Growing Up in Ancient Rome: Childhood Across the Social Divide

What was it like to be a child in ancient Rome? For every Roman child, life began the same uncertain way. A newborn was not formally recognized as a son or daughter until roughly eight or nine days had passed, a custom shaped by the reality that infant mortality was extremely high. Once a child survived that threshold, they received an amulet — a bulla — worn for protection throughout childhood and dedicated at the family shrine around age fourteen or fifteen, when the child put on adult clothing and was recognized as grown up. From that point on, however, much depended on the family you were born into, and whether you were a boy or a girl. Boys were steered toward the military, the law courts, and eventually politics; girls toward marriage and the management of a household.

How that upbringing looked in practice depended heavily on wealth. Families with means placed a son under a pedagogue, an enslaved tutor who escorted him to lessons often taught bilingually in Latin and Greek, with a fortunate few even sent to study in Athens. Girls in these households were educated mainly at home in domestic skills, though some Roman women were notably literate and dined socially alongside men. Most Roman children, though, belonged to families without such means, and for them growing up meant apprenticeship rather than schooling — learning a trade from a parent or master, whether weaving, leatherwork, bricklaying, or barbering. Because these families rarely left written accounts of their own, much of what we know about their lives comes from tombstones, where a trade might be recorded in just a few brief lines. Enslaved children faced a different path still: status followed the household from birth, some were trained for skilled roles like scribe or accountant, and manumission offered a possible route to freedom, though a freedman could choose whether or not to recognize his own children as free.

Whatever a Roman child’s circumstances, the city itself set firm boundaries around them. Gladiatorial combat was treated as unsuitable for young audiences, an ancient equivalent of an age restriction. The great public baths, too, were built with an adult clientele in mind; children bathed at home instead. And a child did not wander the crowded, noisy streets of Rome alone — they moved through the forum, the markets, and the public latrines always in the company of a parent or a pedagogue. Wealthy or poor, free or enslaved, most Roman children reached adult responsibilities — a trade, a marriage, a military post — years before a modern teenager would.

Further reading:

1. Rawson, Beryl. Children and childhood in Roman Italy. Oxford University Press, 2003.
2. Laes, Christian. Children in the Roman Empire: outsiders within. Cambridge University Press, 2011.
3. Golden, Mark. “Did the Ancients Care When Their Children Died?” Greece & Rome, vol. 35, no. 2, 1988, pp. 152–63. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/642999. Accessed 1 July 2026.
4. Bradley, Keith R. “Child Labour in the Roman World.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, vol. 12, no. 2, 1985, pp. 311–30. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41298859. Accessed 1 July 2026.
5. Laes, Christian. Children in the Roman Empire: outsiders within. Cambridge University Press, 2011.