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Whose Identity? Whose Role Model?
Representations of Young Children on Roman Funerary Memorials

Margaret King

The death of a child in infancy or in early childhood entails a complex series of reactions among the bereaved parents both at the societal level and at the individual level. Prominent among the grief reaction of parents who have lost a son or daughter at any age is the tendency to idealise the child. This idealisation is no less true of Roman society in the last decades of the Republic and first two centuries of the Empire than it is of western societies in the early twenty-first century.

This paper will seek to examine this idealisation of children who died at a young age in imperial Rome during the first and second centuries AD in the context of questions related to identity and role models. The principal focus will be on funerary monuments associated primarily with cremation - ash-chests, grave stelae and funerary altars - dedicated to infants and young children aged four/five years and under. All monuments are associated with Rome, in view of the high proportion of funerary commemorations to young children found in the capital city, and feature an image of a child combined with an inscription where an indication is given of age and gender.

A funerary monument is open to many interpretations, not only by contemporary and subsequent viewers, but also by the very persons who commissioned the memorial. In the case of funerary memorials to young children, where the dedicatee could not have made any contribution to the monument, the involvement of the adult dedicator in a memorial raises some interesting questions regarding identity and role models. In particular, do monuments which represent the young child as mature beyond his or her years (the puer senex), advanced in learning and equivalent in all respects to an adult, say more about the identity of the child or the adult (most often the natural parents in the case of dedications from the city of Rome)? The first part of this paper aims to consider this tension between the identity of the child and the identity of the adult.

In addition to ambiguities related to identity, this motif of the mature child on funerary memorials dedicated to young children becomes particularly problematical when assessed in the context of role models. The second part of this paper will consider the intended audience for the funerary motif of the puer senex.

Is this image to be interpreted as a role model to other children, as an exemplar for how children should direct their lives to learning and the advantages which can accrue to children from this way of life? Yet, in view of the tendency of adults to idealise their children in death, is the puer senex motif on funerary monuments to be seen as a role model to parents on how to raise their children and the advantages which can accrue to them from a child advanced for his or her years?

Centre for Continuing Education, The University of Edinburgh.

The Registry, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS.

m.king@hw.ac.uk