THE BEGINNING AND END OF YOUTH IN ROMAN ANTIQUITY 1

Scholars like J.H. Van den Berg and P. Ariès ^{2 2}J.H. Van den Berg, Metabletica of leer der veranderingen (Nijkerk, 1956); P. Aries, L'enfant et la vie familiale sous I'ancien régime (Paris, 1960). — not professional historians by origin — introduced a dramatic innovation in historical approaches. Influenced by their pioneering research on children in the past, many modern psychologists, sociologists or historians don't consider childhood (or youth, old age, maternal love...) as a natural, universal, ageless and self‐evident “phenomenon “ anymore. For F. Musgrove, for example, the concept of youth as a separate age of man is fairly recent. This sociologist expresses his opinion in a radical way: “The adolescent as a distinct species is the creation of modern social attitudes and institutions. A creature neither child nor adult, he is a comparatively recent socio‐psycho/ogi‐cal invention, scarcely two centuries old. [...] The adolescent was invented at the same time as the steam engine. The principal architect of the latter was Watt in 1765, of the former Rousseau in 1762”. ^{3 3}F. Musgrove, Youth and the Social Order (London, 1968²) 13 ff. ("Making adolescents") and 33 ff. ("The invention of the adolescent").

Such statements are a simplification of historical reality. The view of A. Kriekemans is more balanced: depending on the cultural environment, the term “youth “ may cover a different period of life and may be more or less complicated, involving varying levels of conflict, having its own identity, its own way of living, its own status, and its own expectations. ^{4 4}A. Kriekemans, Geschiedenis van de jeugdpsychologie (Tielt‐Den Haag, 1967) p. 298. Let us apply these. words to Roman antiquity and examine the place of youth in the human life span as well as the circumstances which made possible its existence as a separate entity. Before starting the exposition itself, it should be noted that we are dealing with upper‐class youth (we know a/most nothing about youth in the lower classes) and with the young man (girls mostly married between the ages of 12 and 15 and there was no real interval between childhood and adulthood).