Roman Breastfeeding: Control and Affect

Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet

Arethusa, Volume 50, Number 3, Fall 2017, pp. 369-384 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/are.2017.0013

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/671464

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 ROMAN BREASTFEEDING:
CONTROL AND AFFECT*

CLAUDE-EMMANUELLE CENTLIVRES CHALLET

B reastfeeding in ancient Rome was vital, since the only substitutes for
human milk were not appropriate foods for infants and had dire, if not
lethal, consequences; newborns and infants had a better chance of sur-
vival if fed the milk of their mother or of another woman.1 Therefore, it
seems surprising that such an act, not only essential but also ordinary and
commonplace by necessity, was not more often depicted either literarily or
visually. This paper will offer hypotheses based on modern anthropologi-
cal and psychological research concerning this dearth of representations
of breastfeeding in the literary and iconographic sources.

REPRESENTATIONS

Authors of the imperial era were seemingly convinced, and wanted to

convince others, of the beneits of maternal breastfeeding over other ways
of feeding infants. The medical writer Soranus (2.18), the satirist Juvenal
(6.9, 592–97), the philosophers Favorinus (apud Aulus Gellius 12.1.4–7)
and Musonius Rufus (3), the historian Tacitus (Germ. 20), and the biog-
rapher Plutarch (Cat. Ma. 20.3) denounced the practice of wet nursing,2

* I am grateful to the anonymous reader and the editors for their insightful comments.
1 This is demonstrated in detail in Centlivres Challet, “Feeding the Roman Nursling: Mater-
nal Milk, its Substitutes, and their Limitations,” Latomus forthcoming.
2 Wet nursing is a well documented practice in Greece, Rome, and Egypt: Joshel 1986; Brad-
ley 1980, 1986, 1991, 1994; Dixon 1988.120–29, 145–46, and note 7 pp. 161–62; Dasen
2010, 2012; Fildes 1988.1–25; Lefkowitz and Fant 1992 s.v. “wet-nurses” and “nurses.”
Inscriptions mention some ten wet nurses in Gaul: Coulon 2004.59–60.

369

Arethusa 50 (2017) 369–384 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press

370 Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet

which deprived the elite and their children of the physical and emotional
beneits of breastfeeding (see Dasen 2012.51–55).
And yet breastfeeding is a rare Roman literary and iconographic
theme, and one most often addressed in an allegorical or symbolic way
rather than realistically. Stone or terra cotta mother goddesses breastfeed-
ing one or two nurslings (Bonfante 1989a.91–92, 1997.183; Dasen 1997;
Coulon 2004.53–55, 58), Isis breastfeeding Harpocrates (Tran Tam Tinh
1973), the fourth-century empress Fausta represented on coins as breast-
feeding (Centlivres Challet and Bähler Baudois 2003), the legend of Pero
breastfeeding her father Mycon,3 or the myth of Hera breastfeeding her
adult son Heracles (Bonfante 1997.180–81) are all cases of symbolic or
allegoric breastfeeding.
The very few ordinary and domestic representations of Roman
breastfeeding are found on the gravestones of wet nurses4 and mothers5
and on sarcophagi.6 Funerary inscriptions sometimes report the fact that a
mother herself breastfed her child,7 but literary mentions of human women
breastfeeding are scarce.
Larissa Bonfante notes (1989a, 1997) that visual representations
of breastfeeding women are more numerous in Etruscan and Italic art than
in Greek and Roman. She suggests that breastfeeding was associated by
the Greeks and Romans with barbarism and animality (1989a.98, 1997.185,
188), with metaphorical vulnerability when undressed mortal women are
depicted in legendary contexts (1997.175), or with the symbolic magical
power of goddesses’ naked breasts (1989b.544–45, 1997.187). An ancient
image of a breastfeeding mother would relect an absence of sophistication
and refer to the sexual and magical power of breasts as symbols of life
and death (Bonfante 1997.188, DeForest 1993): milk was both a source of
“revival” (Corbeill 2004.104–05) and a luid derived from menstrual blood.8

