There is heated debate in internet forums about the issue:breast-feed or bottle-feed? Breast milk contains natural nutrients. In addition, an intimate mother-child relationship develops during feeding. Does a mother who bottle feeds her child? A similar discussion raged in Roman times:mother or nurse?
The rich families of the Roman elite often used a wet nurse, a nutrix in Latin. This was often a dire necessity, because many mothers did not survive the birth. To keep the baby alive, the father of the house often quickly hired a professional wet nurse. Or he appointed one of his slaves to feed the child. So these babies drank breast milk, but not their own mother's. But even if a woman was healthy and actually perfectly capable of feeding her baby, children in elite families often received a nutrix. Why?
Usually this had to do with the ideal image that the matronae, the women of the Roman elite wanted to live up to. They saw breast-feeding as physical labour, in which you also had to partially undress. Sometimes breastfeeding was even associated with animals suckling their young, an undesirable association for the chaste matronae.
For other mothers much more practical reasons were involved. Even in antiquity it was already known that women are less fertile while they are breastfeeding. If the mothers did not feed their baby themselves, but outsourced it to a nurse, they could theoretically get pregnant again quickly. In times when infant mortality was high and the pressure to have enough offspring was great, this may also have been a reason to appoint a nutrix.
Criticism
The matrons who relied on a wet nurse – like many modern bottle-feeding mothers – were met with a storm of criticism. According to the classical philosopher Plutarch (46 to about 120 AD), the love of hired nurses or slaves was fake and forced. The orator Quintilian (35-100 AD) was deeply concerned about the language development of children who learned to speak from wet nurses who did not even speak proper Greek or Latin themselves. He is referring to poorly educated slave girls from the provinces of the Roman Empire.
The philosopher Favorinus of Arles (c. 85-160 AD) accused matronae who called in a wet nurse of vanity. According to him, they were afraid of losing their youthful appearance and therefore put their child in second place. According to Favorinus, it was not possible to develop an intimate bond with the baby by outsourcing breastfeeding. This jeopardized the child's emotional development. Even today, this is a frequently heard accusation against mothers who do not breastfeed their child, but bottle.
But was the charge of emotional neglect justified? Reliefs like the one in the image below show that the nutrix often not only fed the baby, but also washed and rocked it. In addition, we read in writings that nurses played with the children and sang songs to them.
Neat and nice
Tombstones of children who died shortly after infancy or a few years later were often prepared by the parents and the nutrix. From this epitaph we can conclude that sometimes there was even room for the nurse in a family grave:“Dedicated to the ghosts of the deceased. Proculinus arranged for the erection of this tomb for himself, for his dutiful wife Valeria and for Amabile, the nutrix of his sons”.
In his book on women's diseases 'Gunaikeia', doctor Soranus van Ephese (1 e -2 e century AD BC) what to look for when choosing a nurse. It had to be a healthy woman, not younger than twenty and not older than forty. It was best if her breasts weren't too big but not too small either. In addition, according to Soranus, it was important that the nutrix was neat and nice and had a stable character.
He urged his readers that the nurse should not leave the nipple in the mouth when the baby was asleep, because then it could choke. We can deduce from this practical advice that at least some of the parents paid a lot of attention to choosing a good nutrix.
The babies of the lower classes were probably often worse off. Families that had no slaves or did not have the financial means to hire a nutrix had to rely on the help of women in the family or acquaintances who could breastfeed in an emergency. If this was also not possible, the infants were fed milk from animals or other soft foods. This probably often led to illness and death because babies could not digest this food well and the hygienic situation was bad.
Slaves often had absolutely nothing to say about what happened to their newborn child. Slave babies were sometimes placed with a wet nurse by the dominus (the lord) so that the slave mothers could continue to work. Sometimes one slave or a professional nurse fed several infants, a very efficient method in which as little labor as possible was lost. It is probable that foundlings were sometimes placed with a nurse by a slave owner with the aim of using the child as a slave when it was older.
Contracts
Nutrix contracts have been found specifying how long, how often and for how much money a nutrix would feed a baby. Most of these contracts were concluded by slave owners and professional nurses:free women who made money from this.
It also often stated which rules the nurse had to adhere to:she was not allowed to drink alcohol or have sex during the agreed period. It was believed that this was bad for the quality of her milk.
On a number of contracts it is even stated what fine the minus had to pay if she did not adhere to these rules. Apparently not all nurses put the well-being of the child first. It is clear that the person who appointed the nurse did his utmost in these cases to ensure that the baby was well fed and healthy.
So a large proportion of Roman children were fed by nutrients for various reasons. For elite women, this was often a conscious and well-considered choice, which can be understood if we consider what ideas existed at the time about motherhood and parenting. Just as crèches and bottle-feeding are part of our modern society, nutricians fit into the world of the Roman elite family. In other cases, the use of a wet nurse was necessary. For example, if the mother had died during childbirth or in the case of slave children and foundlings.
In any case, it has become clear that a child fed a nutrix was not necessarily worse off than a baby who drank from its own mother. Sometimes the relationship between nurse, nurse child and family was even very good, the nutrix was certainly no stranger.