Abstract
The first edition of Mark Golden’s Children and Childhood in Classical Athens, published in 1990, drew widespread praise from reviewers. It was heralded as a pioneering work, the first major modern treatment in English of its subject, and was celebrated for its sensitivity, its sound historical scholarship, and its vivid insights into ancient Greek culture. It was a product of the surge of interest in family studies prevalent in Greco–Roman social history of the 1980s and 1990s, and it has had immense influence. New studies, however, have proliferated in the quarter century since its appearance. The present version retains the freshness and authenticity of the original while paying appropriate attention to new developments, the result being that its position at the forefront of classical social history in the decades to come is guaranteed.
The subject itself is the role of children and childhood in the private and public life of ancient Athens from c. 500 BC to c. 300 BC. Adopting a diachronic approach, Golden begins with a study of Athenians’ perceptions of children’s characteristics, investigates the place of children within the household (oikos) and civic community (polis), continues with a discussion of affective relations between children and other family members (parents, siblings, grandparents), and pays special attention to relations with non-kin members of the Athenian household, particularly slaves (children within the slave community itself receive less attention). The one substantive innovation is a replacement of the original final brief chapter on dowry with a much longer discussion of historical change over time, in which Golden solidifies his view, with which I agree but which others may dispute, that little evidence can be found of significant change in the way children’s lives were lived in the centuries concerned. The book’s notes have been thoroughly revised, and with their comprehensive references to recent scholarship provide an exhaustive mine of information for specialists to pursue. An index locorum has also been added. All readers will enjoy Golden’s witticisms, though some may regret the disappearance of Imelda Marcos.
Among the many refinements made, it is now taken as fact, rather than assumed, that “emotional relations” in the oikos were crucial for the development of Athenian children’s consciousness (p. 69), while a new study of Aeschylus’s Oresteia helps to confirm, unsurprisingly perhaps, that siblings could be expected to enjoy close ties (p. 110). A newly discovered literary fragment first discloses legal subterfuge in a court case involving orphaned siblings and, secondly, suggests that slave traders were sometimes ready to incur financial loss, when selling their slaves, by not separating parents and children (pp. 98, 190, n. 26). More telling revisions are due to the findings of archaeologists and art historians, whose contributions seem to complicate rather than clarify issues. The inference from literary sources that Athenians thought of childhood as a distinct phase of life divided into several stages is supported by evidence from burial practices and artistic portrayals—the increasing diversity of children’s burial conventions themselves follows from increases in data from excavations (pp. 73–74)—but how many stages there were and whether they were generally or consistently recognized is less clear than previously thought (pp. 14–15). The assimilation is noted of small children to satyrs on some of the choes (miniature wine jars) after which the second day of the festival of the Anthesteria was named, with the consequence that the meaning of this enigmatic religious celebration becomes more obscure still (pp. 36–37). On the other hand, reconsideration of a gravestone commemorating prematurely deceased siblings can support the view that an older Athenian sister sometimes played a maternal role in the life of a younger brother (p. 107); and new work on the physical remains of houses encourages discarding the once prevalent opinion that Athenian women, and by extension their children, were largely confined within the household to discrete, so-called women’s quarters (pp. 69–70; cf. pp. 104, 185, n. 28).
Golden acknowledges in his new preface (pp. xi–xii), the stress some scholars have recently placed on children’s capacity in classical antiquity to engage actively in cultural formation—children’s “agency”—their purpose being to dispel notions that children were nothing more than passive receptors of social norms. He wisely avoids, however, allowing his book to be overtaken by this concept, the viability of which to my mind its proponents tend to assert rather than to prove empirically, at times in highly questionable terms. (I hesitate to think of Athenian children as “producers and consumers of culture” 1 ). Already in the first edition, Golden had remarked that “children cannot be regarded as purely passive objects of socialization: the process is interactive, and one in which both resistance and creativity play a part” (p. xvi), which seems enough to me to allow for the likelihood that, for example, their games sometimes allowed children to express themselves individualistically and unrestrictedly, and even in ways that to moderns may betray hints of social subversion (pp. 47–48). (Whether Athenian children themselves thought in this way is impossible to fathom, but I wonder what a slave child may have learned about adult life from participation in the game of drapetinda [“runaway slave”].) Nonetheless, basic norms of social deportment showed very little conceptual deviation in classical Athens or indeed in other ages in antiquity. If classical Athenian parents expected their children to display respect, loyalty, and obedience (p. 87), the same was true of parents throughout Greco–Roman history; and mutatis mutandis, the same was also true of the comparably asymmetrical relationships between husband and wife and slave–owner and slave. Whatever signs of individuality and independence might be posited, it follows that children in one generation after another came to accept, and in turn to pass on, what can only be regarded as largely unchanging conservative social values. 2 Antiquity at large indeed shows little evidence of radical social progress of the kind associated with modern liberal democracies. The many particularities of time and place aside, there was no abolition of slavery, no general emancipation of women, and no widespread protection of children against abuse. Society remained rigidly hierarchical, with rights and power unequally distributed in favor of adult male citizens, so that egalitarianism and democratization were unthinkable and notions of improving social policy non-existent. Even in late antiquity, the Christian revolution did not disturb traditional social relations—“Wives, submit to your own husbands,” “Children, obey your parents,” “Slaves, be obedient to those who are your masters” (Eph. 5:22, 6:1, 6:5)—and while sporadic governmental acts of compassion doubtless benefited certain categories of people from time to time, in the longue durée fundamental social structures did not change. It is particularly telling that the idioms of social control found in classical Greek sources on the management of the oikos were adopted, refined, and long maintained by Romans without demur. (The possible decline of traditional patriarchal authority as Christian clergy assumed legitimate social importance and a change in the nature of Roman marriage from an impermanent and easily changeable practical arrangement to a lifelong sacramental union are, at a minimum, very late developments that lie a thousand years beyond classical Athens.) 3
To identify and explain change over time is one of history’s purposes, and Golden does not rule out altogether that some changes may have occurred in Athenian social life in his period of concern. But he is skeptical that they can be securely illustrated, as am I. Issues of traditionalism apart, one problem, as he rightly says, involves evidence. Given the lack of consistency and comparability of their source materials, in both volume and character (art and archaeology included), ancient historians often find themselves comparing chalk with cheese, which means that any change proposed is inherently suspect. In any case, before attempts to identify and explain change can be made, the past has to be recovered and portrayed with some credibility and its distinctive patterns of culture plausibly established. Sense has to be made, in Coleridge’s phrase, of “the numberless goings-on of life.”
