Invisible Romans
Prostitutes, outlaws, slaves, gladiators, ordinary men and women ... the Romans that history forgot
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
Robert Knapp seeks out the ordinary people who formed the fabric of everyday life in ancient Rome and the outlaws and pirates who lay beyond it. They are the housewives, prostitutes, freedmen, slaves, soldiers, and gladiators who lived commonplace lives and left almost no trace in history - until now. But their words are preserved in literature, letters, inscriptions and graffiti and their traces can be found in the histories, treatises, plays and poetry created by the elite. A world lost from view for two millennia is recreated through these, and other, tell-tale bits of evidence cast off by the visible mass of Roman history and culture.
Invisible Romans reveals how everyday Romans sought to survive and thrive under the afflictions of disease, war, and violence, and to control their fates under powers that both oppressed and ignored them. Their lives - both familiar and foreign to ours today - are shown against the tumult of a great empire that shaped their worlds as it forged the wider world around them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
University of California-Berkeley classics professor Knapp attempts to unearth the hidden lives of the great masses of the Roman world in this imaginative historical experiment. From the reign of Augustus to the rise of Constantine, the empire was at its most hierarchical, with the entire propertied and office-holding class amounting to only one half of one percent of the population. In contrast, nearly two-thirds lived in poverty, while another 15 percent were slaves. Cicero, Suetonius, and their peers focused on the doings of emperors and generals while ignoring the lives of peasants, artisans, prostitutes, soldiers, and servants. "The experience of ordinary people," Knapp writes, "has no direct voice in the histories the Romans have left us." To fill this gap, Knapp analyzes unconventional sources such as graffiti, epitaphs, and folklore, providing bold thinking, but timid execution. The paucity of evidence restricts Knapp to banal generalizations: "The ordinary lives of ordinary men in Rome were filled with family, business, socializing and cares and concerns common to much of humanity." At other times, he seems guilty of the same blindness suffered by his sources, taking, for example, a lack of evidence that women resented male dominance as proof that they were content.