{"id":693,"date":"2014-03-18T14:40:21","date_gmt":"2014-03-18T14:40:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/?p=693"},"modified":"2014-03-18T14:57:23","modified_gmt":"2014-03-18T14:57:23","slug":"ancient-rome-in-so-many-words-crepundia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/2014\/03\/18\/ancient-rome-in-so-many-words-crepundia\/","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Rome in So Many Words: Crepundia"},"content":{"rendered":"

CREPUNDIA: a child\u2019s toy rattle, sometimes used for identification; infancy<\/p>\n

\"Marble<\/a>

Marble bust of a sleeping child wearing crepundia (amulets and charms) on a cord across his chest. \u00a9 The Trustees of the British Museum.<\/p><\/div>\n

Ebony comes from India and Ethiopia, and when cut it becomes hard as stone . . . it is also attached to crepundia<\/i>, so that the sight of the color black will not scare the infant. (Isidore of Seville, Etymologies <\/i>17.7.36)<\/p>\n

All too transitory and fragile, like the crepundia<\/i> of childhood, are the so-called power and wealth of human kind. (Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings<\/i> 6.9 ext. 7)<\/p>\n

From infancy [a crepundiis<\/i>] he gave equal attention to courage and to eloquence. (From an inscription honoring Flavius Merobaudes, an imperial official and writer of poetry of the fifth century, CIL<\/i> 6.1724.)<\/p>\n

Now in here are the crepundia<\/i> you had when that woman brought you to me years ago. She gave them to me so as to make it easier for your parents to recognize you. (The madam at a brothel, to one of her courtesans, in Plautus\u2019s comedy Cistellaria<\/i> 635\u2013636.)<\/p>\n

She had already given an indication that she was destined for heaven and not for the couch of marriage: she had rejected her very crepundia<\/i>, a little girl who knew not how to play. No interest in amber, she wept at roses, disdained aureate bracelets, was sober of expression, modest of gate and, though of all-too-tender years, her character imitated that of gray-haired age. (Prudentius, on the twelve-year-old martyr Eulalia, killed in Merida, Spain in AD 304, Crowns of the Martyrs<\/i> 3.16\u201325.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Crepundia<\/i> derives from the verb meaning \u201cto rattle\u201d (crepare<\/i>) and refers in the first instance to the metal charms jingled to try and calm fussing babies. From there crepundia<\/i> comes to stand in as a symbol for early childhood itself, as in the comment of Valerius Maximus and the inscription quoted above. Unlike today, when such things are generally mass-produced, a Roman tot\u2019s crepundia<\/i> were homemade and individualized. They might be inscribed with the name of the mother or father, or include some distinctive figurines. Archaeologists have found bells, clappers, letters of ivory, children\u2019s utensils for eating and drinking, and many other objects that served this purpose.<\/p>\n

Since they were individualized, crepundia<\/i> could be used to identify babies who got misplaced. Special crepundia<\/i> could be given to children by mothers who were compelled by poverty to expose them or give them away, in hope that, when they had grown up in someone else\u2019s care, they might by some chance return and be recognized using the crepundia<\/i>. Such improbable recognitions of lost or abandoned children, duly verified by crepundia<\/i>, were a common plot device in Roman and Greek comedy, as in the line from Plautus quoted here.<\/p>\n

But this does not mean it never happened in real life. The real rate of child abandonment in ancient Rome is unclear. By one estimate, impossible to verify, 20 to 40 percent of all urban children were abandoned in the third century AD. This is a very high figure, and probably not a normal situation, but it is well paralleled in pre-industrial Paris, Vienna, Milan, and Florence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The comparative evidence corroborates the impression we get from Roman sources, that the prototypical abandoner was an urban woman, perhaps from a peasant background in the city as a domestic servant, for whom taking care of an infant interfered with the necessity of urban employment. The modern evidence suggests that, unlike the happy endings of Roman comedy, however, abandonment was often tantamount to infanticide. Eighty percent mortality and higher in the first year was regular, even when foundling homes were in place (which they were not in ancient Rome).<\/p>\n

\"Bronze<\/a>

Bronze Roman necklace fragment with crepundia from the Johns Hopkins Archaeological Museum<\/p><\/div>\n

Just as crepundia<\/i> were fragile and fleeting, childhood itself was seen as a time of immaturity and imperfection. Roman children were often praised by adults for not acting like children\u2014that is, for being serious, responsible, and sober, like adults\u2014the so-called senex puer<\/i> or \u201cold-man boy\u201d phenomenon. Prudentius follows in this tradition when he praises the young martyr Eulalia for wanting to have nothing to do with her crepundia<\/i>, and \u201cnot knowing how to play.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bibliography: Thesaurus Linguae Latinae<\/i> 4.1174\u20131175. J. Marquardt, Das Privatleben der R\u00f6mer<\/i> (repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1980) 1.120. Susan Dixon, The Roman Family<\/i> (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) 98\u2013132; David Kertzer et al., \u201cChild Abandonment in European History: A Symposium,\u201d Journal of Family History<\/i> 17 (1992) 1\u201323.<\/p>\n

\"ARSMW_cover\"<\/a>Adapted from the book\u00a0Ancient Rome in So Many Words<\/em><\/a> (New York: Hippocrene, 2007) by Christopher Francese.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CREPUNDIA: a child\u2019s toy rattle, sometimes used for identification; infancy Ebony comes from India and Ethiopia, and when cut it becomes hard as stone . . . it is also attached to crepundia, so that the sight of the color … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=693"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/dcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}