In making sense of how classical Athenian children lived their lives, Golden responds brilliantly to this priority. He shows how children, initially regarded as “physically weak, morally incompetent, [and] mentally incapable” (p. 4), were prepared for adult life and gradually integrated into oikos and polis through a variety of long-enduring conventions: birth rituals, naming practices, games and competitions, participation in religious festivals, subjection to rigorous discipline and schooling, the acquisition of practical skills, and the slow and steady inculcation of traditional moral ideals and gender roles. At the same time, the distinctive demographic regime that shaped so much of Athenian social relations, of which heavy infant and child mortality and a prevailing pattern of early first marriage for women to much older men were crucial elements—is always kept in view; as too the all-important fact that because classical Athens was a slave-owning society, many parents assigned the tasks of early childcare and social training to men and women who were their chattels—paradoxically to the modern sensibility. The picture drawn of children can be highly engaging: Athenians were sensitive to “the sweet smell of their breath and skin and their softness” (p. 6), but it never becomes sentimental or maudlin, especially because Golden is ever alert to the likelihood of conflict and complexity in family life engendered by factors such as sons’ resentments of fathers, stepmothers’ jealousies, and fraternal rivalries (in which the convention of partible inheritance played a key role). As realities are recovered, moreover, highly specific cultural habits, anthropologically informed, also come into play. Thus on the prosaic topic of food consumption: “In general…children ate with their mothers, not their fathers; and boys who were admitted to the men’s club of the symposium were clearly set apart from their elders. Eating and drinking,…far from offering the whole family an opportunity for communal activity, tended to express and reinforce cleavages within it” (p. 33). The subordination of girls is a recurring theme: “There is…a clear sense that girls were not to be allowed an equal share in the broad range of activities the Athenians described as education or in the community life for which it was in part a preparation” (p. 83; cf. pp. 62, 65). The crucial impact of religion is well emphasized: “cult observance is a thread running through the child’s life in both the family and the community” (p. 43), the character of male homosexuality as “a kind of passage rite” well brought out (p. 50). One consequence must be to ask whether categorizing children as socially marginal has any validity.
Opportunities for further exploration remain. Golden is confident that Athenian children were “loved and enjoyed” (p. 9) and that grief was intense confronting early loss (p. 77; cf. p. 152). To my mind, artistic representations and epitaphs commemorating deceased children often communicate overwhelming feelings of tenderness that, transcending place and time, speak to the constancy of human nature. Different cultures, however, understand human nature in different ways and precisely what “love” and “grief” meant to classical Athenians in the face of common and predictable child mortality may not altogether be what they mean to modern historians. (Family limitation through infant abandonment and the traffic in slave children must also be kept in mind.) The representativeness of extant evidence, moreover, is always something to consider: what can be known of the emotions felt by parents unable to afford, or perhaps indifferent to any need for, commemorative display?
Even more important in my view is the question of how children were affected by the wars that figure so prominently in Athenian political history of the classical age, first in defense of freedom against ambitious Persian kings, then in the creation and ruthless maintenance of an empire, and finally in the long, ruinous war against Sparta that by the end of the period had rendered the cities of mainland Greece and beyond subject to the power of Macedon (and later still to that of Rome). War and the threat of war were endemic.
The question is large, requiring as a start investigation of boys’ military training (were blood sports, tribal camaraderie, and school discipline enough for securing “the hoplite virtues of courage and self-control”?, p. 55), the ideology of militarism to which children were exposed from infancy on (did the inherent violence of slave-owning play a role in the promotion of military aggressiveness?), and the manner in which the prospect of sudden death or injury in battle might be assimilated and accommodated. Wider family issues also arise. Did young boys and girls grow up dreading the loss of fathers in warfare? Did fathers and mothers constantly fear the loss of sons or wives their husbands? As early as Homer, the calamities and tragedies of war were arrestingly expressed, but their real presence was ubiquitous in the classical age. 4 If corporate psychology and study of the emotions are valid aspects of social history, as Golden repeatedly shows them to be, answers to these questions are urgently needed (cf. p. 167, n. 66).
As the history of Athenian childhood proceeds, investigators will be well-advised to adhere to what I take to be a guiding principle of Golden’s book, namely, the idea that the past is to be recovered not solely for its own sake, but because it also has relevance to the present. His study of Athenian children began from personal experience a generation ago of what was then a pressing need for childcare on the part of young Canadian parents (p. xix). The new edition closes with a plea for the improvement of disadvantaged children’s lives in Canada today (p. 153). Golden compels his readers to remember that history is a humane discipline, as it must remain. In my view, this is a special accomplishment of an exceptionally accomplished book.