Compulsions to Commemorate: Slave Children in the Funerary Landscape of Ancient Rome Daisy Bonsall, McGill It is difficult to find evidence of the presence of slave children in ancient Rome. One of the places they do appear, albeit sparsely, is in the funerary context. Commemoration of slave children in funerary monuments offers insight into the roles they played in the context of the family group, both the slave family and in the wider context of a master’s familia, particularly for slaves in the domestic sphere who would have had closer contact with the master’s familia. Evidence from funerary monuments of slave children from Roman Italy between the first and third century CE sheds light on the experience of slave children in family relationships and the ways those relationships might have affected the children’s commemoration. The variation in the relationships depicted in slave children’s funerary monuments demonstrates the social fluidity of the slave child, someone who could form different kinds of familial bonds with both an immediate slave family and the wider kin group of the master’s familia. Within these different relationship contexts, people used the commemoration of slave children to engage in acts of self-representation. To begin to understand what these relationships might have looked like, it is necessary to examine who could or did commemorate slave children in funerary monuments and why they might have done so within the broader context of death and Roman funerary practices. Another key contextualisation is the study of children and the family, which, like the understanding of Roman society’s ideas of death and the rituals surrounding funerary commemoration, offers an important framework for the analysis of slave children’s funerary monuments.
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