Standard text-books have usually presented a cut-and-dried account of three stages of Roman education: primary from age seven, with the grammaticus from age twelve, and rhetoric from about fifteen or sixteen. Most detail is devoted to the rhetorical stage, as that is where the future leaders (politicians, lawyers, army generals) were trained; so there is much detail on rhetorical exercises, declamation, and the like. Such accounts present the Romans as formalistic and rigid, and the focus on adolescent upper-class males tells us nothing about the socialisation and training of younger children, of girls, the lower classes and slaves. (Slaves comprised at least a quarter of the population of a large city like Rome in the late Republic and High Empire, which had a total population of about one and a quarter million at its height, in the 2nd century of this era.)
Studies of aspects of ‘the Roman family’ have developed so quickly and so prolifically in recent decades that it is already possible to write of work of the 1980s as the accepted orthodoxy and to have new, vigorous debates which are stimulating and questioning and deepening our understanding of the complexities of that central institution of Roman society. Other social histories of Rome are now taking account of this, in ways that go far beyond earlier histories' legalistic or political approach to Roman families. The role of children can now be studied against that nuanced and variegated background. There is already one full-length study (Wiedemann 1989) and I expect to have another ready soon.
In the past two decades of rapid expansion,the study of ‘the Roman family’ has developed from its early focus on the city of Rome and on legal, literary and epigraphical sources to a wider geographical canvas and to more extensive use of archaeological material. The whole range of sources is now being applied to particular problems, providing different perspectives and a better chance of contextualising specific details. Of the new methodologies available, demography and the archaeology of domestic space are proving most productive. Questions most frequently debated are the Romans’ concept of ‘the family’ and the nature of family relationships. There is a growing recognition that regional and cultural differentiation must be taken into account: generalisations about ‘the Mediterranean world’ or even ‘Greco-Roman culture’ are seldom useful. Similarly, regional differentiations in early Christianity are being recognised: Christian communities were likely to share many of the characteristics of the city or area in which they were developing. This makes the growing dialogue between Romanists and Early Christian scholars profitable and stimulating, and topics of particular fertilisation are those of family relationships and domestic space.
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