Roman boys arrived at military service already habituated to corporal violence.
Evidence
By the time the seventeen-year-old recruit arrived at his legionary fortress, he had already been formed by twelve to fifteen years of household corporal-correction practice. The army did not have to teach him to accept being struck; he had been struck, on the available evidence, throughout his childhood. What the army taught him was institutional discipline, weapons drill, formation drill, and unit cohesion. The corporal-correction acceptance was already in place when he arrived. — , The Rod and the Child, 2003
Categorization
- XREF: Pays off the season’s earlier episodes on Roman household paterfamilias authority and links to the ‘boys will be men’ trope critique. — connects to: The unregulated Roman household was the central site of child corporal violence. — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 2006