This ordinary ancient Roman object is still used today – and has hardly changed

Life for children in ancient Rome would have looked very different depending on where in the huge Roman empire you lived, what social class your family was from, and your gender. And while childhood in ancient Rome would have looked very different from the lives of children today, there were a few surprising similarities.

Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, Bettany Hughes, a historian and author of the children’s book There Was a Roman in Your Garden, explains that “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.”

One overlap between childhood today and in ancient Rome is the fine-toothed nit comb, designed to remove head lice.

“Nit combs are exactly the same design as they were in the ancient world – this was obviously the perfect design because it hasn't changed over the millennia,” Hughes says.

But while the nit combs of today tend to be made of plastic, the ancient Romans used a different material for theirs: boxwood, a type of wood commonly used for small, carved items.

“Boxwood has slight antibacterial properties, which was probably a really good thing [because] if you have nits, you scratch. Boxwood would hopefully prevent the spread of bacterial infection,” Hughes says.

“The Romans were very smart, and [people in] the ancient world were much better at understanding nature and us being a part of nature than we are today,” Hughes says.

Boxwood wasn’t the only plant that the Romans used for medicinal purposes. According to writings by Dioscorides, a Greek physician who was considered to be an authority on plants and plant medicine in the Roman period, oil made from walnuts was also used on children’s heads – albeit to help with alopecia or baldness, and to make the hair “pleasing.” He also recommended the “scrapings” from various gourds or squashes to help with sunstroke in children, and said that if children ate peonies, it could help to prevent kidney stones.

Familiar features of ancient Roman childhood

When ancient Roman children weren’t busy catching nits from each other, they might have been playing. Ancient children were given miniature versions of adult items to play with, just like some kids are today.

“If you were really wealthy, there were little mini chariots pulled by goats that you could have as a well-to-do Roman child – sort of like how really wealthy kids today get mini Bentleys and Rolls Royces,” Hughes says.

Poorer children also play-acted adult actions. Lots of “young boys were given wooden daggers and swords to practice play fighting with,” Hughes explains.

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While children might play with swords today, play fighting was more likely to be inspired by the real thing for ancient Roman boys, because ancient Rome was a “very militaristic society.”

Girls, on the other hand, might have played with jointed dolls.

“We always do that thing of thinking we do things better than people in the past, but actually the dolls that [the ancient Romans] used were really sophisticated, with beautiful moving arms, moving legs, and moving necks,” Hughes says.

With their jewellery and hairstyles, historian Fanny Dolansky suggests that these dolls were created as idealised figures of high-status Roman womanhood and meant to help wealthier girls prepare for their roles as wives and mothers.

What about Roman education?

The basics of ancient Roman education would be recognisable to many, too; focused on the three Rs – reading, writing, and arithmetic.

There was no free public schooling, so any type of formal education had to be paid for, whether children were sent to schools or if parents hired personal tutors to teach them at home. Poorer children – if lucky – would be taught the basics at home by their parents.

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While ancient Roman children didn’t use pens and paper, they did have the ancient equivalent of whiteboards.

“You’d do your writing by scratching it into a wax tablet with a pointy stick, a stylus,” Hughes says. “And then you’d erase it at the end of the day just by melting the wax or using a kind of rubber, so you had your recyclable exercise-book-equivalent for the next day.”

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And teachers have been exasperated at the quality of childrens’ work since ancient Roman times, too. The evidence for that was found at Vindolanda – a Roman archaeological site in modern-day Northumberland, England – where some organic remains have been well-preserved. On one tablet, someone has written out a line from the ancient epic the Aeneid – and someone else has added a comment.

“The teacher has just written ‘seg,’ which is short for seguta, which means sloppy,” Hughes says. “You can so imagine this poor guy or girl, desperately trying to do their homework and get praised, but the teacher being very dismissive.”

Roman schooling was much tougher

But while there were some similarities, education has changed a lot in the last few millennia.

How you were educated and how long you stayed in school depended on your social status and your gender.

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“Boys were often taught things like arithmetic and rhetoric and lots of other disciplines, and girls pretty much were just taught reading and writing,” Hughes says.

If your family couldn’t afford to pay for your schooling, your education would be entirely up to your family – and “as soon as you could walk, you would work as a child in the ancient world,” Hughes says, whether that was taking messages or helping out in the household.

Children were generally treated much more strictly, too, Hughes says. “No doubt it was very tough. They were chastised with canes and whips.”

Bettnay Hughes was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.