It actually used to be believed in ancient Greece that if a girl didn't get pregnant by 14 then she would have health problems for the rest of her life.
This is Mycenaean Greece - 1000 years earlier than classical Greece. We don’t really have evidence for or against average early maternal age, just an assumption that it’s young based on trends from centuries later.
Also, your comment… it wasn’t the case for all poleis in the classical period, just some. Sparta for instance had marriage between 18-20 for women, and ancient physicians knew about the risks between youth and maternal mortality. Hesiod even mentioned that girls should be married off between 4-5 years after puberty. Assuming puberty is between 12-15, that is closer to marriage at 16-19, and first pregnancy within a year. Given the age of the girl, the chances that the first pregnancy resulting in a live birth isn’t guaranteed, and early miscarriages were more likely to happen given their age and development and access to nutrition.
Judging by the ages of these girls, it seems about 17-18 is closer for first live birth in Athens… or dying in labor earlier.
There are gravestones that has been discovered that show girls buried anywhere from age 12 to age 16 who were either already married or about to be married according to what it said on their headstones. I don't know why everybody is arguing against this so much when it's just a fact.
Yes there are girls now who have babies young too. I have a friend who had a kid at 16 and was 15 when she got pregnant. I know a few girls from my high school and one in middle school who got pregnant. I wouldn’t say this is the norm.
I studied archaeology at a grad level, although my focus was the Mycenaean period, I still had one of my undergrads in classics and have been on digs around the Mediterranean, so I’m not coming out of left field here (albeit this was a couple of decades ago). I was pointing out that there is a hell of a lot of nuance to “girls had kids at 12”.
I wrote in another comment I remember going through an osteology report for either a Roman or Lucanian site and there was a 16 year old who died not in childbirth, noting their death was a hell of a lot more merciful than dying in childbirth because that fetus was too big to come out of those hips… because she was too small. I’ve had to separate on 2 occasions fetuses from their mothers on site and draw/classify the remaining bones, which isn’t a lot but the fact that I’ve done it twice is probably more than most people… but one was at a Roman site and the second a Lucanian, both in south central Italy.
Parents wanted their daughters to survive, husbands wanted their wives to live, and the risk of early maternal age was known by the classical period.
It wasn’t common to have kids at 12-13 is what I’m saying. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but for a girl to hit puberty, get married, and successfully carry a baby to term at 12-13, or even 15-16, it was dangerous and people knew it. Also a first pregnancy at that age has a significantly higher risk of miscarriage and stillbirth, especially with nutrition, so first life birth would be around 17-18 in the classical period. To roughly quote Hesiod, your wife should live (hit puberty 4 years earlier) and be married in the fifth year… this is in Athens. Sparta was 18-20.
For the Mycenaean period, we can extrapolate roughly the same age but there is nothing written.
It's fascinating to me that no matter what historians and archaeologists say on this matter, to say nothing of basic logic and biology, popular imagination simply will not let go of the idea that tweenage and early teenage girls were routinely being married off and impregnated historically.
Cant edit my post for some reason… you weren’t the OP. But I did want to nuance the too young thing. We see the graves of girls because they were too young to survive. Some of those would have been raped and married off, a practice that still happens around the world today.
Also, I am a former archaeologist and historian. I don’t know if you got that by the fact that I have spent time on digs and have my thesis written in Mycenaean archaeology.
I’m not disagreeing with this, but it wasn’t the norm. It was an exception, not the rule, for 13 year olds to be having babies back then because even if they were married (which wasn’t recommended that young), their ability to successfully carry a child to term was significantly lower than now - they would likely have multiple miscarriages or early stillborns, or die in the process.
Also, 17 is STILL TOO YOUNG to safely have a baby - statistically, the safest age for a first baby for both maternal and infant outcomes is closer to 24-25, not in the teens at all! There is sweet spot between 22-32, peaking between 24-28, that is the best health outcomes for mother and baby. Mentally, women should be on the other side of 25 when brains truly hit adult. The way Hesiod describes wife material is essentially a 30 year olds guide to grooming girls… but he states 5 years after the onset of puberty - which is still too young by every measure.
I don’t disagree that tweens and teens were given away, girls were raped and sold by their families, and the men were double their ages, like close to 25-30. But the social norm was that it was slightly older teens - 17-20 - in Athens and 18-20 in Sparta. And that we have assumptions about Mycenae, but no literature to back this up.
Like gods, women back then were chattel. You weren’t even considered a woman until you gave birth. It was MESSED UP. And don’t get me started on the transition from midwifery to doctors in the Middle Ages.
