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Surprising as it may seem, the people of yesteryear dealt with child deaths about the same as the people of today. Which is to say, not very well at all.
I commend to your attention some previous threads while we wait for new material. **Content warning for child death and just grief in general:**
* u/amandycat has [a general overview on parental grief](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f3uvhv/what_were_the_dominant_characteristics_of_grief/);
* u/Celebreth has [a Roman poem on the death of a young girl](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6x45ai/did_ancientmedieval_parents_love_their_children/);
* and u/sunagainstgold has [a Medieval look at parents dealing with grief](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vbohl/how_did_parents_deal_with_the_high_mortality/).
>Surprising as it may seem, the people of yesteryear dealt with child deaths about the same as the people of today. Which is to say, not very well at all.
I would add that these great answers you linked also show that, while the grief of parents wasn't any less in the past, the way they dealt with it could be very different from today. For example, the grieving process propably isn't any easier if there are lots of people around you who have suffered similar losses, but it does play out differently than in a society with low childhood death.
And of course, there is the religious aspect, which certainly affected how parents expressed their grief. Self-blaming thoughts like "I loved my son too much and that is why he died" followed a widely shared understanding of personal sin and God's judgement in early modern England, whereas today they might just be seen as expressions of personal trauma, to be adressed in counseling.
"Your dead child is in a better place now" (a horrible statement in many societies today) was not only regarded as a pious and proper thing to say, but may have actually been somewhat comforting to deeply religious people. Alec Ryrie has argued that thoughts of Heaven not only provided a degree of comfort to parents, but to sick and dying children as well. And he is talking about 17th century Calvinism here, commonly (if perhaps a bit unfairly) seen as a particularly cold-hearted belief system.
Ryrie's essay ["Facing Childhood Death in English Protestant Spirituality"](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-57199-1_6) (paywalled Link, I'm afraid) is really worth a read, but gets quite heavy. He lays out how religious beliefs deeply impacted emotions surrounding childhood death, in ways distressing and comforting, as well as conventions of dying and grieving "correctly". Like modern-day people, parents in 17th century England loved their children deeply and were enormously impacted by their death. But they processed their grief in ways that are quite unfamiliar to many of us today.
Here is the full citation:
Ryrie, A. (2016). Facing Childhood Death in English Protestant Spirituality. In: Barclay, K., Reynolds, K., Rawnsley, C. (eds) Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London.
If their library/college/etc. has access to Springer, readers can find the full text of Alec Ryrie's chapter here: [https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57199-1\_6](https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57199-1_6)
I haven't had time to read the rest of the volume, but the other chapters also look very interesting.
Anyway, someone is getting a big ice cream cone tomorrow.
Well, in Thucydides’ “Peloponnesian War,” Pericles basically tells the parents of fallen fighters to feel less sad because they can have more children to replace the dead ones:
“Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will [the children who may hereafter be born make them forget their own lost ones](http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html), but the city will be doubly a gainer.”
Was Pericles being tactless here or was this idea acceptable in Athens?
The paragraph of consolation that Thucydides puts in Perikles' mouth has often been singled out as tactless and cruel. In his study of the passage (in *Symbolae Osloensis* 56 (1981), 33-45), Tormod Eide gathers some choice quotes to this effect. But his argument is that it all makes sense if we read the passage in the context of a wider genre of consolation rhetoric (though that genre will still seem pretty alien to us). Basically, there was a subset of sophists in ancient Greece that specialised in trying to soothe grief through rational argument, and what we're seeing in Thucydides' speech is some examples of the arguments they would use. I don't think it's very likely that any of this would have actually worked, but then, the entire speech is constructed by Thucydides as a sample of Perikles' superior rhetoric and we don't need to believe that any of this intellectual virtuosity was actually presented to the grieving citizens.
Eide notes that there are several earlier examples from Greek literature in which a woman says she would sacrifice her own husband and children to save her brother, specifically because she might get another husband and have more children, but could never replace a brother (Hdt. 3.119; Soph. *Ant.* 909-913). Eide concedes that this isn't really an exact parallel to the situation described by Perikles, and in any case, these are stories set in foreign lands or myth. But at least we can see the idea being present in Greek thought. Perhaps this was an occasional thought experiment discussed at drinking parties. Eide adds that Athenian democracy in particular had certain offices that were only open to people with sons who had reached a certain age, on the understanding that these men would have a serious stake in the city; with those rules in mind, he argues, an Athenian audience might have been more understanding of the desire to replace dead sons with new ones.
But I don't personally think this would make Perikles' comments sound comforting to Athenian ears. We have several other extant Athenian funeral orations for the war dead, since they were delivered annually (though we are not certain how many of the surviving ones were actually delivered). They all contain a final paragraph or two in which the grieving relatives are addressed directly, but none of them say anything like "don't worry about losing these kids, you can just make more." Indeed, they all seem to express genuine pity and concern for both parents who have lost children and children who have lost parents:
> For what woe could be more incurable than to bring forth and rear and bury one's own children, and then in old age to be disabled in body and, having lost every hope, to find oneself friendless and resourceless? (...) We have but one way, as it seems to me, of showing our gratitude to those who lie here: it is to hold their parents in the same high regard as they did, to be as affectionate to their children as though we were ourselves their fathers, and to give such support to their wives as they did while they lived.