3 Deonna 1954, 1955, 1956; Renard 1955; Knauer 1965; Bonfante 1989a.89–90 and
1997.182–83.
4 Such as that of the famous third-century Severina: see Fildes 1988.10–11, Coulon 2004.52,
54, and Dasen 2012.44–45.
5 Boatwright 2005.287–89 and Moine 2006. Beerden and Naerebout 2011 note the presence
on a irst-century gravestone of a female igure wearing a dress with two openings at the
level of the breasts, which the authors suggest could be a breastfeeding dress.
6 Huskinson 1996.16–17, 23, 53, 111; Boatwright 2005.306–07; Dasen 2012.45–46.
7 E.g., CIL VI, 19128, 21347, and 23078.
8 Laskaris 2008.461 and Pedrucci 2015; the latter also suggests that the dearth of breastfeed-
ing scenes in Greek art might be related to a fear of the evil eye associated with mothers’
breastfeeding envy: Pedrucci 2015.esp. 28, 48.
Roman Breastfeeding 371

Patricia Salzman-Mitchell shares Bonfante’s opinion that breast-

feeding in antiquity was associated with the animal world (2012.153). But
she goes further, reading the sources as revealing that breastfeeding was
associated with incest (2012.141, 158, and passim), and highlighting “the
taboo aspect of the practice” (2012.158). However, none of the Roman
sources have a negative view of breastfeeding, and her conclusions are
based on passages from Homer, Aeschylus, and Euripides—whose epic
and tragic contexts have a strong inluence on the way they must be read.
More importantly, these authors portray adult sons and their legendary
mothers; there is no realistic breastfeeding of young children by their
ordinary mothers. Thus the taboo perceived by Salzman-Mitchell does
not relate to breastfeeding itself, but to mothers showing their breasts to
their adult sons.9 Other hypotheses are needed to explain the relatively
few representations of the act of breastfeeding in Roman art and literature.
Of course, it may just be that the evidence is lost, not having
come down to us, but a real disinterest is another possible explanation. If
the elite are the main consumers of art, and if the elite do not breastfeed
their offspring but entrust them to wet nurses, art will not mirror, or only
faintly, an activity often handed off to women of an inferior social class.
Even if this delegation of breastfeeding pertained more to ideology than to
reality, art would convey images of the ideal situation in order to reinforce
the message concerning giving the breast. Furthermore, domestic breast-
feeding—as opposed to symbolic or allegoric breastfeeding—is a natural
function of daily life, something which is itself less often represented in
the visual and literary sources. Finally, this physiological act belongs exclu-
sively to the female realm and, as such, was less likely to be represented,
since ancient public discourses focused on male activities rather than on
those that were speciically female.
A parallel can be drawn between the depiction of breastfeed-
ing and that of childbirth. The visual representation of childbirth is rare
(Kampen 1994, esp. 113–19), and mainly belongs to the iconography of the

9 Interestingly, Valerius Maximus insists that the stories of Pero breastfeeding her father
Mycon (5.4 ext.1) or a woman breastfed by her daughter (5.4.7; see also Pliny the Elder
7.36) should be considered examples of ilial devotion and not of unnatural or amoral
behaviour. On the painting of Pero and Mycon in the house of Marcus Lucretius Fronto in
Pompeii, and its association with pudor (“modesty”) and pietas (“ilial love”), see Milnor
2006.100; for other paintings of Pero and Mycon in Pompeii, see Milnor 2006.101 n. 13.
See also Morel 2002.154–56.
372 Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet

cycle of life found on biographical sarcophagi and midwives’ gravestones.10

On the same types of visual media—sarcophagi and gravestones of wet
nurses and mothers—are found the few representations of breastfeeding.
Giving and sustaining life have in common that both are necessary for the
perpetuation of humankind and exclusively related to female anatomy and
physiology. Although some breastfeeding scenes include a husband looking
on and childbirth was relatively public (Dixon 1988.106–07 and Rawson
1991.11–12), men do not play an active role in these events and, as a result,
male literary sources mostly do not address these topics. Nonetheless, medi-
cal writers and authors interested in the observation of natural phenomena
give instructions, advice, and recipes related to giving birth (see French
1986) and breastfeeding: this is a way to appropriate those acts without
which human life could not exist. These attempts at interfering and taking
control can be explained by a second hypothesis about why breastfeeding
is so rarely depicted: envy.

