The naked reader: Child enslavement in the Villa of the Mysteries fresco | Hacker News Reader

The naked reader: Child enslavement in the Villa of the Mysteries fresco

journals.uchicago.edu

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I remember reading that historically child nudity before puberty was so common no one would even notice it. For example when Pocahontas encountered John Smith she was completely naked https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-06-24-me-16637-...

Even in Victorian times child nudity was seen as a symbol of purity.

So the conclusion of this article seems to me to be a bit of stretch.

Out of necessity children in third world countries you can see at least toddlers running around naked. Not because that’s what the parents ‘want’ it’s simply the unaffordability of clothing they outgrow fast.

As the economies develop it becomes more rare, till it disappears.

In many ways countries that are advanced today were poorer, for the average person, than today’s third world countries a century or two ago.

I remember reading an article about advertising in either the late 1800s or early 1900s (I mean about advertising back then, not that I read the article back then!) that talked about how a lot of ads included pictures of nude young children. Nude young children were seen as symbols of purity and innocence.

I think the most astounding relatively recent situation where nudity was common was in indoor swimming pools up until the 1960's or so in the US. Most public and school pools were segregated by gender, with the females required to wear bathing suits and the males required to swim nude.

What largely put an end to that was the effects of Title IX which was passed in 1972, and required gender equality in physical education. Schools mostly found that mixed-gender pools were the easiest way to comply, and no way were they going to require males to swim nude in mixed-gender pools. Nude swimming disappeared so quickly that a generation later it was largely forgotten.

Wikipedia has a good article on this [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nude_swimming_in_US_indoor_poo...

I would ask what % of slaves in that period, as children, could read? Much of the rest of this web page assumes slave literacy is normal, and certainly if the child is enslaved to a cult, you would expect that their future life is to perform tasks in the cult which may well demand literacy (unless their life is nasty, brutish and short).

An educated slave was more valuable. Presumably either born into the status, or acquired, being a literate slave had value.

US chattel slaves were forbidden by law to read because it made organizing/rebelling easier and more likely. There were a few exceptions for certain tasks (bookkeeping and the like). Of course punishment for literacy was exacted upon the slave, not the person who taught them.

It was not uncommon for Egyptian and Roman slaves (at least) to be literate (whether before enslavement or taught as slaves). For example, Greek tutors were in high demand.

It's hard to estimate what the literacy rate was; certainly it must have been much lower than in modern OECD countries. In Rome, unlike, say, Sparta, there were no schools; teaching was all done in the home, so if you were a plebian it's less likely you could read. OTOH the roman soldiers typically could read. And most of the surviving graffiti in Pompeii doesn't look aristocratic.

I think Rome probably had a literacy rate on par with contemporary Greece and Egypt; higher than contemporary China's and probably comparable to India a millennium earlier (inferred from the prevalence of public proclamations (e.g. Ashoka steele), compared to the more "aristocratic boasting" of Roman and ancient Egyptian monumental writing aimed more at fellow elite.

> In Rome, ... teaching was all done in the home

Really?? I am very surprised to hear that, I never thought there could be any other way but having schools in a structured and developed society like theirs.

> OTOH the roman soldiers typically could read

Not to disbelieve but can you back that up? I thought the bulk of the Roman military was from pretty low down in society and literacy is usually low to negligible there

> Really?? I am very surprised to hear that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludus_(ancient_Rome)

There were schools...

IIRC that was a later development after the 3rd century C.E., well after the eruption of Vesuvius

As far as we know the Romans used a similar system to the Greeks, there were usually no physical school buildings but parents did/could pool money together to hire a teacher who would teach in various public spaces etc. There are plenty of sources, anecdotes etc. describing this hundreds of years prior the the 3rd century C.E.

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spurius_Carvilius_Ruga is first person that we know of who established an actual school in Rome (and it's unlikely that there weren't any schools before that). He lived in the 3rd century B.C. (not C.E./A.D.)

I did a quick look to search to see - I mean if anywhere has retained evidence of schools it should be Pompeii - I did a cursory search through Bloomer's book 'The School of Rome', and here are some bits from it:

"The physical requirements for a grammar school were minimal: school, like any small ancient business, could be held on the street, under or above a portico, near an important public building such as a temple, or at a rented shop. A wall painting from Pompeii, now lost, showed school near a portico and decidedly amid the bustle of the city. School could be held “in private,” at the teacher’s home or the house of the patron."

"Graffiti indicate schooling took place at several locations in Pompeii and at Rome. The places of instruction are unremarkable shop stalls. Two exceptions to these modest locales merit attention, since they seem to have dedicated space and indicate an education that is decidedly not modest. The emperor’s palace had a slave-training complex known as the paidagogia , and the villas of the wealthy had as part of their design semicircular recesses, or exedrae. The latter, like private libraries, are places of culture, perhaps of poetry reading or rhetorical training." (It links to footnotes which reference an Italian paper apparently saying there are disputes as to how to recognise schools as such).

Anyway, yeah, very good point!

> Really?? I am very surprised to hear that, I never thought there could be any other way but having schools in a structured and developed society like theirs.

Schools as we think of them today are a pretty recent invention. Even the Academies and Gymnasium of Athens were generally for adults. There was an exception in Sparta, where education was part of the facist indoctrination, similar to the system in the DDR or USSR. Then again, Sparta was super weird even by Greek standards (which was a society whose closest modern analog might be Da'esh (AKA ISIS). The hard part of reading ancient Greek for me was not the grammar but the sheer bizarreness of their structural assumptions, which are rarely visible in translation.

> > OTOH the roman soldiers typically could read

> Not to disbelieve but can you back that up? I thought the bulk of the Roman military was from pretty low down in society and literacy is usually low to negligible there

That's the point: it's a confounding point to my assumption of low levels of literacy among the plebians.

You can do your own web search on this topic, but you might want to start with this paper: https://www.academia.edu/37000249/Soldiers_and_Documents_Ins...

From its abstract: "The Roman army as an institution and the Roman soldier as an individual could not have functioned without the written word. A few newly published finds from Primis / Qasr Ibrim in Lower Nubia as well as a number of other documents discussed in this paper illustrate the extent to which administrative paperwork and the soldiers’ (semi-)private correspondence contributed to the army’s functioning and governed the soldiers’ everyday lives already in the first decades of the new imperial army. Other evidence shows how the formal and symbolic qualities of imperial and official texts, and administrative documents served Roman soldiers from all types of units in their private documents and monuments as a means to demonstrate military identity"

> There was an exception in Sparta, where education was part of the facist indoctrination, similar to the system in the DDR or USSR

That's an interesting description considering those schools were only accessible to the elite rather than the general population.

> which was a society whose closest modern analog might be Da'esh (AKA ISIS)

Rather a random thing to say? I don't see that many similarities. For one thing (upper class) women in Sparta (or Rome for that matter) had considerably more rights than in Athens for instance (which was probably even worse than modern Saudi Arabia in that regard).

> literacy among the plebians.

Most of the Roman upper class was plebian.

I thought plebeian meant commoner. Seems it's a bit more complicated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plebs#Noble_plebeians

> The hard part of reading ancient Greek for me was not the grammar but the sheer bizarreness of their structural assumptions, which are rarely visible in translation.

FFS do not do this to me! Don't dangle such gems before me so casually then stroll off! I am fascinated by the different ways people think, how differently they can think, and so be alien to my own thought processes. It's so interesting because I learn as much about my own assumptions about theirs. Such insights are genuinely valuable to me. Please do tell or... something. Anything...

> In Rome, unlike, say, Sparta, there were no schools; teaching was all done in the home,

I'm not sure that's true. Also when people think about Sparta they usually only consider about the upper class elite since almost the entire population of the region were second class freemen with limited civil rights or slaves/serf. In any case the Spartan Agoge (which again was only accessible to a small proportion of the population) wasn't necessarily similar to what we understand a 'school'.

