6 THINGS YOU (PROBABLY) DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT ROMAN WOMEN

From breastfeeding to unusual beauty regimes, classicist Dr Annelise Freisenbruch reveals what life was really like for the wives, mothers and daughters of ancient Rome

- Dr Annelise Freisenbruch

1 WEALTHY WOMEN USED WET NURSES TO FEED THEIR OFFSPRING

Wealthy Roman women did not usually breastfeed their own children. Instead, they handed them over to a wet nurse - usually a slave or hired freedwoman who was contracted to provide the service. Soranus, the influential author of a second-century AD work on gynaecology, prescribed that a wet nurse's milk might be preferable in the days after the birth, on the grounds that the mother could become too exhausted to feed. He did not approve of feeding on demand, and recommended that solids such as bread soaked in wine should be introduced at six months. Soranus also pointed to the possible benefits of employing a Greek wet nurse, who could pass on the gift of her mother tongue to her charge.

Yet this flew in the face of advice from most Roman physicians and philosophers. They suggested that mother's milk was best - both for the child's health and moral wellbeing - on the grounds that wet nurses might pass on servile defects of character to the baby. These same men opined that women who did not suckle their own children were lazy, vain and unnatural mothers who only cared about the possible damage to their figures.

2 ROMAN FATHERS, NOT MOTHERS, USUALLY GOT CUSTODY OF THEIR CHILDREN AFTER A DIVORCE

Marriage was the grease and glue of Roman society, used to facilitate political and personal ties between families. However, marital ties could be severed at short notice when they were no longer deemed 'useful'.