ENVY

Keren Epstein-Gilboa, a researcher in psychology and a psychotherapist,

seeks to explain the doublespeak of twenty-irst century men who, on the
one hand, assure us that they believe that breastfeeding beneits both mother
and child, but who, on the other, interfere in various ways with that pro-
cess. She details the mechanisms, conscious or unconscious, that allow the
dominant male social group to obstruct breastfeeding by, for instance, inter-
rupting or interfering with the feeding session (Epstein-Gilboa 2010.207):

Interrupting exclusivity and duration implies that breast

milk and nursing are not good enough for the infant, and
that women’s other tasks are more important than nurs-
ing. Wet-nursing devalues nursing by fragmenting it into
part objects. The breastfeeding product—breast milk—is
retained while acts of creating and ejecting breast milk and
remaining close to an infant through nursing are removed.
Artiicial feeding destroys all parts of nursing. These
obstructive processes are contemptuous, and reduce the
worth of the envied object, enabling triumph over nursing.

10 Kampen 1981.33–44, 69–72; ig. 3–5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 58, 60.
Roman Breastfeeding 373

Her research and conclusions open new perspectives for the social
historian. Two types of envy seem to activate strategies of control by the
dominant Roman patriarchal group: one type is related to a notion that is
at the heart of Roman ideology: power envy, and another, very human, is
pleasure envy.

POWER AND PLEASURE

As Roman society was patriarchal and ideologically dominated by men, men

appropriated its decision-making processes, the results of which involved the
whole community and, at a domestic level, the whole family. Consequently,
such a demiurgic and vital act as giving the breast, in a society where it
would have effectively sustained the life of an infant, was bound to cause a
desire to appropriate, if not the essential gesture itself, at least the possibil-
ity to determine its processes in an attempt to control this female power.
Male envy of the pleasures of breastfeeding should also be consid-
ered. Soranus and Favorinus notice the relation between breastfeeding and
maternal affection (Soranus 2.18, Favorinus apud Aulus Gellius 12.1.21–22).
The few literary selections that depict breastfeeding show that mothers and
children evince the same feelings of delight and the same sense of close-
ness, security, and intense satisfaction as those felt by mothers and children
of those later periods when they could give their own account of it.11 Thus
Porphyry says of the philosopher Plotinus that the latter kept intact his desire
to suckle until he was eight years old (Vita Plot. 3). Plutarch reports that
his two-year-old daughter would ask her wet nurse to breastfeed her toys
and other children too (Cons. uxor. 2). Perpetua, or the author of her Pas-
sion, says that her prison is to her a palace when she has the opportunity to
breastfeed her child while awaiting her martyrdom (2–10). Ovid describes
the not yet one-year-old as a dulce onus, a “sweet burden,” nestling in his
mother’s arms and suckling (Met. 9.336–39). And Lucretius writes of the
three-year-old who often seeks the breast at night (5.883–85).
These descriptions conjure up positive images and evoke happy
associations for both mother and child, who presumably would not keep
their breastfeeding relationship going, especially through the night, if they
did not enjoy it in the same way modern mother-child dyads describe enjoy-
ing it in an era when breast milk is no longer the only safe food for infants.

11 E.g., Wrigley 1990; Gribble 2009, 2010; Campo 2010, esp. 58–59; Bartlett 2010.
374 Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet

What is more, the release of oxytocin, the hormone which plays a neces-
sary role in the milk ejection relex, has also been shown to be important
in social and pair bonding (Lee et al. 2009, Olff et al. 2013). The pleasures
experienced by mother and child thus have a chemical basis, the produc-
tion and effects of which are unlikely to have changed since Roman times
on the relatively small evolutionary scale of two millennia.
As a corollary, the delegation of the quotidian care of infants to a
third party might have protected Roman parents from emotional trauma; this
is the hypothesis of Keith R. Bradley. He argues that women of the elite, who
could delegate daily care of their offspring to other, subaltern women, might
thus put some affective distance between themselves and their children—of
whom a quarter did not live beyond their irst birthday, half of them dying
before their tenth birthday.12 Bradley believes (1986, esp. 220) that the wet
nurse was subjected to “emotional exploitation” through the compulsory
relationship that she had with the child and, as a consequence, was the one
who suffered most when the child died (if she had indeed become attached
to him or her). Soranus himself says that the nurse must have a liking for,
and demonstrate affectionate behaviour toward, her charge (2.19, 2.40).
Should we imagine that fathers, too, might have preferred their
children to die in arms as far removed from theirs as possible? Mark Golden
notes (2004.156–57) that while women are accustomed to lux and more
attuned to life-cycle changes, men labor to make society stable: the role of
women is to bear children and the loss thereof so that men can continue,
emotionally unscathed, to make social institutions function. Early infancy
is a vulnerable, transitional stage, and breastfeeding belongs to this tem-
porary phase when the child is most likely to die. Accordingly, fathers
would stay away from it and not direct their interest toward it, so as not to
squander, as it were, their energy on processes with uncertain outcomes.

