Nutrix Natorum

In Imperial Rome, mothers rarely breastfed their own children.  According to Hanne Sigismund Nielsen,

The persons mainly responsible for infants and minor children in Imperial Rome were their wet-nurses.  There is reason to believe that most children of almost all status groups spent more than the two first years of their life with their nurse (“Roman Children at Mealtimes,” in Inge Nielsen and Hanne Sigismund Nielsen, Meals in a Social Context: Aspects of the Communal Meal in the Hellenistic and Roman World [Aarhus University Press, 1998], 66n30).

Among Christians, however, Nielsen claims, things changed.  Augustine “mentions the fact that mothers nursed their children themselves.”  In his commentary on Psalm 130, Augustine says that “a mother feeds her infant child with her own milk which is nothing but meat and bread from the dinner table changed in the mother’s body to a substance more suitable for an infant than meat and bread” (62).  In his Sermon 117, he says something similar: “Was there no food on the table?  Yes, but the infant was not able to share it with the others.  So what does the mother do?” (cited 62).  The family is eating together — something that is itself a huge change from typical Roman culture! — and the mother nurses her child so that the child can share in the family meal.

Nielsen cites an epigram from Rome in which

a Christian woman, Turtura, is commemorated by her husband.  He describes her as deo serviens, unice fidei, amica pacis, castis moribus ornata, communis fidelibus amicis, familiae grata, nutrix natorum et numquam amara marito (“serving God, being of unique faith, a friend of peace, embellished with chastity, unpretentious towards all the faithful, agreeable to her household.  She nursed her own children and was never unpleasant to her husband”) (62).

In short, it appears that as the gospel took hold on Roman society Christian mothers began to nurse their own babies instead of giving them to wet nurses to feed and raise.

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