Introduction
There are two very sensible introductions to the challenges of writing ancient history: Michael Crawford (from whom the opening quotation comes) edited a strong collection of essays in Sources for Ancient History: Studies in the Uses of Historical Evidence(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and David S. Potter’s Literary Texts and the Roman Historian (London: Routledge, 1999) (from whom the final quotation comes) offers clear guidelines for using this sort of evidence. Susan Treggiari’s Roman Social History (London: Routledge, 2002) has a good discussion of how to evaluate and use sources specifically for social history. Sandra Joshel’s Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome: A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions (Norman, OK: Oklahoma University Press, 1992), pp. 3–15, presents an exceptionally apposite discussion of the issues involved in learning about invisible Romans from literature, epigraphy, and other sources; the whole book well repays careful reading.
Chapter 1
Works that succeed to some extent in treating ordinary men from a nonelite point of view include the essays in The Romans, ed. Andrea Giardina, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), and Paul Veyne’s ‘The Roman Empire,’ in A History of Private Life, Volume 1: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium, ed. Paul Veyne, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 5–234. Peter Garnsey and Richard Saller’s The Roman Empire: Economy, Society, and Culture(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) remains an excellent brief introduction to the period; Ramsay MacMullen’s Roman Social Relations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974) and anything else by MacMullen provide good insights; and Nicholas Horsfall’s The Culture of the Roman Plebs (London: Duckworth, 2003), while somewhat idiosyncratic, is stimulating. On early Christianity and Christians, see Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), and Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). Teresa Morgan’s Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Maureen Carroll’s Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), a pathbreaking treatment of epigraph as a rich source for the lives of ordinary people, together give background on how we can know what ordinary people thought. For magic, see Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greco-Roman World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), and Matthew W. Dickie, Magic and Magicians in the Greco-Roman World (London: Routledge, 2001); and on curse tablets, John G. Gager,Curse Tablets and Binding Spells from the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). For astrology, see Ramsay MacMullen, ‘Social History in Astrology,’ Ancient Society 2 (1971), 104–16; and for dreams, Arthur Pomeroy, ‘Status Anxiety in the Greco-Roman Dream Books,’ Ancient Society 22 (1991), 51–74; for associations, see Philip A. Harland, Associations, Synagogues, and Congregation: Claiming a Place in Mediterranean Society (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003); for street life, see Barbara Kellum, ‘The Spectacle of the Street,’ in The Art of Ancient Spectacle, ed. Bettina Bergmann and Christine Kondoleon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 283–99; for law, see J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967).
Chapter 2
The following suggestions amplify the picture of women in the Romano-Grecian world. As always, most notices will spotlight elite women, but on a few occasions ordinaries are the focus, and in all there are insights into various aspects of the lives and outlooks of those women.
Sarah Pomeroy moved the study of Greek and Roman women onto center stage in the late twentieth century with her very readable and reliable Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Woman in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken, 1984; reissued with new preface and additional bibliography, 1995). Her treatment of the material is scholarly yet accessible, and important for a wide readership. For a recent, more modest but solid treatment there is now Eve D’Ambra’s Roman Women (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Jane F. Gardner’s Women in Roman Law & Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) takes a more formalist approach, but contains much useful information. For late antiquity (a period mostly following that dealt with in this book), Gillian Clark’s Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) has an excellent overview.
Sourcebooks are a very useful way to see what evidence is available. I mention especially Jane F. Gardner and Thomas Wiedemann’s The Roman Household: A Sourcebook: (London: Routledge, 1991); Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant’s Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); Women in the Classical World: Image and Text, ed. Elaine Fantham et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); and Suzanne Dixon’s Reading Roman Women: Sources, Genres, and Real Life (London: Duckworth, 2001). For the legal condition of women there is Judith Evans Grubbs, Women and the Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood (London: Routledge, 2002).
Collections of essays abound and although usually focused on elite issues, especially literary and art historical studies, they still often contain good information about ordinary women. Women’s History and Ancient History, ed. Sarah B. Pomeroy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), stands out, and, for its useful chapters on ‘invisibles,’ Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations, ed. Sandra R. Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).
