Roman Breastfeeding: Control and Affect*

Breastfeeding in ancient Rome was vital, since the only substitutes for human milk were not appropriate foods for infants and had dire, if not lethal, consequences; newborns and infants had a better chance of survival if fed the milk of their mother or of another woman.¹ Therefore, it seems surprising that such an act, not only essential but also ordinary and commonplace by necessity, was not more often depicted either literarily or visually. This paper will offer hypotheses based on modern anthropological and psychological research concerning this dearth of representations of breastfeeding in the literary and iconographic sources.

REPRESENTATIONS

Authors of the imperial era were seemingly convinced, and wanted to convince others, of the benefits of maternal breastfeeding over other ways of feeding infants. The medical writer Soranus (2.18), the satirist Juvenal (6.9, 592–97), the philosophers Favorinus (apud Aulus Gellius 12.1.4–7) and Musonius Rufus (3), the historian Tacitus (Germ. 20), and the biographer Plutarch (Cat. Ma. 20.3) denounced the practice of wet nursing,² which deprived the elite and their children of the physical and emotional benefits of breastfeeding (see Dasen 2012.51–55).

And yet breastfeeding is a rare Roman literary and iconographic theme, and one most often addressed in an allegorical or symbolic way rather than realistically. Stone or terra cotta mother goddesses breastfeeding one or two nurslings (Bonfante 1989a.91–92, 1997.183; Dasen 1997; Coulon 2004.53–55, 58), Isis breastfeeding Harpocrates (Tran Tam Tinh 1973), the fourth-century empress Fausta represented on coins as breastfeeding (Centlivres Challet and Bähler Baudois 2003), the legend of Pero breastfeeding her father Mycon,³ or the myth of Hera breastfeeding her adult son Heracles (Bonfante 1997.180–81) are all cases of symbolic or allegoric breastfeeding.

The very few ordinary and domestic representations of Roman breastfeeding are found on the gravestones of wet nurses⁴ and mothers⁵ and on sarcophagi.⁶ Funerary inscriptions sometimes report the fact that a mother herself breastfed her child,⁷ but literary mentions of human women breastfeeding are scarce.

Larissa Bonfante notes (1989a, 1997) that visual representations of breastfeeding women are more numerous in Etruscan and Italic art than in Greek and Roman. She suggests that breastfeeding was associated by the Greeks and Romans with barbarism and animality (1989a.98, 1997.185, 188), with metaphorical vulnerability when undressed mortal women are depicted in legendary contexts (1997.175), or with the symbolic magical power of goddesses' naked breasts (1989b.544–45, 1997.187). An ancient image of a breastfeeding mother would reflect an absence of sophistication and refer to the sexual and magical power of breasts as symbols of life and death (Bonfante 1997.188, DeForest 1993): milk was both a source of "revival" (Corbeill 2004.104–05) and a fluid derived from menstrual blood.⁸

Patricia Salzman-Mitchell shares Bonfante's opinion that breastfeeding in antiquity was associated with the animal world (2012.153). But she goes further, reading the sources as revealing that breastfeeding was associated with incest (2012.141, 158, and passim), and highlighting "the taboo aspect of the practice" (2012.158). However, none of the Roman sources have a negative view of breastfeeding, and her conclusions are based on passages from Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides—whose epic and tragic contexts have a strong influence on the way they must be read. More importantly, these authors portray adult sons and their legendary mothers; there is no realistic breastfeeding of young children by their ordinary mothers. Thus the taboo perceived by Salzman-Mitchell does not relate to breastfeeding itself, but to mothers showing their breasts to their adult sons.⁹ Other hypotheses are needed to explain the relatively few representations of the act of breastfeeding in Roman art and literature.

Of course, it may just be that the evidence is lost, not having come down to us, but a real disinterest is another possible explanation. If the elite are the main consumers of art, and if the elite do not breastfeed their offspring but entrust them to wet nurses, art will not mirror, or only faintly, an activity...