L'Enfant grec au temps de Périclès by Danielle Jouanna (review)

The single most significant work on the history of childhood, Philippe Ariès's L'Enfant et la vie familiale sous l'Ancien Régime, was written in French. Since then, francophone scholars have made a series of important contributions to our understanding of children and their contexts in ancient Greece and Rome: Michel Manson's articles in the 1970s and 1980s, Véronique Dasen's ever-extending studies today, and books by J.-P. Néraudau on Rome and Gérard Coulon on Gaul. Now we have Danielle Jouanna's book, the first full-length account of Greek childhood in French. Lively as well as learned, it seems meant for the general reader above all, someone who will not be put off by the transliteration of παῖς as païs or the rather casual approach to documentation. (Though there is a useful source index, quite a few references are missing in the text.) But there is plenty here for specialists too, in particular Jouanna's focus on gender: the differing expectations and experiences of boys and girls, the varying roles of mothers and fathers as they plan, produce, and parent their daughters and sons. As her title suggests, Jouanna treats Athens in the Classical period (to the death of Alexander), with detours to Sparta, Crete, and Persia as points of comparison.

Jouanna identifies four stages in the interrelation of children and their parents and (after a brief and helpful introduction, 11-15) devotes one section of the book to each. The sections are all prefaced by concise summaries of the questions they seek to address. The first, "Le devoir de procréation" (17-52), notes that Athenian men and women wanted and were expected to marry, for both personal and community motives. Men of the elite wished to pass on their names and preserve their patrimonies, poorer parents looked for support as they aged, and the polis needed sons for soldiers and daughters to produce them. So women's fertility was always a priority and reproductive failure a cause for divorce, easy and relatively frequent in any case. (As a result, parentage is often unclear, at least to us: the mother of Socrates' oldest son was likely not Xanthippe.) While male and female agency and origins were the subjects of conflicting theories (did women play an active role or serve solely as the site of conception? what determined the sex of babies?), there was no doubt that it was women who bore reproductive risks (miscarriages, breech births, puerperal fever).

In the next section ("Entre la naissance et l'école: L'effacement du père," 53-110), the father fades into the background. Much engaged in the rituals that attended the child's birth and welcome into the family and phratry (amphidromia, dekatë, Apatouria), he had little to do with infants and young children up to the age of seven. During this time, boys and girls spent much of their time in the women's quarters, the gynaikônitis, where they were under the care of their mothers and of household slaves, and made up the audience for their stories of gods and goblins. (Images on vases and temples supplied another source of cultural conditioning.) Despite Aristophanes, Jouanna doubts that nurses pre-chewed children's food and, despite Plato, that they were constantly swaddled until they were two years old. It was certainly a well-off father's job to pick a male slave as paidagôgos, responsible for a child's safety outside the home, and to give him his instructions (including what games the child should play), but otherwise he took little notice of their activities. (The portrayal of Strepsiades as an attentive father in Clouds is unreliable, intended to stress his son's ingratitude and to amuse the audience by its incongruity.) Similarly, male doctors mention children as sufferers from general complaints and do not write about specifically child-linked diseases. As children grew, however...