Hebdomas septima - A glimpse of teenage life in ancient Rome

     This Ted-Ed video focuses on the day a Roman boy symbolically moves from being a child to being in some ways an adult. He gives up his bulla, putting it in the household shrine with the household gods, the Lares and Penates. 
     There is nothing to indicate that Romans had a clear sense of "teenage" as a distinct stage of life. Yet the passage out of childhood was viewed as important and was embedded in rituals. The rituals were different for boys than for girls. Many fathers did not live past 40 and in a patriarchal society it was important to give boys and girls some legal standing at an early age. Women tended to reach a stage of authority and some independence when they became widows. Since girls were married as young as 12 and were frequently decades younger than their husbands, there were a lot of young widows.  Note how the father grooms the son and what powers the son gains and doesn't gain by his passage from childhood.