A discussion of Invisible Romans appeared in the New Yorker issue of January 9, 2011. 
In “The Empire Strikes Back” Adam Kirsch writes about five recent books on ancient Rome. Here is the excerpt on Invisible Romans:
Much of what we know about the Roman emperors is based on myth and misunderstanding. But even that much can’t be said for the vast majority of their subjects, whose way of life has left barely a trace in the historical record. As Robert Knapp points out in “Invisible Romans” (Harvard; $29.95), “What survives was generally created by or for the rich and the powerful, and hides the actions and perspectives of any but their own class.” Almost everybody we read about in Roman history was a member of one of the three ruling orders–senators, equestrians or knights, and provincial aristocrats. Yet “the three orders amounted to no more than 100,000 -200,000 people, less than half of a percent of the empire’s population of 50-60 million.”
In this passionately moral book, Knapp asks the same question as Occupy Wall Street: What about the ninety-nine percent? What did they think about work, sex, religion, power, and death? “Invisible Romans” attempts to elicit a world view from the scraps of evidence that remain: popular dream-interpretation guides, inscriptions on gravestones, fragments of papyri, and, very often, the New Testament. Although the Gospels are from the Near East and were written in Greek, Knapp argues that “likenesses in attitudes and behavior” make it possible to generalize to the Empire at large. To him, the New Testament is “the single richest collection of literature written by what I call invisibles and expressing their outlook.”
Whenever possible, Knapp tries to restore to these “invisibles” some of the dignity of agency, eliminating the bias of the sources, which see them merely as raw material to be shaped or wasted by their rulers. Roman women, for instance, were “always in the power, under the legal authority, of a male,” either a father or a husband. Deprived of legal power, they turned to magic. Amulets and spells, Knapp observes, were “a major weapon for women against the perils of their world,” and he quotes some surviving examples of love charms: “I will bind you, Nilos”; “You are going to love me, Capitolina…with a divine passion, and you will be for me in everything a follower, as long as I wish.”
Even slaves, Knapp shows, were not without hopes and ambitions: ” slave identity was a combination of what was imposed upon him and what he could fashion for himself.” for instance by saving money or learning a valuable skill in order to bargain for his freedom. Knapp wants to remind us that a Roman slave “remained a thinking, feeling, active human being”–a fact that few would deny but which is easy to forget when reading about the exploits of their owners.
Still, these are meager sparks of light in an overwhelmingly dark picture. “Invisible Romans” is full of anecdotes and quotations that speak volumes about Roman attitudes toward women, slaves, and the cheapness of human life in general. There is the story told by Pliny the Elder about an auctioneer who was selling a hugely expensive candelabra; to sweeten the deal, he “threw in as a free bonus a slave named Clesippus, a humpbacked fuller, and a fellow of surpassing ugliness.” There is the skeleton discovered in North Africa wearing a slave collar inscribed “This is a cheating whore! Seize her because she escaped from Bulla Regia!” And the casual aside in one of Cicero’s speeches in defense of his friend Plancius: “They say you and a bunch of young men raped a mime in the town of Atina–but such an act is an old right when it comes to actors, especially out in the sticks.”
In general, the lot of the ordinary Roman was no different from that of the vast majority of human beings before the modern age; powerlessness, bitterly hard work, and the constant presence of death. The thing that strikes Knapp most about Roman popular wisdom is its deep passivity in the fact of these afflictions, which feels so alien to moderns and especially to Americans. The Romans, he writes, had no concept of progress: “The implication is that the order of the universe is static, that social perspectives do not change; they must be the way they are. The ‘is’ and the ‘ought to be of the world are the same.”
Thus, a slave might dream of manumission but hardly of abolition. For women, “there were no alternative lifestyles and aspirations either offered or considered–no inkling that Roman0Grecian women ever conceived of a world different from the one they were born into.” In such a harsh world, being a soldier–one of the legionaries Polybius mentions, slicing up humans and animals–was actually one of the easier fates: “The army was the only institution in the Roman world that could move or less guarantee social as well as financial advancement if one worked hard and lived long enough.” Even the amenities of the Roman world, like the famous public baths, lose their lustre in Knapp’s grimly realistic portrait: “The baths offered not only social interaction but a lack of hygiene shocking even to contemplate…whatever dirt, grime, bodily fluids, expulsions, and germs people brought with them to the baths, the water quickly shared with other bathers.”
©2012 Adam Kirsch