Specific studies add greater context. The bibliographies of the works cited above will lead to many other interesting treatments. I have used a good deal of material from Egypt; several excellent studies have made use of the papyri and allowed this to happen. I mention especially Women and Society in Greek and Roman Egypt: A Sourcebook, ed. Jane Rowlandson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Roger Bagnall’s work has been very valuable as well: Roger S. Bagnall and Bruce W. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Roger S. Bagnall and Raffaella Cribiore, with contributions by Evie Ahtaridis, Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC–AD 800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). Studies on specific aspects of ordinary women’s lives are rather rare. However, Susan Treggiari’s ‘Lower Class Women in the Roman Economy,’ Florilegium 1 (1979), 65–86 and ‘Jobs for Women,’ American Journal of Ancient History 1 (1976), 76–104 are exceptional, as are Natalie Boymel Kampen’s many contributions to seeing (and being unable to see) ordinary women in art: Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1981); ‘Material Girl: Feminist Confrontations with Roman Art,’ Arethusa 27 (1994), 111–37; and ‘Social Status and Gender in Roman Art: The Case of the Saleswoman,’ in Eve D’Ambra, Roman Art in Context: An Anthology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993), pp. 115–32. Beryl Rawson addresses ordinary women in ‘Family Life among the Lower Classes at Rome in the First Two Centuries of the Empire,’ Classical Philology 61 (1966), 71–83, as does Walter Scheidel in ‘The Most Silent Women of Greece and Rome: Rural Labor and Women’s Life in the Ancient World,’ Greece and Rome 42 (1995), 202–17. Of some interest is also John R. Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C. – A.D. 315 (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). I have not made much use of purely archaeological material; works like Penelope M. Allison’s Pompeian Households: An Analysis of the Material Culture (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, Monograph 42, 2004) and Lindsay Allason-Jones’s Women in Roman Britain, 2nd edn (York: Council for British Archaeology, 2005) and Daily Life in Roman Britain (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008) give an inkling of the possibilities, which surely would repay more study.
Studies of the family and household often touch on the lives of ordinary women: K. R. Bradley, Discovering the Roman Family: Studies in Roman Social History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); and Jane F. Gardner, Family and Familia in Roman Law and Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). On motherhood and family, see Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Mother (London: Routledge, 1988, 1990); Beryl Rawson,Marriage, Divorce, and Children in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); and Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coninges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). I mention only a few articles that touch on specific topics; there is much more to be found in bibliographies. On sex, see Suzanne Dixon, ‘Sex and the Married Woman in Ancient Rome,’ in Early Christian Families in Context: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue, ed. David L. Balch and Carolyn Osiek (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 111–29; on contraception and abortion, see J. M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), and E. Eyben, ‘Family Planning in Graeco-Roman Antiquity,’Ancient Society 11/12 (1980/1), 5–82; on child exposure, see William V. Harris, ‘Child Exposure in the Roman Empire,’ Journal of Roman Studies 84 (1994), 1–22; on widows, see P. Walcot, ‘On Widows and their Reputation in Antiquity,’ Symbolae Osloenses 66 (1991), 5–26.
For evidence about females in early Christianity, particularly useful are Patricia Cox Miller, Women in Early Christianity: Translations from Greek Texts (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005); Gillian Clark, Women in Late Antiquity: Pagan and Christian Lifestyles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Margaret Y. MacDonald, ‘Reading Real Women through the Undisputed Letters of Paul,’ in Women & Christian Origins, ed. Ross Shepard Kraemer and Mary Rose D’Angelo (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 199–220; and Patricia Clark, ‘Women, Slaves and the Hierarchies of Domestic Violence: The Family of St. Augustine,’ in Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations, ed. Sheila Murnaghan and Sandra R. Joshel (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 109–29.
