Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

90 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
grandfather, as is still the custom in Greece to this day—evidence of
the emphasis on the continuity of the family line.
Nursing
It was customary for the well-to-do to secure the services of a wet
nurse to breast-feed their infants. The following contract between a
mother and her wet nurse from Hellenistic Egypt dated to 13 b.c.e.
lays down terms of hire. It is interesting to note that the infant in
question is a foundling slave girl, which suggests that adopted
infants were sometimes raised to be slaves and that well-to-do
families sometimes expended considerable sums of money on such
children:
Didyma agrees to nurse and suckle outside at her own home in the city
with her own milk that is to be pure and unsullied for a period of sixteen
months . . . the foundling slave girl . . . that Isidora has given to her. She
is to receive from the said Isidora as pay for the milk and the nursing ten
silver drachmas and half a liter of oil every month. (Select Papyri 1, no. 16
in Loeb Classical Library)
Nurses feature prominently in Greek tragedy, which suggests that they were
important members of the household. The most sympathetically drawn is
Orestes’ now elderly nurse Kilissa, who makes a brief but memorable appearance
in Aeschylus’s Libation Bearers. In the following passage, she is fondly reminiscing
about the chores that she had to perform on behalf of her royal charge
many years ago:
How I devoted myself to that child from the moment that his mother gave him to
me to nurse as a newborn babe! He kept me up every night, crying and screaming.
He was a perfect nuisance and all for nothing. They’re brainless things,
you see, children. You have to nurse them as if they’re animals and follow their
moods. A babe in swaddling clothes can’t tell you what the matter is—whether
it’s hungry or thirsty or wants to go to the potty—though of course babies can’t
control themselves. It just comes out and you can’t do anything about it. You
learn to tell the future in my profession, but, heavens above, I was wrong often
enough and then I had to wash its clothing. I was a nurse and a washerwoman
rolled into one. (lines 751–60)
Although most nurses were slaves, a few were impoverished freeborn
women. Soranos in Gynaecology (2.19.1) recommended that the
ideal nurse should be “self-controlled, sympathetic, well- tempered,
Greek, and tidy.” Servile or free, many won the confidence and gratitude
of their masters and mistresses, as is indicated by the fact that
they often retained a position of trust in the household even in old