An Elite Upbringing

Abstract The chapter explores the daily life of elite Roman girls and women in the late republic and early principate, and the societal expectations regarding their participation in the religious rituals and social ceremonials of their class, especially marriage. The offspring of the upper classes were generally educated privately at home, and this seems to have been especially true for girls. Sulpicia likely received instruction alongside her brother, and even when her formal schooling came to an end, whether at puberty or marriage, she may have continued to enjoy Greek and Latin literature in the company of a female slave trained to read aloud (lectrix). Alongside the moralizing rhetoric concerning children’s upbringing found in classical literary texts, ancient artifacts reveal the ubiquity of play in their daily lives. Both the literary evidence and the archeological record associate the use of dolls exclusively with girls in ancient Rome, a pastime that modeled to the upper-class Roman girl-child the feminine ideals of “elegance,” “adornment,” and “refinement,” which are on display in the poetry by and about Sulpicia. Since public life was not open to women, the expectation was that they would marry and bear children. Daughters of the upper classes seem normally to have married in their teens, after a betrothal that could (but need not) have been arranged in childhood. While we lack evidence for Sulpicia’s engagement and marriage, the elegiac poetry by and about her bears witness to the social conventions of erotic awakening, elite betrothal, and marriage.