[HN Gopher] The naked reader: Child enslavement in the Villa of ...
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The naked reader: Child enslavement in the Villa of the Mysteries
fresco
Author : Petiver
Score : 14 points
Date : 2023-11-30 03:12 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.journals.uchicago.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.journals.uchicago.edu)
| ggm wrote:
| I would ask what % of slaves in that period, as children, could
| read? Much of the rest of this web page assumes slave literacy is
| normal, and certainly if the child is enslaved to a cult, you
| would expect that their future life is to perform tasks in the
| cult which may well demand literacy (unless their life is nasty,
| brutish and short).
|
| An educated slave was more valuable. Presumably either born into
| the status, or acquired, being a literate slave had value.
| gumby wrote:
| US chattel slaves were forbidden by law to read because it made
| organizing/rebelling easier and more likely. There were a few
| exceptions for certain tasks (bookkeeping and the like). Of
| course punishment for literacy was exacted upon the slave, not
| the person who taught them.
|
| It was not uncommon for Egyptian and Roman slaves (at least) to
| be literate (whether before enslavement or taught as slaves).
| For example, Greek tutors were in high demand.
|
| It's hard to estimate what the literacy _rate_ was; certainly
| it must have been much lower than in modern OECD countries. In
| Rome, unlike, say, Sparta, there were no schools; teaching was
| all done in the home, so if you were a plebian it 's less
| likely you could read. OTOH the roman soldiers typically could
| read. And most of the surviving graffiti in Pompeii doesn't
| look aristocratic.
|
| I think Rome probably had a literacy rate on par with
| contemporary Greece and Egypt; higher than contemporary China's
| and probably comparable to India a millennium earlier (inferred
| from the prevalence of public proclamations (e.g. Ashoka
| steele), compared to the more "aristocratic boasting" of Roman
| and ancient Egyptian monumental writing aimed more at fellow
| elite.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > In Rome, ... teaching was all done in the home
|
| Really?? I am very surprised to hear that, I never thought
| there could be any other way but having schools in a
| structured and developed society like theirs.
|
| > OTOH the roman soldiers typically could read
|
| Not to disbelieve but can you back that up? I thought the
| bulk of the Roman military was from pretty low down in
| society and literacy is usually low to negligible there
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| > Really?? I am very surprised to hear that
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_(ancient_Rome)
|
| There were schools...
| gumby wrote:
| IIRC that was a later development after the 3rd century
| C.E., well after the eruption of Vesuvius
| qwytw wrote:
| As far as we know the Romans used a similar system to the
| Greeks, there were usually no physical school buildings
| but parents did/could pool money together to hire a
| teacher who would teach in various public spaces etc.
| There are plenty of sources, anecdotes etc. describing
| this hundreds of years prior the the 3rd century C.E.
|
| Edit:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurius_Carvilius_Ruga is
| first person that we know of who established an actual
| school in Rome (and it's unlikely that there weren't any
| schools before that). He lived in the 3rd century B.C.
| (not C.E./A.D.)
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| I did a quick look to search to see - I mean if anywhere
| has retained evidence of schools it should be Pompeii - I
| did a cursory search through Bloomer's book 'The School
| of Rome', and here are some bits from it:
|
| "The physical requirements for a grammar school were
| minimal: school, like any small ancient business, could
| be held on the street, under or above a portico, near an
| important public building such as a temple, or at a
| rented shop. A wall painting from Pompeii, now lost,
| showed school near a portico and decidedly amid the
| bustle of the city. School could be held "in private," at
| the teacher's home or the house of the patron."
|
| "Graffiti indicate schooling took place at several
| locations in Pompeii and at Rome. The places of
| instruction are unremarkable shop stalls. Two exceptions
| to these modest locales merit attention, since they seem
| to have dedicated space and indicate an education that is
| decidedly not modest. The emperor's palace had a slave-
| training complex known as the paidagogia , and the villas
| of the wealthy had as part of their design semicircular
| recesses, or exedrae. The latter, like private libraries,
| are places of culture, perhaps of poetry reading or
| rhetorical training." (It links to footnotes which
| reference an Italian paper apparently saying there are
| disputes as to how to recognise schools as such).
|
| Anyway, yeah, very good point!
| gumby wrote:
| > Really?? I am very surprised to hear that, I never
| thought there could be any other way but having schools in
| a structured and developed society like theirs.
|
| Schools as we think of them today are a pretty recent
| invention. Even the Academies and Gymnasium of Athens were
| generally for adults. There was an exception in Sparta,
| where education was part of the facist indoctrination,
| similar to the system in the DDR or USSR. Then again,
| Sparta was super weird even by Greek standards (which was a
| society whose closest modern analog might be Da'esh (AKA
| ISIS). The hard part of reading ancient Greek for me was
| not the grammar but the sheer bizarreness of their
| structural assumptions, which are rarely visible in
| translation.
|
| > > OTOH the roman soldiers typically could read
|
| > Not to disbelieve but can you back that up? I thought the
| bulk of the Roman military was from pretty low down in
| society and literacy is usually low to negligible there
|
| That's the point: it's a confounding point to my assumption
| of low levels of literacy among the plebians.
|
| You can do your own web search on this topic, but you might
| want to start with this paper: https://www.academia.edu/370
| 00249/Soldiers_and_Documents_Ins...
|
| From its abstract: "The Roman army as an institution and
| the Roman soldier as an individual could not have
| functioned without the written word. A few newly published
| finds from Primis / Qasr Ibrim in Lower Nubia as well as a
| number of other documents discussed in this paper
| illustrate the extent to which administrative paperwork and
| the soldiers' (semi-)private correspondence contributed to
| the army's functioning and governed the soldiers' everyday
| lives already in the first decades of the new imperial
| army. Other evidence shows how the formal and symbolic
| qualities of imperial and official texts, and
| administrative documents served Roman soldiers from all
| types of units in their private documents and monuments as
| a means to demonstrate military identity"
| qwytw wrote:
| > There was an exception in Sparta, where education was
| part of the facist indoctrination, similar to the system
| in the DDR or USSR
|
| That's an interesting description considering those
| schools were only accessible to the elite rather than the
| general population.
|
| > which was a society whose closest modern analog might
| be Da'esh (AKA ISIS)
|
| Rather a random thing to say? I don't see that many
| similarities. For one thing (upper class) women in Sparta
| (or Rome for that matter) had considerably more rights
| than in Athens for instance (which was probably even
| worse than modern Saudi Arabia in that regard).
|
| > literacy among the plebians.
|
| Most of the Roman upper class was plebian.
| qwytw wrote:
| > In Rome, unlike, say, Sparta, there were no schools;
| teaching was all done in the home,
|
| I'm not sure that's true. Also when people think about Sparta
| they usually only consider about the upper class elite since
| almost the entire population of the region were second class
| freemen with limited civil rights or slaves/serf. In any case
| the Spartan Agoge (which again was only accessible to a small
| proportion of the population) wasn't necessarily similar to
| what we understand a 'school'.
|
| As far as we know Roman 'educational system' was similar to
| that which existed in normal Greek cities (so not Sparta).
| Upper classes hired private tutors/bough slaves, however
| there were public (privately funded) schools called 'Ludus'
| accessible to a significant proportion of the the population.
|
| > probably comparable to India a millennium earlier (inferred
| from the prevalence of public proclamations (e.g. Ashoka
| steele),
|
| Why do you think that was the case? Also didn't Ashoka live
| in the 3rd century BC (so contemporary to the Hellenistic
| age)?
|
| > monumental writing aimed more at fellow elite.
|
| I'm not sure that was generally the case in Ancient Rome or
| most Greek cities. Many of the public inscriptions were
| clearly aimed at the general population.
| dagaci wrote:
| Why is this downvoted?
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| >US chattel slaves were forbidden by law to read because it
| made organizing/rebelling easier and more likely
|
| That's not the reason why.
|
| The reason is rooted in Wessexian and Mercian cavalier
| culture.
|
| The cavaliers were noble-blood hegemonic, believed that their
| hegemony was sanctioned by God, and that it was not only
| their God-given right to engage in literacy and certain
| leisurely pursuits, but it was their duty, and it was God's
| will that the nobles, and only the nobles, should pursue
| these things.
|
| This cultural expression existed long before chattel slavery
| was ever a thing, with peasants and indentured servants being
| discouraged and disabled from literacy, though not
| necessarily legally forbidden.
|
| So these people didn't forbid literacy out of fear of peasant
| reprisal, they did it because they believed God had granted
| the privilege to them, and only them.
|
| See: Fischer, 1989. _Albion 's Seed._
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| My immediate assumption was that the boy was a catamite to some
| noble. I wouldn't expect a slave to necessarily be able to read.
| But a catamite could have been a slave or just the child of
| another noble family. It wasn't unknown in the ancient world as a
| form of social climbing.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| It was not unusual for Roman slaves to be literate, especially
| in cities. It increased their value.
| ars wrote:
| I remember reading that historically child nudity before puberty
| was so common no one would even notice it. For example when
| Pocahontas encountered John Smith she was completely naked
| https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-06-24-me-16637-...
|
| Even in Victorian times child nudity was seen as a symbol of
| purity.
|
| So the conclusion of this article seems to me to be a bit of
| stretch.
| mc32 wrote:
| Out of necessity children in third world countries you can see
| at least toddlers running around naked. Not because that's what
| the parents 'want' it's simple the unaffordability of clothing
| they outgrow fast.
|
| As the economies develop it becomes more rare, till it
| disappears.
|
| Countries that are advanced today were poorer than today's
| third world countries a century or two ago.
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