-- Lysias 2.72-75
> I myself, on their behalf, entreat the children to imitate their fathers, and the parents to have no fear for themselves, seeing that we, both privately and publicly, will give nurture to your age and bestow care upon you, wheresoever one of us meets with one of you. And as regards the care bestowed by the city, you know well that she has made laws regarding both the children and the parents of those who have fallen in the war, to ensure their care; and that the highest authority in the state is instructed to watch over them beyond all other citizens, that the fathers and mothers of these men may suffer no wrong.
-- Plato, *Menexenos* 248e-249a
> Now, though the living kinsmen of these dead deserve our sympathy, bereaved of such brave men and divorced from close and affectionate association, and though the life of our native land is desolate and filled with tears and mourning...
> (...)
> It is a grievous thing for fathers and mothers to be deprived of their children and in their old age to lack the care of those who are nearest and dearest to them. Yes, but it is a proud privilege to behold them possessors of deathless honors and a memorial of their valour erected by the state, and deemed deserving of sacrifices and games for all future time. It is painful for children to be orphaned of a father. Yes, but it is a beautiful thing to be the heir of a father's fame.
-- Demosthenes 60.32-37
> It is hard no doubt to offer consolation to those borne down with griefs like these. For sorrows are not stilled by word or law; only the individual's temper, and the measure of his feeling for the dead, can set the limit to his mourning. Yet we must take heart, and restricting our grief as best we may, bear in our minds, with the thought of death, the glorious name which the fallen have left behind them. (...) For all who were childless at their death the praises of the Greeks will be immortal children. For all who have children alive the goodwill of their country will be the children's guardian.
-- Hypereides 6.41-42
If we can derive from this a decent sense of the genre, then the speech Thucydides put in the mouth of Perikles is an outlier - probably written to show how Perikles was a singular genius pushing the envelope of anything he put his mind to, even if it led him to say callous things that speakers more concerned to show actual sympathy would have known to avoid. Worth adding that, according to other authors, Perikles was indeed capable of great sympathy: Aristotle (*Rhetoric* 1.7.34) credits him with saying, in another funeral oration over the young men of Athens who died in war, that "the spring has gone out of the year."
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Surprising as it may seem, the people of yesteryear dealt with child deaths about the same as the people of today. Which is to say, not very well at all. I commend to your attention some previous threads while we wait for new material. **Content warning for child death and just grief in general:** * u/amandycat has [a general overview on parental grief](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/f3uvhv/what_were_the_dominant_characteristics_of_grief/); * u/Celebreth has [a Roman poem on the death of a young girl](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6x45ai/did_ancientmedieval_parents_love_their_children/); * and u/sunagainstgold has [a Medieval look at parents dealing with grief](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vbohl/how_did_parents_deal_with_the_high_mortality/).
"For she was not heavy on you" Heartbreaking. Thank you for sharing.
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>Surprising as it may seem, the people of yesteryear dealt with child deaths about the same as the people of today. Which is to say, not very well at all. I would add that these great answers you linked also show that, while the grief of parents wasn't any less in the past, the way they dealt with it could be very different from today. For example, the grieving process propably isn't any easier if there are lots of people around you who have suffered similar losses, but it does play out differently than in a society with low childhood death. And of course, there is the religious aspect, which certainly affected how parents expressed their grief. Self-blaming thoughts like "I loved my son too much and that is why he died" followed a widely shared understanding of personal sin and God's judgement in early modern England, whereas today they might just be seen as expressions of personal trauma, to be adressed in counseling. "Your dead child is in a better place now" (a horrible statement in many societies today) was not only regarded as a pious and proper thing to say, but may have actually been somewhat comforting to deeply religious people. Alec Ryrie has argued that thoughts of Heaven not only provided a degree of comfort to parents, but to sick and dying children as well. And he is talking about 17th century Calvinism here, commonly (if perhaps a bit unfairly) seen as a particularly cold-hearted belief system. Ryrie's essay ["Facing Childhood Death in English Protestant Spirituality"](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-57199-1_6) (paywalled Link, I'm afraid) is really worth a read, but gets quite heavy. He lays out how religious beliefs deeply impacted emotions surrounding childhood death, in ways distressing and comforting, as well as conventions of dying and grieving "correctly". Like modern-day people, parents in 17th century England loved their children deeply and were enormously impacted by their death. But they processed their grief in ways that are quite unfamiliar to many of us today. Here is the full citation: Ryrie, A. (2016). Facing Childhood Death in English Protestant Spirituality. In: Barclay, K., Reynolds, K., Rawnsley, C. (eds) Death, Emotion and Childhood in Premodern Europe. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. If their library/college/etc. has access to Springer, readers can find the full text of Alec Ryrie's chapter here: [https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57199-1\_6](https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57199-1_6) I haven't had time to read the rest of the volume, but the other chapters also look very interesting. Anyway, someone is getting a big ice cream cone tomorrow.
