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Abstract: Fully recognizing all the possible limitations and even objections to a historical inquiry into bullying and harassment in Antiquity, this article tackles the subject by strictly limiting the situations to be studied. It only takes into account those instances in which children or adolescents are both the agents and the victims of bullying and harassing behavior. It only looks at the interaction between children of free status. First, I study children in a stage of life in which they were largely subjected to the authority of parents and other educators. After this, the focus is on young girls, whose coming of age put them in a peculiar situation regarding harassment. Finally, student life is given due attention. In conclusion, I point out how a careful consideration of these fragments not only informs us about aspects of everyday life of young people in antiquity, but also about ancient concepts of personhood.
Keywords: bullying childhood, girls, sexual harassment, youth
1. Introduction: Experience, Agency and the History of Ancient Childhood
Recently, experience and agency have been proposed as new paradigms for the social history of childhood and youth in antiquity. Fully acknowledging the difficulties in hearing the "tiny voices from the past," scholars have approached well known source material with a fresh look and asked new research questions. They recognized that experiences as we encounter them in ancient texts are never simply reported but always processed and narrated. However, the mere fact that certain experiences are narrated is important by itself. Also, the focus on agency opens the possibility of a depiction of the potential of human networks (gender, age, social group, stage oflfe course, cultural area, time) and the way young people made a difference (both individually and collectively) in conditions that obviously also limited them. In all, the attention to experience and agency has resulted in a volume on ancient childhood with particular attention to the settings, activities, religions and negative aspects of this phase of life.1
In the wake of such new studies, this article sets out to examine a much underexplored aspect of ancient childhood: the extent to which children and young people bullied or harassed each other. Starting from an exhaustive survey of the terminology in the literary sources, I develop...