The girl who was buried with her doll in ancient Rome

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The little girl died when she was about eight years old. To do this she had had to survive a first election. Paterfamilias had the right to raise or expose their children, and a girl had a better chance of not making the cut . A letter preserved in Egypt records a husband's order to his pregnant wife to raise the newborn if he was a boy, but abandon her if she was a girl. Roman laws said that families should keep children, but only the firstborn, in the case of girls , and the comedian Posidippus said that even the poorest kept the boys, but even the richest exposed the girls. .

The fact is that our girl was desired and, most likely, loved. She was buried with a rich trousseau, which included a doll, a small makeup set, a necklace with sapphires and a huge marble sarcophagus. It wasn't the BTC Users Number Data most frequent either. In a study on Roman funerary representation, girls are the most underrepresented group . .A study by Eva Minten gives us more concrete data: of more than three hundred and fifty children's graves, only forty are of girls. Once early childhood was over, it was time to go to school, and in that equivalent of “primary” there does seem to be equality between boys and girls. However, in the higher stages, female education would have to be enclosed within the walls of their home , with pedagogues, while privileged children had access to education with a grammarian, a rhetor and, later, with a philosopher. Many managed to have, despite everything, a great educatio



Even so, the small corpse showed serious signs of malnutrition. It was not something unusual, in general, in the ancient world, in which a diet based on cereals frequently led to this type of problems. Still, we know that the classical world tended to undernourish girls . Classical authors were surprised that the Spartans fed their girls well, and it was argued that, since women were weaker and colder, they needed less food. They were also forgotten in the distributions of food and money, as in the Institutiones Alimentariae , and hardly any distribution is thought of specifically for them, such as Hadrian's puellae Faustinianae.