CONTROL

The sense of power and the pleasure given by breastfeeding could not be
appropriated as such by Roman men, but a degree of control could be
ensured by strategic ploys.

12 Bradley 1994.144–46. Statius expresses this when he writes of wet nurses more loving
than mothers: Silv. 2.1.96–102. About the emotional bond that could grow between wet
nurses and children, see Chappuis Sandoz 2004.227–36, and 230–33 for the vocabulary
related to this type of affection. For a discussion of different models of infant and early
childhood mortality rates and statistics, see Parkin 2013.50–55.
Roman Breastfeeding 375

Strategies of Depreciation

We have seen that the lack of literary and visual representations of breast-
feeding could be due to a real disinterest and/or disgust regarding female
physiology and luids. Another type of disinterest, which could be termed
strategic or conscious, might have caused the scarcity of the theme of
ordinary, domestic breastfeeding in all Roman communication media: this
absence would restate and reinforce, by making this type of breastfeed-
ing invisible, the recognition of its lack of importance, thus undermining
the speciic essentiality of an exclusively powerful female prerogative and
ield of knowledge. Similarly, its association with animality and barbarism
makes breastfeeding a subject unit for literary praise or positive visual
representations. Finally, Soranus mentions (2.11) the potential wear and tear
that the female body would incur when giving the breast, and the notion
of breastfeeding as an uglifying process would not have helped promote
it among women of the classes for whom appearance mattered and who
could afford to delegate a burdensome activity threatening their beauty. As
Epstein-Gilboa puts it (2010.216): “The propensity of female ownership of
obstructive processes veriies demoted female status and points to mirror-
ing of male views of self as other, which cause women to deny that their
own physiology is normal and desired.”
The breastfeeding body is considered ugly by the men who love
the female bodies with which they interact to be irm and unwrinkled;
women, internalizing this view, come to consider their own bodies, as
well as their many physiological changes and processes, as undesirable
and, consequently, unwelcome.13

Strategies of Appropriation

Besides strategies of depreciation marking breastfeeding as at best ugli-

fying, at worst dehumanizing, strategies of appropriation would allow the
dominant male group to take back into their own hands a process too impor-
tant to be left to the subordinate female group. This appropriation would
be effectuated by the imposition of rules depriving women of their self-
determination. These rules, created by the male half of society, correspond
to the cultural and social ideals that would suit men’s sense of authority by
attributing the prerogatives of decision making to them. The appropriation

13 For more on women internalizing men’s views, see below “The Use of Wet Nurses.”
376 Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet

process would occur through the monopolization of the knowledge of the

medical and social aspects and implications of breastfeeding.
Arrogation of the knowledge of infant dietary requirements by
male-produced medical literature removes the spontaneity from a natural
and self-suficient activity and makes men those who know best. Women’s
own speciic, and direct, knowledge is devalued, and mothers are deprived
of their self-determination.14 Male medical advice, for instance, that colos-
trum is indigestible and should be replaced with other liquids,15 allows
the male group to appropriate the vital and powerful act of feeding, and
thus sustaining the life of, the infant. Attempts at appropriation by means
of medical prescriptions strip it of its primordial meaning and affective
aspects, which, as we observed above, might have been focal points of
male feelings of envy.
Social rules as devised by the dominant group and aimed at elite
women insist on the ideal role of the matrona as the woman who gives her
legitimate consort legitimate heirs and takes care of them and of their home
(Centlivres Challet 2013.21–29). Accordingly, the prescription to employ a
wet nurse would allow these women to resume more quickly and without
constraint those activities that society expected them to pursue, whether
procreation16 or socializing, but would also launt the household’s social
status and wealth, of which the use of a wet nurse was a symbol. Another
undertaking that individual males, if not society as a whole, might have
wanted women to resume as quickly as possible was an active sexual life.
The belief, as expressed by Soranus (2.19, 29), that intercourse might spoil
a mother’s milk, diminish its low, or suppress it completely might have
prompted decisions to delegate breastfeeding. It goes without saying that

