Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy

Ada Cohen is Associate Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College. Jeremy B. Rutter is Sherman Fairchild Professor of the Humanities at Dartmouth College.

• Childhood between Past and Present: An Introduction (Ada Cohen); The Parental Ethos of the Iliad (Louise Pratt); Children in Classical Attic Votive Reliefs (Carol L. Lawton); The Power of Parenthood in Official Roman Art (Jeannine Diddle Uzzi); Behaving Like a Child: Immature Gestures in Athenian Vase-Painting (Timothy J. McNiven); Paideia's Children: Childhood Education on a Group of Late Antique Mosaics (Constantin A. Marinescu, Sarah E. Cox, and Rudolf Wachter); Educating Paula: A Proposed Curriculum for Raising a 4th-Century Christian Infant (Phyllis B. Katz); Children at Risk: Votive Terracottas and the Welfare of Infants at Paestum (Rebecca Miller Ammerman); Komos Growing Up among Satyrs and Children (Amy C. Smith); The Awkward Age: Art and Maturation in Early Greece (Susan Langdon); Age and Innocence: Female Transitions to Adulthood in Late Antiquity (Lisa A. Alberici and Mary Harlow); Children's Work: Girls as Acolytes in Aegean Ritual and Cult (Paul Rehak); Boys Will Be Boys: Youth and Gender Identity in the Theran Frescoes (Anne P. Chapin); Gendering the Age Gap: Boys, Girls, and Abduction in Ancient Greek Art (Ada Cohen); Childhood among the Etruscans: Mortuary Programs at Tarquinia as Indicators of the Transition to Adult Status (Marshall Joseph Becker); Notions of Childhood in the Classical Polis: Evidence from the Bioarchaeological Record (Anna Lagia); Forever Young: An Investigation of the Depictions of Children on Classical Attic Funerary Monuments (Janet Burnett Grossman); Constructing Childhood on Roman Funerary Memorials (Janet Huskinson); Racing with Death: Circus Sarcophagi and the Commemoration of Children in Roman Italy (Eve D'Ambra); Eros and the Lizard: Children, Animals, and Roman Funerary Sculpture (Jean Sorabella); Children as Poets, Poets as Children? Romantic Constructions of Childhood and Hellenistic Poetry (Annemarie Ambuehl).

This beautifully-produced volume collects papers originally presented at a conference at Dartmouth College in 2003 organized in conjunction with the exhibition 'Coming of Age in Ancient Greece' at the Hood Art Museum. The contributors to this volume successfully address multiple aspects of ancient Mediterranean childhood with very little of the repetitive overlap or loss of thematic focus that can sometimes weaken edited collections. This volume represents the state of the art in Greco-Roman childhood studies and offers valuable resources to scholars of the ancient family, household, and lifecycle Neil Bernstein, BMCR 2008.08.23.