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Popular Culture in Ancient Rome

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Some books prompt the question: `how can no one have done it before?' Toner hasn't brought to light new sources, not exactly; his portrayal is based on long-known popular fables, books of spells, graffiti, and the same archaeology, classical plays, and treatises that inform most ancient history. Yet the author of Popular Culture in Ancient Rome has managed to find new detail, a fresh focus bringing to light a whole reality never looked at.

Popular Culture is a book about all the others, all but the favoured few who held power and for whose benefit classical culture was mostly produced. It looks at the terms of subsistence in urban and rural Rome. It reconstructs everyday work and entertainment, but also illness, ritual, death. It thus includes chapters on daily struggles, mental illness, games and festivals, and mundane notions of dress, cleanliness, and sex. Finally, without subverting established Roman political history, it raises the question of popular attitudes, through small-scale resistance or more widespread scepticism, to the elite.

Toner writes in a matter-of-fact, accessible style. Popular Culture also makes use of modern tools - probability calculation, psychiatric data - to arrive at its observations. But what makes this book most readable is that popular culture was fun. It was weird and imaginative. It was the domain of spells and dream-interpretation, of chariot races, coarse jokes, and irreverent graffiti. `An astrologer casts the horoscope of a sick boy, promises his mother he will live a long time, and then demands his fee. She says that she will give it to him tomorrow. "But what happens if he dies in the night?" he replies'. Further on, a take on a magical remedy: `If you pick up in your left hand the tooth of a shrew which has been killed as I have described, wrap it in the skin of a lion that has recently been flayed, and tie it round your legs, the pain stops at once. "Not a lion," someone objects, "but that of a young female dear, still unmated."' This is a scholarly work, but it will also appeal to anyone who enjoys historical series and novels, anyone with an interest in knowing how it was.