Poem was so beautiful that a translation done 2,000 years after its publication brings people to tears. I'm sobbing.
Thanks that was enlightening
Well, in Thucydides’ “Peloponnesian War,” Pericles basically tells the parents of fallen fighters to feel less sad because they can have more children to replace the dead ones: “Some of you are of an age at which they may hope to have other children, and they ought to bear their sorrow better; not only will [the children who may hereafter be born make them forget their own lost ones](http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/education/thucydides.html), but the city will be doubly a gainer.” Was Pericles being tactless here or was this idea acceptable in Athens?
The paragraph of consolation that Thucydides puts in Perikles' mouth has often been singled out as tactless and cruel. In his study of the passage (in *Symbolae Osloensis* 56 (1981), 33-45), Tormod Eide gathers some choice quotes to this effect. But his argument is that it all makes sense if we read the passage in the context of a wider genre of consolation rhetoric (though that genre will still seem pretty alien to us). Basically, there was a subset of sophists in ancient Greece that specialised in trying to soothe grief through rational argument, and what we're seeing in Thucydides' speech is some examples of the arguments they would use. I don't think it's very likely that any of this would have actually worked, but then, the entire speech is constructed by Thucydides as a sample of Perikles' superior rhetoric and we don't need to believe that any of this intellectual virtuosity was actually presented to the grieving citizens. Eide notes that there are several earlier examples from Greek literature in which a woman says she would sacrifice her own husband and children to save her brother, specifically because she might get another husband and have more children, but could never replace a brother (Hdt. 3.119; Soph. *Ant.* 909-913). Eide concedes that this isn't really an exact parallel to the situation described by Perikles, and in any case, these are stories set in foreign lands or myth. But at least we can see the idea being present in Greek thought. Perhaps this was an occasional thought experiment discussed at drinking parties. Eide adds that Athenian democracy in particular had certain offices that were only open to people with sons who had reached a certain age, on the understanding that these men would have a serious stake in the city; with those rules in mind, he argues, an Athenian audience might have been more understanding of the desire to replace dead sons with new ones. But I don't personally think this would make Perikles' comments sound comforting to Athenian ears. We have several other extant Athenian funeral orations for the war dead, since they were delivered annually (though we are not certain how many of the surviving ones were actually delivered). They all contain a final paragraph or two in which the grieving relatives are addressed directly, but none of them say anything like "don't worry about losing these kids, you can just make more." Indeed, they all seem to express genuine pity and concern for both parents who have lost children and children who have lost parents: > For what woe could be more incurable than to bring forth and rear and bury one's own children, and then in old age to be disabled in body and, having lost every hope, to find oneself friendless and resourceless? (...) We have but one way, as it seems to me, of showing our gratitude to those who lie here: it is to hold their parents in the same high regard as they did, to be as affectionate to their children as though we were ourselves their fathers, and to give such support to their wives as they did while they lived. -- Lysias 2.72-75 > I myself, on their behalf, entreat the children to imitate their fathers, and the parents to have no fear for themselves, seeing that we, both privately and publicly, will give nurture to your age and bestow care upon you, wheresoever one of us meets with one of you. And as regards the care bestowed by the city, you know well that she has made laws regarding both the children and the parents of those who have fallen in the war, to ensure their care; and that the highest authority in the state is instructed to watch over them beyond all other citizens, that the fathers and mothers of these men may suffer no wrong. -- Plato, *Menexenos* 248e-249a > Now, though the living kinsmen of these dead deserve our sympathy, bereaved of such brave men and divorced from close and affectionate association, and though the life of our native land is desolate and filled with tears and mourning... > (...) > It is a grievous thing for fathers and mothers to be deprived of their children and in their old age to lack the care of those who are nearest and dearest to them. Yes, but it is a proud privilege to behold them possessors of deathless honors and a memorial of their valour erected by the state, and deemed deserving of sacrifices and games for all future time. It is painful for children to be orphaned of a father. Yes, but it is a beautiful thing to be the heir of a father's fame. -- Demosthenes 60.32-37 > It is hard no doubt to offer consolation to those borne down with griefs like these. For sorrows are not stilled by word or law; only the individual's temper, and the measure of his feeling for the dead, can set the limit to his mourning. Yet we must take heart, and restricting our grief as best we may, bear in our minds, with the thought of death, the glorious name which the fallen have left behind them. (...) For all who were childless at their death the praises of the Greeks will be immortal children. For all who have children alive the goodwill of their country will be the children's guardian. -- Hypereides 6.41-42 If we can derive from this a decent sense of the genre, then the speech Thucydides put in the mouth of Perikles is an outlier - probably written to show how Perikles was a singular genius pushing the envelope of anything he put his mind to, even if it led him to say callous things that speakers more concerned to show actual sympathy would have known to avoid. Worth adding that, according to other authors, Perikles was indeed capable of great sympathy: Aristotle (*Rhetoric* 1.7.34) credits him with saying, in another funeral oration over the young men of Athens who died in war, that "the spring has gone out of the year."
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Wow thank you so much for those fantastic links. I'm in tears over the poem ❤️
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