The Age of Roman Girls at Marriage.

This article attempts to examine the evidence from which some calculations can be made of the average or modal age at which Roman girls were married. In The Times recently there was a correspondence in which some doctors wrote questioning the assertion by a lawyer that the age of puberty now occurred earlier. They claimed that this was contrary to their clinical experience. Yet in fact there is a mass of reliable evidence from large-scale studies which show that the average age of puberty in Western Europe has been falling by some four months per decade over the period 1830-1960. The correspondence in The Times thus illustrates a point which will be easily granted, that a single doctor's selective perception of individuals and his generalizing reminiscence may be out of focus with the picture gained by scientific observation. This limitation of individual observation has much significance for those scholars of the ancient world, who footnote general assertions about ancient social patterns with a single reference to a typical author, or indeed authors.