ABSTRACT
This book is about the lives and experiences of human beings in a different world from our own—the Roman world. As such it attempts to strike a delicate balance between the uniqueness of that world and the more general commonalities to being human that allow us to comprehend it in this, present, world. There are many ways in which people in the present, and in the more recent past, have identified with Roman culture, whether as a source of politics or entertainment. This has had both positive and negative consequences. It means that most people know something about the Romans, but—quite apart from the very serious part that Roman role-models have played in imperialist and fascist ideologies—it has also made the Roman world seem perhaps a bit too easily comprehensible. This impression is far from groundless, given that many elements of modern Western culture, consciously or not, draw upon Roman technologies or institutions. However, it is at best only half of the story, and at worst distorts the diversity of social processes in the past into the perceived unity of what resulted from them. It also leads to a certain degree of public apathy towards the Roman past, at least in Britain, which some other periods or cultures—such as that of ancient Egypt—manage to avoid thanks to their stimulating degree of exotic mystery. One of the main aims of this book is to challenge this familiarity by highlighting the many gaps in our understanding of what life was like in a Roman province, as well as offering some novel ways of closing them.
