Modestia vs. licentia. Seneca on Childhood and Status in the Roman Family

In the Roman family the relationship between slave children and free adults seems at first glance much less problematic than others that could exist between slaves and free members. Nonetheless literary evidence suggests that it could have been quite ambiguous, implying a mixture of affection and exploitive attitudes. According to different authors, one of the reasons why the domini of the imperial era were so fond of their little slave children was their special skills in the field of verbal impudence and scurrilous jesting. Free speech and a certain kind of humour seem to have been encouraged in these children, for the personal entertainment of the dominus and of his guests. Seneca explicitly adds that the same kind of verbal licentia was not permitted to the free children of the domus; in fact, we know from several sources that elite children were taught to avoid certain speech habits, in order to achieve complete mastery over language as a mark of social distinction. By exploring the different shaping of speech habits of freeborn and slave children and its social consequences, the paper aims to focus on the different ways the upper class Romans understood childhood and at the same time to define more precisely the nature of the relationship between the domini and their petslaves.