Study Of Images Of Children In The Roman Empire In The Early Monuments

This thesis researches the imagery of children on memorials in early Roman Empire. The paper can be divided into two parts, the introduction and the main body.The introduction deals with the present national and foreign study condition of the imagery of Roman children. The main body includes three chapters. The first chapter discusses the development of Roman society in early Empire, the evolution of Roman portraiture and the general attitudes towards children in Roman literatures. The second chapter concerns the images of children, which can be divided into two different types,"images of dynastic children"and"images of social children", occurring on two forms of Roman public monument, historical reliefs and coins. The former was widely exploited in advertisement of the political legitimacy, divinity and continuity of Roman ruling elite, while another shared the features of patria potestas explicitly. The further chapter explores how Romans constructed the images of children on three different types of Roman funerary monument, group reliefs, funerary altars and children sarcophagi, with an argument that children were valued as the essential members of Roman family, in which there was a harmonic relationship between parent and child.In sum, Romans in early Empire constructed the images of children on public and private funerary memorials. They indeed put an emphasis on children's roles and values in both society and family, to whom they showed their concernment and protection.