To: blam
Yes, it is to eliminate 'Before Christ' but actually 'Before Common Era' STILL means 'Before Christ'. The dimwits.
Only rich families could afford wet-nurses.
Social life in Roman times is very well documented by a famous book called Daily Life In Ancient Rome, a marvelous work, written in the '30's. Jerome Carcapaccio or something like that. I have it in my bookshelf and am too lazy to get up and look. A whole chapter on the insanity of the Roman Games and why no politician could stop them even though they knew they were deeply wrong.
Wives were not called 'chaste' on their tombstones because it was expected. Would you put on YOUR spouse's tombstone 'S/He didn't have sex with that or any other woman/man"? Stupid kind of epitaph.
The idea of 'family' was also different in Elizabethan and American Colonial times, it included apprentices, orphans, servants, farm hands, all referred to by the head of the household as 'my family', or 'my people'.
I think this woman has an agenda or hasn't read very widely. She looks thick.
7 posted on
02/29/2004 4:52:59 PM PST by
squarebarb
('The stars put out their pale opinions, one by one...' Thomas Merton)
To: squarebarb
I think she backed into this by way of archaeology. The excavation guys have become more and more divorced from the classicists, ever since they put classical archaeology over in the art department. I had to hike all the way across campus to take those courses!
Seriously, this lady has obviously never read any of the many available texts on Roman family life, and she hasn't read the Latin authors, because you can glean a lot of this from just what Cicero and Tacitus and the rest of them let drop in passing. I thought everybody knew that a Roman of good family (senators and knights and any wealthy freedmen or merchants who could aspire) lived in an extended household where the father, wife and children simply formed the core.
This is no big deal anyhow. An awful lot of southern families have had widowed granny and a housekeeper and/or nanny living in - we certainly did.
12 posted on
02/29/2004 5:03:18 PM PST by
AnAmericanMother
(. . . sed, ut scis, quis homines huiusmodi intellegere potest?. . .)
To: squarebarb
Jerome Carcopino.
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson