Invisible Romans

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. (Oct.)