The Brazilian comparative material mentioned can be found in Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Chapter 3
The basic work has long been H. Bolkenstein’s Wohltätigkeit und Armensflege in vorchristlichen Altertum (Utrecht, 1939), which is heavily used in A. R. Hands’s Charities and Social Aid in Greece and Rome (Ithaca, 1968). Now there is also Marcus Prell,Sozialökonomische Untersuchungen zur Armut im antiken Rome: Von den Gracchen bis Kaiser Diokletian (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1997). Specific studies include J. Kolendo, ‘The Peasant,’ in The Romans, ed. Andrea Giardina, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 199–213; and on pp. 272–99 of the same collection, C. R. Whittaker, ‘The Poor.’ Teresa Morgan’s groundbreaking work, Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007) provides much of the detailed discussion of fables and proverbs I have worked with; Greek popular literature is readily available in Anthology of Ancient Greek Popular Literature, ed. William Hansen (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998); fables are inBabrius and Phaedrus, ed. and trans. with commentary by B. E. Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975). Comparative work in the ancient world includes Thomas W. Gallant, Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece:. Reconstructing the Rural Domestic Economy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquest (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981); and G. Hamel, Poverty and Charity in Roman Palestine, First Three Centuries C.E. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Of wider comparative interest are Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Eric R. Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966); and G. Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City, Past and Present (New York: The Free Press, 1960). Throughout my discussion I have benefited from the fertile ideas of James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
Chapter 4
There are many good resources on Roman-Grecian slavery. Fundamental are Thomas E. J. Wiedemann, Greek and Roman Slavery: A Sourcebook (Baltimore: Routledge, 1990), and the numerous works of Keith Bradley such as Slaves and Masters in the Roman Empire (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 BC – 70 BC (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); and Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), all of which provide much further bibliography. Now see also the excellent treatment by Sandra Joshel, Slavery in the Roman World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). M. I. Finley’s Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology with a new preface by Brent D. Shawn (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1998) remains very important. For a short general treatment, there is Yvon Thébert, ‘The Slave,’ in The Romans, ed. Andrea Giardina, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 138–74. Jennifer A. Glancy’s Slavery in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) has many good observations; Sandra Joshel’s Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992) set studies in a new direction. For thinking about resistance and its embodiments, James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985) is stimulating and his observations about peasants aid greatly the understanding of slaves’ lives in slavery. For the archaeology, see F. H. Thompson, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery (London: Duckworth, 2003). For comparative material in the United States, W. Blassingame’s The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) conveniently gathers much information, as does Mary C. Karasch’s Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) for Brazil; Jane Webster’s ‘Less Beloved: Roman Archaeology, Slavery and the Failure to Compare,’ Archaeological Dialogues 15 (2008), 103–23, critiques archaeological and comparative evidence. Peter Garnsey’s Ideas of Slavery from Aristotle to Augustine (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996) treats elite concepts of slavery, while William Fitzgerald’s Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000) is most enlightening with regard to the elite’s use of slavery in literature. Niall McKeown’s The Invention of Ancient Slavery?(London: Duckworth, 2007) is a stimulating assessment of various approaches to Romano-Grecian slavery by modern scholars; he reveals how much a particular study of slavery is determined by the predispositions a scholar brings to it. Of articles, Keith Hopkins’s ‘Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery,’ Past and Present 138 (1993), 3–27, put The Life of Aesop on the map as evidence for slavery; Keith Bradley’s ‘Animalizing the Slave: The Truth of Fiction,’ Journal of Roman Studies 90 (2000), 110–25, helps to understand the use of fiction to discover slaves. Patricia Clark’s ‘The Family of St. Augustine,’ in Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations, ed. Sandra R. Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan (London: Rout-ledge, 1998), pp. 109–29, describes Augustine’s family’s dysfunctional life, including interactions with slaves; late but still relevant material on Egypt is found in Roger S. Bagnall, ‘Slavery and Society in Late Roman Egypt,’ in Law, Politics and Society in the Ancient Mediterranean World, ed. B. Halpern and D. Hobson (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), pp. 220–40.
