Roman Children and Roman Dogs

The way Ancient Romans treated their dogs mirrored the social relationships among Roman people, and this was at times horrific, and at times truly creepy.

As Robin Fleming presents in her recent lecture “Dogsbodies and Dogs’ Bodies: A Social and Cultural History of Roman Britain’s Dogs and People,” Ancient Roman elites kept pet dogs, and they used them in various ways — for labor as well as affection. But at all times the animals were under their owners’ control and were kept alive to bolster their masters’ social status and personal whims. And this was also true about the child slaves they owned.

Fleming points out that the Latin term “delicia” could mean a luxury item, an animal pet, or a pet child-slave. And the comparisons among human and dog delicia are numerous — in Fleming’s words, both “sat on the laps of their masters’, they slept on their beds, and they were kissed as they entertained”. The wealthy owners might purchase puppies for their children to play with, and bought child-pet slaves in the same way. The late fourth century poet Ausonius discusses one of his child-pets as “my precious, my charmer, my toy, my love, my lust.” Ew, gross.

The child-pets and collared dogs might have cost a lot of resources (the dog collars could be highly decorated), and both would have eaten scraps off their masters’ tables. This first image gets at the similarity of dogs and humans as beloved pets: it is a second-century stele commemorating “Helena, foster daughter, the incomparable and worthy soul” — Helena is shown as a lapdog.

Both collared dogs and child-pets were also used for their labor. You can see an example in the second image of a child slave with a chained collar around their neck, asleep as they await their owner. This is from a copper-alloy oil flask from Aldborough, Britain.

The normalization of child slavery — with all the violence and abuse that entailed — was something that impacted many arenas of Roman society. The parallel lives of collared dogs and child-pets is an example of this.