As far as we know Roman 'educational system' was similar to that which existed in normal Greek cities (so not Sparta). Upper classes hired private tutors/bough slaves, however there were public (privately funded) schools called 'Ludus' accessible to a significant proportion of the the population.

> probably comparable to India a millennium earlier (inferred from the prevalence of public proclamations (e.g. Ashoka steele),

Why do you think that was the case? Also didn't Ashoka live in the 3rd century BC (so contemporary to the Hellenistic age)?

> monumental writing aimed more at fellow elite.

I'm not sure that was generally the case in Ancient Rome or most Greek cities. Many of the public inscriptions were clearly aimed at the general population.

Why is this downvoted?

>US chattel slaves were forbidden by law to read because it made organizing/rebelling easier and more likely

That's not the reason why.

The reason is rooted in Wessexian and Mercian cavalier culture.

The cavaliers were noble-blood hegemonic, believed that their hegemony was sanctioned by God, and that it was not only their God-given right to engage in literacy and certain leisurely pursuits, but it was their duty, and it was God's will that the nobles, and only the nobles, should pursue these things.

This cultural expression existed long before chattel slavery was ever a thing, with peasants and indentured servants being discouraged and disabled from literacy, though not necessarily legally forbidden.

So these people didn't forbid literacy out of fear of peasant reprisal, they did it because they believed God had granted the privilege to them, and only them.

See: Fischer, 1989. Albion's Seed.

Stating one person's theory about complex social behaviors as "fact" seems a little far, even if they did happen to write it down in a book.

I would suggest, rather than inventing your own mythology, rather than subscribing to the mythology of HN comments without any scholarly references, rather than write off a history book because it only has a single author (would two have convinced you? perhaps three?), to go directly to the primary sources cited in the book:

[1] Patriarcha by Sir Robert Filmer

[2] The Diary of William Byrd II of Virginia, 1709-1712

These are just a couple examples, both of which are quite representative of the ideas and culture of the governing elite of the Virginia tidewater.

If you engage with these primary sources, you may be able to relieve yourself of any spurious mythologies and preconceived notions.

I think you completely missed the point here. Your statement categorically denied one proposed cause, and presented another as the sole truth for an incredibly complex social result.

I don't know if you're not a native english speaker, so apologies here if that's not the case, but you seem to have fallen down the stairs with a Thesaurus. This didn't help improve the clarity of your comment in any way, and gives the perception you're trying to give your reply a veneer of intellectualism with no content behind it. What "mythology" did I present? I intentionally presented no alternative theory.

The proposed theory in the book may be well be a large contributor to the end result of illiteracy in slave populations in the US at the time. But to categorically state that a single reason was true for a society consisting of millions of individuals is absurd.

Next time you get owned in any kind of argument, don't go for the "ESL" ad hominem, because when you're wrong, you look like a moron, and when you're right, you look like a jerk. It's just a losing play no matter what. This conversation is done.

Sadly we can't down vote anymore, but please know well that the only person you "owned" here is yourself.

I suspect the Roman tradition of slavery was much less brutal than the American chattel slavery we might be more familiar with. Out of the Roman republic/empire, there are numerous stories about slaves who become poets, authors, adopted sons/daughters with full rights, philosophers, etc.

A quick example, Epictetus was born a slave, but was sent to study philosophy by his master under the tutelage of Musonius Rufus. What kind of minds did the US system of slavery develop over the 200+ years it existed? Frederick Douglass is the only one that really comes to mind, and he succeeded in his intellectual development despite his masters trying to stymie him at every step.

My immediate assumption was that the boy was a catamite to some noble. I wouldn't expect a slave to necessarily be able to read. But a catamite could have been a slave or just the child of another noble family. It wasn't unknown in the ancient world as a form of social climbing.

It was not unusual for Roman slaves to be literate, especially in cities. It increased their value.

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