Chapter 5
The fullest treatment of freedmen and expression of the elite-skewed viewpoint is found in A. M. Duff, Freedmen in the Early Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928); for a succinct statement, there is Jean Andreau, ‘The Freedman,’ in The Romans,ed. Andrea Giardina, trans. L.G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 175–98. Sandra Joshel’s Work, Identity, and Legal Status at Rome: A Study of the Occupational Inscriptions (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992) is fundamental to reassessing the skewed viewpoint; H. Mouritsen’s ‘Freedmen and Decurions: Epitaphs and Social History in Imperial Italy,’ Journal of Roman Studies 95 (2005), 38–63, reorients against that traditional view as well; see his The Freedman in the Roman World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), which appeared too late to be used here. On aspects of imperial freedmen, excluded from this essay, see Paul Weaver, Familia Caesaris: A Study of the Emperor’s Freedmen and Slaves(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972). For demographic questions, works by W. Scheidel are reliable; essays by Peter Garnsey, especially ‘Independent Freedmen and the Economy of Roman Italy under the Principate,’ Klio 63 (1981), 359–71, are always edifying. For ‘freedman art,’ see Lauren Hackworth Petersen’s stimulating treatment in The Freedman in Roman Art and Art History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Brazilian comparative material is from Mary C. Karasch, Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808–1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
Chapter 6
It is appropriate here to pay homage to Ramsay MacMullen, who with his 1963 volume Soldier and Civilian in the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) paved the way for looking at soldiers as more than cogs in a fighting machine, worthy to be studied as a social as well as a military phenomenon. Good general treatments that deal with common soldiers as real people can be found in J. M. Carrié, ‘The Soldier,’ in The Romans, ed. Andrea Giardina, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 100–137, and in B. A. Campbell, War and Society in Imperial Rome 31 BC–AD 284 (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 25–46, 77–105. R. Alston’s Soldier and Society in Roman Egypt: A Social History (London: Routledge, 1995) is full of good material from Egypt which has wider application; Sara Elise Phang’s Roman Military Service: Ideologies of Discipline in the Late Republic and Early Principate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) offers a wealth of evidence. Basic sources are conveniently collected and translated in B. A. Campbell, The Roman Army, 31 BC–AD 337: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1994). For demographic thoughts, see Walter Scheidel, ‘Marriage, Families, and Survival,’ in The Blackwell Companion to the Roman Army, ed. Paul Erdkamp (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 417–34; and for much on marriage, sex, and family life, see Sara Elise Phang, The Marriage of Roman Soldiers (13 B.C. – A.D. 235): Law and Family in the Imperial Army,Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 24 (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
Chapter 7
The most direct and complete access to detailed material on prostitution in the Romano-Grecian world is found in the numerous works of Thomas A. McGinn: Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); The Economy of Prostitution in the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004); and, forthcoming, Roman Prostitution. Rebecca Fleming’s ‘Quae corpore quaestum facit [‘She who makes money from her body’]: The Sexual Economy of Female Prostitution in the Roman Empire,’ Journal of Roman Studies 89 (1999), 38–61, is also fundamental. Briefer treatments are found in Jane F. Gardner, Women in Roman Law and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), and Sarah B. Pomeroy,Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken, 1975), who gives a more generalized classical world context. For the nonexistence of sacred prostitutes, see Stephanie Budin, The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008). John R. Clarke deals adroitly with the evidence of art for the study of Roman attitudes toward sex (and much else in the lives of ordinary folk); among his many works see especially Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art 100 B.C. – A.D. 250 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 B.C. – A.D. 250 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and the Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C. – A.D. 315 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); of a glossier nature is his Roman Sex (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003). For medical information, see Mirko D. Grmek, Diseases in the Ancient Greek World, trans. Mireille Muellner and Leonard Muellner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 132–51; on contraception and abortion, see Plinio Prioreschi, ‘Contraception and Abortion in the Greco-Roman World,’ Vesalius 1 (1995), 77–87. The Egyptian material cited comes from Women and Society in Greek and Roman Egypt: A Sourcebook, ed. Jane Rowlandson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Chapter 8
There has never been a lack of material on gladiators. All recent work goes back ultimately to two mid-century French studies, which accumulated most of the fundamental documentation: Louis Robert, Les gladiateurs dans l’Orient grec (Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Hautes Études, Ive section, Sciences historiques et philologiques fasc. 278, Paris: Champion, 1940), and George Ville, La gladiature en occident des origines à la mort de Domitien (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1981(mostly written by 1967)). The best of the last twenty years includes Thomas Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators (London: Routledge, 1992); D. S. Potter and D. J. Mattingly, Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999); Alison Futrell, Blood in the Arena: The Spectacle of Roman Power (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997); Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1998); and Alison Futrell once again, The Roman Games: A Sourcebook,Blackwell Sourcebooks in Ancient History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). For readers concerned to know what the last twenty years have revealed about the postmodern cultural meaning of the arena and its players – an aspect of the games not treated here – these books will also provide useful bibliography in that regard.
Of the many articles on gladiators, of particular use are two by Valerie Hope, ‘Negotiating Identity and Status: The Gladiators of Roman Nîmes,’ in Cultural Identity in the Roman Empire, ed. J. Berry and R. Laurence (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 179–95, and ‘Fighting for Identity: The Funerary Commemoration of Italian Gladiators,’ in The Epigraphic Landscape of Roman Italy, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Supplement 73 (2000), ed. A. E. Cooley, pp. 93–113. On female gladiators, Dominique Briquel’s ‘Les femmes gladiateurs: examen du dossier,’ Ktema 17 (1992), 47–53, is fundamental while an English summary of the material can be found in A. McCullough, ‘Female Gladiators in Imperial Rome: Literary Context and Historical Fact,’ Classical World 101 (2008), 197–209.
