Name: Invisible Romans
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9780674061996

Robert Knapp

Robert Knapp brings to light the laboring men, housewives, prostitutes, freedmen, slaves, soldiers, and gladiators who formed the backbone of the ancient Roman world, and the outlaws and pirates who lay beyond it. The lives of these invisible Romans emerge from graffiti, incantations, fables, astrological writings, and even the New Testament.

Invisible Romans

Tim Pendry

This is a superb treatment of the invisible classical world – invisible, that is, to several centuries of admiration for a small propertied elite that produced great material and textual works but who subsisted on a vast mass of persons who created the conditions for their wars and pleasures. Knapp does not start with the elite treatment of the mass of the population but uses a relatively small amount of surviving data from papyri, inscriptions, fictional works and dream books to construct a highly plausible account of what it was like to live under Rome for most persons. What Knapp cannot say but the reviewer can is that the genius of the book lies in his own humanity and observation. He does not fall into the trap of using ethnographic or non-Roman historical parallels (except, to good use, towards the end on pirates) but follows an anthropological Occam’s Razor – what is the simplest explanation of the data available? There is no grand theory just observation. The result is a picture not so much of Roman culture as of human culture in pre-modern conditions when the governing class has no ideology beyond its own valuation and enrichment, before the great religions gave greater sanction to systematic exploitation of the masses. Knapp not only covers men in general and women in general and the poor in particular but the specific condition of slaves, freedmen and freedwomen, the soldiery, prostitutes, gladiators, bandits and pirates. The general picture is one of people not so dissimilar from us, struggling with insecurity, (pre-modern) market economics, lack of policing (the military machine of Rome was rarely employed to do much more than protect the elite’s investments or make ‘acquisitions’) and relationships. Roman slavery was nothing like the racially-fixed slavery of the American South, sexuality was open and natural as well as exploitative, exploitation came from poverty, the culture was brutal, soldiers had a relatively good life and outlaws and bandits were rational actors. What is interesting is to think about is what in this narrative represents humanity under similar conditions elsewhere and what was culturally specific. Some things seem ‘natural’ – a system of oppression and exploitation based on ultimate military sanction, patronage and preparedness for draconian punishments. Similarly, there are the ways that the ‘little people’, free and slave alike, and sometimes together, created micro-societies for their own protection and pleasure. Perhaps the visceral pleasure taken in sex and violence. More ambiguously, we have the strutting of a masculine culture being ‘manly’ or ‘vir-ile’, the widespread calculations of women that their allure was an economic asset, the a-political egalitarianism of bandits and pirates, who come out of this better than most of the masters ... There are also insights into the very Roman-ness of Christianity. It was, perhaps, an agent of order and of representation simultaneously. It never criticised the slave holding aspects of the society. Its sexual mores were scarcely understanding of the condition of many women in poverty. As always, Christianity is not what it appears. It likes to present itself as a liberatory step forward, against pagan moral turpitude, but it looks here more like an elite adaptation to the problems of maintaining order in a ‘global society’. The elite strategy, under pressure, of allying with the aspirant and respectable general community at the expense of the really poor, the slaves and women with an ideology of conformity and repression is fairly standard communitarian fare. To adapt Nietzsche, the elite enslaved themselves in order to keep their property – a situation not entirely unfamiliar from later periods of history. The poor, meanwhile, stayed poor – a situation not entirely unfamiliar from later periods of history. A masterful – I would say magisterial if Knapp was not determinedly presenting the case for those for whom the magistracy was more of a threat than a beacon of hope – introduction not only to Roman culture but to the human condition under conditions of economic scarcity and elite organisation. The further reading, illustrations and notes are exceptional. In short, it is highly recommended.

Invisible Romans

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