In Roman Egypt, 14-year-old boys were enrolled in a youth
organization in order to learn to be good citizens.
So says social historian and historian of ideas Ville
Vuolanto, University of Oslo, who has joined forces with Dr April Pudsey of the
University of Newcastle to dive deep into a mass of material of around 7,500
ancient documents written on papyrus. The texts comprise literary texts,
personal letters and administrative documents. Never before has childhood been
researched so systematically in this type of material.