Fun, fear and flatbread: childhood in ancient Rome

Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. What was it like to be a child in ancient Rome? Well in this episode, the historian, author and broadcaster Bethany Hughes delves into life for young people across the civilization, unpicking everything from lice combs and goat-drawn chariots to toga ceremonies and terrifying teachers. Speaking to Emily Briffitt, she draws on extraordinary artifacts to uncover a world that was tough, trying, and surprisingly relatable. If you could survive the first nine days.

So you have recently written a book, There Was a Roman in your garden, and it's all about getting to grips with Roman history for kids. So we are going to be diving into Roman childhood today. Now, if we could summarize in 60 seconds what was it like to be a child in ancient Rome, and is it possible to summarize it in 60 seconds? Yeah, I'd say impossible to summarize in 60 seconds because it depended who you were, where you were born, what you were born into, whether you were an enslaved person or, you know, came from a wealthy family. So it's very different right across the Roman Empire, which of course was huge, as we all know, you know, crossed three continents, covered what's 50 separate countries now.

At one point a fifth of the world's population were under the Roman Empire. But I think one of the things that I wanted to kind of impress on people in the book is that obviously this is a world that was so, so different in many ways, but there are strange things that connect the experience of being a child in ancient Rome with the experience of being a child in the 21st century. So it was trying to help kids today think that's not an alien world that I have no place in. It's somewhere that they can engage in and understand.

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