Ancient Romans were so used to human brutality and violence that they took its existence for granted. Whether the violence was directed by slave owners to their human property, on display at the regular games and gladiator matches, or observed at the very public slaughtering of animals for religious sacrificial purposes, it was normalized.
We can see this is in the way children interacted with animals. Although Roman children (especially wealthy ones) kept pets whom they formed affectionate bonds with, these young ones also participated in the violence done to animals. The sweet, rounded young boys appearing in the first image dating to the Late Republic or first centuries of Empire are watching a cockfight. The birds would have stabbed and clawed at each other, squawking and bleeding, until one of the two died from their wounds. As historian K. Bradley writes, “cockfighting was part of the cultural matrix that repeatedly demanded of adult Romans that they witness the shedding of blood.” Well, the adults witnessed it from an early age.
The second image shows two young boys hunting for sport. Taken from a 4th- century mosaic in Sicily, you can see one of the children has successfully gashed a wound in a rabbit’s side, and blood is spurting out. The Roman writer Plutarch (citing, perhaps erroneously, the Pythagorean philosophers) wrote that showing kindness to animals fosters human compassion, “for habituation has a strange power to lead men onward by a gradual familiarization of the feelings”. What, then, did the regular participation of animal brutality do for Ancient Roman children?
Sources: Robin Fleming, “Dogsbodies and Dogs’ Bodies: a Social and Cultural History of Roman Britain’s Dogs and People” the Ford Lectures, 2022. “The sentimental education of the Roman child: the role of pet-keeping,” _Latomus_, T. 57, Fasc. 3 (July-September 1998), pp 523-557. First Walters Art Museum. Second image, Villa del casale, wikimedia
