-
Seasonal Offer:
This title is part of our Seasonal Offers promotion.
Invisible Romans
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £3.70
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Invisible Romans: Prostitutes, Outlaws, Slaves, Gladiators, Ordinary Men and Women … the Romans that History Forgot for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £3.70, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Special Offers and Product Promotions
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
'Unusual and scholarly...rich with revelation' --Daily Express
Book Description
This book brings Rome's invisible inhabitants to life. Robert Knapp seeks out the tradespeople, innkeepers, housewives, priests, prostitutes, freedmen, slaves, soldiers and gladiators who formed the fabric of everyday life in ancient Rome and the outlaws and pirates who lay beyond it.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
The vast majority of evidence about the life of the Romans comes from, and reflects, lives of the elite. Knapp has attempted, with a degree of success, to look at the lives of the `ordinary' as opposed to this elite. He examines the ordinary man and woman in the street, the poor, slaves, freedmen, soldiers, prostitutes, gladiators, bandits and pirates. The sources he uses are partly predictable, gravestones for example, but others less so. He uses, quite extensively, Artemidorus of Daldus The Interpretation of Dreams. This worried me a little until I read Knapp's final chapter on his sources. He explains that Artemidorus `gives extensive treatment to a wide variety of dreams, all, he claims, based on actual experience.' If this is accepted then using the text as evidence of the mind-set of the non-elite is perfectly valid. And it is mind-set that Knapp is looking for, the way the ordinary people, invisible in the elite sources, actually thought about their lot. Each chapter deals with a different set of people. There has been a lot of work done in recent years about Roman women, but most of this has related to the elite. Knapp concentrates on the `ordinary', using epigraphy amongst other things. I always worry a little about the accuracy of this sort of evidence. When something is being erected for posterity a very sanitised version of life would surely appear. It does, however, show how they would like to be remembered, the ideal. Other sources used include such fiction as The Golden Ass and fables, and the New Testament. Any one source would be questionable, but taking them together adds more weight. I would have liked a proper bibliography, and better referencing, and found the writing style less than stimulating, but on balance found it both enlightening and interesting.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is an excellent book. It is exactly what I was looking for to learn about these aspects of Roman life and society. It is thoroughly researched.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Well documented and informative
31 Oct 2011
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I bought the Kindle version of this book after thumbing through a hard-cover copy at a bookstore. Although I'm not an expert on Roman History (more of an enthusiastic amateur), I found the book to be well written -- the author knows his history and primary sources -- and extremely interesting, covering as it does 'common' Roman people. Especially interesting was the section on gladiators.
1 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Frankly disappointed
9 Oct 2011
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
This seemed as if it would be really interesting, but I was disappointed. No new insights, no new evidence produced, sloppily written and informed author's prejudices as a twenty-first century American.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