14 Halley’s second chapter on contemporary issues related to this topic describes it in a nut-
shell: “The rise of the expert, the fall of the mother” (2007.27–68).
15 Soranus 2.17; Oribasius Syn. 5.5, Lib. inc. 12.6–7 = Dar. III, 119–20. For the com-
mon practice, through the ages and throughout the world, of delaying breastfeeding
or extracting and discarding all or part of the colostrum, see Riordan and Wambach
2010.53–54.
16 The contraceptive effect of lactational amenorrhea has an eficacy of more than 98 per-
cent if the infant is less than six months old, if the mother is amenorrheic, and if she
breastfeeds exclusively, on demand, day and night: Short et al. 1991, Labbok et al. 1997,
and Vekemans 1997. Bradley 1986.212 and Suder 1991.138–41 are of the opinion that a
remark by Plutarch shows that the contraceptive effect of breastfeeding was not unknown
in antiquity. Suder thinks that lactational amenorrhea was known to Aristotle, but notes
that Hippocrates, Galen, and Soranus seem not to have understood it.
Roman Breastfeeding 377

women themselves, too, might have desired to renounce or discontinue

breastfeeding for this reason.17
Moreover, the sexualized breast should be mentioned: modern
theorists often describe the contemporary, pre-eminently American, issue
of breast nudity and the sexualization of breastfeeding, and relate it to
men’s feelings of possessiveness toward the female breast seen primar-
ily as a secondary sexual characteristic (Dettwyler 1995b, Stearns 1999,
and Halley 2007.69–104). What the Romans thought of the female breast
and how erotic it was to them are topics that should be pursued in detail
elsewhere. Still one can wonder whether Roman men’s viewing of female
breasts as secondary sexual characteristics would not also be part of the
pressure to make women abstain from breastfeeding—either consciously
or not, and either willingly or not.

The Use of Wet Nurses

Soranus’s advice concerning the use of wet nurses is ambiguous: he rec-

ommends, on the one hand, using the milk of another woman to feed the
newborn after the period of milk-free diet that he advises (see above),
highlighting the potential of bodily wear and tear to the woman who
breastfeeds after having borne a child and its corollary: the lesser quality
of her milk. On the other hand, he also writes that the mother herself may
have the qualities needed for optimal breastfeeding, and he goes on to say
that maternal milk is the best for the infant and fosters the mother’s feel-
ings of affection for her offspring. He concludes that the newborn should
suckle the milk of another woman if the mother suffers from some aflic-
tion that prevents her from breastfeeding (2.11). So Soranus says several
times and in different ways that maternal milk is the best milk and that
it should only be replaced with another woman’s milk if the mother is
unable to breastfeed, but at the same time, he gives midwives and moth-
ers good reasons to justify the latter’s refusal to breastfeed. Soranus’s text
appears to evince his aim to tell women of the elite what they, or those
caring or deciding for them, wish to hear, whether he was inluenced by
his rich patients or conscious of the enormous social pressures to which
these women submitted, or both, is open to question.

17 Such tensions in western contemporary societies are observed and analyzed by Campo
2010.52, who writes about this issue of modern women’s “feelings of dissonance.”
378 Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet

For families, or single or widowed mothers, who did not have the
inancial means to resort to a slave or paid wet nurse, breastfeeding would
be the natural strategy. The situation would be more dificult if the mother
had to work. Depending on her occupation and her status, she could or
could not take her infant with her to her workplace: a vegetable, poultry,
or cloth seller, a weaver, scribe, or accountant could theoretically keep her
baby with her while working.18 She could also entrust her child to a rela-
tive, friend, or caregiver who would bring it to her at breastfeeding times.
A servile mother would have had fewer possibilities: if she worked in the
home of her owner, and if the latter was willing, she could perhaps go and
breastfeed her infant when needed, but if she worked in close attendance
upon her mistress, for instance, or outdoors, her owner might decide to
entrust the slave’s child to someone else.
The rarity of visual or literary representations of wet nurses breast-
feeding infants can be explained by the inferior status that made them no
it subjects for artistic representations for elite consumption. The use of
wet nurses by the elite would have been a powerful demoting tool: moth-
ers delegating the feeding of their infant, willingly or not, renounced their
demiurgic powers, as it were, as well as the pleasure given not only by
the act of breastfeeding but also by the presence of the infant and by the
activities involved in taking care of her or him. The power and pleasure
having been delegated to a worker or employee of inferior status, male
envy had as a result no raison d’être. The use of wet nurses is a strategy
of both appropriation and depreciation, and a way to take control in order
to make any envy of power and pleasure disappear.
Women of the elite resorted to wet nurses either under social pres-
sure or having internalized the debased image of breastfeeding conveyed
by the ambivalent male discourse. As Epstein-Gilboa explains (2010.207):