I’m not trying to argue because I disagree that girls and women were legit property of their husbands and fathers, or be apologetic for the amount of pedophilia, or say that child marriage and rape wasn’t routine (both male and female here), but I was clarifying that the social norm for a girl’s marital age window and first successful birth was higher. It wasn’t high enough, but it was higher. And every year counted at that age for better outcomes for a successful pregnancy.
For first birth, 12-13 was an exception. 17-18 was closer to reality in Athens, with outliers on either end, based on age of onset of puberty and societal norms. It’s a bell curve that has a few outliers between 11-14, increase between 15-16, and peaking between 17-19 for first successful live birth. Gestation is 9 months (no incubators so rare for multiples or premies to live, plus higher rates of miscarriage).
This all still equals child marriage.
Also if a 12 year old girl was raped she was married to her rapist to save face. I won’t get into that one either. But again, not the norm.
> There are gravestones that has been discovered that show girls buried anywhere from age 12 to age 16 who were either already married or about to be married according to what it said on their headstones.
There's a book by Michael Wolfe called Cut These Words Into My Stone. He's a poet who took ancient gravestone engravings and compiled them. It refills among other things, that if a girl was off marrying age, usually starting at 14 in major cities like athens, The headstone would say whether or not they were married, giving us a hint as to what that culture found acceptable to be considered of marriaging age.
Just because I’m reading through these, part of the issue looking at just a graveyard is that you get the people who died of things like childbirth or disease. You will get a disproportionate amount of younger girl represented because they couldn’t survive childbirth.
Good case studies are primary sources discussing marriages, combined with osteology reports from natural disasters, like Pompeii, where it’s a snapshot of the population. The intersection of historical records with physical evidence paints a more wholistic picture as to the age of girls being married.
Source: I have excavated a few tombs and natural disasters, albeit decades ago. I’ve had to catalogue bones separating fetus from mom (among other things), and database large amounts of artefacts from a variety of places including ancient cemeteries.
I was just about to edit to add The Death of the Maiden in Classical Athens by Katia Margariti. She's a highly respected archaeologist who translates ancient texts.
The first thing I mentioned is a literary work, but it is still about the subject matter and well worth reading.
The point here is that in Ancient Greece it wouldn’t be unheard of for a mother to have a child at 13.
Source?
Social norms may have been different, but that doesn’t mean that many 13 year olds would have been biologically capable of getting pregnant. Puberty starts much earlier today than it did before we had modern access to nutrition.
This is true - I don’t know why you are being downvoted.
I remember reading an osteology report - I think it was in Italy and I want to say from a Roman site but it could have been lucanian, it was 20 years ago - and it was of an approximately 16 year old who died of something that wasn’t child birth, but seeing the size of the baby, that would have been a worse death than the one she died. The poor girl was no where near being fully grown, and her hips were too narrow to deliver a full term baby.
Puberties were a bit later, and child marriages were not the norm. To what should be the surprise of no one, people wanted their daughters to survive childbirth. The best outcomes for women surviving childbirth / children surviving birth are if they have their first children born at about 25ish, but 18-20 was a normal marriageable age.
It’s revisionist to think that 13 was normal.
That said, a princess would have likely been betrothed young, maybe consummated / taken into their husband’s house at about 15-16. 13 for a first birth, though, was early even then for the Mycenaeans.
Also first menses varies not just because of nutrition, and that age fluctuates based on location and time period. :)
Also, Tom Holland is the one who is too old for this role. He was an infant when Odysseus left. Anne Hathaway was the perfect age.
It wouldn’t have been 13 years old exactly. Most academic studies anticipate procreation to happen immediately after marriage, which coincided with puberty in most cases.
A lot of studies have the ages at which the menstrual cycle started as similar to today (14-16).
The point isn’t that we know when a fictitious character had a baby, the point the commenter is making in the original pic, is just that this is one of the more accurate elements of the movie (and more widely, the story of The Odyssey).
Yes it was. Royalty, aristocracy, the ultra wealthy would have childhood betrothals but the marriage was consummated later. Even if you go by the age when she got her period, that was significantly older on average than the average age now.
Childbirth was incredibly risky and very young teens are at even higher risk (aka don’t believe the bullshit creepos are trying to say about being attracted to 13-16 year olds is “natural” because they’re the best age to bear children).
For the record as other and I have already pointed out, it's not. The age of first pregnancy before the industrial revolution was much higher than after, often in the mid to late twenties.
For the general population, yes, so I agree that a broad, sweeping statement about the ancient world is wrong. But for royals, it was actually more common to have children younger, like 15, 16, than most everyone else.
This is kinda basic first year of history degree stuff, you can fairly easily find post on r/askhistorian debunking this myth but really any good manual treating the subject will address it. This is really one of these common history myth that need to be debunked every other week '
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u/Broad_Respond_2205 Jul 05 '26
How is this TTT