Concepts of childhood and the treatment of children are often used as a barometer of society's humanity, values, and priorities. Children and Childhood in Roman Italy argues that in Roman society children were, in principle and often in practice, welcome, valued and visible. There is no evidence directly from children themselves, but we can reconstruct attitudes to them, and their own experiences, from a wide variety of material - art and architecture, artefacts, funerary dedications, Roman law, literature, and public and private ritual. There are distinctively Roman aspects to the treatment of children and to children's experiences. Education at many levels was important. The commemoration of children who died young has no parallel, in earlier or later societies, before the twentieth century. This study builds on the dynamic work on the Roman family that has been developing in recent decades. Its focus on the period between the first century BCE and the early third century CE provides a context for new work being done on early Christian societies, especially in Rome.

This book illuminates the lives of the 'forgotten' children of ancient Rome and draws parallels and contrasts with contemporary society.

This volume contains 20 papers that explore ancient notions and experiences of childhood around the Mediterranean, from prehistory to late antiquity.

This collection employs a multi-disciplinary approach treating ancient childhood in a holistic manner according to diachronic, regional and thematic perspectives. This multi-disciplinary approach encompasses classical studies, Egyptology, ancient history and the broad spectrum of archaeology, including iconography and bioarchaeology. With a chronological range of the Bronze Age to Byzantium and regional coverage of Egypt, Greece, and Italy this is the largest survey of childhood yet undertaken for the ancient world. Within this chronological and regional framework both the social construction of childhood and the child’s life experience are explored through the key topics of the definition of childhood, daily life, religion and ritual, death, and the information provided by bioarchaeology. No other volume to date provides such a comprehensive, systematic and cross-cultural study of childhood in the ancient Mediterranean world. In particular, its focus on the identification of society-specific definitions of childhood and the incorporation of the bioarchaeological perspective makes this work a unique and innovative study. Children in Antiquity provides an invaluable and unrivalled resource for anyone working on all aspects of the lives and deaths of children in the ancient Mediterranean world.

The past thirty years have seen an explosion of interest in Greek and Roman social history, particularly studies of women and the family. Until recently these studies did not focus especially on children and childhood, but considered children in the larger context of family continuity and inter-family relationships, or legal issues like legitimacy, adoption and inheritance. Recent publications have examined a variety of aspects related to childhood in ancient Greece and Rome, but until now nothing has attempted to comprehensively survey the state of ancient childhood studies. This handbook does just that, showcasing the work of both established and rising scholars and demonstrating the variety of approaches to the study of childhood in the classical world. In thirty chapters, with a detailed introduction and envoi, The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World presents current research in a wide range of topics on ancient childhood, including sub-disciplines of Classics that rarely appear in collections on the family or childhood such as archaeology and ancient medicine. Contributors include some of the foremost experts in the field as well as younger, up-and-coming scholars. Unlike most edited volumes on childhood or the family in antiquity, this collection also gives attention to the late antique period and whether (or how) conceptions of childhood and the life of children changed with Christianity. The chronological spread runs from archaic Greece to the later Roman Empire (fifth century C.E.). Geographical areas covered include not only classical Greece and Roman Italy, but also the eastern Mediterranean. The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World engages with perennially valuable questions about family and education in the ancient world while providing a much-needed touchstone for research in the field.

Mussolini's Children uses the lens of state-mandated youth culture to analyze the evolution of official racism in Fascist Italy. Between 1922 and 1940, educational institutions designed to mold the minds and bodies of Italy's children between the ages of five and eleven undertook a mission to rejuvenate the Italian race and create a second Roman Empire. This project depended on the twin beliefs that the Italian population did indeed constitute a distinct race and that certain aspects of its moral and physical makeup could be influenced during childhood. Eden K. McLean assembles evidence from state policies, elementary textbooks, pedagogical journals, and other educational materials to illustrate the contours of a Fascist racial ideology as it evolved over eighteen years. Her work explains how the most infamous period of Fascist racism, which began in the summer of 1938 with the publication of the "Manifesto of Race," played a critical part in a more general and long-term Fascist racial program.

Integrating social and cultural history with archaeological evidence and material culture, this first comprehensive study of infancy and earliest childhood encompasses the whole Roman Empire and explores the particular historical circumstances into which children were born and the role and significance of the youngest within the family and society.