexual  integrity? Because the the, the in this way of thinking, the the bodies of women really convey  the honor of the family. And so obviously, adultery is a violation. Anything outside the norms  of sexual propriety, virginity until marriage, fidelity within marriage, celibacy and widowhood.  And really preserving the honor the honorable reputation of the family, not doing anything to  that would even make people question the honor of the family. So that's a way of approaching this of looking at the differences in the way males and females were socialized. So And it's  interesting to point out that there is there's no evidence when we look at a Christian raising of children. There's no evidence until the fourth century of anything like a Christian curriculum.  There may have been We don't have the evidence for it. And in the fourth century, we do  begin to get a few people talking about how do you raise a child, particularly Jerome, writing 

to his friend, Paula, and we'll get to know them a little later about how to raise her daughters.  And, and that, of course, is within the context of an ascetic lifestyle. So and that there he has  them raised on the scriptures. They learn to they learned literacy early, so that they can read  the scriptures. And he gives some advice about which books to start on you. And the Psalms,  

especially the Psalms are the favorites they are to memorize the Psalms, and to pray them  regularly. The Song of Songs, he says, sort of leave that until they're older, you know, that's,  that's, that's too much for the children to handle. But the Gospels, of course, and so you, you  begin to get a sense of what Christian education was actually like. And so it's a kind of a  gradual evolution, I think, from Homer and Virgil descriptive, the the whole educational  system before that is based on homer for Greek and Virgil for Latin. And the evidence that we  have for the education of boys in Rome, is bilingual, they are learning both Latin and Greek, at the same time, and they are in there, and they're keeping them straight. And the the literary  models in both cases are our Homer and Virgil, the the classics, so that everyone is familiar  with those classic texts. And at the beginning, Christians must have done the same thing.  That because that was the way you learned, that's what you learned when you went to  school. And it really took a couple of centuries, though, I think they must have started  teaching the scriptures to their children earlier than the fourth century, certainly. So we just  don't have any discussion of, of a system of how to do that. But what you learned when you  went to school was, was Homer and Virgil. And eventually, there would be develop a Christian sense of, but we have our own texts, we have our own literature, and this is what they should  be learning. By that time. Of course, you've got a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, from  a couple of centuries before that. Not necessarily the best literary style, but it was something  that that was in the language that they knew and from which they could learn from a  Christian perspective. So that's what we think was was going on in the educational system for children.