Hello, i need help is writing my roman society article assignment which is due on March 28th 2020. I have attached the files that includes the guidelines on how to write the assignment and what should

CASE STUDY I: Did parents care when their young children died?

1. Artemidorus On the Interpretation of Dreams 1.15 (translated by R. J. White)

To dream that one has or sees young children, especially new-born infants, when they belong to the dreamer, is bad for both men and women. For it signifies cares, griefs, and anxieties over some important matters, since it is impossible to raise children without them. Indeed there is an old saying that clearly makes this point. It goes as follows: “A fear or a grief forever is a child to his father.” Male children prophesy good results, but female children indicate an end worse than the beginning and they also foretell loss. For whereas boys take nothing from their parents after they have been raised, girls require a dowry. I know of a man who dreamt that a little daughter was born to him. He borrowed money at interest. Another man, moreover, dreamt that his daughter had died and that he buried her. This resulted in his paying off a debt. (In this way, then, a daughter has the same meaning as a loan.) Seeing the children of others, however, is good, whenever they are handsome, graceful, and have an aura of youthfulness. For it signifies the advent of prosperous times…

2. Oxyrhynchus Papyri (P.Oxy.) 744, 1st C CE, a letter from Hilarion to his wife Alis (translated by V. Hope)

I send you many greetings. I want you to know that we are still in Alexandria. And please do not worry if all the others return but I stay in Alexandria. I beg you and call upon you to take care of the child and, if I receive my money soon, I will send it up to you. If you give birth before I return, if it is a boy, let it live; if it is a girl, expose it. You sent a message with Aphrodisias, ‘Don’t forget me’. How can I forget you? I beg you then, not to worry.

3. Seneca Letters 99.2, to his friend Marullus (translation from the Loeb Classical Library)

Is it solace that you look for? Let me give you a scolding instead! You are like a woman in the way you take your son’s death; what would you do if you had lost an intimate friend? A son, a little child of unknown promise, is dead; a fragment of time has been lost.

4. Pliny Natural History 7.72 (translation from the Loeb Classical Library)

It is the universal custom of mankind not to cremate a baby who dies before cutting his teeth.

5. Plutarch Consolation to His Wife 11 (translated by V. Hope)

For our people do not bring offerings to any of their children who die in infancy, and in their case they do not observe any of the other rites that the living are expected to perform for the dead, since these children have no part in earth of earthly things. The mourners do not stay at the graves where a burial is celebrated or at the laying out of the dead, and sit by the bodies. For the laws forbid us to mourn for infants, holding it an impiety to mourn for those who have been exempted from life and gone to a place that is better and more divine.

6. ICUR 5.13984 (tombstone inscription from Rome; translated by H. Sigismund Nielsen)

Here is buried Aemilius Eulalius, our son, contrary to our hopes, the sweetest little child who lived eight days. Rest in peace.

7. Tacitus Agricola 29.1 (translated by V. Hope)

Early next summer Agricola suffered a severe personal blow in the death of a son who had been born a year before. He accepted this loss without displaying the ostentatious fortitude of many men or giving way to tears like a woman.

8. Cicero Tusculan Disputations 1.39 (translated by V. Hope)

The same people think that if a small child dies, the loss must be taken calmly; if a baby in the cradle, there must not even be a lament. And yet it is from the latter that nature has more cruelly demanded back the gift she has given.

9. Ausonius Parentalia 10 (translated by V. Hope)

I will not leave you unlamented, my son, nor deny you the complaint due to your memory, you my firstborn child and my namesake. Just as you were beginning to turn your baby talk into the first words of childhood and you were full of natural gifts we had to mourn your death. You lie on your great grandfather’s breast sharing one common grave so that you will not suffer a solitary grave.

10. CIL 6.19747 (tombstone inscription from Rome, translated by D. Ogden)

Iucundus, the slave of Livia…As I grew towards my fourth year I was seized and killed…snatched by a witch’s hand, ever cruel so long as it remains on earth and does harm with its craft.