ABSTRACT
Moving to Imperial Rome we saw how citizens understood themselves as subjects according to new precepts and problems. The Roman self became concerned with the privatisation of life in which medicine (and, increasingly, pathology), marriage and sexuality began to add new pressures and new obligations. Compared to those in early Greece, Roman citizens were required to understand themselves in a more complex and more extensive field of power where the details of everyday life, especially pertaining to bodily practices, were opened up for scrutiny and self-problematisation. The importance of askesis, training and exercise, was central to life in general and bodily pleasures in particular. Thus fasting and austere food practices were practised by the Epicureans and the Stoics in order to prove that they could endure privations if necessary.
