Daily Life in Ancient Rome

This is a vivid and intimate account of everyday life in ancient Rome during the Republic, from the downfall of the kings in 509 BC to the seizure of power by Augustus in 27 BC. Drawing widely on rich contemporary sources, Florence Dupont recreates the public and private lives, rituals, actions, institutions, and religion of the Roman Republic. She shows how Roman culture and society revolved around one kind of individual, the Roman citizen, whose roles encompassed soldier, voter, estate-owner, householder and slave-master, paterfamilias, priest, party-goer, farmer and city-dweller. It was citizenship, she reveals, that shaped Roman notions of space, time, human nature and the human body.The author describes the profound effect of Rome’s increasing power and wealth. Excess, luxury and greed gradually eroded the traditional values of order, thrift, honor and liberty: citizens became transformed into subjects. ‘Streets flowed with precious wines and the blood of exotic wild animals and inumerable oxen,’ she writes. ‘Makeshift theaters were thrown up and bedecked with gold and ivory.
In a hopeless attempt to empty both its own coffers and those of the nobility, the republic endowed the city with temples, basilicas and colonnades. But the world was too rich, too vast, and Rome, at its center, choked on all its wealth.’

Author Biography

Florence Dupont is Professor of Latin at the University of Nice. Christopher Woodall is a freelance translator and journalist.