In premodernity, a time when human milk was the only secure means for infant nutrition, and in societies, such as antiquity and early Byzantium, where breastfeeding was considered a servile work, wet nursing was both a necessary and widespread occupation. Despite the social demand for the profession, public discourses around wet nurses were mostly unfavourable, while their work was treated with both admiration and scorn. In an attempt to understand ancient and early Byzantine approaches to the wet nurse, this paper takes a matricentric perspective. It investigates various discourses (rhetorical, moralist, philosophical, theological, hagiographical, medical, and contractual) which establish the wet nurse as an essential part of the institution of motherhood, as a social and moral category whose work, way of life, and behaviour are constantly defined, controlled, and regulated. These discourses, nevertheless, tell us much more about the anxieties and preoccupations of the societies that produced them and much less about actual contemporary wet nurses. The choice for an investigation encompassing antiquity up to early Byzantium, an uncommon extension in the chronological range of existing studies, further enlightens the mechanics and dynamics of the ideologies around the wet nurse, as these are preserved or evolve in time.