ABSTRACT
Children can be understood as typifying social virtues because they are human beings before the deleterious effects of social ambition or personal vice. This chapter considers two modes in which Romans used children to communicate important social and cultural ideas: the material record by which parents commemorated their prematurely dead child, and the prescriptive treatise of the great Roman educator Quintilian. The chapter ascertains what the important questions regarding children among Romans of the later republic and early empire were. The increased attention of Romans of the late republic and early empire to the representation, education, and commemoration of children is clear from literature and from graphic representations, especially funerary monuments. The graphic evidence of funerary and political sculpture testifies to a wide-ranging reestimation in the Roman world of the child as an asset and as a symbol of social worth. Roman society's increased concentration of resources in the elite child drove reflection on the proper management of these resources.
