- chapter 20: Mothers and children –
as a universal symbol of maternity and of the close physical and emotional bond
between mother and child.^54 The motif of the kourotrophos was not universal, however.
It was relatively rare in comparison to other images of women in most of the ancient
world, and served a number of different symbolic functions, ranging from honoring the
king of Egypt, to adding strength to magical spells, to depicting scenes of daily life.^55
The importance in Italy in the art of all periods of the fi gure of the female kourotrophos
contrasts with its absence in the offi cial religion of the Greeks – though not in cult, where
ancient practices survive into much later times^56 – and its occurrence in Italy constitutes
the most visible and remarkable difference between this imagery and that of mainland
Greece. Groups of the “holy family,” with father, mother, and child, are almost unknown
as a motif in Greek art. After the little Mycenaean “divine nurses” of the thirteenth
century bc, images of mothers and children are also rarely found in Greek art before the
Hellenistic period. Greek myth, as well as art, shows divine babies handed over to foster
mothers or tutors, to be nursed by nymphs or animals. The chances of mythological
babies being nursed by their own mothers are slim.
What accounts for this reluctance on the part of the Greeks to show this act, so
natural in real life? Much of it stems from religious reasons. As we have seen, the
male gods were in charge. In addition, male-dominated Greek society looked upon
nursing and the baring of the breasts with revulsion and dread. Two strong taboos
were involved, nudity and milk. Mother’s milk was a powerful magic and strong
medicine, used by Egyptians, Greeks and Romans – and no doubt by Etruscans,
though we have no information on that account. A recent study fi nds that human
milk, a heavily symbolic and highly-effective substance, was used in different ways
in Greek and Roman pharmacopias, and varied according to the patient’s gender. It
was connected with therapies involving animal excrements and with the Greek idea
of women’s pollution and cathartic treatment: early Greek sources recommend human
milk, sometimes specifi cally from “a woman who has borne a male child,” almost
exclusively in treating women. Human milk therapies in the Roman context, on the
other hand, are not gender specifi c, since, owing perhaps to Etruscan infl uence, Roman
society was less polarized sexually than Greek, and more accepting of the female body.
Noting the remarkable difference between Greek and Roman ideas, the author of the
study concludes that different conceptions of gender are involved – the Romans not
associating women with pollution in the same degree as the Greeks.^57
The second taboo was the universal rule against showing the naked female body
and the related requirement that the sexual organs and women’s breasts be covered in
public at all times. This taboo, too, involved a powerful magic. In Greek art the sight
of a nursing mother had far different connotations from those we associate with the
maternal, protective aspects of the Virgin Mary. It signifi ed vulnerability and impending
danger for both mother and child: a red-fi gure hydria shows Amphiaraos going off to
war and death, as his wife, soon to be a widow, nurses their infant son; and a Pompeian
fresco, taken from a Greek image, shows Danae nursing Perseus at her breast, at her
side the open chest in which the child will be sent off to die.^58 The bared breast that
Clytemnestra offers to the matricidal Orestes, often shown in art, belongs in this same
context of impending danger. The breast need not be maternal; the Niobids also bare
their breasts in their headlong fl ight.^59
Images of kourotrophoi and nursing mothers are frequent in Italy from the eighth
century bc on and continue well into Roman times; they are by no means limited to the