Chapter 9
On bandits the best short introductions are Brent Shawn, ‘The Bandit,’ in The Romans, ed. Andrea Giardina, trans. L. G. Cochrane (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993), pp. 300–341, and his ‘Outlaws, Aliens and Outcasts,’ in The Cambridge Ancient History,2nd edn, Vol. 11, ed. A. K. Bowman et al. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 382–405. Werner Riess’s Apuleius und die Räuber: Ein Beitrag zur historischen Kriminalitätsforschung (Stuttgart: Heidelberger Althistorische Beiträge und Epigraphische Studien 35, 2001) lays out fully the convincing arguments for being able to see ‘real’ bandits in Romano-Grecian history; his ‘Between Fiction and Reality: Robbers in Apuleius’ Golden Ass,’ Ancient Narrative 1 (2000–2001), 260–82, is an English summary of his main points. Thomas Grünewald’s Bandits in the Roman Empire: Myth and Reality (London and New York: Routledge, 1999) denies an ability to see the ‘real’ bandits and argues for only a ‘myth’ being retrievable from antiquity. For piracy in particular, P. de Souza’s Piracy in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999) is a good introduction to the evidence. For a rather imaginative treatment of pirate life, see Nicholas K. Rauh, Merchants, Sailors and Pirates in the Roman World (Charleston, SC: Tempest Publishing, 2003). Groundbreaking work in seeing outlaws as a social phenomenon appears in Ramsay MacMullen, Enemies of the Roman Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); comparative material for bandits in Eric Hobsbawm, The Bandit (New York: Delacourt Press, 1969); and for pirates, Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–1750(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), Chapter 6: ‘The Seaman as Pirate: Plunder and Social Banditry at Sea,’ pp. 254–87. The romances are easily accessible in Collected Ancient Greek Novels, ed. B. P. Reardon et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Sources
For Lucian, see C. P. Jones, Culture and Society in Lucian (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); for the Moretum, William Fitzgerald, ‘Labor and Laborer in Latin Poetry: The Case of the Moretum,’ Arethusa 29 (1996), 389–418; for Apuleius, F. Millar, ‘The World of The Golden Ass,’ Journal of Roman Studies 71 (1981), 63–75, and William Fitzgerald, Slavery and the Roman Literary Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000); for Aesop, Keith Hopkins, ‘Novel Evidence for Roman Slavery,’ Past and Present 138 (1993), 3–27; for the sensible use of Petronius as evidence, John H. D’Arms, Commerce and Social Standing in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); for legal material, J. A. Crook, Law and Life of Rome(London: Thames & Hudson, 1967), and O. F. Robinson, The Sources of Roman Law (London: Routledge, 1997). Sources for popular morality are now readily available in Teresa Morgan’s excellent Popular Morality in the Early Roman Empire(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Artemidorus is most accessible in The Interpretation of Dreams: Oneirocritica by Artemidorus, trans. and commentary by Robert J. White (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press, 1975); Dorotheus of Sidon is found in Carmen Astrologicum, trans. David Pingree (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1976); magical papyri are in H.D. Betz et al., The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation: Including the Demotic Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
New Testament background can be found in A. N. Sherwin-White, Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), and for an anthropological and sociological perspective, see P. F. Esler, The First Christians and Their Social Worlds (London: Routledge, 1994). For an excellent introduction of what epigraphy can tell us, see Epigraphic Evidence: Ancient History from Inscriptions, ed. J. Bodel (London: Routledge, 2001) and now Maureen Carroll’s outstanding study,Spirits of the Dead: Roman Funerary Commemoration in Western Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Roger Bagnall has written a clear introduction to using papyri as evidence: Reading Papyri, Writing Ancient History (London: Routledge, 1995). On dreams, see Arthur Pomeroy, ‘Status and Status-Concern in the Greco-Roman Dream Books,’ Ancient Society 22 (1991), 51–74. For the use of art as evidence, start with T. Hölscher, The Language of Images in Roman Art (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004 (orig. German, 1987)) and John R. Clarke, Art in the Lives of Ordinary Romans: Visual Representation and Non-Elite Viewers in Italy, 100 B.C. – A.D. 315 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).