Antiquities Exhibit Explores Childhood in Ancient Greece
The Juggernaut
John H. Oakley
Special for National Geographic News
September 12, 2003
Haunting images on gravestones of children having died too young, baked clay
baby feeders, a schoolboy's writing exercises, and children's toys are just
some of the objects and images presented in the first major exhibition to
explore childhood in ancient Greece.
This remarkable collection of some 128 artifacts, mainly from American museums
and collections, but including several major loans from Europe and Canada,
opened to the U.S. public last month at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth
College in Hanover, New Hampshire.
Entitled "Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the
Classical Past," the exhibit features a wide range of objects in various forms
and media, including gold jewelery, silver coins, bronze statuettes, wooden
writing tablets, baked clay figurines, marble statues, and a toy glass
knucklebone. The artifacts range in date from about 1500 B.C. to the fourth
century A.D.
One of the revolutionary contributions of this exhibition is that it makes
clear how the Greeks were the first culture to represent children and their
activities naturally. In addition, it shows that this was true already as early
as the second millennium B.C. during the Bronze Age, both on mainland Greece,
as well as in the islands.
The exhibition is organized into five major sections that roughly correspond to
the chronological development of a child, from birth to the transition to
adulthood.
Following the sculpted images of a boy and girl that draw the viewer into the
exhibit is a section on myth. Greek artists normally did not depict human
birth, rather it was the births of gods, many of them fantastic, that they
rendered.
Similarly, many of the dangers children faced while growing up were appropriate
subjects only for mythological figures who could overcome these dangers.
Depictions of the goddess Athena's birth from the head of her father Zeus and
Helen's birth from an egg, along with images of the baby Herakles strangling
the snakes sent by the goddess Hera to destroy him illustrate these aspects of
childhood.
Life at home in the house is the theme of the second section. Children normally
spent their early days in the women's quarter. Several rare pictures on figured
vases of children in the household are assembled here, along with a
representative sequence of one of the most enduring images in Western art, that
of the kourotrophos, or mother and child—a precursor to the Madonna and
child. A range of baby feeders, including one in the form of a pig, and
classical vase-paintings showing children seated in potties remind the viewer
of the daily needs of young children.
Around the age of seven boys started going off to school while girls stayed
home to learn a woman's duties, such as weaving, cooking, and child-care. After
minimal schooling, boys from less well-to-do families learned a trade, either
from their father or as an apprentice to someone else, while aristocratic boys
continued their schooling.
Fittingly, the third section focuses on education and work. A charming and rare
image of a mother teaching her daughter to cook, pictures of boys going to
school, and examples of their writing are some of the artifacts that will
attract viewers of all ages.
Certain to fascinate children are the various toys and scenes of gaming in the
fourth section, whose theme is play. Play was an integral part of Greek
childhood as it is for children today—a time when they learned to socialize
with friend and family and when gender stereotyping was reinforced. Pig
rattles, wheeled toy horses, tops, and clay dolls are some of the toys
represented, along with pictures of boys with wooden hoops and toy carts, and
girls juggling and playing seesaw.
Ritual is the subject of the final section. The images on a selection of small
ritual pitchers known as choes provide a rich tableau of children involved in
various activities, including crawling, playing with pets, and driving their
toy carts. Other objects show children involved in cult—girls serving as
sacred basket carriers and boys assisting priests making sacrifice.
At the end of the section are four gravestones of girls and boys who died
before their time, a stark reminder that children's mortality rate was
considerably higher in antiquity than today. Monuments as these belie the
commonly held notion that there was little parent-child bonding in a society
with a high infant mortality rate.
Closing the exhibit is a pair of objects signifying the transition to
adulthood: the marble statute of a youth on the verge of manhood and a woman's
wedding bowl. The wedding marked a girl's transition to womanhood.
John H. Oakley, chair of the department of classical studies at the College of
William and Mary in Virginia, and Jenifer Neils, professor in the department of
art history and art at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, are
the curators of "Coming of Age in Ancient Greece: Images of Childhood from the
Classical Past."
Following its stay at the Hood Museum (August 23 to December 14), the
exhibition will travel to the Onassis Cultural Center in New York (January 19
to April 1, 2004), the Cincinnati Art Museum (May 21 to August 1, 2004), and
the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (September 14 to December 5, 2004).
Yale University Press has published a fully illustrated catalogue. The
exhibition and catalogue are funded in part by the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.