ABSTRACT
The last twenty years have seen a remarkable increase in interest in the investigation of the Roman world from a sociological viewpoint. While the daily habits of the Romans were once seen as of general interest (as witnessed by the popularity of Jérome Carcopino’s Daily Life in Ancient Rome (1939, English translation 1940) and other similar studies), they were never treated in the same systematic fashion as Roman political and military events. Various factors have since led to a basic change in the examination of the Roman world: an interest in Roman economy and slavery, derived from the economic models of Marx and later German historians, such as Weber and Polanyi; a desire to recover the place of women and the family in Roman life, in part as the result of the rise of feminism; and a wish to outline the nature of population structures and their effects on life, which can now be attempted using more sophisticated modelling techniques derived from the social sciences.
