(please see previous essay in this series)
Let's consider the children of Rome. Can we find answers in the children?
First, some vital statistics. One-third of all children in the city of Rome did not reach the age of 10 years. In the poorer classes, half the children died before the age of five. The average life span of men in Rome was about 22 years, of women about 20 years. But we can assume that one-third of the population, the actual Roman citizens, led healthier lives and were better fed than the other two-thirds, and they probably had a longer average life-span. We certainly have enough historical evidence of middle-aged emperors, generals, senators, bankers, intellectuals, and other privileged citizens. In the absence of registrations of births and deaths, historians who study ancient Rome are reduced to examining tombstones and other debris of Roman civilization, which means vital statistics are not always reliable. But Roman children did die in great numbers for various reasons, and this certainly reduced the calculated average life span.
Full reconstruction of the lives of children of the remote past is impossible. Dead civilizations leave us nothing but debris, and the more remote in time the civilization is the more the debris is sparse and unreliable. What we know about the children of ancient Rome is derived from a compilation of bits and pieces of evidence: various laws, scattered writings offering advice about parenting, epitaphs on tombstones, inferences from customs, and so on. The task of reconstruction is made more difficult by the emphatic stratification of Roman society: rich citizens, rich freedmen, poor citizens, poor freedmen, slaves. As for gender, women had hardly any rights. Women were wives, concubines, and prostitutes, with the last category comprising a substantial fraction of the population of the city of Rome. The legal age of sexual consent was ten years, an easy age to fudge, so we can assume that a large proportion of the prostitute population was prepubescent--both male and female children offered for sexual use. In general, the tendency of modern historians of Roman life has been to either avoid or mask details about Rome that might shock the reader. Of more concern here are details that may have shocked the children of Rome in their daily life during development.
Although hard evidence about the lives of Roman children is sparse, the developmental reality is that a Roman infant was biologically and psychologically not much different than a contemporary infant. If we could somehow transfer an ordinary two- or three- month old Roman infant in a time machine to modern Chicago or London, that Roman infant would develop and grow into a Chicago child or a London child and eventually into an American or British adult. The importance of this simple fact is that on the basis of what we know about contemporary children there is much that we can infer about how Roman children might react to their early experience and surroundings. We could not do the same with adults, since adults are shaped by their culture. In contrast, very young children are for the most pre-cultural--not yet shaped--and across time and space they are very much alike. So ancient Rome is "remote" in one sense but still close enough to maybe answer a few questions.
Infanticide was legal in the Roman Empire until 374 AD. Whole books have been written about this, about why and how it occurred. The practice was certainly not unique to Rome, and it had a long history before Rome appeared on the scene. In Rome, infants were killed outright at birth for many reasons. One reason in all socioeconomic classes was an apparent disability or deformity. Such infants were almost immediately killed, often by the attending midwives. Historians continue to argue whether in Rome female infanticide was more common than male infanticide, but we still don't have enough evidence to be certain. What is certain is that an apparently healthy infant could be killed immediately for any reason upon command of the male head of household--the paterfamilias who ruled as an autocrat. Common methods of infanticide were strangling or drowning. As for why, we can guess the answer differed for the various social classes and for different personal circumstances. What is certain is that the practice was legal, it was common, and hardly any family was either condemned or ostracized for it.
In many cases, however, children were merely abandoned. The usual term for this is "exposed". But sometimes this meant actual isolated exposure to the elements (and a quick death), and sometimes it meant abandonment in a public place where someone might take the infant as a foundling. Abandonment is probably a more useful term. In ancient Rome the practice of abandonment was common, and historians agree that during the Empire most children who were abandoned were gathered to be raised as slaves or prostitutes or physically mutilated to be used as beggars. The gathering of abandoned infants was certainly economically profitable, since during the Empire the demand for slaves was high. Of importance is the fact that infants that were abandoned were usually not the children of slaves, since the children of all slaves were the property of the slave-owner, and it made little sense for the slave-owner to allow valuable property to be discarded. Abandoned infants were more likely the children of free-born but poor people who chose to abandon the infant rather than kill it. Again, no matter how or why an infant was abandoned, it was the Roman male head-of-household who had complete legal authority to order any newborn killed or abandoned.
For any family, infanticide or abandonment of a newborn infant might be secret or not secret, but certainly other children in the family, especially if they were older than four or five years, were either explicitly aware or smart enough to guess the fate of a newborn sibling arrived yesterday or last week or last month and suddenly gone. It's hard to imagine that young children were immune to the reality of infanticide or abandonment of their siblings. The argument that this imposes our own standards on children of another culture is hardly reasonable, since children at a very young age have barely any culture at all. What very young children do have, and in striking abundance, is a chronic feeling of vulnerability as they encounter every day a crowd of giants with supreme authority over them in a world that makes little sense to their young minds. Given the daily life of the children of Rome, and their overt treatment as disposable property, the constant feeling of vulnerability in a Roman child had to be intense.
There were more agonies in the life of the Roman child than witnessing or awareness of infanticide or abandonment of siblings. Among the upper classes in Rome, the sexual abuse of young slave children by men was a commonplace.
Girls usually married in mid-adolescence, usually to a man at least twice their age, and they usually had at least 6 children.
During the Empire, upper class Roman women hardly ever nursed their children. The custom was to use a slave or hired wet-nurse. How did this affect the necessary bonding of an infant to a care-giver? Children were usually fully weaned at 2 to 3 years of age. Were the children bonded to their wet-nurses, who nursed them as slaves or for hire? We currently have a mountain of research evidence that suggests that lack of early bonding can be a cause of the callous-unemotional child syndrome. Early beatings and mistreatments also appear to be causes. The idea that children are not affected by early parenting and child-rearing practices is a gene-mongering fantasy.
The Roman father had complete authority over all women, children, and slaves in his household. The Roman father had the right to sell his children into slavery. Sexual access of the father to all male and female slaves, including children, was absolute and usually not secret. In any household, children often witnessed the beating of wives, slaves, concubines, and other children.
So what does it all mean for us and our questions about why the mob in the Roman arena was able to watch and cheer the mangling and death of people on the sands below them?
I will cut to the chase. In modern child psychology and child psychiatry, there is a syndrome called "the callous-unemotional child." It's a child who for one reason or another has defective social cognition and an absence of empathy, an absence of feeling for others, an inability to imagine the mind of others. Such a child accepts cruelty the way it accepts the names of the days of the week.
Given all the facts we have, sparse as they are, we can guess that ancient Rome was a huge social machine that produced callous-unemotional children by the hundreds of thousands. The stands of the arenas could never be empty.
The idea sounds so simple, one wants to discard it as implausible. But think about it. Imagine yourself as a child of the poorer classes growing up in ancient Rome. If you're lucky enough to survive into adolescence, you will take your seat in the arena and cheer with the rest of the mob. Why not? Ancient Romans were not born to accept cruelty. They were made that way as children.
