Mark Golden

The family in Greek history

The 19th-century paradigm of Greek family history the family in Homer and Hesiod early Greek law and the family marriage and adultery in democratic Athens adultery onstage and in court public and private in early Hellenistic Athens.

Childhood, class and kin in the Roman world

It can be difficult to hear the voices of Roman children, women and slaves, given that most surviving texts of the period are by elite adult men. This volume redresses the balance. An international collection of expert contributors go beyond the usual canon of literary texts, and assess a vast range of evidence - inscriptions, burial data, domestic architecture, sculpture and the law, as well as Christian and dream-interpretation literature. Topics covered include: * child exposure and abandonment * children in imperial propaganda * reconstructing lower-class families * gender, burial and status * epitaphs and funerary monuments * adoption and late parenthood. The result is an up-to-date survey of some of the most exciting avenues currently being explored in Roman social history.

Slavery and Homosexuality at Athens

SO M. I. FINLEY IN 1959.1 In the intervening years, numerous studies have been devoted to the makeup of the slave population, the legal status of the slave, the role of the slave in production or commerce or war. It seems, however, that historians have concentrated on the facts of economic and social life at the expense of less clearly defined, but equally important, areas.2 In particular, there has been very little recent work on the effects of slavery on the nature and depiction of sexual and emotional relationships among free citizens at Athens. For good reason, perhaps. It is difficult to establish the norms of interpersonal relations in any group in any society, more difficult still to determine attitudes towards those norms, especially when the society in question cannot be observed directly nor its members

The Second Childhood of Mark Golden

This article reviews the past twenty-five years of scholarship on the history of childhood in ancient Greece and Rome, with a special focus on the iconography of childhood, the archaeology of childhood and childrens agency.

EQUESTRIAN COMPETITION IN ANCIENT GREECE : DIFFERENCE, DISSENT, DEMOCRACY

I MOVE IN THIS PAPER from a motley mix of mercenaries on a mountain on the margins of the Greek world to the economic and political elite of classical Athens. The long journey is perhaps made more manageable by the presence of horses throughout. In the first section (I), I announce a major theme-the creation and expression of difference in Greek sport-and identify a particular area, equestrian competition, marked by the age and wealth of its participants. In the second section (I), I take evidence from many places and periods in the Greek world to demonstrate that entrants in horseand chariot-racing were indeed usually older than athletes, and suggest that this pattern might influence competitive choices among the elite. The concluding section (II) has a more restricted focus. It reconsiders and revises a current hypothesis on the value of equestrian competition as a claim to political preferment in the Athenian democracy.

War and Peace in the Ancient and Modern Olympics

The past sleeps lightly at Olympia. Recall the opening sequence of Leni Riefenstahls 1938 film, Olympia . In a misty landscape of ruined buildings, broken columns, and weeds run wild, a Greek temple stands amid the wreckage. Statues appear and then waken to life; a naked athlete throws a discus, another a javelin – this heads towards a bowl of fire. Another naked youth lights the Olympic torch and holds it high. It is carried from hand to hand in a relay and then reaches the stadium in Berlin, home of the 1936 Olympic Games, which the film is meant to celebrate. Adolf Hitler salutes the spectators, 100,000 strong.

Care, Socialization and Play in Ancient Attica. A Developmental Childhood Archaeological Approach

the volume present children as the main actors in historical narratives, from prehistory to the present day. The volume, divided into three sections, opens with two introductory chapters that focus on the uses of daily and symbolic space in the construction of children’s identity, both individual and group identity. The second section focuses on the analysis of the spaces where children’s experiences occur. Space is here presented as a dynamic place, varied and interactive, in whose construction the emotions and experience of children play a decisive role. Experience, in turn, is affected by the space. The final section looks at the same aspect of how the study of the spaces of the past provides the researcher with access to the emotions of those who inhabited it, but focuses on funerary contexts. The most interesting feature of the book is that it proposes a research strategy of childhood that passes for paying attention to space, understood as the place in which the relationship between the individual and the material culture is ordered in a certain way. As the editors state in the introduction, the dependence of most of the approaches to the history of childhood on textual sources is quite evident. This approach can produce a biased understanding, inasmuch as a great part of the emotional experience of children from the past is not reflected in those texts. As this volume states, other paths could be, and must be, explored. A good example is Victoria Carmona Buendía and Elisa Valero Ramos’s essay, ‘La evolución de los espacios de aprendizaje de la infancia a través de los modelos pedagógicos’. This examines the importance of space in children’s educational experience, and the various ways in which pedagogy has used and adapted the space and the objects in it to contribute, and sometimes determine the physical mental and social development of the child. This new approach opens the door to a new understanding of how emotions shaped the experiences of our little forebears. The stress on the relationship between space and material culture provides a new and interesting approach to the history of childhood, leading to a path-breaking, interdisciplinary, and almost unexplored area of study.