Descriptions of maternal despondency . . . and disgust

with nursing and wet-nursing, and practices of hiring wet
nurses from a lower status than mothers . . . suggest that
females also envied and belittled those who nursed when
they couldn’t. This view is backed by theories that women
internalize male perceptions of females.

18 For employment possibilities for women, free, freed, or servile, see, e.g., Treggiari 1976
and Kampen 1981, esp. 107–29.
Roman Breastfeeding 379

Our knowledge of Roman breastfeeding mainly comes from male

sources, and this situation its the model of the “muted group” theory pro-
pounded by the anthropologist Edwin Ardener (1975). Accordingly, we
only ind the male perception of the female act, and no questioning (by the
social group subordinated to male discourse) of the use of the wet nurse
or of the artiicial feeding of newborns has reached us. Because the visual
and literary depictions of women by men pertain mostly to ideology and
relate to the public image of women and their ideal roles and qualities, it
is to be expected that the representations of breastfeeding emphasize its
public aspects in the sense that they serve a symbolic discursive purpose:
the gravestone of the breastfeeding wet nurse represents her professional,
public, side; the representations of divine breastfeeding convey allegoric
messages to a wide audience; and the rare depictions of breastfeeding mor-
tal mothers evoke a nourishing function within the speciic setting of a
particular iconographic or literary genre, with its tragic or moral message.

CONCLUSION

A coherent Roman ideology of breastfeeding is conveyed in both literary

and visual sources, however limited. The ideal of the breastfeeding mother
is advocated by authors and embodied by legendary, mythical, or divine
igures. The elite praise maternal breastfeeding as what is best for the child,
but this ideal seems to be at variance with practice as reported by medical
writers giving arguments for the use of wet nurses and texts mentioning
the reluctance of women of the elite to breastfeed. The primary obstacle to
breastfeeding by women of the elite would have been the men of the elite: as
the dominant group, they were by tradition the keepers of scientiic knowl-
edge and its transmission, while they also inluenced the themes and trends
of the visual arts. Therefore, the discourse conveyed by these means relects
what they wish to see implemented. Where breastfeeding is concerned, their
message runs counter to their ideals: they do not wish breastfeeding to stay
in the hands of their wives. This act of vital importance also has a powerful
symbolic signiicance and, as such, gives women demiurgic power. What is
more, men are excluded from an emotionally rewarding dyad. Men, unable
either to appropriate the physiological process or to take part in the physi-
cal and affective bonding process, monopolize instead the scientiic and
literary knowledge about breastfeeding and fragment the act by delegating
it to other women and excluding it from ordinary art and literature, since
dominance is ensured by the depreciation or appropriation of what cannot
380 Claude-Emmanuelle Centlivres Challet

be mastered or acquired. These strategies, in turn, inluence the women of

the elite who internalize the views of their patriarchal society.
Delegated breastfeeding was also used by the upper classes as a
status symbol. Women themselves may have appreciated this way of being
differentiated from their poorer contemporaries.19 The lower classes rarely
appear in the sources, but Juvenal tells us (6.592–94) that poor women did not
avoid the burden of breastfeeding; their inances probably did not give them
any choice. The ideals of the elite are here the reality of the lower classes.
In view of what modern studies have shown about the physical
and emotional beneits of breastfeeding for both mother and child,20 it so
happens that, even without knowing it, mothers in antiquity who had to
resort to maternal breastfeeding did not lose on all counts: since the pro-
cess was the most beneicial to both parties involved, and, in addition, did
include some non-negligible pleasure, were the indigent masses, for once,
not better off than the elite?

University of Lausanne

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