Old Age in Greco-Roman Society
I'm looking for a resource that speaks to the reality of aging in 1st century Greco-Roman society. Any suggestions on a resource or for how to search for this in Logos? I'm having no luck so far.
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There are thousands of people who know how to answer your question better, but my first instinct for resources was to see if Robert Garland's "The Greek Way of Life" or "The Greek Way of Death" were available in Logos, supposing those books might explore what you're after; but alas, these are not available. I don't know if he addresses that idea explicitly, anyway.
But I decided to look up γῆρας in factbook and got quite a few hits of ancient writers referring to aging. Likewise, looking that term up in a Greek lexicon also gives a lot of hits, and from there, you can learn a ton about how first century people in the Greek speaking world thought about aging.
Finally, on a whim, I looked in Albert A. Bell, Exploring the New Testament World for information about aging because he often covers stuff like that, and discovered only a couple indirect references in Aristophanes’ play The Frogs (345ff) and Suetonius (Aug. 82), the latter in which he says, "The emperor Augustus, in his old age, usually wore four tunics and a heavy wool cloak in the winter." These are primary sources, but most concepts of aging found in secondary resources will probably begin with primary sources, anyway.
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Lew Worthington said:
There are thousands of people who know how to answer your question better,
I very much doubt it. I've 'watched' that question, and authors generalize, and then qualify. I think the answer is opposite of today. We think average life span; they thought average 'fate' death point (most of the references).
- Birth/kids were iffy; so the need for higher-fertility rates.
- Disease with urbanization (bronze age forward), and 'empire' (higher migration rates)
- Rough lives: largely farming, unpredictable rain patterns, attacks
- Men dieing earlier; wives accumulating wealth/health (Roman laws to reduce)
My impression is the ancient formula is a death issue; life span was similar to the 1940s (pre-medical), and then higher probabilities for accidental death. Very similar to today's pandemic .... average life span reduced, only due to selected death-participants.
This distinction shows up in Bible class. Often you hear, people died at 30-40 (males, of course). But that's averaging high youth-loss rates, etc. If you survived youth, you'd have a good life-span (and so, 30 being the start of a jewish male's adulthood, eg Jesus 30/Luke, 50/John).
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